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Arizona: School Choice Harms Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2025 //
6

Laura Meckler of the Washington Post visited Arizona to learn about the effects of an expansive program of charter schools and vouchers. Arizona voted overwhelmingly against vouchers in a state referendum in 2018. Vouchers lost by 65-35%. The rightwing legislature and Governor Douglas Ducey, encouraged by billionaire Charles Koch, ignored the views of the electorate and enacted a large voucher program.

Now the state underwrites the tuition of kids who were already in private schools, many of whom come from affluent families. Voucher schools admit the students they want and exclude those they don’t want.

Arizona’s charter sector includes for-profit charters and charters run by entrepreneurs and grifters. It has experienced numerous scandals.

There’s no accountability for voucher schools and minimal accountability for homeschoolers whose parents spend money on sports equipment, ninja warrior training, toys, LEGO sets, and a wide variety of nonacademic stuff.

Eli Hager of ProPublica wrote that the cost of vouchers had blown a huge hole in the state’s budget, making it necessary to reduce spending on highway projects, water infrastructure, and other critical needs.

Vouchers and charters have not produced academic gains. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Arizona is among the lowest-ranking states.

But the biggest consequence of voucher expansion has been the closing of neighborhood public schools. .

Meckler writes:

PHOENIX — The party at John R. Davis Elementary School was in full swing, but at the snow cone station, the school’s librarian was in tears.

In the cafeteria, alumni marveled at old photographs on display and shook their heads. On a wall of the library, visitors posted sticky notes to describe their feelings: “Angry,” read a purple square. “Anxious,” said a pink one. “Annoyed.” “Heart broken.” “Bummed.” And more than any other word: “Sad.”

Ten days later, John R. Davis Elementary School would close — not just for the summer, but for good.

Now, as the new school year begins, the Roosevelt Elementary School District opens with just 13 schools. That’s almost a third fewer than it had last spring, a response to enrollment declines as the state offers unprecedented taxpayer funding for alternatives to public school.

The party gave the community a few hours to celebrate the school’s 43 years — to say goodbye.

“It’s a grieving process for me,” Antionette Nuanez, the librarian, told a pair of Davis graduates who dropped by the party. Everyone at the party, it seemed, was feeling the loss — loss of tradition, of community, of simply having a school in walking distance. Nuanez, in particular, was overcome with the emotion of it all: “It’s like a death,” she said.

Perhaps more than any other state, Arizona has embraced market competition as a central tenet of its K-12 education system, offering parents an extraordinary opportunity to choose and shape their children’s education using tax dollars, and developing a national reputation as the Wild West of schooling.

The state has supported a robust charter school system, tax money for home schooling and expansive private school vouchers, which are available to all families regardless of income. Nearly 89,000 students receive Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, a form of vouchers, state data show; a second voucher program awarded nearly 62,000 tax-supported private school scholarships in 2024, though some students received more than one. More than 232,000 students attend charter schools.

Together, these programs help explain why just 75 percent of Arizona children attended public schools in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s one of the lowest rates in the country.

Supporters of school choice say families are turning to alternatives because public schools are not serving their children well. It’s only right, they argue, that tax dollars follow children to whatever educational setting their families choose.

Critics complain that vouchers eat up state funding, benefit families who can afford private school on their own, disrupt communities and send tax dollars to schools that face little accountability. Unlike public schools, private schools don’t have to administer state tests. They can pick and choose their students, while public schools must educate everyone.

The modern school choice movement began in 1990 with a small voucher program in Milwaukee and has grown into a central plank of the Republican education agenda, with programs now operating in more than half the states. In 2022, Arizona created the first universal program — open to all, not just low-income families. Since then, about a dozen conservative states have adopted universal or near-universal programs. And in July, President Donald Trump signed into law the first federal voucher program, which will require states to opt in, at an estimated cost of $26 billion over the next decade.

Some state programs have now grown so large that spillover effects on public schools are coming into view. In Ohio, the legislature agreed toincrease voucher spending to $1.3 billion by 2027, up from just over $1 billion in 2025, while traditional public schools, which serve far more children, were given a smaller increase — and less than what public education advocates say had been promised under a multiyear agreement to ramp up school spending. In Florida, which has a $4 billion voucher program, public schools districts are seeing enrollment declines, meaning less money from the state and, in many cases, budget cuts.

The ramifications for public education have been particularly clear in Arizona, offering an early picture of K-12 education under the Republican vision of maximum school choice, or what proponents call education freedom. Here, public schools are starting to close.

The challenge: more competition for the same number of students. For the past 15 years, the state’s school-age population has remained steady, though the overall population has grown, said Rick Brammer, principal manager of Applied Economics, a consulting firm that has analyzed enrollment trends, demographic data and the effects of school choice programs in dozens of Arizona school districts.

“You’re taking the same size pie and cutting it into more pieces,” Brammer said. “As we’ve created and funded alternatives, we’ve just emptied out school after school from the districts. In a tight nutshell, that’s the whole story.”

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Home Schooling, Privatization, Vouchers

Ex-CIA Whistleblower: The 2024 Election Was Rigged

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2025 //
37

We have learned, over the past decade, that Trump often projects what he is doing, what he has done, or what he intends to do, on others. We have heard his nonstop claim that the 2020 election was rigged since the day it was decided. Even now, his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says that the 2020 election, which he lost, was rigged. Apparently it is a job requirement to agree with his delusions and lies.

There are people who suspect the 2024 election was rigged to enable Trump’s re-election. I am one of them, though I have no evidence, just a gut feeling that the American electorate would not re-elect a twice-impeached convicted felon and sexual predator who campaigned on a platform of hate, divisiveness, and lies. But that’s just me. Time and again, Trump thinks, acts, and speaks like a mobster, so why would he not cheat to win? Winning means redemption, revenge, and riches. He never accepts losing.

A CIA whistleblower claims that the voting machines were programmed to produce a Trump win. He believes that Harris and Walz won, and it was not close.

During their week of breaking up, Elon Musk said several indiscreet things about Trump. Among them was a tweet saying that Trump would not have won without him, and that Republicans would not control the House without him. Was he referring to his gift of $300 million to the campaign? Or, did he mean another kind of help? Did Trump spill the beans when he said that no one understood the voting machines in Pennsylvania better than his close friend Elon?

