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John Thompson: “Proficiency” Is NOT Grade Level, Not Even in Oklahoma

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2025 //
13

Oklahoma’s State Superintendent, Ryan Walters, changed last years’ testing cut scores, redefining the term “proficient” in the state’s accountability data. Fortunately, there has been a bipartisan backlash against Walters’ lack of transparency when making the change, which looked like an effort to trick Oklahomans into believing that he had improved student outcomes.

But, this month, the Oklahoma Commission for Educational Quality and Accountability brought back a misleading, inappropriate, and destructive definition of the term proficiency for accountability purposes.

In doing so, the Commission revitalized the use of one of the most effective weapons for privatizing public education. They perpetuated the lie that “proficiency” is “grade level,” thus making it sound like public schools are irrevocably broken. 

We need to remember the history of this propaganda which took off during the Reagan Administration, which misused data in its “A Nation at Risk” to push high-stakes testing.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are the best estimate of students’ outcomes, but they should be used for diagnostic, not accountability purposes.   But, as the Tulsa World reported, in 2011, Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) high-jacked NAEP’s terminology when writing and editing then State Superintendent Janice Barresi’s new accountability-driven A-F school report card. The World presented evidence that the FEE was engaged in a “pay-to-play” scheme to reap profits while influencing policy.

As The Washington Post reported in 2013, FEE was at the nexus of rightwing political influence in K-12 education and corporate interests seeking to profit from the nation’s schools. It claimed that raising “expectations” for students would advance their learning. In fact, NAEP scores provide evidence that starting in 2012 , when corporate reforms were in place, the opposite happened, as NAEP scores declined, reversing decades of incremental growth.

It did, however, advance the privatization of public education.

At the 2024 Oklahoma conference, Bush’s new think tank, ExcelinEd used misleading and misconstrued data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to conflate NAEP “proficiency” with “grade level.”

In fact, as Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer explained, Oklahoma’s 8th grade reading proficiency grade requires that “students demonstrate mastery over even the most challenging grade-level content and are ready for the next grade, course or level of education.” That definition of mastery of grade level skills included critical thinking, interpretation, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis when reading across multiple texts, and writing.

But, Palmer noted, “8th graders who didn’t score proficient, but are in the ‘basic’ category, can still do all this.”

Moreover, as Jan Resseger further explained, the nation’s NAEP proficiency grade “represents A level work, at worst an A-.” She asks, “Would you be upset to learn that “only” 40% of 8th graders are at an A level in math and “only” 1/3rd scored an A in reading?”

Resseger also cited the huge body of research explaining why School Report Cards aren’t a reliable tool for measuring school effectiveness.

We need a better understanding how and why the word “proficiency” has been weaponized against schools. To do so, we must master the huge body of research which explains why standardized tests aren’t fair, reliable, or valid measures of how well schools are performing.

In 2013, after surveying national experts about “misnaepery,” Education Week explained that NAEP “is widely viewed as the most accurate and reliable yardstick of U.S. students’ academic knowledge … But when it comes to many of the ways the exam’s data are used, researchers have gotten used to gritting their teeth.”

Also in 2013, James Heckman, a Nobel Prize laureate who lived in Oklahoma City as a child, warned of the dangers of misusing test data. In 2025, Heckman and his co-author, Alison Baulos, published “Instead of Panicking over Test Scores, Let’s Rethink How We Measure Learning and Student Success.” They urge us to “pause some tests and redirect resources toward more meaningful ways to promote and assess student learning.”

They don’t oppose the use of tests as one measure when used for diagnostic purposes; those metrics “may be valuable for tracking large-scale trends — such as monitoring recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.” However, “the current overreliance on tests is costly in many ways and is not an effective strategy for improving education as a whole.” And, “standardized tests often conceal more than they reveal.” 

Getting back to recent headlines, I appreciate the press’ reporting on Ryan Walters’ lack of transparency. I’m even more impressed with their reporting on the lack of evidence to support his claims that his administration has improved outcomes. But they now need to report on the reasons why the Commission made a terrible mistake, apparently based on the alt facts generated by corporate reformers’ false public relations spin.

Categories Accountability, NAEP, Oklahoma, Standardized Testing

NPR: Trump’s Agreements with Law Firms May Be Illegal

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2025 //
0

Soon after he was inaugurated, Trump began to inflict punishments on his enemies. That included law firms that had represented his political opponents in the past, such as federal prosecutor Jack Smith and prominent Democrats. He threatened to cancel any contracts those firms held with federal agencies and to bar them from future cases involving the federal government. Several major law firms worried about financial losses and immediately gave in to Trump’s demands. All agreed to provide pro bono services for causes chosen by Trump.

But a few major law firms refused to capitulate to Trump. Instead of agreeing to serve him, they went to court. To date, all the firms that challenged Trump have won in court. It’s a basic principle in American law that every defendant should have access to a lawyer and that lawyers can represent defendants no matter what they are accused of doing.

