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Adam Kinzinger: The Prospects in the Iran War Mess

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2026 //
2

Adam Kinzinger writes a regular blog, where this important post appeared. He was a Republican member of Congress from Illinois who agreed to serve on the January 6 Committee, knowing his Trump-aligned party would isolate him. He decided not to run again, but he remains active in politics. He is a combat veteran.

He wrote that control of the Strait of Hormuz is the key to everything and that the U.S. is paying a price for Trump’s hostility to our allies:

It has now been over a month since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury. Iran’s nuclear sites are degraded. Its air force is largely gone. Its senior military leadership has been decimated. By the traditional metrics of military campaign assessment, the United States has won — or at least that is what the administration is telling itself.

But the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. And that changes everything.

The story of what happens next in this conflict is really three overlapping stories: economic, diplomatic, and military. They are inseparable, and each is deeply, structurally broken in ways that the triumphalist announcements coming out of Washington are not grappling with honestly. Understanding that requires sitting with the scale of what a closed strait actually means — and then asking the hard question of whether anyone in charge actually has a plan to reopen it.

Declaring Victory Into the Void

On March 31st, 2026, reports emerged that President Trump had told aides he was prepared to end military operations in Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed. The White House press secretary, asked directly whether reopening the strait was a “core objective” of the war effort, said it was not. This followed a dizzying series of 48-hour ultimatums, deadline extensions, threats to obliterate Iran’s power plants, and a social media post in which the President of the United States referred to a critical international waterway as the “Strait of Trump.”

The signal this sends to global markets, to allies, and to Tehran cannot be overstated. If the United States walks away from this conflict with the strait still effectively closed, Iran will have achieved something extraordinary: it will have absorbed one of the most intensive American-Israeli military campaigns in modern history, lost its supreme leader, seen its conventional military largely destroyed — and still hold a chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows.

That is not a defeated power. That is a wounded power with leverage.

Let us be precise about what the Strait of Hormuz actually means to the global economy, because the word “important” has been used so many times that it has lost all weight.

On a normal day, before February 28th, approximately 20 million barrels of oil transited this narrow channel — 21 miles wide at its tightest point — every single day. That is roughly one-fifth of the world’s entire oil supply, moving through a corridor that Iran can, and now demonstrably has, made functionally impassable at will. In the first full month of war, vessel crossings dropped from roughly 135 ships per day to an average of six. Six.

Brent crude has surged close to 50% since the conflict began, touching over $112 a barrel. U.S. gasoline prices have crossed $4 per gallon for the first time in nearly four years. The International Energy Agency has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Every single one of those numbers will get worse if the strait stays closed — or worse, if markets conclude it will stay closed indefinitely.

That last point matters most. Oil markets do not price the present; they price expectations. Right now, markets are still pricing in some probability of resolution — a deal, a military reopening, a diplomatic settlement. The moment that probability goes to near zero, you will see another leg up in oil prices that will be sustained, not a spike. It would represent a structural repricing of global energy, with cascading consequences for inflation, interest rates, industrial costs, and food prices (fertilizer shipments through the strait have also been disrupted, threatening planting season in multiple countries).

What would that sustained leg look like? It is not difficult to imagine oil at $140, $150, or higher. The world has not truly absorbed the scenario where a major shipping chokepoint is closed not temporarily, by crisis, but semi-permanently, by policy.

The Insurance Problem Nobody Can Fully Solve

The closure is not simply a matter of Iran’s navy physically blocking ships. That would actually be easier to address militarily. What Iran has done is subtler and, in some ways, harder to unwind: it has turned the strait into an active combat zone, where the threat of drone and missile attack makes the waterway functionally impassable for commercial shipping regardless of what any navy does.

The maritime insurance market understood this within days. Major P&I clubs — Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard, the London P&I Club, the American Club — canceled war risk coverage for vessels operating in the Persian Gulf within the first week. Rates for Very Large Crude Carriers hit record highs, with the benchmark freight rate for shipping oil from the Middle East to China rising more than 94% in a single day early in the conflict. Before the war, typical war-risk premiums for Strait of Hormuz transit ran between 0.15% and 0.25% of hull value per week. By late March, some quotes were coming in at 5% to 10% of hull value for a single transit. For a tanker worth $100 million, that is several million dollars for one voyage.

The U.S. government recognized this problem and moved to address it. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation established a $20 billion reinsurance program, to backstop commercial insurance for ships attempting the crossing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the cabinet in late March that the program would begin soon. As of this writing, there is no confirmed evidence of any vessel benefiting from the program having actually transited the strait.

And here is the fundamental problem with government insurance as a solution: it covers the financial risk. It does not cover the human one. Charter agreements include clauses that allow captains to refuse orders to enter a zone if the risk to the vessel and crew is assessed as too high. No reinsurance program changes that calculus for a mariner looking at a drone war in the Persian Gulf. Sailors have families. They have life insurance policies that may have exclusions for active combat zones. They have the right, in many jurisdictions, to simply decline a voyage they believe will kill them. You can insure a hull. You cannot compel a person to accept a bullet.

The clean version of reopening the strait requires not just insurance but safety — and right now, even a degraded Iran has demonstrated it can put drones in the water and missiles in the air with enough frequency to make every transit a gamble with human life.

The Military Dilemma: You Cannot Disarm a Rocket Launcher

The administration has made much of the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities. This is largely accurate. Iran’s navy has been severely degraded. Its air defenses are largely gone. Its air force is functionally inoperative. These are real achievements.

