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Parker Molloy: What the Media Got Wrong About Jack Smith’s Testimony and Eric Schmitt’s Accusation

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2026 //
0

Republicans in Congress are clearly out to incriminate Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, who was appointed by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate former President Donald J. Trump for his role in the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

In the latest debacle, Senator Eric Schmitt garnered headlines for making a huge mistake. He wanted to trap Smith in a lie so he could be charged with perjury. He claimed to have proof that Smith flew to Atlanta under the pretext of watching a basketball game when his real purpose was to meet secretly with Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis. Smith said it was untrue. On the night in question, he was not in Atlanta. Instead, he attended a women’s basketball game in Maryland, in which the phenomenal Caitlin Clark played.

Blogger Parker Molloy pointed out that the news coverage of Schmitt’s collossal error overshadowed the importance of Jack Smith’s eloquent testimony. Molloy’s blog is titled “The present Age.”

What is bizarre about the Republicans’ rage towards Jack Smith is that they are trying to exonerate the man who tried to stage a coup against the Constitution and overturn the election. I know they are afraid of Trump and cower before him. But must they join in the fantasy that the bloody January 6 insurrection was no big deal, just a load of faithful patriots visiting the U.S. Capitol. They were there. Weren’t they hiding under their chairs and in secret rooms?

Molloy writes, in part:

If, like me this week, you heard about this hearing via social media or just a stray article that made its way through your feed, you probably saw one specific highlight: Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) swung for the fences during his questioning of Smith, and… well… it didn’t go how he thought it would.

The short version (which you’ve probably seen) is that Schmitt claimed Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024 and suggested he’d gone to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Both Smith and Willis had been involved in investigating Donald Trump’s alleged crimes and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” he asked. Smith said no. Schmitt continued: “The day before, Fani Willis came clean with her affair with the prosecutor.” And Smith said that he had never met Willis during his time as special counsel, and he had definitely not been in attendance at that Hawks game.

Schmitt then whipped out a poster board that purported to show evidence that Smith had lied under oath.

“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself,” Schmitt said, dripping with smug confidence. And as you probably know by now, no, Smith wasn’t at that game. He was actually at a University of Maryland women’s basketball game that night. Schmitt seemed to have been confusing the Hawks (NBA team) with the Hawkeyes (NCAA team).

To use a basketball term here, Schmitt air-balled this one big time.

(Somewhat unrelated, but the Warriors-Hawks game Schmitt accused Smith of attending was the one where Steph Curry dropped 60 points, setting a season high. So, hey, I guess if you’re going to put a guy at the wrong basketball game, you might as well pick a good one.)

Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) (L) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) display a sign accusing former Special Counsel Jack Smith of meeting with Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on September 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. The committee is holding the hearing to examine Smith’s probe into Donald Trump. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Now, this flub is notable for a couple of reasons. That morning, Axios’s Jim VandeHei reported that Schmitt “is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.” I find it hard to believe the timing was a coincidence. The story ran on the same day Schmitt would try to grab the headlines with a grandstanding moment in which he’d catch Smith in a lie, committing a crime. This was supposed to help propel Schmitt to political stardom in the GOP, but instead, he came away looking like a clown. Even after being corrected, fact-checked, and called out for all of this, Schmitt continued to insistthat he was right, long after he’d been proven wrong. No surprises there.

To add to the egg on his face, there’s the additional irony that he’s the same guy who, back in August, accused Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed of not knowing ball for saying “Beat Ohio” in reference to Ohio State University (for the record, El-Sayed was right; University of Michigan and its fans regularly do say “Beat Ohio” when referring to OSU, sometimes as a bit of a taunt as Ohio State fans and alumni are known to get a bit touchy whenever someone doesn’t refer to it as “THE Ohio State University.” Hell, former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh even renamed a practice drill after the phrase).

And yes, all of this clearly is a story. It’s absolutely newsworthy that Schmitt botched his big moment on the day that Axios puffed him up. It’s newsworthy that he clearly thought this was such a slam dunk, and that guys like Benny Johnson and Sean Hannity rushed to post about it on social media, despite the fact that they had literally everything wrong. (Both later deleted their posts.) And yes, it’s newsworthy that Schmitt still won’t actually admit that he made a mistake.

But there was a lot more to the hearing that kind of got lost in the Schmitt show. And if you were paying attention to this as someone who doesn’t closely follow politics, you probably missed it. Smith said a lot of stuff that should shake the country to its core, but instead everyone ended up talking about Eric Schmitt.

And it’s not to say that news organizations ignored the other aspects of Smith’s testimony. They didn’t! But the whole thing got overshadowed by Schmitt’s moment. And I guess that the one thought I had as I read more about what happened during the rest of the hearing was that I kind of wish there was a way for news organizations to capitalize on the viral moment to help inform the public about everything else that happened, to use the viral moment specifically as an opportunity.

But to avoid contributing to the Schmittiness of this, I suppose I should also give a quick rundown of what Smith said during the hearing that I think more people should be aware of. So what did Smith actually say?

Smith told the Senate that people are being threatened with prosecution for being seen as opposing the president

In his opening statement, T-minus about 60 minutes before Schmitt grabbed the spotlight, Smith told the committee this:

As with my appearance before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, I am prepared to answer your questions truthfully. I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives, and I will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.

As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal prosecution because they are perceived to have opposed the president. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s longstanding core values and traditions.

History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It’s often weakened by attacks on the institutions and the public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January of 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the agents, prosecutors, and staff who worked on my team, simply because of their unwavering dedication to the rule of law.

I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States. However, I remain confident that the rule of law will endure, because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths, despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.

Back in July, House Judiciary Chairman and alleged knower of a disgusting abuse scandal at THE Ohio State University Jim Jordan referred Smith to the Justice Department, accusing him of knowingly making false statements in his December deposition. At issue are text messages that Smith’s team obtained involving 44 members of Congress, including Jordan. These texts were obtained through the National Archives in response to a request for White House phones. Since we live in bizarro-world, Todd Blanche, Trump’s defense attorney during Smith’s investigation, is now the attorney general. Every day is a new horror, basically.