Now leaders of the legal profession are saying out loud what they thought all along: Trump’s demands and punishments are illegal.

NPR reported:

Veteran lawyers have reached a curious conclusion about President Trump’s deals with big law firms this year: they do not appear to be legally valid.

Trump since coming to office has punished certain firms for their past clients or causes, stripping them of security clearances and government contracts, while trumpeting deals with others, including titans like Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins.

The White House said the nine firms it’s settled with agreed to provide about $1 billion in pro bono services in order to curtail investigations into their hiring practices and maintain access to federal buildings. But the details of those agreements remain murky, even after Democratic lawmakers demanded answers.

“The problem with the law firm deals is … they’re not deals at all,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor and former dean at Yale Law School. “You know, a contract that you make with a gun to your head is not a contract.”

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Injustice, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump and Musk Are Destroying the Government

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
14

Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates the negative effects of Elon Musk’s DOGS, which protected his interests and saved little, if any, money. With Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax plan, the deficit will increase by $4-5 trillion, so Musk’s chainsaw contributed nothing but demoralization and destruction of the federal workforce. She also summarizes the multiple ways in which Trump is sabotaging the rule of law. She includes footnotes, as usual. Subscribe to her blog to see them.

She writes:

In July 2024, according to an article published today by Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey in the New York Times, billionaire Elon Musk texted privately about his concerns that government investigations into his businesses would “take me down.” “I can’t be president,” he wrote, “but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will.”

After appearing on stage with Trump on October 5, Musk texted a person close to him: “I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight. Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” About an hour later, he added: “This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised. “‘Lasers’ from space.”

Musk invested about $290 million in the 2024 election and, when Trump took office, became a fixture in the White House, heading the “Department of Government Efficiency.” It set out to kill government programs by withholding congressionally approved funds, a practice that courts have ruled unconstitutional and Congress expressly prohibited with the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

Musk vowed that his “Department of Government Efficiency” would cut $2 trillion from the U.S. budget, but he quickly backed off on those numbers. In the end, DOGE claimed savings of $175 billion, but that claim is unverifiable and CNN’s Casey Tolan says it’s probably wrong: less than half of it is backed up with any documentation.

Instead, as CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf reported today, since DOGE cut staffing at the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service, for example, and cut employees at national parks, which also generate revenue, its cuts may well end up costing money. Max Stier, who heads the Partnership for Public Service, suggests DOGE cuts could cost U.S. taxpayers $135 billion because agencies will need to train and hire replacements for the workers DOGE fired. Stier called DOGE’s actions “arson of a public asset.”

Grind and Twohey reported that Musk’s drug consumption during the campaign—they could not speak to his habits in the White House, although he appeared high today at a White House press conference—was “more intense than previously known.” He was a chronic user of ketamine, took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and traveled with a box that held about 20 pills for daily use. Those in frequent contact with him worried about his frequent drug use, erratic behavior, and mood swings. As a government contractor, Musk should receive random drug tests, but Grind and Twohey say he received advance warning of those tests.

It was never clear that Musk’s role at DOGE was legal, and the White House has tried to maintain that he was only an advisor, despite Trump’s February 19 statement, “I signed an order creating [DOGE] and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.” On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” saying the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’”

Trump posted today on social media: “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way. Elon is terrific!” In a press conference today, Trump reiterated that Musk “is not really leaving.”

Musk’s time at the helm of DOGE might not have saved taxpayer money, but it has changed the world in other ways. Musk has used his time in the government to end investigations into his companies, score government contracts, and get the government to press countries to accept his Starlink communications network as a condition of tariff negotiations. According to John Hyatt of Forbes, Musk’s association with Trump has made him an estimated $170 billion richer.

The implications of DOGE’s actions for Americans are huge. DOGE operatives are now embedded in the U.S. government, where they are mining Americans’ data to create a master database that can sort and find individuals. Former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper called it “a full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire.”

Today, Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik of the New York Times reported that Musk put billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir data analysis firm into place across the government, where it launched its product Foundry to organize, analyze, and merge data. Thiel provided the money behind Vice President J.D. Vance’s political career. Wired and CNN had previously reported how the administration was using this merged data to target undocumented immigrants, and now employees are detailing their concerns with how the administration could use their newly merged information against Americans more generally.

Internationally, Musk’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, slashing about 80% of its grants, is killing about 103 people an hour, most of them children. The total so far is about 300,000 people, according to Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeller Dr. Brooke Nichols. Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect reported today that about 1,500 babies a day are born HIV-positive because Musk’s cuts stopped their mothers’ medication.

In the New York Times today, Michelle Goldberg recalls how Musk appeared uninterested in learning what USAID actually did—prevent starvation and provide basic healthcare—and instead called it a “radical-left political psy-op,” and reposted a smear from right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos calling USAID “the most gigantic global terror organization in history.” Goldberg also recalls Musk’s tendency to call people he disdains “NPCs,” or non-player characters, which are characters in role-playing games whose only role is to advance the storyline for the real players.