But the Strait of Hormuz does not require a navy to close. It requires, in the limiting case, a man with a drone and a coast to launch it from. The IRGC has spent decades building a distributed, asymmetric maritime warfare capability precisely because it understood that its conventional forces could never match the United States. Mines. Small fast boats. Land-based anti-ship missiles. Cheap drones that cost a few thousand dollars and can seriously damage a tanker worth hundreds of millions. These capabilities are dispersed, hidden, and enormously difficult to fully eliminate through airstrikes.

The harder truth is this: even if the United States were to conduct the most comprehensive military campaign imaginable against Iran’s remaining capacity to threaten the strait, Iran retains the ability to reconstitute a sufficient threat to close it again over time. An IRGC soldier with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher on a cliff overlooking the strait is a sufficient deterrent to commercial shipping. The threat can be rebuilt. The closure can be reimposed. This is the fundamental strategic problem that no amount of bombing resolves.

The only durable solutions are an agreement that gives Iran sufficient reason not to close the strait, or a change in the Iranian political order so fundamental that the intent to close it no longer exists. Everything else is temporary — and markets, over time, will price that temporariness accordingly.

The Diplomatic Catastrophe: We Broke Our Alliances Before We Needed Them

This brings us to what is, in many ways, the most damaging and least-discussed dimension of this crisis: the United States walked into a conflict requiring maximum allied cooperation after spending months systematically degrading its most important alliances.

Trump’s Truth Social post on March 20th calling NATO a “PAPER TIGER” and its member states “COWARDS” for not dispatching forces to help reopen the strait was extraordinary. Not for its vulgarity, which has become routine, but for its timing and its logic. He was, in effect, demanding that allies sacrifice their sailors and their economies for a conflict they were not consulted about, had not agreed to, and in some cases had explicitly opposed — and calling them cowards for declining.

The response from allied governments was predictable to anyone paying attention. Australia said it had not received a formal request to participate in strait operations, and its prime minister pointedly noted that Australia had not been consulted before the February 28th strikes. Germany publicly condemned the U.S. posture (after being one of the most supportive allies of the strikes initially). Britain has cooperated in some defensive operations but has drawn clear lines about the scope of its involvement. The United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, while condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf partners, made clear that British operations were defensive and limited. France, whose relationship with Washington has been severely damaged by tariff disputes and the broader contempt the administration has shown for European institutions, has been largely absent.

This is the predictable consequence of a foreign policy that has treated alliances as transactions, demanded payment for commitments, threatened to abandon mutual defense guarantees, questioned the legitimacy of multilateral institutions, and — almost unbelievably — spent the preceding year threatening to invade Greenland and annex Canada. When you spend political capital like that, you do not get to spend it again quickly. Trust, once spent, does not regenerate on command.

The result is that the United States finds itself trying to manage a global energy crisis that affects Europe and Asia far more than it affects America — the U.S. is largely self-sufficient in energy, as multiple administration officials have noted — while the nations most economically injured are not actively helping to solve it and in some cases are actively frustrated with Washington’s handling. Europe gets far more of its energy from the Gulf than the United States does. Japan, South Korea, and India are massively exposed to Hormuz-priced oil. China, which has reached separate arrangements with Iran, is threading a different needle entirely. The international coalition that might have made a military or diplomatic solution to the strait possible does not currently exist, and the window for assembling it has narrowed severely.

And when you cannot assemble a coalition, and you cannot militarily guarantee a solution, and you cannot sustain unlimited military presence indefinitely, you are left with either a deal or an ongoing crisis. The United States currently doesn’t know clearly who within Iran’s fractured post-war power structure is even authorized to make a deal.

The Governance Vacuum Problem

One detail that has received insufficient attention in the coverage is this: the administration has acknowledged it is not entirely clear who is in charge of Iran right now. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in the initial strikes. The government of President Pezeshkian continues to exist and engage in some diplomacy. But the IRGC — whose navy controls the actual mechanics of strait harassment — has historically operated with significant autonomy and has its own institutional interests, its own ideology, and its own command structure. The person with the finger on the drone controller at the strait may not be taking orders from whoever sits across the table in Islamabad or wherever talks are happening.

This is not an abstraction. It means that even a notional diplomatic agreement about the strait may not translate cleanly into tankers moving safely. It means verification is almost impossible in the near term. It means that a ceasefire at the political level is not the same thing as safety at the waterway level. The closing of the strait may have started as a strategic decision by the Iranian state. It may now be partly self-perpetuating — sustained by actors whose primary interest is leverage, money from tolls Iran is now legislating, or simply ideological commitment to bleeding the Gulf states and their Western partners.

Iran has, in fact, begun to formalize its control: its parliament is moving to codify tolls for ships transiting the strait, requiring detailed information sharing and fees. This is not the behavior of a state preparing to cede control of a chokepoint. It is the behavior of a state that has decided the chokepoint is now a permanent asset.

The Path Out: Narrow, Contested, and Getting Narrower

The range of outcomes is not large. At one end: a negotiated settlement that reopens the strait under terms that do not reward Iran disproportionately. At the other end: a prolonged closure that restructures global energy markets, accelerates the fracturing of the international economic order, and leaves Iran — weakened militarily, devastated at home, but strategically positioned — with a leverage point that will outlast any administration’s attention span.

The honest assessment is that the best outcome — a negotiated reopening that does not leave Iran stronger than it was before February 28th, and that does not simply reward closing the strait as a template for future coercion — is very hard to achieve.