I digress. Back to the hearing. Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked Smith whether whistleblowers who’d talked to Congress about Smith’s investigation should themselves be investigated. Smith said: “I’m not aware of any whistleblowers being investigated. I believe public servants should be protected. The members of my team, that you just mentioned, I’m extremely proud to have worked with them. And the fact that they have been targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally, and had their lives turned upside down by this Department of Justice is an outrage.”

It is a long but very interesting post. I encourage you to open the link and read it in full.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Injustice, Lies, Trump

Do You Agree with the Education Experts?

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2026 //
67

The New York Times asked 37 education experts to rank the best ideas for reforming schools. This is a gift article. Many of you are current or retired teachers. Please read it and share your thoughts.

The experts were asked to rank the “best ideas” by their effectiveness and their cost.

Among the five “most effective ideas” were:

  1. Small-group tutoring.
  2. Science of reading.
  3. Universal pre-K.
  4. Increase per-student funding.
  5. Increase teacher pay for high-poverty schools.

The authors–Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris, and Claire Cain Miller–begin:

U.S. schools are facing a daunting problem. Students simply can’t read or do math as well as they used to.

Student test scores have declined over the last decade, in an academic slump that started before the pandemic and has continued since. Compared with 2015, reading scores are down in 83 percent of districts, and math declines are nearly as pervasive.

But improving student achievement is notoriously difficult. Do schools need more money? Better teachers? More standardized testing? Less?

What could actually help turn things around?

We asked 37 top academics and researchers who study education to rate a range of ideas for both effectiveness and cost, on a scale of 1 to 7.

*****£*******

Overall, no single idea was enough on its own, experts said. And no idea would be successful unless it was executed well. But the results showed there are a number of ideas that can work.

We asked experts to evaluate each idea for its impact on academic achievement, which is generally measured by standardized test scores.

Lots of other things matter, too, including enrichment activities like the arts, teacher work satisfaction, and student excitementabout learning. Children also have other needs beyond academics, including mental health and well-being.

But given the results of the last decade, we were interested in what could lift student achievement, which is tied to many later life outcomes, for students, society and the economy.

Interestingly, the least effective idea was “private school vouchers.” Second, reduced class size. Third, increase all teacher pay.

Among the comments, the most frequent complaint was: “Why didn’t you ask the real experts–the teachers?”

My biggest complaint about the survey and the responses is that it omits the most powerful influences on student performance in the classroom: the effects of poverty, family stability and support, health, and other factors outside the teacher’s control. According to the American Statistical Association, about 1-14% of variation in test scores is under the teachers’ control. This is not to say that teachers don’t make a difference, but that you can’t change a child’s academic performance if he or she is persistently sick, absent, has vision or dental problems, doesn’t get fed regularly, and lives in substandard housing.

I didn’t see any mention of community schools, which address some of these problems, making sure that children have medical check-ups, dental and vision screening, have a food pantry and clothing supply, offer job counseling for parents, etc. That is, the school recognizes that the children’s well-being is a necessary precondition to school performance.

I don’t have all the answers. Some of the ideas in the survey are good; some don’t go far enough. But if this I feel sure: children are at their best when they are healthy, when they are well-nourished, when they don’t worry about the physical safety of themselves or their family, when they have a stable home.

Maybe that is too much to hope for in our highly individualistic society, where everyone is on their own and expected to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even if they don’t have any bootstraps.

Recommended reading:

Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Class size, Closing schools, Community Schools, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Innovation, Literacy, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teacher Pay, Teaching, Vouchers

John Thompson: What Do “Experts” Know About School Reform?

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2026 //
5

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, asked the obvious question about “education experts”: what is their own experience in teaching? He was prompted to ask the question by a recent article in The New York Times:

The New York Times asked 37 experts to evaluate 30 ideas for their “impact on academic achievement, which is generally measured by standardized test scores.”

That goal seems to be the reason why the panel concluded that the “Science of Reading,” and the Mississippi Miracle,” and accountability-driven reforms were low-cost approaches that produce the most benefits.

But, what are the costs to students? After all, they have endured a couple of decades of test-driven, competition-driven mandates that started with the No Child Left Behind Act, that was launched in 2002, and the teach-to-the-test culture that many advocates for the Mississippi Miracle want to bring back.

At least, the Times reporters “asked researchers to rate effectiveness ‘when done properly.’ In the real world, a lot can fall apart because of the details.”

And, they noted::

Several experts also said that schools should think beyond test scores and focus on making learning less boring and more engaging — less passive listening and memorizing for tests, for example, and more open-ended research and project-based learning.

But, I experienced the disaster that began around 2004 in Oklahoma City’s schools when the NCLB was fully implemented, and worsened after corporate reforms, like Race-to-the-Top, were fully implemented.

So, a big question jumped out to me.

How many of the panelists had experience in what happened in the “the real world” of the highest-challenged schools? 

And, I was stunned to read the list of the best known experts that were surveyed. 

Around a third of them were smart data-driven people, ranging from economists like  Eric Hanushek and Tom Kane to Marguerite Roza, the Director of the Edunomics Lab, whose “intentially deceitful” spin is documented in Bruce Baker’s “Seventeen Years of Roza-Tinted Glasses.”

Being a former academic, I had communicated with several of them who correctly understood how difficult it would be to scale up systemic reforms. That’s why reformers usually said that is why they pushed the more affordable, simplistic, quick fix of test-driven accountability; “Our kids can’t wait.” 

I understood why so many of them sought quicker, transformative changes, as opposed to the incremental improvements that followed the failed “Nation at Risk” of the Reagan years, his Supply Side economics that wiped out so many blue collar jobs, and the crack and gangs era. 

But, many of the best-known advocates I communicated with, including those who served on the Times survey, seemed like they didn’t know what they didn’t know about public schools. 

Often I was told, maybe you are right, and if you are, we’ll run more controls. 

Yes, many of them now reject the hypothesis that market-driven policies, alone, could replace the complex reforms that traditional educators and their unions, worked for. But, based on my conversations with reformers, then and recently, they still blame us Baby Boomers for supposedly having “low expectations, and accepting “excuses.” 

