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New Hampshire: Vouchers Are Costly Subsidy for Mostly Affluent Families

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2025 //
2

Garry Rayno, veteran statehouse reporter for InDepth NH, writes here about the now-familiar voucher scam. Republican legislators claimed that low-income students would use vouchers to transfer to private schools that better met their needs. When New Hampshire removed income limits on families that want vouchers, the voucher program proved to be a subsidy for students who were already enrolled in private schools, mostly religious schools. The program is more costly than predicted, and public schools will see cuts to finance vouchers.

Rayno has the story:

Free money is free money so many New Hampshire parents in the last month lined up at the non-public schoolhouse door to grab what they can.

The parents of the 11,000 students who applied for grants from the newly opened vault in the state treasury are not the ones advocates tout as the beneficiary of the Education Freedom Account program if New Hampshire resembles other state’s experiences when they transitioned to “universal vouchers.”

In those states like Arizona, Ohio and North Carolina very few students left public schools to take a voucher, almost all of the new enrollees are students currently in religious and private schools or homeschooled as they are here in New Hampshire.

These are parents who did not qualify when there was a salary cap of 350 percent of the federal poverty level or $74,025 for a family of two and $112,487 for a family of four, because they made too much money.

Consequently, most of the new Granite State enrollees will have family incomes above $112,487 and if the average grant is similar to what it was last school year, $5,204, the state will be liable for well over $52 million this fiscal year because there are a number of exceptions for the cap that could add 1,000 or more students.

As has been the history of the program, the number of students and the cost have always been way more than the department’s estimates.

Lawmakers used estimates from Drew Cline, the State Board of Education Chair and the head of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a Libertarian organization, that were substantially less than 10,000, and they only budgeted $39 million for the first year of the biennium and $47.8 million for the second year when the salary cap will rise to 12,500 or when the cost is likely to be over $65 million.

For the biennium, the program is likely to be $30 million more than budgeted or more than what was spent last school year for the program.

The money comes from the Education Trust Fund which also pays for the state adequacy grant to school districts, charter school per-pupil grants (about twice the public school per-pupil grant), special education costs and the school building aid program.

The fund was expected to be in deficit this year and require an infusion from the general fund to meet its obligations, when general fund revenues are shrinking and not be able to cover the cost.

You can see where this is headed. The current crop of lawmakers in the majority will say they will have to cut back on state aid to public education just as the state Supreme Court agreed with a superior court ruling in the ConVal case that the state has failed to meet its constitutional obligation to pay for an adequate education for its students.

The decision did not say the state is obligated to pay for an adequate education for students in religious and private schools or being homeschooled.

The greatest vendor beneficiaries of the new state obligation according to out-of-date data from the administrator of the EFA program, The Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, are religious schools, followed by private schools and homeschooling parents.

But the students in those programs are not the ones touted to benefit from the EFA program.

Even before its beginning, voucher advocates touted the EFA program as an opportunity for low-income parents to find the best educational environment for their students if they do not do well in the public school environment.

How many of these students actually left public schools since the program began to take EFA grants?

The Department of Education lists the number of “switchers” for each year and a couple extra years before the program began. 

The total for the first four years is 1,417 if you remove the two years prior to the start of the program that the department uses to derive its suspect 36 percent figure.

The agency’s statistics also list the number of students who re-enrolled in public school after the first year and that number is 214, so the actual switchers over the first four years are 1,203.

The total enrollment over the first four years is 14,192 which would be 8.5 percent and if you just account for the new students every year it would be less than 20 percent of the students that left public school to join the program at the most optimistic.

More than 80 percent of the students who have enrolled in the program were not in public schools when they were awarded EFA grants that were as high as $8,670 last school year when students received the base per-student aid, as well as differential aid by qualifying for free and reduced lunches and special education services, at the same rates as public schools.

While students in public schools and the EFA program have to meet the same criteria to receive the differential aid for free and reduced lunches, the students in the EFA seeking special education aid only need a medical professional to say they need the services and not the elaborate process students and parents have to traverse in the public school system.

The next question is if EFA grants are a determining factor in being able to send your kid to a private or a religious school or is it essentially a subsidy allowing the family to take a trip to Europe or a ski vacation in the Rockies.

Paying to send your child to the best private schools in the state is not cheap, for example attending St. Paul’s School in Concord costs $76,650 according to the school’s website including room and board, while Phillips Exeter costs $69,537 for boarding students and $54,312 for day students.

Holderness, Dublin, Kimball Union, and Proctor Academy all cost about $80,000 a year for boarding students, with different rates for day students, and New Hampton costs about $75,000 for boarding students and $45,000 for day students.

Derryfield, which only takes day students, costs $43,650 a year according to its website.

Religious schools tuition varies a great deal, but Concord Christian costs $7,600 a year, while Laconia Christian, which received the most in EFA money for the 2021-2022 school year of any private or religious school according to data from the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, the only year the organization reported vendor receipts, has a sliding rate of $7,536 for Kindergarten to fifth grade, $8,087 for grades six to eight, and $8,570 for high school.

Trinity High School in Manchester costs $14,832 for the coming school year, while Bishop Brady in Concord charges $15,250 and Bishop Guertin in Nashua charges $17,225 plus $600 in fees, according to the schools’ websites.

You can see why the religious schools are the prime beneficiary of the free money that is now available to every parent of a school age student in the state.

If nothing else is done, about $120 million will be spent on the EFA program in the next two school years without much accountability.