It requires a negotiating partner with actual authority over the people who can end the attacks on shipping. It requires an American administration willing to sustain focus and strategic patience, operating through quiet diplomacy rather than Truth Social ultimatums. It requires the reconstruction of at least some allied cooperation to provide diplomatic cover and economic pressure. It requires Iran to conclude that reopening the strait under acceptable terms serves its interests better than continued leverage over global oil prices.

None of those conditions are clearly present right now.

The absolute worst outcome — the one we should be most worried about — is not a dramatic escalation or a ground war. It is muddling: mixed signals from Washington, periodic deadline extensions, occasional tanker attacks, oil prices that stay structurally elevated, markets that gradually accept $120-per-barrel oil as the new normal, Iran slowly consolidating its de facto authority over transit, allies who have drifted further away, and no clean moment of resolution that anyone can point to. Just a slow, grinding deterioration of the global energy order, presided over by an administration that declared victory and went home.

A Hope, Honestly Assessed

It would be dishonest to write this without acknowledging that negotiations are, as of this writing, apparently ongoing. Pakistan has facilitated back-channel contacts. Iran has acknowledged the exchange of messages, even while denying direct talks. Some tankers have moved. Deadlines have been extended. The fact that both sides are talking at all, even indirectly, is not nothing.

There is a version of a deal that could work. It would require Iran to reopen the strait under some formulation that allows it to claim a measure of dignity and face-saving — perhaps a ceasefire framework, perhaps economic relief, perhaps some form of international maritime governance for the strait that gives Iran a role without giving it a veto. It would require the U.S. to accept less than total victory — to not demand a posture from Iran that is explicitly weaker than before the war — while extracting enough in return that the closure of the strait is not simply rewarded.

The deep problem is structural: as long as Iran retains any capacity to threaten shipping through the strait — and as we have discussed, that capacity can be rebuilt and is, in the limit, as simple as a drone and a shore — the threat of re-closure is permanent. Any deal that does not include either a verifiable irreversible disarmament of Iran’s strait-harassment capabilities, or a fundamental change in the political character of the Iranian state, is ultimately a temporary arrangement. And verifiable, irreversible disarmament of a distributed asymmetric force is something no arms control regime has ever achieved.

This is not an argument against a deal. It is an argument for sobriety about what a deal can deliver. A negotiated reopening buys time, reduces near-term economic damage, and creates a space — however narrow — for a longer-term political evolution in Iran that makes the threat less likely to be exercised. That is worth pursuing. It is just not the same thing as solving the problem.

The shortest honest summary of where we are: the military phase of this conflict is likely winding down. The strategic problem — a wounded Iran with leverage over global oil supply, a fractured alliance system, a confused negotiating track, and a chokepoint that can be closed again whenever someone in the IRGC decides to close it — is not.

And it will not be resolved by a tweet, a deadline, or a declaration of victory.

Categories Accountability, International, Trump

A Must-Watch Interview: Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2026 //
2

This is a very important interview, a thoughtful discussion between two remarkable people.

Two historians talk about Trump tyranny, the rule of oligarchs, and the power of the fossil fuel industry.

Snyder reminds us of the importance of the November elections. It’s our chance to put limits on the oligarchs and authoritarians.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Trump

The Trump Regime is a “Criminal Enterprise” and Must Be Held Accountable

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2026 //
10

I subscribe to Marc Elias’ blog called “Democracy Docket.” Marc is a veteran prosecutor who is actively pursing lawsuits against the crimes of the Trump administration and winning many of them.

On his blog today is a fascinating conversation with another veteran prosecutor Glenn Kirschner.

Together they discuss how the Trump regime has corrupted the rule of law; how grand juries have usually stood firm in defending it; why Trump and his cronies must be held accountable for their efforts to destroy our democracy; why Merrick Garland was weak but Jack Smith was strong; why the Department of Justice must always be apolitical and hold members of both parties accountable; how Pam Bondi has repeatedly broken the law; and why the Epstein Files will eventually reveal a massive coverup.

All that is to say that I found the discussion to be enlightening and informative. These two—Elias and Kirschner–are truly experts, not just someone fulminating at the latest outage.

Since the content of the blog is for subscribers only, I can’t post it in full. It is definitely worth your while to subscribe.

Here is Marc Elias’ introduction to the dialogue:

For decades, the American justice system has operated on a “presumption of regularity” — the idea that the government acts in good faith. But as we enter the second year of this administration, that presumption has become a dangerous fantasy. Glenn Kirschner spent 30 years as a federal prosecutor, and he knows that when the rule of law is hanging by a thread, there’s no such thing as “business as usual.” 

Glenn joined me to explain why we need a “scorched earth” mission to investigate the criminal enterprise currently occupying the White House. We also dive deep into the Epstein files cover-up and discuss what it takes to hold the Trump administration accountable when we take back the White House in 2029. 

And here is a brief snippet from Kirschner’s remarks:

Glenn: I think accountability doesn’t look like “you’ve got to throw them all in prison, they all need to be in orange jumpsuits.” That’s not accountability. My version of accountability, my definition of accountability, is if we fairly, impartially, aggressively — and I mean scorched earth — investigate in an apolitical fashion every crime that we see with our own eyes. The President and his cabinet, basically this is a criminal enterprise. I prosecuted lengthy RICO cases in federal district court in Washington, D.C. I don’t say that flippantly. This is a criminal enterprise.

So what we need to do is make sure every crime gets fully investigated through an apolitical investigation whereby we give all of the evidence to the grand jury and we let them serve as the first check on our instincts with respect to who should be prosecuted. Do we have enough evidence to make out, one, probable cause, and two, beyond that, do we prosecutors believe we have a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits, which looks like a conviction at trial? That’s some of the language taken from the U.S. Attorney’s Manual. That is our procedural Bible at the Department of Justice. Once we secure indictments against everybody who has been victimizing the American people and violating our nation’s laws, then we move into the courtroom. We try the case as best we can. We deliver it to the jury and they begin to deliberate.