If those experts had had experience in public schools they might have known that “giving schools a rating, like an A-F letter grade, and requiring underperforming schools to make changes” would create the nightmare that the less-expensive, test-driven, competition-driven reforms produced. 

Again, to be fair to the Times, they reported that “several experts also said that schools should “think beyond test scores and focus on making learning less boring and more engaging — less passive listening and memorizing for tests, for example, and more open-ended research and project-based learning.”

And they quoted Chris Torres, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who asked, “How do we get an education system that promotes high academic achievement, but is also a place where kids really want to be?” 

And, their reporting prompted numerous readers’ comments advocating for the policies of Scandinavian countries, like Finland, which “has better schools than the United States because its system focuses on equity, high-level teacher training, and student well-being instead of high-stakes testing,” and where “teachers have total autonomy over their lesson plans and methods.

Another commentator also shared her thoughts about how “none of the experts consulted for this project mentioned an evidence-based school improvement approach called community schools.”

I can’t complain when data-driven advocates provide interpretations that educators like me oppose. But, the surveyed group should have included an equal number data-informed, not data-driven researchers, who have done qualitative research, as well as those who listened to the poorest children of color, like my students, who repeatedly complained they had been “robbed of an education,” by standardized testing. 

And that is why I’m focusing on the dangers of the “Mississippi Miracle” where ideology-driven advocates “in recent years, …  have used a model of accountability that focuses more on student progress,” hoping that will give “underperforming schools support to improve.” Like so many reforms, Mississippi has produced short-lived 4th grade increases, but not increases in 8th grade reading scores, which likely is due to their failure to improve reading comprehension. 

I also googled around twenty members of the survey group who I didn’t know. Several were completely committed to the Science of Reading and/or the Mississippi Miracle. For instance, one claimed that this approach is “affordable, effective, and should be done everywhere.” And another expert that I hadn’t studied before said, “Mississippi’s success offers a proven solution to the reading literacy crisis facing many states – a clear road map for closing early literacy gaps and improving reading outcomes nationwide.” 

Through my googling, however, I concluded that there were more panel members, who I didn’t know about, who opposed the “Miracle.” Also, I couldn’t find what a number of the other experts believed about it.  

Yes, supporters of the “Miracle” often say their 8th grade NAEP reading scores haven’t dropped as much as other states. But, I didn’t see any supporters of the Science of Reading in the Times article who mentioned  the way Mississippi is using NAEP materials for test prep, and the effect of small group tutoring becoming too expensive now  that the Covid money is gone. 

And I didn’t see pro-Science of Reading experts explaining why the Mississippi Miracle is teaching so many kids to reject reading.

Understandably, the debates have focused on the harms vs. the benefits on student retentions. 

But, what I fear will matter the most is the degradation of learning cultures. Increased test prep and placing stats over children could bring back a revival of the destructive school cultures that were, I believe, the most important factor that got us here. 

Finally, the Times’ other cost /benefits analyses raised questions about their excessively quantitative approach. When they minimized the attempts to control cell phones, A.I., and other technologies, did they try to estimate the harms to students that will result from turning the clock back to unregulated use of digital products? When they minimize the test score gains due to better funding for teachers and class sizes, how would they estimate the human costs of continuing to abandon teacher autonomy, and retaining teachers? And, if they minimize the benefits of non-academic supports for students, mental health supports, and pre-k because they are too costly, how will they measure the costs of treating kids as more than a test score?    

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Research, Standardized Testing, Teaching, Testing

Florida Parents and Teachers Aghast at Downplaying of Climate Change and Evolution in K-12 Science Standards

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2026 //
13

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t want the state’s children to learn modern science. The Orlamdo Sentinel reported that parents and teachers were “gobsmacked” by the state’s new science standards. In one of the states most threatened by environmental degradation, the state has deleted the study of evolution and diminished the study of climate change.

Stephen Walker reported:

Florida’s new plan for teaching science in public schools lacks depth, skirts around the important topics of climate change and evolution and would be a “disservice” to the state’s students, dozens of parents and teachers told the Florida Department of Education late Wednesday.

Nearly 300 people attended a virtual education department forum, with nearly all 29 speakers criticizing the state’s proposed new science standards, which are benchmarks for what should be taught in science lessons in kindergarten through 12th grade. Experts who’ve reviewed them have shared similar views, calling them a step backwards

The state released its proposed standards on Sept. 25 and is now taking public comment on them, both on its website and in several meetings.

Robin Williams, a retired biology and environmental science teacher, called them a “disservice” to Florida students because they don’t fully tackle evolution.

The state’s current standards, adopted in 2008, call evolution one of science’s “big ideas” and insist it must be taught.

That makes sense and should not change, Williams said.

“Evolution is a fundamental underlying process unifying all of biology. To leave it out is ideology posing as biology,” she said.

The proposed standards barely mention evolution — a scientific theory explaining change in living species over time from natural selection that has been a cornerstone of biology for more than a century. The term “evolution,” in fact, is never defined in the new high school life sciences standards, though the concepts are sprinkled across several units.

The new standards would replace the current set, adopted after a months-long, statewide fight over the inclusion of evolution as a required subject of study. Those who opposed the 2008 standards argued creationism, or the biblical story that God created all living things, should be taught alongside evolution.

Education Commissioner Henry Mack seemed to some to re-ignite that fight with a statement released with the new standards that included a reference to “the book of creation.”

But Thursday morning he took to social media to insist he was not “smuggling a Sunday-school lesson into Biology,” adding in his post on X that, “I am not advocating religious influence in the standards. I am opposing the opposite error: treating nature as a prop for adult ideology, or treating wonder as something to be talked out of children by leftist zealots.”

His original statement said, “The classical tradition taught that nature is intelligible because it is ordered—that the book of creation can be read by reason. Florida’s new science standards will form students who observe carefully, reason rigorously, and treat the natural world as something given to be known, not invented.”

During Wednesday’s forum, one parent asked for clarification on what Mack meant by that. But state education department employees facilitating the meeting did not respond to that or other questions from speakers, instead thanking attendees and encouraging them to submit their concerns in writing.