Aside from DOGE, the focus of Trump’s administration—other than his own cashing in on the presidency—has been on tariffs and immigration. Like the efforts of DOGE, those show a disdain for the law in favor of concentrating power in the executive branch.

During the campaign, Trump fantasized that constructing a high tariff wall around the U.S. would force other countries to fund the national deficit, enabling a Republican Congress to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. In fact, domestic industries and consumers bear the costs of tariffs. Trump’s high tariffs, many of which he imposed by declaring an economic emergency and then using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), created such havoc in the stock and bond markets that he backed off.

Yesterday, Sayantani Ghosh, David Gaffen, and Arpan Varghese of Reuters reported that although most of the highest tariffs have yet to go into effect, Trump’s trade war has cost companies more than $34 billion in lost sales and higher costs.

Trump has changed tariff policies at least 50 times since he took office, and traders have figured out they can buy stocks cheaply when markets plummet after a dramatic tariff announcement, and sell when Trump changes his mind. This has recently given rise to Trump’s nickname “TACO,” for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

This moniker has apparently irritated Trump so much he has taken to social media to defend his abrupt dropping of tariffs on China, saying he did it to “save them” from “grave economic danger,” although in fact, China turned to other trading partners to cushion the blow of U.S. tariffs. Trump went on to suggest China did not live up to what he considered its part of the bargain, and he would no longer be “Mr. NICE GUY!”

On Wednesday a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs based on the IEEPA are illegal. The Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to levy tariffs. Trump launched a social media rant in which he attacked the judges, insisted that “it is only because of my successful use of Tariffs that many Trillions of Dollars have already begun pouring into the U.S.A. from other Countries,” and said that he could not wait for Congress to handle tariffs because it would take too long—in fact, most of Congress does not approve of the tariffs—and that following the Constitution “would completely destroy Presidential Power.” “The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm.”

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit paused that ruling until at least June 9, when both parties will have submitted legal arguments about whether the stay should remain in place as the government appeals the ruling that the tariffs are illegal. White House senior counsel for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro, the key proponent of Trump’s trade war, said: “Even if we lose, we’ll do it another way.”

Today Trump said he will double the tariff on steel imports from 25% to 50%.

The other major focus of the administration has been expelling undocumented immigrants from the U.S. During the 2024 campaign, Trump whipped up support by insisting that former President Joe Biden had permitted criminals to walk into the U.S. and terrorize American citizens. Trump vowed to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and often talked of deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., although his numbers have ranged as high as 21 million without explanation.

The administration has hammered on immigration to promote the idea that it is keeping Americans safe. But its first target of arresting at least 1,200 individuals a day has fallen far short. In Trump’s first 100 days, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it arrested an average of about 660 people a day.

On Wednesday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who along with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is the face of the administration’s immigration policy, told the Fox News Channel that the administration is now aiming for “a minimum of 3,000 arrests…every day.” Administration officials hope to deport a million people in Trump’s first year in office.

CNN reported yesterday that those officials are putting intense pressure on law enforcement agencies to meet that goal. This means that hundreds of FBI agents have been taken off terror threats and espionage cases involving China and Russia to be reassigned to immigration duties. Some FBI offices are offering overtime pay if agents help with “enforcement and removal operations.” Officers from other agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) have also been deployed against immigrants in place of their regular duties.

Steven Monacelli of The Barbed Wire noted today that local law enforcement and state troopers have also been diverted to immigration, using a national network of cameras that read license plates. Joseph Cox and Jason Keobler of 404 Media reported yesterday that a Texas sheriff used the same system over the course of a month to look for a woman whom he said had a self-administered abortion, saying her family was worried about her safety.

Their attempt to appear effective has led to very visible arrests and renditions of undocumented migrants to prisons in third countries, especially the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador. The administration has deliberately flouted the right of persons in the United States to due process as guaranteed by the Constitution. The administration has met court orders with delay and obfuscation, as well as by attacking judges and the rule of law.

The administration continues to insist those it has arrested are dangerous criminals who must be deported without delay, but more and more reporting says that many of those expelled from the country had no criminal convictions. Today, ProPublica reported that the Trump administration’s own data shows that officials knew that “the vast majority” of the 238 Venezuelans it sent to CECOT had not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. even as it deported them and called them “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters,” and “the worst of the worst.”

ICE has increasingly met quotas by arresting immigrants outside of immigration check-ins and courtrooms: yesterday Dina Arévalo of My San Antonio reported that ICE arrested five immigrants, including three children, outside of an immigration court after a judge had said they were no longer subject to removal proceedings. The officers used zip ties on all five individuals.

At stake is the turn of the United States away from democracy and toward the international right wing. Yesterday the U.S. State Department notified Congress that it intends to use the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor to promote “Democracy and Western Values.” On Tuesday a senior advisor for that bureau, Samuel Samson, who graduated from college in 2021, explained that the State Department intends to ally with the European far right to protect “Western civilization” from current democratic governments.