Accountability is done at that point. That may sound counterintuitive coming from a prosecutor who liked winning convictions. I enjoyed holding perpetrators accountable, vindicating the rights of victims, and protecting the community. But the result is not as important as the process. Justice is a process. And once we deliver it to the second check on our instincts—the trial jury sitting as the conscience of the community, just as grand jurors do—we live with the result, win, lose, or draw: conviction, acquittal, or mistrial because it’s a hung jury where the jurors couldn’t agree unanimously on a verdict. That’s what accountability looks like: putting everybody fairly and apolitically through the criminal justice system and let first the grand jurors decide and then we let the trial jurors decide.

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

My Views on Mayoral Control of Public Schools in NYC

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
17

I submitted the following testimony to the Committee on Education of the New York City Council, when it held public hearings February 10, 2026, on the current system of natural control of the schools.

I studied mayoral control and other forms of governance when I wrote my first book, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973.

My testimony follows:

The time has come to rethink the governance of the New York City public schools. 

Mayoral control in its present form was enacted by the Legislature in 2002, at the behest of newly elected  ayor Michael Bloomberg. 

The Legislature was no doubt dazzled by Mayor Bloomberg. He was and is an amazing businessman who built an iconic technology-media corporation. 

To think that this titan of American business was willing to take responsibility for the school system was an exciting prospect. 

What is more, the Mayor boldly said that he could fix the schools. He projected confidence. He believed, and he was convincing. 

The Legislature gave him an unprecedented level of control over the system. The Mayor would appoint a majority of a new board, which he called the Panel on Education Policy, its name a signal of its powerlessness. The eight of 13 members appointed by Bloomberg served at his pleasure, not with a fixed term. This arrangement eliminated any likelihood that his appointees would exercise independent judgment. On the rare occasion that they did, he fired them. 

And of course, the legislation gave Bloomberg the power to pick anyone he wanted as Chancellor. 

For Chancelor, Bloomberg appointed a lawyer, Joel Klein, who had no experience as an educator or an administrator. 

Klein spent 8 1/2 years as Chancellor. 

During the 12 years of the Bloomberg mayoralty, there were many changes–the dissolution of large high schools, the creation of scores of small schools, the opening of charter schools, the imposition of a standardized citywide curriculum in math and science, the launch of a Leadership Academy to train new principals, and a heavy emphasis on standardized testing to judge students, teachers, principals and schools.

Schools received A-F grades, based on whether their test scores went up or down. Schools were closed if their scores were persistently low. Test scores were everything. 

When Klein left on the first day of 2011, the Mayor appointed a retired magazine publisher who had no relevant experience. That didn’t work. After 3 months, she was gone. 

While there was much breathless reporting about a “New York City Miracle,” there was no miracle. New York City’s public schools are not a paragon for other cities to follow. 

The problems of educating New York City’s public school children have not been solved. 

Mayoral control in the administrations of DiBlasio and Adams continued to reflect the inherent flaws of the concentration of power in the hands of the Mayor. 

If we step back for a minute, the nation is now experiencing a Presidency in which almost all power resides in one person: the President. Surrounded by a servile Cabinet, a Congress whose majority supinely obeys almost every Presidential order, and a Supreme Court with a sympathetic conservative majority, Americans can see daily the dangers of a government that has no checks and balances. 

The New York City public school system is no different. Checks and balances are necessary. Presently, there are none. 

Top-down management with no checks and balances is especially inappropriate for the school system. Parents and communities feel that they have no voice, and they are right. 

The truth is that there is no organizational structure that is perfect. Mayoral control has been tried for nearly a quarter-century. We now know that it has multiple flaws. We know that there has been no”New York City miracle.”

Some adjustment is needed now. 

I propose reviving the Board of Education. Every borough should be represented on that Board. The Board should select the Chancellor, who reports to the Board on a regular basis. The Board should be composed of people devoted to improving the public schools–either as educators or community advocates. They should know the schools and school leaders in their borough. They should regularly attend meetings of local school boards. They should serve for a set term and should be free to exercise their independent judgment. They should receive a salary for their time, so that their service on the Board is properly compensated. It would be a full-time position. 

Clearly, the Mayor has a large stake in the schools. He or she should have representatives (but not a majority) on a reconstructed Board of Education. 

The Mayor’s ultimate power is that he or she controls the budget. 

Will such an arrangement solve all problems? No. But it will create a structure where parents and communities have a voice and are heard. The Board, when choosing a Chancellor, should select an experienced educator, whether chosen from the city or from another school system. 

There will still be controversies. It’s inevitable. Over funding. Over building new classrooms to meet the requirement to reduce class sizes. Over charter schools. Over admissions to gifted programs and selective schools. Over racial segregation in a system whose students are overwhelmingly Hispanic, Black, and Asian.  

The Mayor–every Mayor–has a full plate of issues to deal with: economic development, public safety, transportation, natural disasters, building codes, public health, housing, and much, much more. He or she doesn’t have time to run the school system, nor is he or she likely to be an experienced educator. 

I can’t think of any important problem that mayoral control has solved.

My advice: Create a stable and democratic structure.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Disruption, New York City

Paul Krugman: Treason in the Oil Markets

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
14

Paul Krugman, Nobel-Prize winning economist, writes about shady speculation in the oil futures market. He says it’s not just insider trading, it’s treason.

