I will be in Conroe, Texas, just outside Houston, for the convening of the Network for Public Education from September 25-26.
Please join us.
The Network for Public Education (NPE) and NPE Action National Conference will take place from September 26 to September 27, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe in the Greater Houston area (Conroe, Texas). The theme for this year’s event is “Public Schools Build Democracy”.
Event Details
Dates: Saturday, September 26 (8:00 AM) – Sunday, September 27, 2026 (3:00 PM)
Location: Hyatt Regency Conroe, 1001 Grand Central Pkwy, Conroe, TX 77304
Registration Cost: $199 per ticket (includes meals)
Featured Keynotes & Highlights
Keynote Speakers: Author/journalist Katherine Stewart, Dean Emerita/Professor Leslie Fenwick, and Texas AFT President Zeph Capo.
Core Panels: Discussions covering student-led public school advocacy movements, fighting back against school closures, and union/alternative educator preparation partnerships.
Thom Hartmann is a diligent journalist who digs deep into the corruption of this regime.
On the deregulation of public lands: Trump is allowing destruction of parts of Big Bend National Park, to make way for its exploitation. No complaints from Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon.
— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November.
— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics.
— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster.
Andrew Tobias is a financial writer who watches politics closely.
He writes here about the hollow “bravery” of SusannCollins, who has carefully tailored her reputation as a moderate and a centrist. She is now running for her fifth term in the geriatric U.S. Senate.
Susan Collins had the courage to stand up against her party 61 times (61 times!) when Republicans controlled the Senate in the years since 1997, as they do now — not even counting her brave announcement this past week that she would vote against Trump’s pick for attorney general, Epstein-files-scofflaw Todd Blanche. (Look at that, Mainers! She stands up to Trump!)
The only thing is . . . according to an analysis a classmate of mine just did with the help of A.I. . . . that in 60 of those 61 instances (60!), she knew her vote wouldn’t matter, so she got permission to do it, and it was not bravery on display, but cunning hypocrisy. (Look at that, Mainers: she thinks you’re stupid!)
(The lone exception was a 2000 legislative-branch appropriations conference report defeated 28–69, with Republicans themselves almost evenly divided, so it was hardly much by way of defiance.)
Every one of her 27 votes against a Republican president’s nominee ended in confirmation. And Trump’s Big Ugly Bill? Collins was — bravely! — the sole Republican NO. But, as planned, it squeaked by when Vance broke the 50-50 tie.
She is, of course, famously ridiculed for being “concerned” about women losing control over their reproductive organs — etc. — but the only thing I think she’s really concerned about is losing to Troy Jackson.
Texas has a bizarre and punitive approach to public school accountability. If only one school in a large district is “low-performing,” the state can take control of the entire district. Houston is under state control because of only one school, as is Fort Worth.
The State Commissioner of Education, Mike Morath, is not an educator. He served on the Dallas School Board, but he is a businessman.
In Houston, he appointed former military man Mike Miles, to be the state-appointed superintendent. Miles is a “graduate” of the Broad Superintendents’ Academy, where would-be school leaders were taught to be tough, make demands, close schools, and enforce top-down commands. As a military man, Miles flourished in this environment. He led the Dallas school district, but things didn’t work out because of a exodus of teachers.
He then crested a charter chain based in Colorado. And now controjj on a the Houston Independent School Disrrict.
The confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States has been kabuki theater of sorts. We were hopeful that three Republicans had the backbone to turn down this man who has broken the Department of Justice. Surely, the Senate would not confirm a man who is so subservient to Trump. The DOJ is supposed to be at arms’-length from the President. Blanche is under Trump’s thumb.
Blanche is the one who negotiated a deal to create a $1.776 billion slush fund for insurrectionists and Trump allies as well as a sweet deal for Trump, his sons, and their business NOT to be audited by the IRS, a gift to them of at least $100 million, probably more.
I imagined that there would be outrage towards the man who refused to release the Epstein files. The guy who spent two days interviewing sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell, then arranged for her transfer to a minimum security prison where she received special treatment, as if she were a privileged guest, not a convicted pedophile.
Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski will vote against confirming Blanche. In Collins’ case, this is a pattern. She votes against her party only when her vote is not needed.
Most shocking are the “yes” votes of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, and–today–Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. All three were driven out of the senate by Trump. Till is resigned because Trump threatened to primary him. The other two were primaried by Trump choices and lost.
They had reason to stand against Trump, and they had reason to have a spine. But in the end, all three caved.
And Todd Blanche will head the nation’s Justice Department, where he will continue Trump’s agenda and his vendettas.
Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect is disgusted by the capitulation of Senators Cornyn and Tillis on their vote for Todd Blanche. The two held out until Blanche gave them a signed piece of paper that is utterly meaningless.
There are many reasons to oppose Blanche: he has utterly politicized the Department of Justice, making it totally subservient to Trump. He has continued to act as Trump’s personal lawyer, not as the nation’s chief defender of the rule of law.
Blanche was ordered by Congress last December to release all the Epstein files. He released about half of them, heavily redacted to protect the names of the predators. He has conspired with Trump to free the Insurrectionists of January 6, 2021. He reacted to Trump’s absurd lawsuit seeking $10 billion from the Treasury Department by signing off on a $1.776 billion fund for Trump’s allies, friends, and insurrectionists. More consequentially, he signed an agreement with Trump in which he pledged that Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, and various Trump friends would not be audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Since Trump owes the IRS about $100 million, this is a sweetheart deal for him.
Trump collected over $2.2 billion in income in 2025, but his avarice is never satisfied.
Kuttner writes about the collapse of opposition by Senators Cornyn and Tillis.
Blanche’s nomination will be voted in by the Senate next Tuesday. Senator Susan Collins of Maine has said she will vote no; her Senate race in a blue state needs a boost. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has not said how she will vote. It takes only two votes to sink Blanche.
The problem is that Trump will find someone even worse!
Over the weekend, it looked as if President Trump had backed himself into a corner in his efforts to get Todd Blanche confirmed as attorney general. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who was recently primaried by Trump ally Ken Paxton yet remains a key vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee for the rest of the year, wasn’t budging in his insistence that Blanche commit in writing to killing the corrupt deal in which the government set up a $1.776 billion slush fund to compensate supposed victims of government violence and Trump personally got immunity from IRS audits.
Trump himself poured oil on the flames in a series of comments and social media posts in which he walked back his previous commitment to end the slush fund and further insulted Cornyn and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who was following Cornyn’s lead.
Tillis, who had previously signaled his support for Blanche, then posted a withering comment on X: “Despite comments as late as yesterday that the fund is dead, President Trump clearly intends to resurrect the payout pot for punks …”
The two holdout senators had little to lose. Both are leaving Congress this year. Both were dispatched in part by Trump’s hostility. Trump made clear that he would not support Tillis’s re-election, so Tillis decided to retire. Trump explicitly endorsed Cornyn’s challenger, despite Cornyn’s decade-long record of dogged loyalty to Trumpism.
So quite apart from principled objections to the deal, there is little love lost between the two lame-duck senators and Trump. But then, Sunday night, the waves parted. After extended conversations with Blanche, Cornyn agreed to support his nomination. And the details of the deal reeked.
Though Blanche posted on social media a signed memo formally rescinding the order that created the so-called “anti-weaponization fund,” he left most of the IRS deal intact. Trump still gets full immunity from IRS audits of past tax returns, and the scope of the immunity is narrowed to protect “only” Trump, the Trump Organization, and two of his sons. And once Blanche is confirmed, some version of the slush fund could be resurrected at any time.
Somehow, disgracefully, this satisfied Cornyn and Tillis. It’s far from clear, however, that it will satisfy U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams. Back in May, Judge Williams voided an earlier version of the IRS deal. In a scathing ruling on July 13, she threatened a formal ethics complaint against Blanche for conflicts of interest and misrepresentations. “In sum,” she wrote, “the facts before this Court demonstrate there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail.”
The Judiciary Committee has now scheduled a vote Tuesday to advance Blanche’s nomination to the Senate floor. But this isn’t quite over.