An investigation of voting irregularities in Rockland County, New York, was initiated a few months ago. Some districts in Rockland posted surprising results in a few districts. Governor Kathy Hochul won one district by hundreds of votes, but Presidential candidate Kamala Harris received zero votes. An MIT professor claimed that the vote reflected bloc voting by Orthodox Jews, but others questioned his analysis. The judge will decide whether to proceed in late September.

A side note: I was a member of a federal commission created after the debacle of the 2000 election to make recommendations for improving elections. The commission was bipartisan, chaired by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. One of our recommendations was that the federal government should pay the cost of replacing existing voting machines with electronic touch screens. We made this recommendation after reviewing all existing and proposed machines.

Interestingly, the most accurate voting machine tested in 2001 was the one in New York City, known as a mechanical lever machine. The voter enters an enclosed space, closes a curtain behind her, pulls individual little levers for the preferred candidates, then records the vote by pulling a large lever that also opens the curtain, and exits. Every vote is cleanly and correctly registered on paper. That machine had 100% accuracy but it was considered antiquated. It was likened to an old-fashioned cash register that would soon be replaced by touch-screen technology.

Congress adopted some of our commission’s recommendations, including the purchase of touch-screen technology and allocated $350 million to states that agreed to buy the new machines.

Some members of the commission–including me– were concerned about the possibility of hacking. Hackers had demonstrated that there were no electronic machines, no matter how sophisticated, that were secure. But our doubts were dismissed. There was no reversing the inevitable march of progress.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Trump Foolishly Fired BLS Commissioner Because He Didn’t Like the Data

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2025 //
19

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the number of new jobs created in the past month–73,000. The BLS lowered its estimates of new jobs created in the previous two months by 258,000.

The sections of the BLS report that outraged Trump said:

Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in July (+73,000) and has shown little change 
since April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today. The unemployment rate, 
at 4.2 percent, also changed little in July. Employment continued to trend up in health care 
and in social assistance. Federal government continued to lose jobs...

Revisions for May and June were larger than normal. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment
for May was revised down by 125,000, from +144,000 to +19,000, and the change for June was revised 
down by 133,000, from +147,000 to +14,000. With these revisions, employment in May and June 
combined is 258,000 lower than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional 
reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and 
from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)

Trump was furious. The revisions meant that the labor force grew not by 291,000 new jobs, but by only 33,000 jobs. He insisted that the numbers were “rigged,” and he announced that they had been rigged for political reasons, to make him look bad. He fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, accusing her of chicanery. She had worked for the BLS for 20 years.

The message that was sent to all agencies was that Trump wants only good news. Numerous commentators wondered if any government data could be trusted during Trump’s tenure.

Gene Sperling posted this tweet. Sperling was a senior economic advisor to both President Clinton and President Obama.

@GenebSperling:

For anyone who spends even a split second taking even 1% of the Administration’s explanation for firing the BLS commissioner seriously, read the words of Bill Beach, the former Trump-appointed BLS commissioner:

“These numbers are constructed by hundreds of people. They’re finalized by about 40 people. These 40 people are very professional people who have served under Republicans and Democrats.

And the commissioner does not see these numbers until the Wednesday prior to the release on Friday. By that time, the numbers are completely set into the IT system. They have been programmed. They are simply reported to the commissioner, so the commissioner can on Thursday brief the president’s economic team.

The commissioner doesn’t have any hand or any influence or any way of even knowing the data until they’re completely done. That’s true of the unemployment rate. That’s true of the jobs numbers.”

I was going to post this but then I saw this brilliant article in The New York Times by Peter Baker, the Times‘ chief White House correspondent. He put Trump’s latest effort to control the jobs data into a broad perspective. Trump wants to control the news, the arts and culture, and history. He is a deeply insecure man. He wants the world to believe that he’s the most amazing person who ever lived and superior to all past presidents. Deep down he knows he’s in over his head. He has surrounded himself with sycophants and blocks out any news that disrupts his fantasy of greatness.

In an article titled “Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook,“ Baker writes:

An old rule in Washington holds that you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts. President Trump seems determined to prove that wrong.

Don’t like an intelligence report that contradicts your view? Go after the analysts. Don’t like cost estimates for your tax plan? Invent your own. Don’t like a predecessor’s climate policies? Scrub government websites of underlying data. Don’t like a museum exhibit that cites your impeachments? Delete any mention of them.

Mr. Trump’s war on facts reached new heights on Friday when he angrily fired the Labor Department official in charge of compiling statistics on employment in America because he did not like the latest jobs report showing that the economy isn’t doing as well as he claims it is. Mr. Trump declared that her numbers were “phony.” His proof? It was “my opinion.” And the story he told supposedly proving she was politically biased? It had no basis in fact itself.

The message, however, was unmistakable: Government officials who deal in data now fear they have to toe the line or risk losing their jobs. Career scientists, longtime intelligence analysts and nonpartisan statisticians who serve every president regardless of political party with neutral information on countless matters, such as weather patterns and vaccine efficacy, now face pressure as never before to conform to the alternative reality enforced by the president and his team.

Mr. Trump has never been especially wedded to facts, routinely making up his own numbers, repeating falsehoods and conspiracy theories even after they are debunked and denigrating the very concept of independent fact-checking. But his efforts since reclaiming the White House to make the rest of government adopt his versions of the truth have gone further than in his first term and increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries have sought to control information.

“Democracy can’t realistically exist without reliable epistemic infrastructure,” said Michael Patrick Lynch, author of the recently published “On Truth in Politics” and a professor at the University of Connecticut.

“Anti-democratic, authoritarian leaders know this,” he said. “That is why they will seize every opportunity to control sources of information. As Bacon taught us, knowledge is power. But preventing or controlling access to knowledge is also power.”

The British philosopher Francis Bacon published his meditations on truth and nature more than four centuries before Mr. Trump arrived in Washington, but history is filled with examples of leaders seeking to stifle unwelcome information. The Soviets falsified data to make their economy look stronger than it was. The Chinese have long been suspected of doing the same. Just three years ago, Turkey’s autocratic leader fired his government’s statistics chief after a report documented rocketing inflation.

Mr. Trump’s advisers defended his decision to fire the Labor Department official, saying he was only seeking accuracy, and they released a list of recent job estimates that were later revised. While revisions of job creation estimates are normal, they argued without evidence that recent ones indicated a problem.