He writes:

Source: Yahoo Finance


Over the weekend Donald Trump threatened dire vengeance on Iran unless its government opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, a deadline that would expire Monday evening in Washington. Specifically, he announced that the U.S. would begin bombing power plants — plants that supply electricity to Iran’s civilian population — unless the Strait was cleared.

But at 7:05 AM Monday Trump called the whole thing off — for five days, he said, but many people are assuming that the threatened action, which would have been a massive war crime, is now off the table.

The reason for the about-face, he claimed, was that the U.S. was engaged in productive negotiations with Iranian officials — although this seems to have come as news to the Iranians, who denied that any such negotiations are taking place. Sad to say, in this case, as I tried to explain yesterday, the fanatical, brutal Iranian regime is more credible than the president of the United States. Is he lying or living in a fantasy world? Neither possibility is comforting.

But in any case, Trump’s sudden climb-down was startling. Who could have seen this coming?
The answer is, the person or people who bought large quantities of stock market futures and sold large quantities of oil futures around 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement. As CNBC reports,

At around 6:50 a.m. in New York, S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop. With thin liquidity typical of early trading hours, the sudden burst stood out as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.
A similar pattern was observed in oil markets. West Texas Intermediate May futures also saw a noticeable pickup in trading activity at roughly the same time, with a distinct volume spike interrupting otherwise quiet conditions.

This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.

This wasn’t the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn’t count the purchases of stock futures.

When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”

Why is profiting from insider information about national security decisions effectively a form of treason? First, it’s hard to think of a more fundamental principle for officials we entrust with important decisions, especially those that involve national security, that they or people they know should not be allowed to exploit their positions for personal gain.

Second, financial trading based on what should be closely held secrets reveals information to current or potential foreign adversaries. To exaggerate a bit, but only a bit, who needs to bribe agents within the government, or recruit them with honey traps, when you can infer the same information by keeping track of transactions on futures markets?

Finally, there isn’t that big a gap between using knowledge of national secrets to make lucrative financial trades and simply selling those secrets to the highest bidder. Once you’re breached the line that says you shouldn’t profit personally from access to information that is or should be highly classified, the line between trading based on state secrets and selling those secrets directly is a blurry one.

In fact, I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning. Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?

I’m sure we’ll find out once Kash Patel’s FBI carries out its careful, no-holds-barred investigation.

For the humor-impaired, that was a joke. However, I do believe that the culprits will be easy to determine once Democrats are back in power, and they must apply the full force of law to the people responsible.

One question that may be harder to resolve is the extent to which the possibility of insider trading may actually have influenced policy. Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest? If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.

There’s a broader lesson here: You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.

Among other things, deeply corrupt governments tend to be very bad at waging war, no matter how much they may exalt “warrior ethos” and “lethality.” When we do a post-mortem on how the Iran debacle happened, arrogant ignorance may still get top billing. But grotesque venality will come a close second.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Cheating, Corruption, Fraud, Trump

Peter Greene: Voucher Battle in Nebraska Sinks the State Budget

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
3

Yesterday, I posted Peter Greene’s post about the voucher battle in Nebraska. Republicans in the state legislature really want vouchers. Voters really don’t want vouchers. I no as recent referendum, Nebraska voters overturned the state’s voucher program. That shoukd have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t. The Republican Governor and legislature decided to ignore the voters and participate in Trump’s voucher plan.

But then Peter discovered the battle was not over.

He wrote an update:

As we noted last week, some Nebraska fans of taxpayer-funded vouchers tried–again–to get enact vouchers, this time through the sneaky technique of putting them in the budget. Instead of getting their vouchers, they raised a controversy that sank the entire budget.

State Sen. Rob Clements of Elmwood, Appropriations Committee chair, removed the $3.5 million of voucher money, meant to bridg the gap between the end of the state’s voucher program that was repealed by voters, and the beginning of the federal voucher system that Governor Pillen opted into (the voters get no say on that one). And lots of people were upset, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner.

Arguments for the voucher money were baloney. Sen. Christy Armendariz of Omaha argued that the vouchers were needed to protect poor kids who might be “kicked out” of public school. State Sen. Brad von Gillern of the Elkhorn area expressed frustration toward opponents, calling it hypocritical to oppose the measure when many of the same senators argue the state isn’t doing enough to help the poor.

“Shame on you,” von Gillern said. “If you make a pitch for poor people for any other reason, and you can’t support this, you’re a hypocrite.”

Except that vouchers are used mostly by wealthy, already-in-private-school students, and it’s the private schools that get to pick their students, not vice versa. It is telling that the voucher crowd did not have anecdotes of poor children who had been kicked out of public school and had been rescued by vouchers. The program ran all this year, so those stories, if real, should have been easy enough to locate.

Sen. Myron Dorn of Adams, the only Republican on Appropriations to oppose the $3.5 million in vouchers, criticized focus on this one issue, and also criticized the whole sneaky business of trying to slip this policy into the budget when there is no bill or law behind it. 

Said Tim Royers, president of Nebraska State Education Association–

This standoff is exactly why you don’t try and pass policy through the budget, especially when that policy is to extend an incredibly unpopular program that was repealed by voters in the most recent election. … We hope enough can come together and negotiate a path forward that keeps vouchers out of the budget.

So Nebraska voucherphiles managed to sink the state budget over a program that voters had already voted down. That’s a bold stance to take and one can hope that Nebraska voters will deliver the reward they so richly deserve. It’s yet another reminder, in a backhand way, that no matter how hard voucherphiles insist to the contrary, supporting taxpayer-funded school vouchers is not actually a winning political issue.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Nebraska, Privatization, Vouchers

Tom Ultican: Grade Retention is a Popular “Remedy” That Hurts Students

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
12

When an education policy is tried and failed, then tried again and continues to fail, that policy may justly beee called “zombie policy.” It survives despite experience..