Chris Vercelli, a parent in Sarasota County who regularly attends government meetings to preach Christianity, suggested at Wednesday’s meeting that he read the commissioner’s statement as an endorsement of his views and said he was in “full support” of the new standards.

It was “refreshing” to hear the state was “entertaining the idea of teaching creation and intelligent design in schools,” he said, referring to the argument that an “intelligent cause” better explains living things than evolution by natural selection.

“The way that evolution is taught really is like a bait and switch … that means that everything originated from primordial soup, and there is no God. That’s just ridiculous. That is like total non-science,” Vercelli said.

The proposed standards also give little attention to human-made climate change and do not use that term, instead referring to “anthropogenic activities” that affect “Earth’s systems.”

Brad Dupke, an Earth science teacher and geologist in Hillsborough County, asked how the state expects him to teach a required unit on fossils without teaching evolution and climate change.

“We need to call a spade a spade instead of trying to dance around what it is. I can’t teach geologic history of the Earth without being able to say how the climate changed,” he said.

In addition to complaints about the state’s proposed handling of evolution and climate change, several speakers said the standards were too numerous and lacked rigor and others criticized the way the state posted its proposal for public review. Instead of a single document, the department initially posted each standard on a separate page, requiring clicking through hundreds of pages to view all the standards.

I have s hunch that students in Florida don’t learn about the Scopes trials read the fictionalized version Inherit the Wind.

Tags
Categories Accountability, Censorship, Curriculum, DeSantis, Environment, Ethics, Florida, Science

Robert Reich: A Dystopian Nightmare, with Hegseth in Charge

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
19

Robert Reich invites readers to imagine a war fought by AI-powered robots. What could possibly go wrong? Bill Gates warned a few days ago that AI could go rogue and kill one billion people..give or take a few thousand. Imagine this cyber war controlled by men who are not celebrated for their humanity, but for their yearning to amass power.

Get out and vote.

Reich warns:

Imagine four of the most frighteningly irresponsible people in America deciding how AI will be put to use in the most frighteningly irresponsible way. 

Pete Hegseth is one of them. Trump is another. The other two are Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich. 

Hegseth says he’s tasking Musk and Gingrich with laying the groundwork for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command,” or AutoWarCom — a new Pentagon command operation for autonomous warfare. It would feature unmanned drones, autonomous sensors, unmanned boats, and other autonomous systems. Hegseth is proposing to triple spending on autonomous warfare to $74 billion. 

Hegseth has also named as an adviser Palmer Luckey, a major Trump donor who designed the Oculus Rift, a virtually reality headset credited with reviving the virtual reality industry, and co-founded of Anduril Industires, a military tech company focused on autonomous drones and sensors. 

The specter of autonomous lethal weapons — weapons that kill without human beings first deciding who, how, or when — is the nightmare of many who deal with AI. Autonomous AI weapons are fraught with unpredictability. And what happens when AI weapons escape their controls and go rogue, as recently occurred at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google? 

Bad enough that Hegseth and Trump are pouring money into this. Worse that they’re setting up a separate military command for it. Worse still that they’re depending on Musk, Gingrich, and a virtual-reality game designer to tell them how. 

I keep thinking I’ll wake up from this nightmare into a sane world.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Evil, Extremism, Insane, Trump

Peter Greene: New Regulations for Federal Voucher Program Tie the Hands of Local Officials

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
5

Starting on January 1, 2027, the federal government will sponsor its own voucher program. In this post, Peter Greene explains how the new program will work. You can be sure that every dollar spent on charter schools and vouchers will be taken away from public schools.

Peter Greene writes:

Since Congress passed President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill with its federal school voucher, questions have abounded about the exact form that the tax credit program would take. Today the Treasury Department released proposed rules for the voucher program, and some of those questions are being answered

One of the persistent questions has been how much flexibility will states have in how the program is administered. The answer that came today is “Not very much.”

The basic structure of the tax credit voucher program works like this: a taxpayer redirects $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) and receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The SGO uses that money (minus an up-to-10% administrative fee) to grant scholarships to students, who may then use the money for educational expenses. 

While the state must require SGOs to meet the state’s requirements for charitable organizations, the state may not put restrictions on how the SGO operates “such as by limiting the type of school that scholarship recipients may attend or the types of qualified elementary or secondary education expenses for which scholarship funds may be used.” 

This restriction on restrictions dovetails with the voucher movement’s push to render legal the use of redirected taxpayer dollars to fund religious schools without setting limits on how those schools can discriminate.

The rules appear to solidify the idea that an SGO cannot be removed by the state for reasons other than failure to comply with the law’s SGO requirements. These requirements simply require an SGHO to serve at least ten eligible students and spend the appropriate amount of money on the vouchers. Nothing in the law requires SGOs to monitor or assess the educational quality of the vendors who receive the money.

The rules issued do indicate that an SGO can choose to limit its scholarships “to specific subject matter” or to students whose household income is less than 80% of the area median gross income, but it appears that those limits would be placed at the SGO’s discretion and not the state’s.

The federal voucher program caps eligibility at 300% of area median gross income, a generous cap that would make the vast majority of American families eligible for the voucher. 

The rules published today show that if a state wanted to, for instance, add restrictions that directed vouchers only to low-income students or students in particular communities, they could not do so. Nor could they impose any restrictions that would keep the voucher dollars from going to religious schools. 

In short, any governors who expected to use these redirected taxpayer dollars in ways that aligned with their own policy goals may need to reconsider. If they opt in, their hands are tied.

There are other details to be dug out and discussed, but one rule guarantees that these discussions may go on forever. While some “stakeholders” recommended restricting state’s ability to opt out after opting in, the rules indicate that a governor will opt in for just one year at a time.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

The Five Biggest Charter School Grifts

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
4

Bruce Baker taught for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He now teaches education policy at the University of Miami. He will have many opportunities to observe and document edu-grifting in Florida.

In this post, he identities the five biggest charter scandals and explains how they worked. Much of what you will read was called “legal graft” by past pundits. In other words, the charter operators collect millions in public funds while providing a dubious education, and they get away scot-free.