The bureau’s “data has been historically inaccurate and led by a totally incompetent individual,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman, said on Saturday. “President Trump believes businesses, households and policymakers deserve accurate data when making major policy decisions, and he will restore America’s trust in this key data.”

Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime trying to impose his facts on others, whether it be claiming that Trump Tower has 10 more floors than it actually has or insisting that he was richer than he actually was. He went so far as to sue the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien for $5 billion for reporting that Mr. Trump’s net worth was less than he maintained it was. The future president testified in that case that he determined his net worth based in part on “my own feelings.” (The suit was dismissed.)

His fast-and-loose approach to numbers and facts finally caught up with him last year when he was found liable for fraud in a civil case in which a judge found that he used his annual financial statements to defraud lenders and ordered him to pay what has now exceeded $500 million with interest. Mr. Trump has appealed the ruling.

During his first term as president, Mr. Trump chastised the National Park Service for not backing up his off-the-top-of-his-head estimate of the crowd size at his inauguration. He used a Sharpie pen to alter a map to argue that he was right to predict that a hurricane might hit Alabama, and federal weather forecasters were rebuked for saying it would not.

Most explosively, he pressured Justice Department officials to falsely declare that the 2020 election was corrupt and therefore stolen from him even after they told him there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

This second term, however, has seen Mr. Trump go further to force his facts on the government and get rid of those standing in the way. After just six months of his return to office, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, counted 402 of what it called “attacks on federal science,” nearly double its count from the entire first term.

Gretchen T. Goldman, president of the union and a former science adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said federal agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose director was fired by Mr. Trump on Friday, are meant to operate more independently to avoid the politicization of data collection and reporting.

“Firing the top statistical official sends a clear signal to others across the government that you are expected to compromise scientific integrity to appease the president,” she said. “This puts us in dangerous territory far from an accountable and reality-based government.”

Mr. Trump’s team has aggressively sought to steer information emerging from the federal government since January if it contradicted the president. The top aide to Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, ordered intelligence analysts to rewrite an assessment on the Venezuelan government’s relationship with the gang Tren de Aragua that undermined the president’s claims. Ms. Gabbard later fired two intelligence officialsbecause she said they opposed Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump and his allies assailed the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for projecting that his tax and spending legislation would add trillions of dollars to the national debt and offered his own numbers instead.

“I predict we will do 3, 4, or even 5 times the amount they purposefully ‘allotted’ to us,” he said, referring to growth expected to be stimulated by tax cuts, which he insisted would “cost us no money.” Mr. Trump called the budget office “Democrat inspired and ‘controlled,’” even though it is nonpartisan and Republicans have majorities in both chambers of Congress.

In recent days, Mr. Trump has sought to rewrite the history of the 2016 election when, according to multiple intelligence reports and investigations, including by Republicans, Russia intervened in the campaign with the goal of helping him beat Hillary Clinton. Ms. Gabbard released documents that she claimed showed that in fact President Barack Obama orchestrated a “yearslong coup and treasonous conspiracy” against Mr. Trump, even though the documents she released did not prove that.

Federal officials have gotten the hint. Throughout the government, officials have sought to remove references to topics like “diversity” that might offend Mr. Trump or his team and to revise presentation of history that might in his view cast the country in a negative light. After Mr. Trump ordered the National Park Service to remove or cover up exhibits at its 433 sites across the country that “inappropriately disparage Americans,” employees have flagged displays on slavery, climate change and Native Americans for possible deletion.

Just last week, the Smithsonian Institution confirmed that it had removed Mr. Trump from an exhibit on impeachment at the National Museum of American History, despite the fact that he is the only president to have been impeached twice. The exhibit was changed to say that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal,” referring to Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton — with no mention of Mr. Trump.

The Smithsonian, which has been under pressure from Mr. Trump to eliminate “anti-American ideology,” as he put it in an executive order, said in a statement that it had made the change after reviewing the “Limits of Presidential Power” section of the exhibit, which also includes sections on Congress, the Supreme Court and public opinion.

Because the other sections had not been updated since 2008, the Smithsonian said it decided to revert the impeachment section back to its 2008 version, even though it now presents a false account of history. After The Washington Post and other outlets reported about the change, the Smithsonian on Saturday said the exhibit would be “updated in the coming weeks to reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”

The president’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, came just hours after her office issued its monthly report showing that job growth in July was just half as much as last year’s average. The bureau also revised downward the estimated job creation of the two previous months.

Mr. Trump erupted at the news and ordered her dismissed, claiming on social media that the numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” He offered no proof but just said it was “my opinion.”

Both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move, including Mr. Trump’s labor statistics chief in his first term, William W. Beach, who wrote on social media that it was “totally groundless” and “sets a dangerous precedent.”

Speaking with reporters before heading to his New Jersey golf club for the weekend, Mr. Trump asserted bias on the part of Dr. McEntarfer, who was appointed by Mr. Biden and confirmed by a large bipartisan vote in the Senate, including Vice President JD Vance, then a senator. The example Mr. Trump offered as evidence was flatly untrue.

“Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala,” Mr. Trump said, referring to his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “Then right after the election — I think on the 15th, Nov. 15 — she had an eight or nine hundred thousand-dollar massive reduction.” What he meant was that the bureau revised downward its estimate of how many jobs had been created by 800,000 or 900,000 only after the election so as not to hurt Ms. Harris’s chances of victory.

Except that it actually happened the exact opposite way. Dr. McEntarfer’s bureau revised the number of jobs created downward by 818,000 in August 2024 — before the election, not after it. And the monthly report her bureau released just days before the election was not helpful to Ms. Harris but instead showed that job creation had stalled. The White House offered no comment when asked about the president’s false account.

“It’s a post-factual world that Trump is looking for, and he’s got these sycophants working for him that don’t challenge him on facts,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia.

But firing the messenger, she said, will not make the economy any better. “The reality is the economy is worse, and he can’t keep saying it’s better,” she said. “Joe Biden learned that; people still experience the experience they have, no matter how much” you tell them otherwise.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Data, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Fraud, History, International, Jobs, Lies, Research, Stupid, Trump

Colorado: Aeronautics Charter School Closes Suddenly, Two Weeks Before Start of Semester

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2025 //
5

A charter school in Colorado shocked parents and students by announcing its closure two weeks before school opened.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Colorado Skies Academy, a Centennial-based charter school with a focus on aviation and aerospace education, abruptly announced its closure on Friday, just 16 days before the start of the school year. 