It also plans to turn the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which manages the flow of people into the U.S., into an “Office of Remigration” to “actively facilitate” the “voluntary return of migrants” to other countries and “advance the president’s immigration agenda.”

“Remigration” is a term from the global far right. As Isabela Dias of Mother Jones notes, its proponents call for the “mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, and an end to multiculturalism.” Of the congressional report, a person who works closely with the State Department told Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket: “All of it is pretty awful with some pieces that definitely violate existing law and treaties. But institutionalizing neo-Nazi theory as an office in the State Department is the most blatantly horrifying.”

This concept is behind not only the expulsion of undocumented immigrants, but also the purge of foreign scholars and lawful residents. The Supreme Court blessed this purge today when, during the period that litigation is underway, it allowed the administration to end immigration paroles for about 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela admitted under a Biden-era program, instantly making them undocumented and subject to deportation.

The court decided the case on the shadow docket, without briefings or explanation. In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote: “[S]omehow, the Court has now apparently determined…that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”

Jackson added a crucial observation. The court, she wrote, “allows the Government to do what it wants to do regardless [of the consequences], rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.”

—

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Citizenship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Funding, History, Immigration, Musk, Elon, Propaganda, Trump

Peter Greene: The Perverse Incentives of School Choice

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2025 //
12

Peter Greene nails one of the many flaws of school choice. The choice movement hurtles forward despite its record of failure to fulfill any of its promises but one: It provides choice. Not necessarily good choice or better choice. Just choice.

Greene writes:

When researcher Josh Cowen is talking about the negative effects of school vouchers on education, he often points at “subprime” private schools— schools opened in strip malls or church basements or some other piece of cheap real estate and operated by people who are either fraudsters or incompetents or both.

This is a feature, not a bug. Because as much as choice advocates tout the awesomeness of competition, the taxpayer-funded free market choice system that we’ve been saddled with has built in perverse incentives that guarantee competition will be focused on the wrong things.

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. Now, the marketing can be based on superior quality, but sometimes it’s just easier to go another way.

The thing about voucher schools is that quality is not what makes them money. What makes them money is signing people up.

That’s it. Voucher school operators don’t have to run a good school; they just have to sell the seats. Once the student is signed up and their voucher dollars are in the bank, the important part of the transaction is over. There is no incentive for the school to spend a pile of money on doing a good job; all the incentive is for the school to come up with a good marketing plan.

Betsy DeVos liked to compare the free market for schools with a row of food trucks, which was wrong for a host of reasons, but one was the market speed. Buy lunch at a food truck, and you become part of the marketing very quickly. Within minutes, you are either a satisfied customer telling your friends to eat there, or warning everyone to stay away. Reputations are built quickly.

But for schools, the creation of a reputation for quality takes a long time, time measured in years. The most stable part of the voucher school market is schools that already have their reputation in place from years of operation. But if you are a start-up, you need to get that money for those seats right now. If you are a struggling crappy private school with a not-so-great reputation, you don’t have time to turn that around; you’ve got to up your marketing game right now.

So the focus (and investment) goes toward marketing and enrollment.

Won’t your poor performance catch up with you? Maybe, but the market turns over yearly, as students age out and age in to school. And you don’t have to capture much of it. If you are in an urban center with 100,000 students and your school just needs to fill 100 seats, disgruntled former families won’t hurt you much– just get out there and pitch to the other 99,900 students. And if you do go under, well, you made a nice chunk of money for a few years, and now you can move on to your next grift.

This is also why the “better” private schools remain unavailable to most families holding a voucher. If a reputation for quality is your main selling point, you can’t afford to let in students who might hurt that record of success.

Meanwhile, talk to teachers at some of the less-glowing private and charter schools about the amount of pressure they get to make the student numbers look good.

Because of the way incentives are structured, the business of a voucher school is not education. The business of the voucher school is to sell seats, and the education side of the business exists only to help sell seats. Our version of a free market system guarantees that the schools will operate backwards, an enrollment sales business with classrooms set up with a primary purpose of supporting the sales department, instead of vice versa.

Charter schools? The same problem, but add one other source of revenue– government grants. Under Trump, the feds will offer up a half a billion dollars to anyone who wants to get into the charter biz, and we already know that historically one dollar out of every four will go to fraud or waste, including charter businesses that will collect a ton of taxpayer money and never even open.

“Yeah, well,” say the haters. “Isn’t that also true for public schools”

No, it is not. Here’s why. Public schools are not businesses. They are service providers, not commodity vendors. Like the post office, like health care in civilized countries, like snow plows, like (once upon a time) journalism, their job is to provide a necessary service to the citizens of this country. Their job should be not to compete, but to serve, for the reasons laid out here.

And this week-ass excuse for accountability– if you do a bad enough job, maybe it will make it harder for your marketing department– has been sold as the only accountability that school choice needs.