In other words, take the money and run. No consequences.

He writes:

Five cases, four mechanisms, one ranking: this post lines up the biggest fraud prosecutions, the biggest company-store combination, and the biggest sweeps contract in the charter sector’s history against the single largest real-estate deal any operator has ever built, and asks which one moved the most money. The answer isn’t the one with an indictment attached.

In The Grift Model I group the ways charter operators route public money into private hands into four repeating types: enrollment inflation (getting paid for students who aren’t really being educated — phantom seats, unverifiable attendance, ghost enrollees); related-party transactions (a school’s own board or executives sitting on both sides of a contract); the company store (a captive vendor a school is required to buy from — curriculum, credentials, back-office services — that happens to be owned by the people running the school); and real estate (buying, or arranging for a related party to buy, the very buildings public dollars already financed, then leasing them back at a markup).

What I hadn’t done before is put the five biggest documented cases — regardless of category — on the same page and rank them by dollar figure. A caveat before I do: these numbers come from different kinds of documents (a criminal restitution order isn’t the same instrument as a municipal bond prospectus), cover different time spans, and in a couple of cases reflect an auditor’s or a prosecutor’s counting choice as much as anyone’s. I’m ranking them anyway, because the comparison itself is the point — and because the single largest number on this list isn’t attached to anyone’s indictment.

Here they are, five to one.

5. White Hat Management, Ohio: about $100 million over a decade

White Hat’s “sweeps” contracts with ten Hope Academy and Life Skills Center campuses in Cleveland and Akron routed roughly 95 percent of each school’s state funding to the management company, which then handled teacher salaries, facilities, and operations with minimal board oversight — company-store logic applied to an entire school’s back office rather than one vendor line. Over a decade that added up to something like $100 million. When several of the nonprofit boards tried to switch management companies, White Hat argued the computers, furniture, and classroom equipment it had bought with that money belonged to White Hat, not the schools — meaning the boards would have to buy back the property their own public funding had already paid for once.

In 2015, a divided Ohio Supreme Court sided with White Hat, 4–3, upholding the buy-back scheme as an enforceable contract term. Justice Paul Pfeifer’s dissent put it about as plainly as a judicial opinion gets: “the contracts require that after the public pays to buy those materials for a public use, the public must then pay the companies if it wants to retain ownership of the materials.” Justice William O’Neill called it, in a dissent The Progressive covered in full, “a fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit.” Neither dissent changed the outcome. Nobody broke a law here — a state’s highest court looked at the arithmetic and, on the merits, said it was fine. (Court News Ohio’s case summary has the full procedural history.)

4. ECOT, Ohio: $117 million ordered repaid

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was, at its peak, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Ohio funds schools on a formula built around enrollment and documented hours of learning activity — a formula that works fine when “attendance” means a body in a classroom, and considerably less well when it means a login timestamp nobody is verifying. A state audit covering fiscal years 2016 through 2018 found ECOT couldn’t substantiate the participation hours behind a large share of the funding it had claimed. The Ohio Auditor of State’s officeultimately found the school owed $106.6 million to the Ohio Department of Education, plus additional findings against ECOT-affiliated management entities, for a combined total just over $117 million. ECOT shut down in January 2018 rather than pay it back; Ideastream’s coverage of the final audit and the Dayton Daily News both note the state has spent the years since trying to collect. A related judgment against affiliated entities separately reached $161.6 million. It remains the largest attendance-fraud clawback in the sector’s history: virtual schools, virtual kids, real dollars.

3. Chester Community Charter School / CSMI, Pennsylvania: roughly $122 million combined

This is the case I use to show what happens when the company store, related-party real estate, and plain self-dealing all show up in a single school under a single owner. Chester Community Charter, Pennsylvania’s largest brick-and-mortar charter, is managed by CSMI, a company controlled by Vahan Gureghian. A 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer public-records fightestablished that CSMI had been paid roughly $60.6 million in management fees since 1999. In 2010, Gureghian sold the school’s buildings — which he owned personally — to a newly created nonprofit, for the specific and sole purpose of leasing them back to the school, for $50.7 million, financed through municipal bonds and requiring roughly $4 million a year in lease payments; Pennsylvania’s Auditor General found the school had also improperly claimed $1.27 million in state lease reimbursements on buildings the program’s own rules made ineligible, because the “related parties” on both sides of the lease were, functionally, the same person before and after the sale. Then, in 2016, a federal Office of Inspector General audit found that the school’s CEO — Gureghian himself — had written checks to himself totaling $11 million without board approval. Add the pieces up and you get a single owner, across roughly fifteen years, sitting on every side of upward of $122 million in transactions with the school he ran. No criminal charges resulted from any of it.

2. The A3 charter network, California: $400 million generated, about $80 million allegedly diverted

Between 2015 and 2019, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock used a network of 19 online charter schools, partnerships with struggling private schools, and summer athletic programs to enroll thousands of students who, per prosecutors, never took a class. The scheme generated roughly $400 million in California public education funding; investigators alleged about $80 million of it was funneled into companies the two men controlled. Voice of San Diego’s account calls it, by the state’s own description, one of the largest charter-school fraud cases in the country’s history — and yet neither man served a day in prison. McManus, an Australian citizen, was sentenced to four years but served it under house arrest with an ankle monitor in Australia; Schrock’s ankle-monitor time was credited against his sentence. Nine other defendants pleaded to reduced or misdemeanor charges. Both men paid roughly $19 million each in fines and restitution, and the California State Controller’s office says the state has recovered more than $240 million overall — real money back, on a fraud whose architects never spent a night in a cell.