The announcement, which came in an email on Friday at 8:17 p.m., leaves parents scrambling to find alternative schools for their children. 

The school cited financial challenges as the reason for the immediate closure. A spokeswoman for the Colorado Charter School Institute, which serves as the school’s authorizer, said there were  “unanticipated financial developments” over the summer which, caused the school’s viability to “rapidly deteriorate.”

CSI acknowledged the sudden closure was not ideal, but said it supported the board’s decision to close now, rather risk closing mid-school year which would have been more challenging.

Still, the timing of the announcement has particularly frustrated parents, who received the closure notice hours after the school posted on Facebook about an upcoming back-to-school night event. 

“They posted in the morning, come join us for back-to-school night. Then they send an email in the evening saying sorry, there’s gonna be no school at all,”  parent Erin Hess said. Her son Connor was set to attend sixth grade at the 6-8 school. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Colorado, Failure

NPE: Charter Schools in Decline: A National Report

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2025 //
9

The National Center for Charter School Accountability, which is a project of the Network for Public Education, released the first of a three-part series of a national report on the decline of the charter school sector.

Written by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris, the report will be released in three sections. The first one, Decline, documents the startling halt in charter school growth. Once heralded as the salvation of American education, charter schools are no longer growing. Despite the lack of demand for new charters, the Trump administration recently increased the annual appropriation to the federal Charter Schools Program from $440 million every year to $500 million a year.

The report will be released in three parts: Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs. This is the first part.

Burris begins:

In 1992, City Academy — the nation’s first charter school — opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. Created and led by experienced teachers, it was designed as an alternative school for students struggling in traditional settings. With just 53 students, City Academy embodied the original vision for charter schools: small, teacher-run schools within public districts that tested innovative strategies to reach hard-to-teach kids.

When successful, those strategies would inform and strengthen public education as a whole.

That was the idea supported by American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker in 1988.

But by the early 1990s, Shanker had become disillusioned. As his wife Edith later explained, “Al became increasingly critical of charter schools as they moved further from their original intent.

He warned that without well-crafted legislation and public oversight, business interests would hijack the charter school concept, ‘whose real aim is to smash public schools.’”

His warning proved prophetic. In the decades since, real estate investors, for-profit management companies, and corporate charter chains have taken over what began as teacher-led experiments. Today, more than fifty charter trade associations—some state-based, others national—lobby aggressively to block charter school oversight and resist any legislative reform. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported over $26.5 million in income in 2023, with more than $28 million in assets. The California Charter Schools Association reported nearly $13 million in revenue that same year. These organizations are not only advocates but powerful lobbyists, intent on protecting all existing charters and promoting unlimited growth.

During the Obama years, federal initiatives like Race to the Top fueled charter expansion with strong bipartisan support. But that coalition has since un-raveled. While Republican enthusiasm for any alternative to public education— charters, vouchers, homeschools — has surged, Democratic support has eroded, particularly as concerns grow over transparency, equity, and privatization.

Today, the charter sector stands at a reckoning point. Growth has slowed.

For-profit models are expanding. The push to create religious charter schools has fractured the movement from within. Meanwhile, charters are now competing not just with public schools and each other, but with a growing network of voucher-funded private schools and publicly subsidized homeschools.

This report, released in three parts — Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs —examines the trajectory of the charter school movement. It contrasts the promise of its early days with its complex, often troubling reality today.

As the charter experiment enters its fourth decade, the question is no longer what charter schools were meant to be — but whether they can still be reformed in order to serve the public good….

Burris questions why the federal government–which claims to be cutting costs and cutting unnecessary programs–continues to send $500 million every year to a sector that is not growing and does not need the money. DOGE eliminated most employees of the U.S. Department of Wducation but left the federal Charter Schools Program untouched.

The charter school sector stands at a critical juncture. Once heralded as a bold experiment in innovation and opportunity, it is now characterized by stagnation, retrenchment, and rising school closures. Between 2022 and 2025, growth has nearly halted, and closures — often sudden and disruptive— are accelerating. Federal investment, rather than adapting to the sector’s shifting realities, has ballooned to half a billion dollars annually, funding schools that never open, quickly fail, or operate with minimal oversight and accountability.

As the data show, under-enrollment is the primary driver of failure. There is no crisis of unmet demand. Hundreds of charter schools, according to NCES data, can’t fill even a single classroom. The frequently cited “million-student waitlist” has been thoroughly debunked, yet continues to be invoked to justify ever-increasing taxpayer support.

Meanwhile, mega-charters and online schools like Commonwealth Charter Academy siphon vast sums of public dollars while delivering dismal academic outcomes. Others, like Highlands Community Charter School, have defrauded taxpayers and exploited students under the guise of second chances.

With enrollment stagnating and oversight failing, taxpayers should ask: Why are we continuing to fund with federal dollars an expansion that isn’t happening? It is time for Congress and the Department of Education to reassess the Charter Schools Program. Federal dollars should no longer subsidize a shrinking and troubled sector. Instead, they must be redirected toward accountable, transparent, and student-centered public education.

Part II of this report, Disillusionment, to be published this fall, will further explain the reasons behind the sector’s decline.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization

El Paso: IDEA’s First Graduating Class Lost Half Its Students

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2025 //
3

When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, she gifted the IDEA charter chain with $225 million to expand, mostly in Texas. She expected that they would flourish, especially in El Paso, where they intended to open 20 charter schools.

IDEA’s first charter school in El Paso recently held its graduation ceremonies. Only half the students who were enrolled in eighth grade remained to graduate. The others had returned to the public schools.

Claudia Lorena Silva reported in El Paso Matters about the shrinkage of the class:

As the first graduating class of IDEA Public Schools in El Paso donned caps and gowns mid-May, it was less than half the size that were in the school system in eighth grade four years earlier.

In 2021, IDEA’s first two El Paso campuses, Edgemere and Rio Vista, had a combined 256 eighth-graders, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. Four years later, 124 seniors were enrolled in IDEA’s class of 2025 at graduation time, all set to continue their education in college.

IDEA contends that students return to public schools because IDEA’s curriculum is too rigorous. But IDEA students do not consistently outperform those in public schools.

IDEA boasts that all its graduates enroll in college. They do not mention that many students attend colleges that accept all applicants.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Texas

The Supreme Court Majority Are MAGA Sycophants

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
9

I hoped, as I’m sure you did, that the Supreme Court might be a moderating force during Trump’s second term, even though he appointed three of its 6-members Republican majority. Back in the day, conservative Republicans were not extremists. They respected the rule of law and the Constitution.