School choice, because its perverse incentives favor selling seats over educating students, is ripe for enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s name for the process by which operators make products deliberately worse in order to make them more profitable. The “product” doesn’t have to be good– just good enough not to mess up the sales. And with no meaningful oversight to determine where the “good enough” line should be drawn, subprime voucher and charter schools are free to see just how close to the bottom they can get. It is far too easy to transform into a backwards business, which is why it should not be a business at all.

If your foundational belief is that nobody ever does anything unless they can profit from it (and therefor everything must be run “like a business”) then we are in “I don’t know how to explain that you should care about other people” territory, and I’m not sure what to tell you. What is the incentive to work in a public education system? That’s a whole other post, but I would point to Daniel Pink’s theory of motivation– autonomy, mastery and purpose. Particular a purpose that is one centered on making life better for young human beings and a country better for being filled with educated humans. I am sure there are people following that motivation in the school choice world, but they are trapped in a model that is inhospitable to such thinking.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Education Industry, Ethics, Lies, Vouchers

Judge Tosses Lawsuit Against Reading Reseacher Lucy Calkins, Other Reading Researchets

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
28

For many years, “Balanced Literacy ” was considered the gold standard of reading instruction; it encouraged students to use context clues, Then came the fervor for the “Science of Reading,” which emphasized phonics. The reading wars dominated the education world for nearly two decades. Reading instruction across the nation changed to reflect the pro-phonics emphasis.

But then a group of parents went to court to close down the teaching of Balanced Literacy, and they sued Dr. Calkins. They blamed her for students’ test scores and their poor reading skills.

Sarah Schwartz of Education Week reported:

A first-of-its-kind lawsuit against three influential reading professors and their controversial literacy curricula has been dismissed, after a U.S. District Court declined to wade into the murky landscape of curriculum quality and education research. 

Last year, a group of parents filed the lawsuit, which alleged that the professors and their publishers used “deceptive and fraudulent marketing” to sell their popular reading materials.

The case, brought by two parents from separate families in Massachusetts, centers on two sets of reading programs, one created by Lucy Calkins, an education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the other by reading researchers Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, of Lesley University and The Ohio State University, respectively. 

The parents argued that the creators, publishers, and promoters of the curricula—Calkins’ Units of Study for Teaching Reading and a suite of Fountas & Pinnell branded materials—violated consumer protection law in the state by making false claims about the research supporting their programs.

Publishers said that the programs were backed by research even though, the plaintiffs claimed, they omitted or diminished the role of phonics instruction, which decades of reading research has demonstrated is a key component of teaching young children how to decode print.

On Thursday, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts determined that the court could not grant a decision in the case, because it would require passing judgement on the quality of the reading programs in question—a task that the court said it is not equipped to perform.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Reform, John King, Librarians

William Kristol: A Permanent Stain on Our History

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2025 //
29

William Kristol was a leading figure in the conservative movement. His father Irving Kristol was renowned as the godfather of neoconservatism. Bill was the editor of the Weekly Standard for many years. But because he is a principled conservative, he loathes what Trump is doing to our nation. He writes at The Bulwark, my favorite Never-Trump blog.

What’s happening is not normal, he writes:

If the Trump administration’s sudden assault on thousands of foreign students legally studying at Harvard seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the abrupt abrogation of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans legally living and working in the United States seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the sudden arrests and deportations of law-abiding immigrants checking in as ordered at government offices seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the deportations of other immigrants without anything like due process and basically in defiance of court orders to prisons in third countries seems unprecedented, it’s because it is.

And if it all seems utterly stupid and terribly cruel and amazingly damaging to this country, it’s because it is.

But it turns out nativism is one hell of a drug. The Trump administration has ingested it in a big way, and it’s driving its dealers and users in the administration into a fanatical frenzy of destructive activity. And the Republican party and much of Conservatism Inc.—and too much of the country as a whole—is just watching it happen.

The United States has many problems. No one seriously thinks that Harvard’s certification to participate in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program is one of them. And the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement of the action against Harvard makes clear this isn’t just about Harvard: “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.” Are our other institutions of higher education suffering from their ability to attract and enroll students from abroad, if they chose to do so? Are the rest of us?

No. And to the degree there are some discrete problems, nothing justifies this kind of action against Harvard. As Andrea Flores, a former DHS official, told the New York Times, “D.H.S. has never tried to reshape the student body of a university by revoking access to its vetting systems, and it is unique to target one institution over hundreds that it certifies every year.”

Similarly, what’s the justification for the Trump administration’s unprecedented sudden and early abrogation of temporary protected status for 350,000 Venezuelans who fled tyranny and are now living peacefully and working productively in this country? There is no broad unhappiness at their presence, no serious case that they are causing more harm than doing good. Nor for that matter is there a real argument that the presence of 20,000 Haitians living and working in Springfield, Ohio, is a problem that required first lies to denigrate them and now attempts to deport them.

And this week, the nominee to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the Trump administration intends to end the well-established Optional Practical Training Program, which is the single largest channel for highly skilled immigrants to stay and work in the United States after finishing their education here. A study by a leading immigration scholar, Michael Clemens of George Mason University, finds that slashing that program would cause permanent losses to U.S. innovation, productivity, economic growth, and even job opportunities for native workers.