Tom Ultican, retried teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, here describes such a policy. It is called “grade retention,” but is more commonly known as flunking a student because he or she is not “ready” to be promoted with peers. The short-term effect may seem successful: test scores. But the long-term effect on students’ success is typically negative.

Ultican writes:

Twenty-six American states have a mandatory third-grade retention policy for students who do not pass the state’s reading exam and Maryland is set to implement that policy in 2027. According to researchers, this is bad thinking based on intuition not science. Writing for Education Trust, Brittney Davis declared, “The research is clear that grade retention is not effective over time, and it is related to many negative academic, social, and emotional outcomes for students — especially students of color who have been retained.”  

Economist Jiee Zhong won her PhD from Texas A&M in 2024 and is now an assistant professor of economics at the University of Miami. Last year, she just finished a very impressive study on the effects of grade retention for Texas third graders. Texas abandoned mandatory third-grade retention in 2009.

Zhong studied outcomes of third-graders from 2002-03, 2003-04 and 2004-05 school years who took the Texas reading exam that carried retention consequences. This large data set allowed her to use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to extract many results. By 2024, the students studied were all young adults over 26 years of age. She was able to evaluate their education, social and economic outcomes using powerful math techniques.

Zhong concluded:

“I find that third-grade retention significantly reduces annual earnings at age 26 by $3,477 (19%). While temporarily improving test scores, retention increases absenteeism, violent behavior, and juvenile crime, and reduces the likelihood of high school graduation.”

For one outcome, she investigated a group of students who barely passed or barely failed the reading test. She learned that the barely failing students earn $1,682 (11.3%) less at age 23 than the barely passing students. Zhong noted that 64.2% of barely passing students graduated from high school while just 55.1% of the barely failing students graduated. She observed that both of these results were statistically significant at a 5% level.

Zhong also noticed a racial disparity. She reports, “White students experience a sharp 43.8 percentage point decline in high school graduation probability, higher than the reductions for Black (17.6 percentage points) and Hispanic students (0.6 percentage points).”

These results from 2025 add more weight to similar results that previous researchers have reported.

The Retention Illusion

In January 2025, Duke University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina published a linked series of three policy briefs concerning grade retention by Claire Xia and Elizabeth Glennie, Ph.D. The Duke researchers stated, “The majority of published studies and decades of research indicate that there is usually little to be gained, and much harm that may be done through retaining students in grade.”

They also mention the grade retention illusion is held by many community members, administrators and teachers who believe grade retention is helpful and needed. The Duke researchers stated, “The findings that retention is ineffective or even harmful in the long run seem counterintuitive.” This belief is so strong that on the 31st Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallop Poll, 72% of the public favor stricter promotion standards even if significantly more students would be held back. Other studies show the public being strongly opposed to social promotion believing low-achieving students will continue to fall farther behind.

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Failure, Research

Putting ICE in Place of TSA Won’t Work, Say Experts

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2026 //
5

The ongoing partial shutdown of the federal government affects only the Department of Honeland Security. Democrats refuse to fund it without reforms in ICE, which have used violent tactics in their pursuit of immigrants. They have been given a numerical target, and they have arrested citizens as well as citizens, raided schools and churches and broken into homes without a judicial search warrant.

Democrats would like to sever ICE funding from funding other parts of the Department of Homeland Security but Republicans have refused.

One consequence is that TSA agents have been quitting, and there are long lines at many airports. Some passengers have waited 3-4 hours to board their flights, yet still were unable to board.

Some TSA agents are looking for other jobs, because they need the money.

Thanks to cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s DOGE, TSA was already short of staff.

Trump says that he will send ICE agents to take the place of TSA personnel but ICE has no training for security screening.

At a time when people are concerned about terrorism, in response to Trump’s war in Iran, it’s wrong to reduce safety at airports.

The publication Government Executive reported:

President Trump will beginning Monday shift Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel to airports to provide security there in a move he said will alleviate long lines created by shutdown-induced callouts but which experienced TSA officials said would have minimal impact. 

The unusual approach comes as Trump administration officials have repeatedly lamented that Transportation Security Administration employees are calling out and quitting the agency due to the shutdown’s impact on paychecks, lengthening wait times at many airports around the country. Details of the assignments were not clear as of Sunday, despite Trump declaring that the airport deployments would occur on Monday. Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, told CNN on Sunday that he was “working on the plan” and would come up with one soon. 

Several current and former TSA officials told Government Executive that ICE personnel will be limited in what they can accomplish at airports, as they will not have the requisite training to check identification, examine luggage x-rays or provide other key security services. TSA employees go through classroom and on-the-job training before they can staff those roles, the officials said. 

“It serves no practical use,” said one former official with decades of federal experience who declined to be named out of fear of professional reprisal. “It’s a political, publicity action, not a practical solution.” 

Homan suggested ICE employees could staff the areas where travelers exit their terminals, though former officials noted many airports already use non-TSA personnel for those areas. 

A second former senior TSA official added there are almost no functions ICE staff would be capable of offering. 

“They can basically provide little help,” the former senior employee said. 

In some airports, such as in Houston, call outs during the shutdown have reached 50%, forcing TSA to close lanes and leaving travelers waiting for hours to get through security. Employees have now missed at least one full paycheck after receiving a partial paycheck last month during the shutdown that began Feb. 14. Staff are guaranteed full back pay for their hours worked once the government reopens.