But the Roberts Court is turning out to be a patsy for MAGA extremism and an all-powerful executive branch.

The Republicans on the Court claim to be “originalists” and “textualists,” rendering every decision with fidelity to the Constitution.

But now we can say with certainty that the six-member reactionary majority will reliably give Trump whatever power he wants.

If the Founders were united on one principle, it was the balancing of power among the three branches: the President, the Congress, and the Judiciary. No one of them was to reign supreme.

And yet the Roberts Court has allowed Donald Trump to run roughshod over the Congress, the Judiciary, even the law.

Trump and his handlers have spent six months assuming the powers of Congress, especially the power of the purse. and ignoring the laws passed by Congress.

The Supreme Court has approved his mass firings, even those firings that resulted in the elimination of Departments, agencies, and functions written into law by Congress. SCOTUS greenlighted his seizure of USAID and approved his evisceration of the Education Department. SCOTUS disregarded the fact that the President cannot abolish functions authorized by Congress without Cingressional approval.

If Trump and his handler want to take control of an agency or abolish it, the Suprreme Ciurt gives him a thumbs up.

His disregard for law and norms began with his mass firing of Inspectors General. These are the high-level, nonpartisan ombudsmen in every department who guard against waste, fraud, and abuse. Gone.

Then he peremptorily fired members of independent agencies and boards who were appointed for a set term and cannot be fired for any reason other than malfeasance and neglect of duty. These independent bodies were supposed to be insulated from partisan politics. Trump ignored the safeguards and began firing Democrats, on grounds that they would not support his agenda.

Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox as chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Cathy Harris as chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). The two women were appointed by Biden. Lower courts enjoined their firing, but the DC Court of Appeals said it was ok for Trump to remove them.

NPR said:

These agencies and many others have historically operated with a degree of autonomy granted by Congress. Their structure, with Democratic and Republican members serving staggered terms, has helped ensure some distance and independence from the White House.

Members are nominated by presidents and confirmed by the Senate. But in creating those agencies, Congress held that presidents can only fire members for cause, such as neglect of duty or malfeasance.

In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld those limits on the president’s power in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor about another independent agency, the Federal Trade Commission. Now the future of that 90-year-old decision is highly uncertain.

In March, Trump fired the two Biden appointees on the Federal Trade Commission, Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. His letter of ouster said that the commissioner’s “continued service on the F.T.C. is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.”

Trump removed Christopher Hanson, a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Hanson said he was removed without cause, flatly contradicting the law and precedent.

Democracy Docket reported on the Supreme Court decision released this week, which gave its approval to Trump’s firing of the Democratic members of independent agencies. The majority did not write an opinion. The dissenters did.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump’s emergency request to fire members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) without cause. The ruling allows Trump to proceed with his purge of three Democratic CPSC commissioners and replace them with appointees of his choosing, despite federal law requiring “neglect of duty or malfeasance” for removal.

In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the decision allows for “the permanent transfer of authority, piece by piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another.”

The court, in a 6-3 vote, blocked a lower court ruling Wednesday that reinstated the fired commissioners, siding with Trump and halting the lower court’s enforcement of statutory protections.

In its ruling, the Court cited a similar decision from May, Trump v. Wilcox, which allowed Trump to remove Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board. 

“The stay we issued in Wilcox reflected our judgment that the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer,” the Court wrote. “The same is true on the facts presented here.”

Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson,  issued a blistering dissent accusing the majority of upending nearly a century of legal precedent that protects the independence of federal agencies – all without full briefing, oral argument or a decision on the merits. 

“Once again, this Court uses its emergency docket to destroy the independence of an independent agency, as established by Congress,” Kagan wrote.

Kagan mocked the stacking of precedent with no clear rationale, noting that the court’s only justification was its previous order in Wilcox.

“Next time, though, the majority will have two (if still under-reasoned) orders to cite,” Kagan added. “Truly, this is turtles all the way down.”

Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, recently told Democracy Docket that in not offering explanations, the Supreme Court is damaging its own authority. 

“The power of the Court is its judgment. It doesn’t have the power of the purse nor the power of the sword,” Kreis said. “So, when six justices fail to explain the Supreme Court’s rulings and let major changes in the federal government’s structure go forward that appear to be inconsistent with the law, one must ask why?”

The CPSC was designed by Congress to be bipartisan, with five members serving staggered terms. By law, the president cannot remove commissioners without cause and no more than three of the Commissioners can be affiliated with the same political party.

The same structure governs other independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Communications Commission. Trump’s firings — now twice greenlit by the court — appear to break that model. 

The justices did not rule on the case’s legal merits yet. But by staying the lower court’s ruling, the court effectively sided with Trump’s expansive view of executive authority while appeals proceed. 

By allowing Trump to remove Democratic appointees on independent boards without cause, in direct violation of the law, the 6-member majority presents itself as a wing of MAGA. The majority is enabling a remarkable concentration of power in the hands of the President. The Imperial Presidency arrives, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Assuming that the Democrats regain control of the White House in a future election, the Supreme Court has removed the guardrails that protect a balance of power.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Trump

Jan Resseger: Ohio Legislature Robs Public Schools to Fill Pockets of the Rich

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
1

Jan Resseger writes here about the injustice of the budget for public schools passed by the Ohio legislature. Firmly in the control of hard-right Republicans, the legislature eagerly funds vouchers and charter schools while underfunding the public schools. As in every other state, the vast majority of Ohio students attend public schools. The only evaluation of the Ohio voucher program showed that most students who used the vouchers were already attending private schools; those who transferred from public schools fell behind the peers they left behind.

Ohio legislators know that vouchers and charters do not increase educational opportunity. They don’t care. Parents of public school students must inform themselves and act to protect their public schools.

She writes:

In the last week of June, two important events happened almost simultaneously in Ohio: A district court in Columbus found the state’s EdChoice voucher program unconstitutional, and the state legislature passed a budget that at the same time shorts the state’s public schools that serve the mass of our state’s children, significantly cuts the state income tax, and increases funding for private school vouchers over the next two years.

We all desperately hope the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit will save our public schools, but appeals of the case to higher courts will likely take several years, a period when the  new budget’s underfunding of the Fair School Funding Plan, the effect of the income tax cuts and the diversion money to private school vouchers will inevitably continue to diminish the state’s investment in Ohio’s public schools.