But here we are, with an administration where fantasy trumps reality, ideology trumps evidence, and demagoguery trumps decency. As the economist Dani Rodrik puts it, “Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.”

Foreigners studying and working here are not damaging the United States. A virulently nativist administration is what’s damaging the United States. It’s doing so in ways from which it will be difficult to recover. Just as important, it’s doing so in ways that will be a permanent stain on this nation’s history.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Higher Education, History, Trump

Breaking News! Trump Revokes Harvard’s Ability to Enroll International students

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2025 //
22

The Trump administration upped the stakes in its vindictive campaign against Harvard University. It has canceled Harvard’s enrollment of international students.

Harvard refused to cave to the Trump administration’s demands to monitor its curriculum and its admissions and hiring policies. In response, the administration has suspended billions of federal dollars for medical and scientific research.

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.

The administration notified Harvard about the decision after a back-and-forth in recent days over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The latest move is likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to one person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” according to a letter sent to the university by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

About 6,800 international students attended Harvard this year, or roughly 27 percent of the student body, according to university enrollment data. That is up from 19.7 percent in 2010.

The move is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line…

In a news release confirming the administration’s action, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”

This message came from a Cabinet member who was asked in a hearing to define “habeas corpus,” and she said it meant that the President can deport anyone he wants to.

This action is a demonstration of Presidential tyranny. It should be swiftly reversed by the courts.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Higher Education, Trump

Federal Judge Blocks Shutdown of Department of Education

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2025 //
6

When Trump promised to shut down the U.S. Department of Education during his campaign, he must have known that he couldn’t close down a department without Congressional approval. Everyone else knew it. He brought in wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education to preside over the Department’s demise. He never sought Congressional approval.

Elon Musk’s DOGS team did the dirty work, laying off half the Department’s employees, some 1300 people.

The most severely affected offices were the Federal Student Aid office, the Office for Civil Rights, and the Institute for Education Sciences (which oversees federal research and NAEP). The IES was eliminated, leaving future administrations of NAEP in doubt and disemboweling the government’s essential historic role in compiling data about education.

But today a federal judge ruled that the shuttering of ED was wrong and that everyone laid off should be rehired. Bottom line: a President can’t close a Congressionally authorized department by executive order.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the Education Department and ordered the agency to reinstate employees who were fired in mass layoffs.

U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston granted a preliminary injunction stopping the Trump administration from carrying out two plans announced in March that sought to work toward Trump’s goal to dismantle the department. It marks a setback to one of the Republican president’s campaign promises.

The injunction was requested in a lawsuit filed by the Somerville and Easthampton school districts in Massachusetts and the American Federation of Teachers, along with other education groups.

In their lawsuit, the groups said the layoffs amounted to an illegal shutdown of the Education Department. They said it left the department unable to carry out responsibilities required by Congress, including duties to support special education, distribute financial aid and enforce civil rights laws.

In his order, Joun said the plaintiffs painted a “stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations.”

Layoffs of that scale, he added, “will likely cripple the Department.”

Joun ordered the Education Department to reinstate federal workers who were terminated as part of the March 11 layoff announcement.

The Trump administration says the layoffs are aimed at efficiency, not a department shutdown. Trump has called for the closure of the agency but recognizes it must be carried out by Congress, the government said.

The administration said restructuring the agency “may impact certain services until the reorganization is finished” but it’s committed to fulfilling its statutory requirements.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Next for Vouchers: Champagne or Storm Clouds?

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2025 //
5

Jennifer Berkshire has both good news and bad news about vouchers. The idea of public funding for religious and private schools had some big wins this year, especially in Texas. But most vouchers are subsidizing kids who never attended public schools; that’s a feature, not a bug as it creates strong support for the giveaway among the highest-income people. But, lo! The real cost of have the state pay for everyone’s tuition is beginning to get the attention of taxpayers. And that could cause a backlash against welfare for the wealthy. Florida is already paying $4 billion a year for vouchers. Will taxpayers object?

She writes:

Champagne corks, storm clouds—I’m mixing my metaphors here. But as we survey the steaming wreckage of the 2025 state legislative sessions, both are present in spades. Let’s start with the popping corks: the school voucher movement really did notch some big wins this year, adding Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho and the biggest prize of all, Texas, to the list of states with “education freedom.” Now add in the sneaky move to slip a voucher program that is really a tax shelter for the wealthy into the tax code and it’s easy to feel despondent, and not just about the future of public education. 

Listen in on the debates that played out in these states, though, and you’ll come away with a very different view. As the economy sours and the tide of red ink rises, alarm bells are sounding and a backlash is brewing.

Let’s start with a quick trip to my neighboring state, New Hampshire, where a familiar series of events has transpired. Now, in the Granite State, vouchers are known as Education Freedom Accounts, and they were sold to notoriously thrifty Yankees as a way to save money as students abandoned “government schools” for less expensive private religious schools, home schools, microschools. But nothing of the sort happened, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for thousands of students who’d never attended public schools. Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s revenue situation has been deteriorating rapidly thanks to yet another round of slashing taxes on businesses. 