After seeing consistent staffing growth for the previous five years, TSA lost around 3,000 employees in 2025, or around 5% of its workforce, due to various firings and attrition measures. The agency has seen more than 400 employees leave the agency since the shutdown began, the White House said on Sunday. 

Congressional Democrats are holding out on funding the Homeland Security Department until the White House agrees to reforms for law enforcement personnel carrying out President Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown. They have repeatedly sought to fund TSA and other non-immigration components of DHS—including on Saturday in a rare weekend session—but Republicans have blocked all of those efforts.

“If the Democrats do not allow for just and proper security at our airports, and elsewhere throughout our country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before,” Trump said on Sunday, making the announcement just one day before he said the deployments would begin. 

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA staff, said those workers spend months learning specific skills that enable them to detect explosives, weapons and individuals looking to evade security. They are recertified on an ongoing basis after receiving extensive instruction and seeking to replace them with ICE personnel would only exacerbate the problem. 

“You cannot improvise that,” Kelley said. “Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap. It creates one.”

Lawmakers have met with Homan in recent days in hopes of reaching an agreement on reforms that Democrats would accept in exchange for funding all of DHS, but they have yet to strike such a deal. 

Kelley added that turning to ICE could prove dangerous, given that the allegations of excessive force that they have faced. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Funding, Safety

Audrey Watters: Who Benefits from AI? Not You.

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2026 //
6

Audrey Watters is one of the best–maybe the very best–writers about Ed-tech. As she has documented in her writings, including her book, Teaching Machines, the quest for a cheap and mechanical way to replace teachers with efficient devices has a long history. A few people dream of endless profits, but the promise of better teaching by machines has never been realized.

Watters believes that the Ed-tech industry is minting money for itself without delivering on its promises. In this article, which appears on her blog, Second Breakfast, she describes the current AI boom and the likely endgame.

She writes:

This morning I attended one of the new NYC Chancellor’s public “conversations,” his administration’s initiative to “engage directly with communities to reflect on what safety, academic rigor, and true integration look like in practice.” There were about one hundred folks in attendance, including members of the AI Moratorium for NYC schools, who were there to leaflet beforehand (and were vastly outnumbered, I should note, by the NYPD). 

As the aforementioned name suggests, this coalition of local organizations is asking for a two-year moratorium on AI in the city’s schools, pointing to the growing opposition to AI and (in their words) “to evidence that it represents substantial risk to student privacy, cognitive development and skills, critical thinking, creativity, mental health, and the environment.” I’d add that it represents substantial risk more broadly: to labor (teachers’, librarians’, translators’, social workers’) and to democracy itself.

And really, what’s the rush?! I mean, other than the desperate need of the tech sector to prove that the trillions of dollars invested in this endeavor will soon show some profit and that – unlike crypto and Web 3.0 – this isn’t just some giant fraud being perpetrated so executives can buy more private islands.

I’ve said repeatedly (but didn’t articulate into any open mic at the meeting because I still very much feel like a new New Yorker), this recent push for “AI” is yet another grandiose and grotesque experiment on children – one that no one asked for and few want. Another grandiose and grotesque experiment on all of us. 

We have lived through decades and decades now of repeated digital promises — we’ll be better, faster, stronger, more connected, what have you — and none of the computational fantasies have really come to fruition, certainly not for everyone. We are not more productive (despite now being asked to work so much more, clicking away on our devices at all hours of every day); we are not smarter; and most importantly, we are not better. (A tiny group of men are, on the other hand, now richer than any other humans have ever been in all of history. So there’s that.) Our public institutions are crumbling, in no small part because these men are fully and openly committed to the failure of democracy, having positioned themselves to profit mightily from years of neoliberalism. “AI” marks the further (and they hope, final) consolidation of their power – not just the privatization and monopolization of all information under their control, but the automation of the dissemination and replication of knowledge. These men are more than happy to sell a story, a system that trains all of us, but particularly young people, to become entirely dependent on and subservient to computational machinery; they are more than happy for us to sacrifice our cognitive capabilities, our creativity, our agency, our decision-making, our morality, to solidify their crude oligarchal dreams of total efficiency, total financialization, total domination.

Jennifer Berkshire writes about the back history to the growing backlash against not just “AI” but a lot of ed-tech and what she calls “the curious case of collective amnesia” (invoking one of Hack Education’s enduring contributions to “the discourse: “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade” as well as Teaching Machines).

We should know by now that this stuff is almost entirely wretched – we do, right? I mean, at this stage, I’d be deeply embarrassed if I was out there, trying to argue that this stuff is any damn good. And yet here comes Silicon Valley and education reform, hand-in-hand once again, trying to peddle disruption and innovation and their long war on “one size fits all education,” armed with their algorithmic bullshit and billionaire board members.

It doesn’t help, I think, that there are several prominent technology journalists who keep falling for / perpetuating this stuff, who loudly insist in caps-lock-on prose that “THERE IS NO EVIDENCE!!!111” that devices are bad for children. (The irony, of course, is after they repeat this claim — and with such certainty — they turn around and point to dozens of stories of the most batshit–crazy news about the horrors of digital culture.)

And maybe part of the problem too is just that: we are so steeped in the insanity of techno-capitalism, the insanity of techno-capitalists that some folks are losing track of what aberrant behavior really is. Cory Doctorow writes a bit about this this week, offering “three more AI Psychoses” — a response, in part, to Samantha Cole’s excellent piece in 404 Media, “How to Talk to Someone Experiencing ‘AI Psychosis’.”