In the new budget, the legislature technically phased in a new Fair School Funding Plan—a mathematical formula to ensure that the state will guarantee adequate and equitably distributed state school funding. However, after the House Speaker called the plan unsustainable, the legislature failed fully to fund the new formula’s provisions and thereby ensured the new formula’s ultimate failure before Ohio can even try it out.

The Ohio legislature’s income tax reduction along with lawmakers’ choice to permit continuing growth of publicly funded, universal EdChoice private school tuition vouchers emerges from a philosophy that government’s responsibility is to protect individual parents’ freedom. Solid support for the state’s public schools would instead embody a commitment to what we call the social contract, explained here by economist Joseph Stiglitz:

“A social contract defines the relationship between individuals and societies, much as an actual contract would, outlining the obligations of the parties to the contract and to each other. There is one big difference between the social contract and ordinary contracts. When an actual contract is breached, there are consequences both for the relationship and especially for the breaching party… But when the state violates what it is supposed to do, there is no corresponding mechanism for enforcing the social contract.” The Road to Freedom, p. 86)

Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution definesthe state’s responsibility to provide a strong system of public education as part of the social contract: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”

Here are three ways in which the new state budget undermines Ohio’s public education social contract.

The New Ohio Budget Does Not Commit the State to Equitable and Adequate Public School Funding.

In a new brief, Lawmakers Underfund Ohio Schools by $2.86B in FY26-27; Veto Overrides Risk Another $330M, along with an attached PowerPoint slide presentation, Policy Matters Ohio shows how Ohio’s Fiscal Year 2026-2027 budget undermines the new Fair School Funding Plan just as it is being launched.

The first slide of Policy Matters’ PowerPoint presentation summarizes the impact of the new budget for the state’s public schools: “Ohio lawmakers give a billion-dollar annual tax break to Ohioans earning six figures, underfund (public) schools by $2.86 billion, and leave behind students with the greatest need.”

In Slide 3, Policy Matters compares the amount of public school funding allocated in the new state budget to the amount the new Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP) would have awarded to each school district if the legislature had, as the formula requires it to do, correctly factored in the district’s current costs instead of old cost data from FY 2022. “Under the enacted plan, 74% of Ohio’s school districts will receive less than what the FSFP says they need to meet the costs of an adequate education.”

In a recent Hannah News Service publication, Howard Fleeter, Ohio’s well known school finance expert, explains¹ exactly how the legislature robs school districts of what they had expected under the Fair School Funding Plan: “One of the most important features of the Fair School Funding Plan is its utilization of an inputs-based approach to determining adequacy, which results in a base per-pupil amount which can vary across districts based on the number of students and their distribution across grade levels… In order to not just fully phase in the funding formula but to adequately fund it, the base cost in FY 26 should be based on FY 24 input data and the base cost in FY 27 should be based on FY 25 data.” However, this year the legislature used old, FY 2022 cost data, thereby failing accurately to measure school districts’ costs. In other words, the state should recognize that school district expenses rise year after year due to inflation, and the formula should recognize that school districts have to keep up or risk losing teachers and services.

In Policy Matters’ Slide 5, a bar graph demonstrates that in the new budget, legislators leave farthest behind the school districts serving concentrations of the state’s poorest students. These school districts will fall 107% behind what the FSFP would have brought them in state funding. Their school funding is actually being cut this year.

Part of the loss to school districts serving masses of poor children comes from a recalculation of Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid.  Slide 7 explains that the legislature used “direct certification, a process of identifying low-income students by relying on public benefits data that will lead to fewer low-income students being counted in the system and fewer DPIA dollars going to the places that desperately need them.” Why has the legislature chosen to base DPIA on a data set that will, “cut more than $200 million in DPIA funds over the next biennium, from FY 2025 levels of support”?

Slide 7 adds, as a preface to Slide 8, that the new budget, “appears use that money to offset the ‘performance’ supplement which is estimated to cost $215 million over the biennium.”  What is the Performance Supplement? Slide 8 explains: “The Performance Supplement would rely on (each district’s)  state report card data, increasing funding by $13 per student times the number of stars on their state report card or progress report… Report card scores are built on testing performance as well as factors like chronic absenteeism, and the ‘breadth of coursework available in the district.’ ”

Policy Matters Slide 8 clearly identifies the injustice embedded in the Performance Supplement: “Low scores on these indicators should signal to policymakers that the school and the community it serves are devalued, under-resourced, and in need of more help, not less.  It explicitly reverses course on closing opportunity and education gaps, which would help schools improve.” In Slide 8, we also learn that the budget adds a $225 per student Enrollment Growth Supplement for the fastest growing suburban school districts. While the supplement will help meet the costs of serving new students moving to these districts, it is important to remember that these are districts serving wealthier families.

In the brief itself, you can link to your own school district’s profile to see how your district fares under the new budget here.

The New Budget Reduces Ohio’s State Income Tax—Undermining the State’s Capacity to Raise Its Share of Public School Funding.

The Plain Dealer‘s Anna Staver explains: “Lawmakers eliminated the state’s top income tax bracket, collapsing Ohio’s tax structure from two rates to one. It’s the last step in a decade-long push for a flat tax —and this final move amounts to a $1.14 billion cut.”  Signal Ohio‘s Andrew Tobias adds: “That new top tax rate of 2.75% is lower than any surrounding state and lower than any time in the past five decades… About 96% of the $1.1 billion in annual lost revenue… will stay in the pockets of those earning $138,000 or more….” Policy Matters Ohio’s Slide 10 depicts the legislature’s new flat tax diverting a billion dollars of essential state revenue to wealthy individuals and away from the state’s social contract. The new budget exacerbates a long trend of tax slashing in Ohio. Last fall, Policy Matters Ohio’s Bailey Williams tracked two decades of Ohio tax cuts that have progressively reduced Ohio’s capacity to support the needs of the public and to support the system of common schools promised in the Ohio Constitution.

The New Budget Allows Private School Vouchers to Continue Eating Up School Revenue.