All of which adds up to some pretty bleak math as the state must now figure out how to pay for an expensive—and expanding—school voucher program even as New Hampshire’s budget pie keeps shrinking. Which is how GOP lawmakers seem to have landed on the worst of both worlds: an austerity budget that slashes funding for the state’s public higher education budget in order to pay for the cost of further undermining the state’s public education system. (If you’re wondering why this recipe sounds familiar, you’re thinking of Indiana, star of a recent episode of Have You Heard, and a cautionary tale about what happens when a state expands school choice while simultaneously cutting school funding and divesting from public higher education.)

Different state, same story

While the libertarian paradise known as New Hampshire may be unique, the dynamic playing out here is the same as in virtually every state that has now adopted school vouchers. 1) Ever-shifting goal posts regarding the purpose of these programs? Check. 2) Ballooning voucher costs as states now pick up the tab for students already attending private schools? Check. 3) Deep tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, meaning less revenue to spend on public education and other social programs? Check. 

Consider Louisiana, which last year enacted the so-called LA GATOR program—short for Giving All True Opportunity to Rise. Now if you know anything about the recent history of school vouchers in Lousiana (spoiler: not good!), this is the time for a chuckle of the bitterest variety. What IS rising rapidly is the program’s cost—nearly $100 million in its second year, estimated to reach as much as $520 million as the program scales up. But when Governor Jeff Landry tried to collect the cash from lawmakers, something interesting happened. They said no, or at least, not so much. 

“I was not remotely expecting that,” [Senate President Cameron] Henry said about Landry seeking an extra $50 million for the program. “Somehow there was a misunderstanding, which we will rectify.” Despite Landry’s request, Henry said he will hold firm to spending roughly the same amount as vouchers cost this school year: $43.5 million “It will be no more” than that, he said, “because that was the original agreement.”

And it wasn’t just Louisiana. Over in Missouri, lawmakers axed their governor’s request for $50 million to scale up the voucher program known as MoScholars. The GOP senator behind the move offered a simple explanation. “I want to make sure that we’re fully funding our obligation to public schools before we start spending 10s of millions of general revenue dollars on private schools.”

If you’re wondering what’s going on, the answer is fairly simple. As voucher programs have ballooned in size and cost, they’ve become a bigger target, especially in states where they’re now hoovering up state funding at the expense of the public schools—which are still attended by most children in every state. And years of tax slashing in these same states is exacerbating what we might call the ‘pie’ problem. Factor in the worsening national economic forecast and things look even more dire. Texas, which is now on the hook for $1 billion a year to pay for vouchers, plummeting oil prices due to Trump’s tariffs is likely to lead to a recession as soon as this summer. 

Theory of change

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I’m an avid reader of conservative treatises. As I type, I’m surrounded by anti-public-education screeds by Pete Hegseth, Kevin Roberts, Betsy DeVos, and Corey DeAngelis. It’s the last one, Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, that has proven to be a particularly useful guide to our times. How, for example, did school choice for the very wealthy become the civil rights cause of our times? Dr. DeAngelis explains:

“Allowing politically advantaged groups to benefit from the program is also a smart way to keep the policy protected for years to come.”

You see, there’s a theory here: that as monies grow scarce and one state after another devolves into a pitched battle over what’s left, the richest and most connected will fight the hardest to keep what’s theirs. For a preview of what this looks like, I recommend a pitstop in West Virginia, where lawmakers just wrapped up another session by shoveling money at tax cuts for the wealthy and school vouchers, while cutting programs that help people get clean water, find work after struggling with addiction and get child care. Oh well…

But for the theory of change to work, people have to want to live in a West Virginia-like reality, and I’m not at all convinced that that’s the case. Don’t believe me? Let’s head to Florida, which school choice proponents like to point to as a model for the rest of our states, and which now spends $4 billion a year on vouchers. Since the state made the program available to even the wealthiest Floridians, surprise, surprise, they’ve leaped at the opportunity to have tax payers pay their children’s private school tuition:

More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions.

But Florida is also an example of the bad math, and shoddy assumptions, that drive the push for school privatization. As public education advocate and blogger extraordinaire Sue Woltanski has been tirelessly documenting, vouchers are indeed succeeding in defunding Florida’s public schools:

This isn’t because the money follows public school students fleeing to private options, but because, when families, whose children are ALREADY in private schools, are offered a tax-funded discount for their private school tuition, they flock to apply, and private schools encourage it.

As Sue keeps pointing out, the big flaw in the school choice lobby’s theory is that Florida’s public schools aren’t going away. A state that used to brag about how little it spent on its students is now funding two parallel education systems: “one for the nearly 3 million students still enrolled in public schools, and another for the hundreds of thousands already in private or home education, all out of the same funding formula.”