1. National Heritage Academies, Michigan and six other states: $853.6 million

In 2021, National Heritage Academies — the country’s third-largest for-profit charter operator, with more than 90 schools — arranged to sell 69 of its campuses across seven states to Campus Partners 1, a nonprofit newly created for the transaction, with no operating history and, at the time reporters looked, no registration on file with Michigan’s attorney general. NHA’s owner, J.C. Huizenga, controls both the seller’s side (through Charter Development Co., which retained the facility-maintenance and ground-lease contracts) and, through his general counsel installed as the new nonprofit’s president, effectively the buyer’s side as well. The purchase was financed through $853.6 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, issued by an industrial development authority in La Paz County, Arizona — a jurisdiction with no obvious relationship to any of the seven states where the schools actually sit. The schools then signed 30-year leases back to the very entities that had just “sold” them. Network for Public Education’s account and NCSPE’s coverage at Teachers College, Columbia University both flag the same detail: nothing about this required hiding anything, and no one has been indicted. Local commissions in Michigan raised transparency objections and briefly slowed a few approvals, but the deal closed.

It is, by a wide margin, the largest single dollar figure on this list — more than double the other four cases combined — and it’s the cleanest illustration in the sector of this project’s core argument: the extraction that scales isn’t the kind that needs a prosecutor. It’s the kind a bond market is happy to underwrite.

Open the link to see his comparisons of these five top educators-grifts.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Cheating, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, Hoax, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Come to Hear a Brilliant Analysis of Trump’s War on DEI!

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2026 //
5

Come to Wellesley College to hear Dr. Yohuru Williams dissect and eviscerate the Trump administration’s attack on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Such policies are meant to broaden opportunity. They take us closer to our professed goals of liberty and justice for all. Yet the Trump administration wants to abolish them. Civil rights protections have already been reversed, so that any effort to help students of color is treated as a violation of this administration’s hostility to DEI.

Yohuru Williams is a leading scholar and public intellectual who has often appeared on public television to expound on African American history. He is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and Founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a wonderful speaker.

Join me on October 6 at Wellesley College.

Open to all. Free.

Yohuru Williams is speaking as part of the annual lecture series that I established several years ago.

The event will be live-streamed and available later online.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Racism, Trump

Robert Hubbell: Republicans Are Out of Touch with the Past and the Future

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2026 //
10

Robert Hubbell is a steady and wise blogger who has a knack for interpreting events as they happen. While Heather Cox Richardson looks at the day’s events from a historical perspective; Hubbell has a keen perspective honed by age and experience.

At a time when the public is skeptical, even fearful, of artificial intelligence, Trump has embraced this powerful technology with fervor, reassuring the tech titans that the federal government won’t regulate them but will trust them to regulate themselves. Simultaneously, Bill Gates was worrying in public that AI had the potential to wipe out a billion people. This is a “don’t worry, be happy” moment for Trump and his circle. They Pooh-pooh the growing number of people who worry about what big data centers will do to their water supply, their electricity bills, their jobs, their lives. Trump doesn’t get it.

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans have chosen to use the weeks before the mid-term elections rehashing the investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn his electoral loss in 2024. They have chosen this moment to prosecute Jack Smith, who led the investigation of Trump. In their attempt to prove that Trump was unjustly targeted, they are successfully rekindling bad memories of January 6, 2021, when Trump summoned a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. Five years later, is this a winning hand for them. Hubbell thinks not.

He wrote about yesterday’s events;

Tuesday was a wild news day, but the throughline is this: Republicans are missing this moment in America, only five weeks before the midterms. They are clutching to the transitory retrograde spasm that propelled Trump to the presidency for all it is worth. They have no platform, no values, no principles, and no vision, so they cling tightly to the culture wars they exploited for a decade. But Americans have moved on to new issues, including the threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence, the growing economic chasm between the haves and have-nots, the crushing burden of medical debt, the unaffordability of higher education, and the imploding economy for those who work for a living.

As the electorate recoils in disgust and fear over the coming onslaught at the hands of AI, Trump posed with nineteen AI oligarchs at the White House (eighteen of whom are men). At that meeting, Trump surrendered control of AI’s future to the handful of billionaires who will most benefit from the reckless development of a technology that will put millions of Americans out of work while polluting their communities and driving up electricity costs. Talk about a lack of self-awareness. See CNN Politics, Trump’s blasé attitude toward AI risks backfiring politically.

Per CNN,

Trump’s answer to voters who worry that AI will take their jobs, or who look askance at data centers’ enormous strains on electrical grids and water supplies, is an optimistic promise that such installations are “going to be very popular” and will make everyone rich.

He’s causing himself an immediate political problem. Some 75% of Americans view the growth of AI with fear and concern, according to a CNN/SSRS poll last week, and 71% want the federal government to do more to regulate it. Higher electricity bills attributed to the immense proliferation of data centers are deepening affordability frustrations among voters — a top midterm election issue.

So, at a time when more than 70% of Americans fear AI and want the government to regulate it,Trump entered into a deal that handed control of AI to the men most likely to profit from its unregulated development. See NBC News, After summit with tech titans, Trump calls for ‘self-regulation’ by AI companies.

When in the history of the world has “self-regulation” by monopolists ever inured to the benefit of the people—as opposed to the generational wealth of the monopolists?

At the luncheon, Trump and the AI oligarchs signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” Trump’s rebranding of “artificial intelligence.” The term “super intelligence” is insulting to humans. “Artificial intelligence” correctly signals that the technology is a probabilistic prediction model about which words follow other words. Calling it “super intelligence” signals that it is superior to human intelligence—which it is not and never will be. But Trump sees a profit opportunity in convincing people that they are inferior to AI, so he chose the moment five weeks before the midterms to align himself with the AI oligarchs and their dangerous vision of the future.

The “Accord on Super Intelligence” (which has not been made public—another worrisome sign) allegedly commits the AI tech companies to “building robust internal controls and detecting if there are any issues with the technology, coupled with multiple layers of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk review.” See The Guardian, Trump announces vague ‘morally binding’ AI deal among tech CEOs for ‘tremendous self-policing’.

You have got to be kidding, right?

If the AI tech companies are not already “building robust controls” and “detecting issues with the technology” and submitting it to “multiple layers of auditing and risk review,” then those tech companies should be shut down immediately. And if they are already employing those practices, then Trump got nothing in exchange for his agreement to let the AI oligarchs regulate themselves.