Article IX, Section 1 of the Florida constitution:
a) The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education and for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require.
Article I, Section 3;
Religious Freedom
There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof. Religious freedom shall not justify practices inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety. No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.
The Florida state constitution explicitly requires that the state provide a free public education for all children. It explicitly forbids the use of any public funds for religious schools. In 2012, then Governor Jeb Bush promoted a referendum to change the constitution and allow vouchers for religious schools. Florida voters resoundingly said NO. But the voice of the people did not dissuade Bush and his friends.
Florida now has a full/blown universal voucher system where the state funds children who attend religious schools, private schools, even home schools, regardless of family income. Most of the children who use vouchers were already in nonpublic school.
The state now spends billions of dollars every year on charter schools and vouchers. Many charter schools operate for profit. Their lobbyists work in tandem with the legislature, which seems eager to defund public schools.
Ironically, Jeb Bush used to boast that Florida was successful because of its toughs count ability. Yet this is the same governor who pushed through vouchers, even though voucher schools have NO accountability.
Go figure.
Stephanie Vanos wrote the following article for the Orlando Sentinel. She is a member of the Orange County School Board, where her children are enrolled.
She wrote:
There is an alarming misuse of public funds in Florida that isn’t just unfair and irresponsible, it undermines our state’s constitutional obligation to provide a high-quality, uniform education for every child and erodes trust in the very system meant to serve all of Florida’s children.
The taxpayer-funded voucher program has created a shadow educational system, one where billions in taxpayer funds move with little oversight, leaving families and communities in the dark about how their money is spent. This lack of accountability and transparency has created a fractured, unequal education landscape, robbing students of stability and opportunity no matter where they go to school.
Approximately $5 billion in taxpayer money is being siphoned away from our traditional public schools into voucher systems. Private schools that accept vouchers are held to a tiny fraction of the standards our public schools must meet, if any at all. Nearly a quarter of all state funding for education is now drained by voucher programs that serve only 15.3% of Florida’s students and overwhelmingly benefit families who were already paying to send their child to private school. How is this fiscally responsible?
The consequences of this system are clear in Orange County, where my kids go to school.
This year, our county was forced to close seven public schools and cut hundreds of positions despite the district earning high grades. An estimated $315 million of education money will be diverted from Orange County Public Schools to vouchers just this year. These closures and loss of funding are a direct result of a state system that puts politics and profits ahead of students.
Traditional public schools across the state are held to incredibly high standards on how and what they teach students, who they hire, how they report grades and more. However, the taxpayer-funded voucher program and charter schools are not held to the same standards and measures of accountability despite receiving public tax dollars.
Charter schools, deemed public schools by law, sometimes serve an unmet need in a community, and may operate transparently under a fully nonprofit model. In some cases, they can benefit our larger communities. However, charter schools operate with far fewer requirements and accountability measures than traditional public schools, and far too many are franchise operations, run by for-profit management companies that benefit affiliated for-profit entities with our tax dollars.
L.C. Francis authors the blog “L.C. Francis Open Society for History and Civics.” In this post, he imagines how Benjamin Franklin would react if he could time-travel to the present day. He titled this one “A Republic in a Costly Costume.”
His subtitle is:
Benjamin Franklin visits Washington and finds the experiment alive, wounded, witty, dangerous, and leaning toward the very monarchy it was built to resist.
“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.” — Benjamin Franklin, writing as Silence Dogood, No. 8, published in The New-England Courant, July 1722.
Dear Friends,
Yesterday, I wrote about Adams and Jefferson, two bitter friends who died on the Fourth of July, fifty years after the Declaration. But for weeks, another question has been on my mind: what would one founder think if he returned for America’s 250th birthday?
On this Sunday morning, after the fireworks have quieted and the crowds have gone home, I did not want to hand you another stack of bad news. I did not want to build another time machine just for cleverness. I chose Benjamin Franklin because, of all the Founders, he might be the least surprised by what he found in Washington in 2026.