With that kind of tax money flowing mostly to religious schools, the program’s administrator should have to provide a yearly breakdown of where the money is being spent several months after every school year for public consumption.

The Children’s Scholarship Program NH retains up to 10 percent of the grants as its administrative fee, which would be about $12 million over the biennium, making the organization the biggest beneficiary of the EFA program.

This organization, with the blessing of former Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, refused to make program data available to the Legislative Budget Assistant’s Office for a performance audit of the program required by state law. 

The limited audit is expected to be released by the end of the year.

When a compliance check was done in-house by the Department of Education after the first two years of the EFA program of 100 applications, 25 percent contained errors that allowed students to enroll when the information provided was inadequate.

People need to tell their state representatives and senators to make the program more accountable for the millions of dollars of state taxpayers’ money it spends.

Because if they don’t demand transparency, the current crop of lawmakers will shift more public school costs on to your future property tax bills while blaming the public schools and not themselves for irresponsible spending.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Failure, Fake, Funding, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

Becky Pringle: Hungry Children Can’t Learn

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
6

Trump and his compliant allies in Congress took pride in the One Big Ugly Bill that they passed in early July. But it offers reasons for shame, not pride. The Trump bill finances tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting food for schoolchildren and Medicaid for millions of children.

The Republican budget bill locks in benefits for the rich and hunger for children of the poor.

Imagine laughing, applauding, and feeling proud of this heartless bill! I

President Trump Signs His "Big, Beautiful Bill" Into Law And Celebrates Independence Day At The White House

President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cut federal spending on SNAP by around $186 billion over the next decade. Samuel Corum—Getty Images

Becky Pringle, President of the NEA, writes in TIME magazine about the shamefulness of this legislation.

She writes:

Hunger in America’s public schools is a real problem, and it is heartbreaking. As the head of the largest union of educators in the country, I hear stories almost daily of how kids struggle and how schools and teachers step up to fill the gaps. It’s the school community in Kentucky filling a Blessing Box with foods to help fellow students and families who don’t have enough. It’s the teacher in Rhode Island who started a food “recycling” program to ensure no food goes to waste and to give students access to healthy snacks like cheese sticks, apples, yogurt, and milk.

School meals are more than a budget line item. They are lifelines that help millions of students learn and grow. But as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals.

President Donald Trump’s newly-signed tax bill, which Republicans overwhelmingly voted to pass, slashes food assistance benefits via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by an estimated $186 billion over the next decade—thelargest cut in American history. These devastating reductions will result in an estimated 18 million children losing access to free school meals.

The cuts shift the cost of school lunches to the states, costing them more than they can afford when they are already grappling with tighter budgets and substantial Republican-led Medicaid cuts.Twenty-three governors warned these cuts will lead to millions of Americans losing vital food assistance.

It’s hard to understand if you’ve never faced hunger, but millions of American children do not have access to enough food each day. In a recent survey of 1,000 teachers nationwide, three out of every four reported that their students are already coming to school hungry. 

Our children can’t learn if they are hungry. As a middle-school science teacher for more than 30 years, I have seen the pain that hunger creates. It’s the student who skips breakfast so she can give it to her little brother. It’s the student who misbehaves because his stomach is rumbling. It’s the students who struggle in class after a weekend where they didn’t have a single full meal. Educators see this pain everyday, and that’s why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students. 

Free school meals represent commonsense and cost-effective public policy. They don’t just prevent hunger, they help kids succeed. Decades of research reviewed by the Food Research & Action Center shows that when students participate in school breakfast programs, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement go up and tardiness goes down. When I stand in a room of bright and curious children, it breaks my heart that some of them are going without the food they need to learn and thrive—not because America can’t afford to feed them, but because adults in Washington decided they’d rather spend the money on tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

The cuts from the Republican tax bill will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many. In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced lunch during the 2022-2023 school year.

These are not abstract numbers. These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America’s kids deserve better. 

The National School Lunch Act of 1946 laid the foundation that public schools are places where children can receive a free breakfast and lunch each day. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike expanded school lunch programs, operating under the shared understanding that no child should go hungry at school in the richest country in the world.

But the extreme right wing of today’s Republican Party has walked away from that moral consensus—ripping away these programs to give another tax break to billionaires.

The Trump Administration’s authoritarian blueprint outlined in Project 2025 takes the anti-public education attacks even further by attempting to gut the Department of Education and to send tax dollars to private schools, and promoting ideologically-driven book bans and classroom censorship.

And now, as the Trump Administration and its allies work to destroy public education, they also have attempted tointimidate the National Education Association and our 3 million educators. They know we are powerful and vocal advocates for students and a formidable opponent to their attacks on public education. Last month, the relentless efforts of organized educators and our allies got the Trump Administration to release $7 billion in education funds it had tried to withhold.

Together, we will fight forward: for our vision where every student attends a safe, inclusive, supportive, and well-resourced public school, which includes nutritious meals for all students regardless of race or place. 

We are educators. We don’t quit. We will continue to engage with school boards, town halls, state legislatures, and Congress to fight for students. Public education does not belong to politicians trying to dismantle it. It is for every student, parent, and educator who understands it has the power to transform lives.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Poverty, Trump

Rachel Maddow: Our Worst Fears Have Come True

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2025 //
5

This is one of Rachel Maddow’s best clips. She says that we worried about what Trump might do if he won re-election. Wonder no more. It is happening. He is a full-fledged authoritarian, intent on smashing the Constitution and our rights. what can we do? She has some ideas.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Immigration, Trump

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
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