So what gives? The GOP’s solution is to slash funding for popular programs in public schools: AP, IB, CTE. When I asked a reader in Florida what he thought was motivating the lawmakers, he saw a longer-term conspiracy at work. Get rid of programs that parents care about and eventually they’ll abandon their local public schools. But that assumes that these parents are powerless and that lawmakers can eviscerate programs and institutions that matter to them without paying a price. I’m not so sure. 

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Sarasota to speak to a group called Support Our Schools. SOS is a phenomenal advocacy group, and in partnership with a youth-led group that’s “organizing school boards to fight fascism, protect democracy, and build power from the ground up,” they’re having a real impact in a community that’s been ground zero for the right-wing takeover of public education. I headed south anticipating that my hosts would be despondent over the state of Florida and the nation, but what I found was the opposite. These local activists were energized, convinced that their cause—defending and strengthening public education—is finally breaking through. In their words, the situation for Florida public schools is now so dire that it’s impossible to ignore. 

Throughout my visit, one theme echoed repeatedly. A backlash is coming. It can’t come soon enough.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Funding, Lies, New Hampshire, Vouchers

Lithwick & Stern: A Time for Lawyers to Defend Their Profession and Democracy

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2025 //
0

Writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern criticize the big law firms that immediately caved to Trump’s demands to quash their diversity programs and pledge millions of dollars in pro bono work for Trump’s causes. They were singled out for punishment by Trump in executive orders because they dared to represent his political enemies.

In the present crisis of American law, judges have been overwhelmingly strong in upholding the rule of law over the demands of an egotistical, lawless president. Over 200 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration, which has so far not gone well for Trump. Judges have been targets of abuse, intimidation, even death threats directed at them and their families.

The authors single out Judge Beryl Howell for her fearless defense of the right of lawyers to represent their clients regardless of their political views.

They write:

Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell deftly knit together the professional obligations of the bench to the bar when she handed down a 102-page opinion in favor of one of these fighting firms, Perkins Coie, handing it a massive victory that carried a deeper lesson for the entire legal profession. Howell’s decision is noteworthy for all manner of things, but perhaps the most important aspect is that it serves as a clarion call for lawyers—meaning every lawyer in the country—to find their way to doing the work of democracy. The judge highlighted the “importance of independent lawyers to ensuring the American judicial system’s fair and impartial administration of justice,” a role “recognized in this country since its founding era.” She condemned the administration’s “unprecedented attack on these foundational principles.” And she praised Perkins Coie for defending its lawyers’ right “to represent their clients vigorously and zealously, without fear of retribution from the government simply for doing the job of a lawyer.” Howell also gave credit to the hundreds of lawyers who filed amicus briefs on behalf of the firm, including a cross-ideological array of lawyers, former government officials, and retired judges, reflecting the profession’s near-unanimous revulsion at the prospect of singling out firms based on the clients they choose to represent.

But Howell went out of her way to cast doubt upon the capitulating firms that took Trump’s deal, for possibly compromising their own legal ethics. Describing Trump’s threat that “lawyers must stick to the party line, or else,” she wrote, archly: “This message has been heard and heeded by some targeted law firms, as reflected in their choice, after reportedly direct dealings with the current White House, to agree to demand terms, perhaps viewing this choice as the best alternative for their clients and employees.” Some clients, she noted, “may harbor reservations about the implications of such deals for the vigorous and zealous representation to which they are entitled from ethically responsible counsel”—an extraordinary warning to these clients that their lawyers may no longer be defending their best interests. And to make her position perfectly clear, the judge added: “If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.”

Howell’s opinion serves as the most important reminder to date that in this constitutional moment, those trained to operate within the law and those who swear oaths to defend it have a singular and critical role to play. The days of “I just do mergers and acquisitions” are behind us, sports fans. If America were experiencing a national tooth-decay crisis, the dentists would be on the front lines; and were it experiencing a sweeping leaky-pipe epidemic, the plumbers would be on the front lines. Given that we are in the throes of the greatest legal disaster the country has faced in many Americans’ lifetimes, it might be a good idea for the nation’s attorneys to begin to understand that they have a role to play too. Howell, meanwhile, holds no quarter for those who would seek to be neutral. If you have the tools to fight lawlessness and you opt not to use them at this moment in history, you are emphatically still taking a side.

It is hard to read Howell’s opinion without worrying that some judge somewhere will find it too sweeping, too polemical, and too teeming with overinflated claims about the centrality of attorneys in American life. (She quoted Alexis de Tocqueville’s observationthat in the early United States, “the authority … intrusted to members of the legal profession … is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy.”) What Howell seems to understand, with as much force as de Tocqueville, is that those entrusted to protect against the “excesses of democracy” are not going to have the luxury of appearing “neutral” much longer, or even just tamping down criticism by avoiding flowery prose in favor of more anodyne wrist slaps. Effective immediately, the defenders of the rule of law are those who went to school to understand it, who get paid to fight for it, and who swear an oath to uphold it.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Justice, Trump
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