Franklin was intimately aware of monarchial tendencies because he had known kings, ministers, courtiers, printers, mobs, frauds, scientists, diplomats, and men who mistook applause for wisdom. He would not arrive appalled by our foolishness. He would arrive amused, worried, and already reaching for his pen, because sometimes a Republic needs to hear the truth from a man who understood both human weakness and the strange miracle of self-government.
I visualized him observing the ruined East Wing, the ballroom adjacent to the People’s House, the painted Reflecting Pool, attacks on the press, a craving for royal attention, and an occupant of the People’s House who is more eager to be admired than to serve our Republic.
Then Franklin writes home…Hope you find this insightful & enlightening.
Dispatch on the Status of Our Republic
Washington City July 5, 2026
My Esteemed Friends,
Having been conveyed, by means I cannot explain, into a future age that corresponds to 250 years from our time, and finding myself in the city your posterity has raised for the administration of the Republic, I have thought it prudent to send you a few observations before I am returned, if I am permitted to be returned to our time.
Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson will be pleased to hear that our Republic still exists in form. Elections take place, courts at the national, state, and local levels continue to interpret the law, newspapers continue to publish, and the public debates with such fervor that I almost thought the entire nation was a printing press.
Yet I confess that the condition of the Executive office gave me pause.
We once quarreled with George III because no free people should be governed by the vanity of one man. I now find, to my astonishment, a chief magistrate who appears to regard that monarch not as a warning but as an interior decorator. He favors ceremony, obedience, personal loyalty, public flattery, and buildings large enough to persuade small minds that greatness has occurred.
I had hoped your descendants would remember that we rejected monarchy not because crowns were uncomfortable, but because men wearing them became so.
The President’s residence, also called the People’s House and meant as a duty-bound home, has been significantly transformed. A wing was removed, and a ballroom was added. Donors gather nearby, contractors appear pleased. The words reflect public service, but the atmosphere feels like courtly flattery. I’ve strolled through Versailles and seen men bow so deeply they could pick pockets unnoticed. Now, even the Potomac seems to have acquired a touch of French elegance.
I am told this is all done for greatness. I have found that when a man must constantly proclaim his greatness, the evidence is usually still under construction.
As a printer, I paid especially close attention to the press, and this issue grew more serious the longer I spent in this era. The current President doesn’t just dislike criticism; all public figures dislike it, though some handle it more gracefully. This gentleman, with a countenance the color of an apricot or a persimmon, seems to believe himself to be the reincarnation of the courts of France and, therefore, the press should praise him, obey him, change geography in his favor, and apologize whenever inconvenient facts emerge.
One news service was punished for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico on command, as though a president could improve geography by signing it in a larger hand. Broadcasters have been threatened. Reporters are treated as enemies when they ask questions rather than bring incense. Lawsuits are brandished like royal decrees. It reminded me of old George III, though fairness requires this confession: George was born into a monarchy. He did not have to assemble one from wounded vanity, public entertainments, donor money, and several coats of gold paint.
Permit an old printer to be plain: a free press is not an ornament of liberty. It is one of its tools. A government that fears printers has already confessed more than printers have written.
I also observed that nearly every citizen carries a small glowing glass into which he may speak a question and receive an answer before his own judgment has had time to put on its shoes. This instrument is astonishing. It fetches a fact, composes a letter, translates a tongue, summarizes a book, and offers counsel with the confidence of a lawyer who has not yet found the statute. Much of what it provides is helpful, though some is incorrect. Its rapid delivery might lead a lazy mind to equate speed with wisdom.
I say this as one who loved invention: no machine, however clever, can spare a Republic the burden of discernment. A device may gather the lightning, but only judgment can make the rod.
Nevertheless, I do not lose hope.
I observed citizens carefully counting votes. I saw judges trying to keep the law from becoming a command. I saw teachers, librarians, clerks, veterans, reporters, and ordinary Americans doing the quiet work no ballroom can replace. They receive little applause, which may be why their service remains valuable.
When we gave the people a Republic, I warned that keeping it would be their burden. Upon further reflection, after visiting our Republic for the first time in 250 years, I would only add this: beware the man who loves the symbols of our country more than its restraints. Beware the patriot who attacks the press, flatters himself with marble, and treats public office as family property. George III lost America by misunderstanding Americans. It would be a poor anniversary indeed if Americans returned the favor by misunderstanding George III.