In his June 27th On the Money¹ school funding expert Howard Fleeter describes another primary drain on state revenue: private school tuition vouchers will continue to eat up an increasingly large chunk of the new state budget. Fleeter compares the legislature’s investment in public school funding to the legislature’s investment in private school vouchers. Fleeter calculates, “that state foundation funding for Ohio’s traditional school districts—spread across the state’s 609 local school districts—will increase by $281.9 million over the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 biennium compared to current funding levels.” He continues: “Voucher funding is slated to increase by $327.1 million over the FY26-27 biennium…. This increase is $45 million more than the increase slated for the traditional K-12 districts over the biennium, despite the fact that K-12 districts educate roughly 8 times as many students as do private schools.”

In the New Budget, Legislators Shift the Responsibility for Funding Public Schools More Heavily onto Local School Districts.

We continue to hear a lot from our legislators about the danger of rising property taxes, but ironically, by reducing the state’s investment in public education, the legislature itself has made it necessary for school districts to increase reliance on local property taxes or cut programs and teachers. Howard Fleeter concludes¹ that, in the current fiscal year (FY 2025) under the budget that passed two years ago, the state is paying 38.4% of public school funding in Ohio. In the new budget, in which the legislature has failed to update the cost data in the formula, has cut the state income tax, and has kept on letting an uncapped voucher program grow,“the average state share (of total public school funding) will drop to 35.0% in FY 26 and to 32.2% in FY 27….”

When a state violates the social contract by reneging on its responsibility to fund public schools, the funding burden falls more heavily and more inequitably on local school districts.

¹Howard Fleeter, “On The Money,” Hannah News Service, June 27, 2025, (available free in many public library research collections).

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio, Parents, Privatization

Parents Are the Most Important Element in Student Learning

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
18

Way back in 2014, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was selling the idea that teachers should be rewarded or punished based on their students’ test scores. That idea, baked into Race to the Top, was a dismal failure. Teachers who taught the neediest kids got low ratings, and teachers in the most advantaged schools got the highest ratings. Bill Gates was similarly infatuated with the idea, and he handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to districts and charter chains to test it. Rigorous evaluation showed it to be demoralizing to teachers with no impact on test scores.

What we should have learned from the experience of Race to the Top is that carrots and sticks applied to teachers do not help students and do not improve education.

It’s parents and home life that have the largest effect on student learning. So said the American Statistical Association in 2014, making a futile attempt to persuade Secretary Duncan that he was on the wrong track.

Susan E. Mayer and Ariel Kalil explain why policymakers should focus on parents and help them become better parents. [Let me add, however, that I disagree with their comments about reading and math proficiency. As I have written many times before, NAEP proficiency is not grade level; it is a high bar, and it’s unlikely that most students would ever score the equivalent of an A.]

They write:

American schoolchildren are performing abysmally in tests of basic skills. Only 36% of fourth-grade students were deemed proficient in national math tests and only 33% were deemed proficient in reading as of 2022, the latest year for which such data is available.

Those numbers are even worse than before the pandemic – 5 percentage points lower in math from 2019 and 2 percentage points lower in reading. And the drop in reading and math proficiency after the pandemic has happened to both economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. Students across the board need help.

There is a tendency to blame schools – and by extension, teachers – for students’ poor performance. The temptation to focus solely on schools, however, is misguided. Parents are the ones who must build the foundation for children’s learning. Yet parenting has long been viewed as a private behavior for which women are presumed to possess unique instincts, leaving parents with little evidence-based guidance on how to develop their children’s skills.

Meanwhile, the political right often favors more accountability for teachers, more charter schools and more vouchers for private schools. The political left often favors more teacher training, reducing class sizes, more equitable distribution of school resources and patience as students recover from the pandemic-related dip in scores.

But it’s parents and family background that make the biggest difference. This is evident because the gap in children’s math and reading test scores is already large at the start of kindergarten, in line with their socioeconomic status, and does not narrow as children progress through schooling.

Many people think that the solution, therefore, is to improve parents’ socioeconomic status, which will in turn improve children’s skills. But the reason that low-income parents parent their children differently than high-income parents is not a causal result of the low income itself. Improving parents’ household income would be laudable for many reasons, but experimental evidence shows that giving parents cash payments after they have a child neither changes parental investments nor changes the child’s skills. [Note from Diane: I disagree. Making cash payments is not the same as improving family socioeconomic status; investing in good jobs, housing, and long-term improvements in SES would make a huge difference.]

Instead, we need to support parents in directly changing what they do. Our experimental research on specific parent behaviors that boost child skills points to the importance of reading and talking to children. Analysis we conducted of the American Time Use Survey shows that on average, however, only 21% of mothers of children ages 3 to 6 report spending daily time reading with their child, only 30% report any daily time playing games with them, and only 11% report daily time dedicated to “listening or talking with” their child.

Worse, many parents are misinformed about how to prepare their young children for school. According to a survey we conducted with 2,000 parents in Chicago, about 25% more parents thought it was essential that children know the alphabet before starting school than thought it was important to spark children’s curiosity.

But this is misguided. Children will eventually learn the alphabet and how to count to 50. Especially for parents with less than a four-year college degree, language interactions with young children – parental storytelling, reading books and asking questions about them – along with math interactions such as playing with shape blocks and reading books about numbers are correlated more strongly with growth in children’s language and math skills than activities such as teaching the alphabet and counting or practicing letter sounds and how to calculate simple sums.

We do a disservice to parents by not redirecting their attention from rote skills, such as memorizing letters, sounds and numbers, to more open-ended inquiry. But researchers are limited as well. We need many more resources devoted to improving high-quality research on understanding precisely what types of parent engagement build the child skills necessary for success in later life. We also need much more research on how to boost parents’ capacity for child skill-building.

But first we must acknowledge that mothers, fathers and other caregivers play a crucial role in building children’s skills. Second, we have to acknowledge that as a nation, we have an interest in what parents do. Children are not just the property of their parents. They are the nation’s future.

Their schooling can only build upon the foundation that parents provide. The United States spends more on education per pupil and less on supporting parents than almost any other wealthy country. The government needs to expand its vision of what it means to support childhood development and invest in helping parents create nurturing learning environments at home in the years before formal schooling begins.

We should signal the value children have for the nation by making work compatible with raising children through family leave, providing access to health care for all children and caretakers and offering free access for children to libraries and museums where they can build a love of learning.

We should also explore new solutions, such as providing digital libraries and utilizing technology in innovative ways to support parents in helping their children learn. Evidence from our recent research shows that this can increase parental reading, boost child language development and close the socioeconomic gap in children’s language skill.