But the larger point is that hosting an AI oligarchs’ lovefest at the White House was Trump’s strategy for stopping his freefall in the polls. It was a monumentally stupid idea that was improbably exceeded in its stupidity by Senate Republicans who thought that the best way to distract from inflation, the Iran war, and existential fear of AI was to remind voters that Trump mounted an insurrection in 2021. They did so by bringing former special counsel Jack Smith to the Senate for a hearing.

For the third time, Jack Smith gave a commanding performance, reminding congressional Republicans that he had developed evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump conspired to obstruct the congressional count of electoral votes and unlawfully took national defense documents when he left office. See PBS, WATCH: Jack Smith says he would prosecute Trump again for ‘serious crimes against our nation’.

Apart from the gross error of believing the American people are focused on Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s crimes instead of the war, inflation, and the AI threat, GOP Senator Eric Schmitt’s questioning of Jack Smith turned into a debacle for the ages. Senator Schmitt believed he could prove that Jack Smith attended an NBA Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024 to surreptitiously conspire with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

After Jack Smith said he did not attend the game, Senator Schmitt smirked and accused Smith of perjury. Senator Schmitt concluded by calling Jack Smith a “dirt bag.”

When Jack Smith was handed a copy of the texts that allegedly placed him at a men’s professional basketball game featuring the NBA Atlanta Hawks, he said he could explain.

Instead of being at the Atlanta Hawks men’s professional basketball game, Jack Smith was at a women’s college basketball game between Maryland and Iowa. The University of Iowa’s sports teams are known as “the Hawkeyes” (not the Hawks). See C-SPAN, Sen. Schmitt confuses Hawks and Hawkeyes While Accusing Jack Smith of Perjury. The C-SPAN clip is 7 minutes long and contains the gist of the exchange.

Right-wing media was prepared for Senator Schmitt’s planned perjury trap—which failed in a spectacular fashion when it turned out that Senator Schmitt did not know the difference between the NBA Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team. 

Several right-wing podcasters and commentators released canned statements saying that Schmitt had trapped Jack Smith in perjury but they later deleted those statements when they realized that Senator Schmitt had committed a face-plant for the ages. See Rolling Stone, Eric Schmitt Gaffe in Jack Smith Hearing Covered as Win by MAGA Media. (“Johnson deleted his post later on Tuesday, after it had been up for hours with a community correction. Sean Hannity also picked up and ran with Schmitt’s story, but deleted his post highlighting the moment soon after.”)

But the more significant point is that Senator Schmitt’s planned perjury trap for Jack Smith was intended as his stealth launch as a vice-presidential candidate in JD Vance’s 2028 presidential campaign. Hours before the Senate hearing, someone planted a story with the ever-obliging Axios that there was “buzz” that Senator Schmitt might be JD Vance’s running mate. See Axios, Sen. Eric Schmitt is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.

Axios reporter Jim VandeHei wrote, “We hear the VP views Schmitt, 51, as trustworthy, intelligent, articulate, and a deft political operator.”

The Axios story was obviously planted by JD Vance or Eric Schmitt. It aged badly in four hours.

More to the point, if JD Vance thinks Eric Schmitt is a good VP candidate, it confirms that Republicans are more out of touch than imagined. Vance exudes arrogance and creepiness— “anti-charisma.” Eric Schmitt would add sneering smugness with a dollop of white nationalism to the ticket. 

The fact that anyone thought to float a trial balloon of Eric Schmitt as a VP candidate shows that the next generation of Republican leaders are missing the moment and failing to anticipate the future direction of the American electorate.

Other examples abound. The backlash against the implementation of Trump’s mass deportation policy has been severe. Rather than deporting the “worst of the worst,” Trump has effectively kidnapped law-abiding, productive members of American society and deported them to troubled countries with which the deportees have no connection. So, for example, the US has agreements to deport people seized in the US to (among others) Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, South Sudan, the DRC, and the Central African Republic. See Refugees International, Banished by Bargain: Third Country Deportation Watch (2026)

In the face of the backlash, the Trump administration is doubling down on its policy of renditions to third-party countries. On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to continue its policy of deporting immigrants to third-party countries, at least for now. See Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration’s Third-Country Deportations, for Now.

Even if deportations are warranted and lawful, sending deportees to third countries with which they have no connection (and are often violence-prone) is cruel and inhumane. Trump and Stephen Miller appear to derive perverse pleasure from inflicting suffering on immigrants seeking asylum in the US.

And in a development that seems designed to ensure Ken Paxton’s defeat in his senatorial race against James Talarico, federal prosecutors in Texas have charged the Venezuelan DoorDash driver shot in the back by ICE agents with assault. See Man Shot by ICE Agent in Austin Is Charged With Assault – The New York Times

A similar story is playing out in education. On Monday, the Department of Education announced that it was officially removing a Biden administration rule that added LGBTQ protections to Title IX. See Education Week, Ed. Dept. Officially Kills Biden Rule That Added LGBTQ+ Protections to Title IX.

The Trump administration exhibits animus toward LGBTQ+ people in general, and toward transgender people in particular. Although the administration often justifies that animus on the grounds of preventing transgender people from participating in women’s sports, the repeal of the Biden-era rule is an attack on women who are victims of sexual assault on college campuses. As explained in the Education Week article,

The 2020 rules [imposed by Trump] notably had added more due-process protections for students accused of sexual harassment, an issue especially salient at the college level. . . . [¶]

The National Women’s Law Center warned the department’s move “significantly weakens protections against sexual harassment in education.” It pointed to a case of alleged sexual assault of a woman by fraternity members at Cornell University that has been in the news. A state prosecutor has reopened the investigation of the 2024 incident, which Cornell said in a statement that it supports notwithstanding its own Title IX investigation that resulted in a range of sanctions for the accused students.

In other words, at the very moment of national outrage over Cornell’s investigation and punishment of male students accused of a gang rape in 2022, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for victims of sexual assault to hold their attackers accountable. See Human Rights Campaign, You Get No Say: Trump Administration Abandons Rule Protecting LGBTQ+ Kids and Survivors of Sexual Assault in School Settings, Denying Public Any Chance to Weigh In.