Tell our friends in Philadelphia that the Republic has not failed. The forms remain: elections, courts, printers, laws, and that blessed American habit of arguing with everyone within reach.
But the balance has shifted toward one man’s office in a manner that would please Mr. Hamilton, satisfy much of Mr. Adams, send Mr. Jefferson searching for ink and a quill, and prompt Paul Revere to get back on horseback. The President now stands so enlarged that many citizens seem less interested in restraining him than in being near enough to admire the glow.
This is the warning I carry home: a Republic may keep its papers and still lose its posture. If the people do not soon pull power back toward Congress, the courts, the press, the states, and themselves, they may wake to find they have not crowned a king but have trained themselves to obey one.
Our democratic experiment continues, but it now dangerously leans toward the very thing we crossed an ocean of trouble to resist.
I remain, as ever, Your affectionate friend and humble servant, B. Franklin
P.S. I hope this dispatch finds you in good health and, if possible, in better shade than I presently enjoy, for the heat here is dreadful. I am told the current chief magistrate has intellectual doubts that the climate itself can change, which is a curious position in an age that can weigh the stars, split the atom, and yet still offends itself by consulting a thermometer.
I posted the link to Carol Burris’s terrific article about school choice yesterday but was unable to copy the text. Carol sent the text to me.
Here it is:
Advocates of a rightwing, billionaire-funded campaign to replace public education with a privatized education marketplace have been candid about their goals and disciplined in pursuing them. A new reportfrom the organization I lead, the Network for Public Education, provides an accounting of how far state lawmakers across the nation, in both red and blue states, have advanced this campaign and have put at grave risk access to the current system of education that is free and available to all families.
For nearly a decade, the Network for Public Education has issued statehouse-by-statehouse report cards holding legislators accountable for how they treat public schools and the children who depend on them. And over the years, we have seen a ramp up in school privatization and continuous neglect of public school students and teachers.
This 2026 Report Card is our most expansive to date, evaluating all fifty states and the District of Columbia across four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning based on thirty-nine factors. Some of those factors include charter school expansion, discrimination, and student-to-teacher ratio.
In 2022, when we issued our second report card, ten states achieved 80 percent or more of a possible 102 points. By 2024, the number of states achieving 80 percent of all possible points had dropped to four. Two years later, only two states, Nebraska and Vermont, hit the 80 percent mark.
Over the past four years, privatization efforts have seen heightened success across the country. Voucher programs (which began in the mid-1990s) have expanded from twenty-seven programs in 2022 to seventy-three programs in thirty-four states as of 2026, with multiple programs in several states. Vouchers pay for tuition at both secular and religious schools, and in some states, the purchase of goods and services by homeschoolers and microschoolers. Schools accepting vouchers also typically face little of the academic, financial, or civil rights accountability required of public schools, and many can reject or expel students based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or academic record. And because voucher amounts frequently fall short of full private school tuition, the benefits flow disproportionately to families who could already afford private school without public dollars.
Charter schools, which began in 1992 as experimental schools controlled by school districts, have been privatized to include large chains of schools, some of which span across multiple states. Nearly one in five charter school students attends a charter run by a for-profit corporation. It is an unstable sector of schooling, with more than one in four closing by year five.
Only Nebraska and Kentucky are now the only remaining states free of both charter schools and state voucher programs. But the 2026 report card reveals a troubling and consistent pattern beyond the expansion of school privatization. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and home schools—are the same states that fund privatization at the direct expense of investment in public schools.
In fact, our analysis found a strong and statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and other indicators of public school support. Privatization and public school disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.
Seventeen states earned a grade of F, meaning they failed to meet even 40 percent of the thirty-nine standards we set for responsible stewardship of public schools. Standards that included equitable school funding, teacher satisfaction, protections for homeschooled students, and class size. Florida ranked dead last, scoring just fourteen out of 102 possible points, with Arizona following closely behind. These are not struggling states making hard choices with thin budgets. They are states that have made deliberate decisions to defund neighborhood schools while directing public money toward private alternatives with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and documented records of fraud and mismanagement.