Susan E. Mayer is a professor and a dean emeritus at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. 

Ariel Kalil is the Daniel Levin Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. They are the directors of the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the University of Chicago.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Literacy, Parents, Race to the Top, Research

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Distractions from Epstein Files Are Not Working

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
9

Heather Cox Richardson makes two important points in this post:

  1. Trump’s poll numbers have gone down on his deportation policy (the public wants him to deport criminals, not honest, hard-working non-citizens) and on his tariff policy.
  2. Trump has thrown red meat to his base (stripping Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, telling Coke to change to cane sugar, demanding that two sports teams return to their original names, which were offensive to Native Americans), but his distractions have not worked.

I wonder: How can we survive another 3 and one-half years of this craziness?

No matter what Trump does or says, he will stil be President. The Republicans who control the House and Senate will not impeach him, no matter what. His Cabinet of lapdogs will not invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him. The best we can hope for is a Democratic sweep of both houses of Congress in 2026 so Trump is not allowed to get away with lying and grifting and destroying the global economy.

Richardson writes:

On Friday, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that “polls show Trump’s position plummeting.” On Friday morning, the average job approval rating for Trump was 42.6% with 53.5% disapproving.


Those numbers break down by policy like this: Gallup polls show that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy with 62% opposed. A new poll out from CBS News/ YouGov today shows that support for Trump’s deportations has dropped ten points from the start of his term, from 59% to 49%. Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose the administration’s use of detention facilities. The numbers in a CNN/SSRS poll released today are even more negative for the administration: 59% of Americans oppose deporting undocumented immigrants without a criminal record while only 23% support such deportations, and 57% are opposed to building new detention facilities while only 26% support such a plan.


American approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is unlikely to rise as news spreads that last Monday, the government gave ICE unprecedented access to the records of nearly 80 million people on Medicaid, allegedly to enable ICE to find undocumented immigrants. Kimberly Kindy and Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that enables ICE to access Medicaid recipients’ name, ethnicity and race, birthdate, home address, and social security number.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, although they may use it in an emergency to cover lifesaving services in a hospital emergency room. The release of personal information from Medicaid lists is unprecedented. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned: “The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American…. It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to health care.”


Trump’s tariffs are not popular. An Associated Press–NORC poll on Thursday found that 49% of Americans thought Trump’s policies have made them worse off while only 27% think his policies have helped.


And then there are the Epstein files.


A YouGov poll from Tuesday showed that 79% of Americans think the government should release all the documents it has about the Epstein case while only 4% think it should not. Those numbers included 85% of Democrats, but also 76% of Independents and 75% of Republicans. And that was BEFORE the publication of the Wall Street Journal article detailing the lewd and suggestive birthday letter Trump apparently contributed to Epstein’s fiftieth birthday album.


As Morris notes, Trump is underwater on all the issues of his presidency, but he is most dramatically underwater over Epstein.


You don’t need polls to see that Trump, at least, is panicking. He is throwing red meat to his base in what appears to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative. After his July 12 threat to strip comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship (she was born in New York, and he does not have that power), he has kept up a stream of social media posts that seem designed to distract his wavering followers from the news around them.


On Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It’s just better!”


But Coca-Cola had apparently not gotten the memo. It uses cane sugar in a number of foreign markets but has used high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. products since 1985. On its website, it wrote: “We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand. More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon.”


Social media users posted memes of Coke bottles emblazoned with the words “Trump is on the List” and, in small letters below, “Now with cane sugar.”


On Thursday, after observers had noted both the president’s swollen ankles and what appeared to be makeup covering up something on his hand, the White House announced that Trump has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that his physician described as a “benign” and common condition in which veins don’t move blood back to the heart efficiently.


Trump has never offered any information about his health, and his doctors have presented accounts of his physical exams that are hard to believe, making observers receive this announcement at this moment with skepticism. “Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released,” one social media meme read.


Today, Trump posted on social media: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”


Hours later, he posted that his post “has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way.” Then he threatened to block the deal to move the Commanders back to Washington, D.C., from a Maryland suburb unless they “change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins.’”
At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of “savagery” in the safe space of a playing field. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had come to recognize the racism inherent in those names, and colleges started to retire Native American team names and mascots. In 2020 the Washington football team retired its former name, becoming the Commanders two years later. At about the same time, the Cleveland baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians in honor of the four pairs of art deco statues installed on the city’s Hope Memorial Bridge in 1932.


Trump’s attempt to control the narrative didn’t work. “The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list,” one social media user wrote. The post was representative of reactions to Trump’s post.


Today marked the end of the first six months of Trump’s second term, and he marked it with a flurry of social media posts praising his performance as “6 months of winning,” and attacking those he sees as his opponents. He again went after the Wall Street Journal, which ran the story about Epstein’s birthday album. He complained the paper had run a “typically untruthful story” when it said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had had to explain to Trump that firing Fed chair Jerome Powell would be bad for markets. Trump took exception to the idea he did not understand the interplay of the Fed and markets, despite his repeated threats against Powell.


“Nobody had to explain that to me,” he wrote. “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. if it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED! So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”

Tonight, Trump’s social media posts seemed to project his own fears on Democrats he perceives as enemies. He once again claimed Senator Schiff, who managed one of the impeachment cases against Trump when he was a representative, had falsified loan documents in 2011 and should go to prison. In 2023, a judge determined that the Trump Organization had falsified loan documents. Trump posted: “Adam Schiff is a THIEF! He should be prosecuted, just like they tried to prosecute me, and everyone else—the only difference is, WE WERE TOTALLY INNOCENT, IT WAS ALL A GIANT HOAX!”


On Late Night with Stephen Colbert last night, Schiff said: “Donald, piss off…. But Donald, before you piss off, would you release the Epstein files?”
Trump also posted an image of intelligence agents and politicians in prison garb as if in mug shots, and reposted both an image of what appears to be lawmakers in handcuffs and an AI-generated video showing former president Barack Obama being arrested by FBI agents and then being held in a jail cell.


Meidas Touch posted: “The crazy thing about Donald Trump posting an AI video of Obama getting arrested is that Trump once had someone organize a party for him and invite a bunch of ‘young women’ and it turned out Jeffrey Epstein was his only other guest.” Alan Feuer and Matthew Goldstein broke the story of that party in Saturday’s New York Times.
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Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Immigration, Obama, Opinion Polling, Scandals, Stupid, Trump
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