As I said in the introduction, Republicans simply do not understand the cross-currents of change that are sweeping the country. Instead, they are running a playbook that ignores the fact that their standard-bearer has become everything that he ran against in 2016.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Politics, Technology, Trump

Did Netanyahu Know about the October 7 Attack Before It Happened?

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2026 //
34

For as long as I can remember, I have been a strong supporter of Israel. I was ten years old when the state was created as a refuge for the Jewish people, for those who survived the European genocide and for those who were fleeing persecution in Muslim countries across the Middle East. 

In Sunday School every week, we children brought pennies, nickels, and dimes to fill up little blue tin cans marked “For Palestine.” 

We celebrated the creation of the state of Israel and its triumph when it was attacked by all the neighboring Arab states. And we celebrated every other attempt to extinguish the only Jewish state in the world, the only safe haven for Jews. 

But my unwavering faith in Israel has been shattered by Benjamin Netanyahu and his ruthless response to the horrific events of October 7, 2023. 

His brutal campaign of violence in Gaza has not only killed tens of thousands of civilians but has made Gaza an uninhabitable wasteland. 

Almost as awful is his refusal to stop the violent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians living on the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Forces have failed to intervene as rabid settlers torch the homes of Palestinians and murder them. 

Netanyahu is directly responsible for murder, aggression, and brutality. Instead of seeking peace, he is continuing the inhumane treatment of Palestinians and indulging the extremist settlers who want to seize more and more of the West Bank. 

Netanyahu justifies whatever he does or condones because of the Hamas attack on October 7. 

But there is a disturbing picture emerging about that day, stongly suggesting that Netanyahu was warned about October 7 and failed to take action. Did he decide not to protect the people who lived near the border with Gaza? If he did, he is an accessory to their deaths.

Like many other people, I was appalled by the savagery of October 7. I was obsessed by the accounts of the attacks on young people dancing until dawn at “the Rave.” They were hunted down and slaughtered like animals. They were killed as they hid, as they attempted to flee. Families in the Kibbutzim near the border were mercilessly murdered, even the children. Some 251 hostages were brutally kidnapped and taken to Gaza.  

Immediately after that day’s horrifying events, I subscribed to the English-language version of Ha’aretz to learn what was happening from an Israeli perspective. Ha’aretz is a a liberal, anti-Netanyahu publication. Soon after the October 7 massacre, a disturbing story appeared. The story said that trained observers at a military monitoring post called Nahal Oz, near the Gaza-Israeli border, had repeatedly informed their superiors about what they saw every day on the other side of the fence in Gaza. To them, it appeared that Hamas was preparing for an incursion. 

The monitors were identified as Combat Intelligence Collection Unit 414. Unit 414 consisted of 25 unarmed young women, trained to watch the border for signs of trouble.

They saw men conducting military exercises, studying maps and the terrain, practicing attacks near the fence, digging positions. All of it looked ominous to them but Israeli intelligence decided that these activities were not hostile. They were nothing more than training exercises. 

Unit 414’s many warnings were ignored. On October 7, Unit 414 was defenseless. At least 15 of the young women were murdered, and seven were taken hostage. 

Since that fateful day, we have learned that other nations warned Israel that Hamas was planning an attack. 

CNN reported that Netanyahu was warned that Hamas was planning an attack, but did not pinpoint the date it would happen. 

Two days after the massacre, The Times of Israel reported that Egyptian intelligence warned Israel that Hamas was planning a major attack. “Mounting questions over Israel’s massive intelligence failure to anticipate and prepare for a surprise Hamas assault were compounded Monday when an Egyptian intelligence official said that Jerusalem had ignored repeated warnings that the Gaza-based terror group was planning “something big” — which included an apparent direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister to the prime minister.” 

The story appeared recently in The Atlantic magazine, which reported that the chief of Egyptian intelligence flew to Israel on September 26, 2023, to warn Netanyahu of Hamas’ plans.

In September 2026, the Associated Press reported that Netanyahu was warned by the United Arab Emirates that an attack was imminent.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was directly warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive just days before the militant group attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, according to an Israeli newspaper report.

UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed spoke with Netanyahu 10 days before the attack and said Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza at the time, was planning an operation, the Haaretz daily said. 

Bin Zayed said it would lead to bloodshed and could destabilize the region and undermine the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab and Muslim-majority nations, the newspaper reported.

But Netanyahu “reacted with relative calm,” according to Haaretz, which said he assured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario and a possible attack was more likely to come from the occupied West Bank.

Netanyahu denied the story. He denied all the stories. He knew nothing. Yet the border of Gaza was not reinforced. Netanyahu shifted troops to the West Bank. Did he really know nothing? 

Put the pieces together. Netanyahu had multiple warnings about a major attack. He did not bolster the military presence. He did not tell the organizers of “the Rave” to move their dance to a safer location. He did not warn the settlers to evacuate. 

He continues to use his narrative about October 7 to bomb and destroy what’s left of Gaza and to allow West Bank settlers to harass and attack Palestinians in their homes and to steal their property.. 

The Israeli elections will be held on October 27. Netanyahu must be ousted.  There should be a thorough public investigation of what he knew and when he knew it. In addition to the deaths that he is directly responsible for, he has made Israel a pariah nation. He should be held accountable for his crimes. Israel has a heavy burden to bear for the crimes he committed in Israel’s name. The good people, the generous people, the open-hearted Israelis must act to restore the Israel that so many of us once revered. 

PS: As Americans, we should be able to sympathize with Israel’s dilemma. We have an authoritarian President who ignores the Constitution, norms, and laws to show his power. He has killed countless Iranians in a pointless war. He has murdered scores of men on the high seas, claiming they were carrying drugs but offering no evidence. He shut down USAID, which supplies food and medicine to the neediest in the world; this caused the deaths of many thousands of children in sub-Saharan Africa. He repeatedly tells the world that our elections–the centerpiece of our democracy–are rigged (is that a confession?) He has unleashed ICE to terrorize immigrants, some of whom have papers, and to kill people who committed no crime.

Will we ever reclaim our reputation as a nation of laws? Will Israel?

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Extremism, International
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