The appeal of “school choice,” in which families are permitted to use state funds that would’ve been otherwise spent on public education on non-traditional programs like charter or private schools, is easy to understand. The promise of options and tailored education sounds reasonable in the abstract. But in practice, choice works best for families with the time, information, and flexibility to navigate it, and whose children the private school is willing to choose. For a family in rural Florida or a child with complex disabilities whose needs most private schools won’t accommodate, the marketplace of options is theoretical. The public school is the only institution legally required to educate every child who walks through the door. When it is weakened through funding cuts, the diversion of students and dollars, or a hollowed-out teaching workforce, the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to find alternatives.
Meanwhile, many of these states that have expanded privatization are the same states that fail to uphold school policies that support teaching and learning.
You cannot systematically eliminate teachers’ job protections, freeze wages, and inject heavy political pressure into classrooms, then be surprised when talented people leave the profession. States like Arizona and Florida, which we rank at the bottom for teacher working conditions, are the same states reporting severe shortages of teachers and the highest rates of underqualified instructors. That is a direct consequence of policy choices, not a demographic inevitability.
The top of the rankings offers a useful counterpoint. States like Nebraska and Vermont demonstrate that it is possible to adequately fund public schools, support teachers as professionals, and resist privatization pressure. The distance between them and the bottom-ranked states reflects not differences in wealth or circumstance, but differences in political priorities.
None of this means public school systems are beyond criticism. They have real failures and persistent inequities worth addressing. But the solution is not to defund the institution and redirect money to private alternatives that face no equivalent accountability. Charter schools limit enrollment. Voucher schools can turn away students. Education savings accounts, which give taxpayer funds to parents to buy private services in lieu of public schooling, can be misused with little consequence. Public schools cannot do any of these things—and that constraint is precisely what makes them worth protecting.
What happens next depends on whether parents, teachers, and the communities built around our public schools engage with the same urgency as forces on the right wing who work to dismantle them.
When I worked in the federal government during the administration of President George W. Bush, I learned a lot about how the civil service functions. I was Assistant Secretary for Education Research and Innovation in the U.S. Department of Education. A small number of people in my office were political appointees. The vast number were civil servants.
The highest ranking civil servants were designated SES–Senior Executive Service. Only the very best civil servants reached that rank. These are people with long and distinguished careers. They are the best of the best. Like most civil servants, they are nonpartisan and they have lifetime tenure.
Miles Taylor informs us that Trump has just turned these top civil servants into at-will employees. He can fire them for any reason or no reason.
This is part of his Project 2025 plan to remove resistance to his total control of the government.
Miles Taylor was Chief Of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term. He famously wrote an op-d for The New York Times with the byline “Anonymous,” describing his role in “the resistance” inside the Trump administration.
The president did something yesterday that almost no one noticed. He signed an order that will allow him to fully hijack (and politicize) the federal government, like never before.
While the country was looking elsewhere, Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to convert roughly 8,000 of the federal government’s most senior career officials into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.
The order is called “Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service,” a name obviously engineered to be skimmed past. And surprisingly, almost everyone obliged. The coverage that followed dutifully reported that thousands of workers are now “easier to fire,” which is true and also misses the point entirely.
The point is that these are the top lieutenants across the federal government. In other words, these are the people serving right under Trump’s political appointees (the ones he assigns to run federal departments and agencies). Presidents get “their people” to reshape policy priorities. And Americans count on the rest of the government staff, the career officials, to carry out the workings of those agencies and follow the law faithfully and impartially. Trump has just upended that centuries-old system.
His executive order would, in effect, triple the number of people inside of government who he can personally toss out on a whim, as easily as his own top henchmen. It’s a breathtaking takeover of the machinery of state. And if it’s not challenged in the courts, it will make it easier for Trump to weaponize almost every agency under his purview.
The number of “political appointees” in the executive branch hovers around 4,000. Think of these as the top jobs. Each president comes in and spins up an HR operation to bring in ideologically-aligned folks to fill those roles, most of which are in charge of running key departments, agencies, boards, and commissions across the federal government. You can see them all here in what’s called the “Plum Book.” They serve at the pleasure of the president and can be hired and dismissed at will.
That was the kind of role I was in as DHS chief of staff in the first Trump administration. I wasn’t protected by anything other than the president’s favor. That’s why — when you make a decision to speak out about wrongdoing — you’ve got to be prepared to quit or be fired. You have no protections if you fall out of favor with the president. Unfortunately, that’s why you see so many Pam Bondis and Todd Blanches, eagerly doing whatever Trump wants. They know how easy it is to lose their job.
That four thousand number is important. It’s the practical measure of a president’s direct grip on the executive branch. Everyone underneath those positions, some two million civil servants, has historically been insulated from political whim by removal protections dating to the reforms that ended the spoils system back in the 1800s. Those protections are the entire reason a new president inherits a functioning government, rather than giant shell of a machine to reconfigure each time we have a national election.
Yet Trump just took 8,000 of those highest-ranking career officials and effectively turned them into potential shock troops. They are no longer protected workforce. The office directors, deputy directors, chiefs of staff, senior advisers, and people who draft regulations and decide who receives federal grants have been stripped of their protections, which means Trump can dispose of them whenever he wants and for whatever reason. Add that to the 4,000 appointees he already controls, and the universe of executive-branch officials who now serve entirely at his pleasure has, in functional terms, roughly tripled.
The White House disputes this with a smirk. These remain “career” positions, they insist. They are not technically political appointments. Strictly speaking, this is correct. But as the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service put it, that’s “a distinction without a difference.” It’s now just a meaningless category. The president can toss them out as easily as his own, hand-picked loyalists. And surely the White House is already thinking about how they’ll short-circuit the “merit” process to restock those vacant roles with campaign aides and January 6 rioters.
The chilling effect has begun either way, before any of these 8,000 people have been replaced. An official who can now be fired this very afternoon for “subversion of presidential directives” — the order’s own language — does not need to be hand-picked to understand what is now expected of him or her. The threat does all the work. And the result is that Donald Trump has expanded the ranks of his political army almost instantly.
What just happened is almost certainly illegal. A coalition of federal employees unions are, I hope, prepared to fight hard. There already have been against similar orders. Here’s why they need to take this one down.
The president’s authority to pull positions out of the protected civil service comes from a provision of Title 5 that lets him make only “necessary exceptions” from the competitive service. That word, “necessary,” was something government managers were keenly aware of when I was in the executive branch. Job categories could only be reclassified in extenuating circumstances — basically where it was urgently necessary to create a position that wasn’t selected through the normal competitive service system.
Reclassifying 8,000 senior careerists to make them fireable at will is not “necessary” for good administration. It’s the total opposite of the merit-based system the laws exist to protect in the first place. Indeed, the rights being stripped away are supposed to be written in stone, e.g. the right to notice before firing, the right to appeal to an independent board, etc.. A president cannot use a magic wand to erase the very protections Congress wrote into law. They were put in place for this exact reason, that is, to prevent presidents from either party from simply firing all the top people across government and stuffing agencies with inexperienced, political bootlickers.
Upon reading it, I found the most revealing detail to be how the order was seemingly written to escape scrutiny. A rule this consequential would normally have to go through what’s called the Administrative Procedure Act, requiring a period of public comment, a reasoned justification, and review by a court that can strike it down as arbitrary, if needed. But Trump didn’t want that. He wanted to wave his wand. So the White House performed a quiet bit of engineering. They wrote the rule to make the president himself (not the Office of Personnel Management) the official who formally moves positions into this new category because the president, unlike an agency, is not technically bound by that Act. They might as well have admitted their goal was to break the law.
The famously brutal English king Henry VIII didn’t need to appoint every man in his court to make every man in his court afraid. All he had to do is make them aware that he might swing the axe at any time. In America, we’ve spent more than a century building a civil service so that the people who enforce our laws answer to the law and not to the mood of one man. Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump tried to change that.
All I can tell you now is this: we’re going to help fight it. Stay tuned.
Diane Ravitch's blog 