I wonder if it isn’t simply that “AI” delusions are ubiquitous (at this stage, I’m thinking these delusions are experienced by almost everyone, not just a tiny fraction of “AI” users); it’s that many of these delusions are unrecognizable as such because they reflect precisely the sort of sociopathy long embraced by Silicon Valley’s Ayn-Randian, libertarian set. “Here’s to the crazy ones” indeed.

[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. – David Graeber, Debt…

If plagiarism is wrong and bad and theft is wrong and bad and schools are duty-bound to help instill these values in students, how can they justify adoption of a technology that is, at its core, built on stolen work and whose purpose is the extrusion of text to be passed off as one’s own thinking and writing?

I invite you to open the link and continue reading this thought-provoking article.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Online Education, Technology

The Century Foundation: The Federal Voucher Program is a Hoax and a Fraud

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2026 //
2

The Century Foundation published an analysis of Trump’s federal voucher program, which explains why it is a hoax and a fraud. The authors are Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra.

The promise it makes is that families and students will choose schools that are just right for them, but the reality is that schools choose the students they want.

The promise is that school choice will benefit black and brown children, as well as children with disabilities, but children abandon all civil rights protections when they enroll in private schools.

The promise is that schools of choice will produce better academic outcomes but typically they produce worse outcomes (see Josh Cowen, The Privateers).

The promise is that school choice represents accountability but it usually means no accountability at all, because nonpublic schools don’t take national or state tests.

Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra write:

Modern school voucher programs are often framed as a response to declining academic achievement and a way to expand “parent choice” by enabling private educators to operate within the public system. But in practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools, not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.

The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCS), passed as part of the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA), scales this model for camouflaged privatization to the national level. Though branded as a tax incentive, it functions as a nationwide voucher system that diverts public dollars to private schools while allowing those schools to play by different rules than public providers—evading civil rights protections, academic oversight, and any requirement to provide meaningful evidence to the public of their students’ outcomes.

A National Voucher Program Disguised as a Tax Credit

The FTCS nationalizes a model that at least twenty states and counting –including Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania – have already adopted, one which functions by siphoning public dollars through scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Under this law, individual taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 annually to SGOs in exchange for a 100 percent federal tax credit, effectively turning private donations into reimbursed public expenditures.

SGOs then will distribute “scholarships” to K–12 students to use toward private school tuition, books, curriculum materials, tutoring or other educational classes, and educational therapies provided by licensed providers. While the program is optional for states, at least twenty-seven have already signaled their intent to participate.

[To see which states have expressed their intent to participate, open the link.]

Despite its branding, this design drains public revenue that would otherwise support public schools—which still educate roughly 90 percent of American students—and redirects it to private, religious, and largely unregulated providers. 

The program model also ignores what parents time and again have told us they want for their children. When given a direct choice at the ballot box, voters have repeatedly rejected school vouchers and related private-school subsidy measures. In the 2024 election, proposals to authorize or expand voucher-style programs in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska were defeated, and historical ballot measure data show that voters have rejected every statewide private voucher or education tax credit initiative placed before them since 1970. This opposition is reflected in polling that shows nearly 70 percent of voters say they would rather increase federal funding for public schools than expand government-funded vouchers, including majorities across party lines.

[Open the link to see which states have held referenda on vouchers.]

Broad Eligibility, Few Quality Controls, and Limited Public Benefit

Even measured against its stated goal of affordability, the FTCS program misses the mark. But if the goal is to make education more affordable for families under real financial strain, this program is also ineffective. Private K–12 tuition averages nearly $13,000 per year nationwide, placing private schooling out of reach for many families even with a modest subsidy. Yet the tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible. In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education, while in a city like New York—where median income is about $81,000—families earning nearly $244,000 would qualify. At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.

At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.

At the same time, the program imposes no meaningful accountability requirements on participating schools. There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes. In contrast to nearly every other federal program serving children, from Title I to Head Start, this is public spending without public oversight. Federal programs historically are monitored for fiscal, quality, and sometimes for safety compliance by the agency with charge over the program. In this case, U.S Department of Education (ED) expertise plays no role in oversight of new national policy for education.1

What State Leaders Can and Cannot Control

FTCS offers a tempting hook for well-intentioned state policymakers as well: Some governors and state legislatures may view the tax credit as a way to unlock new resources for priorities like tutoring or after-school programs. In practice, however, it offers no new, flexible funding for states and gives them little control over how public dollars are used. The law defines “scholarship-granting organizations” so broadly that states cannot meaningfully restrict eligibility, set standards, or influence whether funds flow primarily to high-cost private schools rather than unmet public needs.

Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S. Treasury without authority to shape program design or accountability. Far from being additional education funding that states need, opting in requires that states absorb the fiscal, administrative, and equity consequences of a federal program they are unable to direct or correct. It is not “free money” for states. The opt-in decision is therefore the only meaningful leverage states have—and governors should use their right to refuse to play along in order to protect their public education systems.

Why Oversight and Accountability Matters

Public funding should never function on a good-faith system. It’s very simple: in good policymaking, whenever taxpayer dollars are allocated, oversight measures are put in place to make sure those dollars are spent in the way intended. We already know from numerous examples in the school choice policy space itself that no accountability means that those who need the help the least receive the most benefit.

Eighteen states have a universal private school choice program. Unfortunately, states that have expanded vouchers or education savings accounts with minimal oversight have already seen waste, fraud, and abuse. Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, for instance, has minimal controls, audit practices that automatically approve reimbursements, and has been linked to purchases of non-educational items like diamond rings, televisions, and even lingerie with taxpayer funds, prompting investigations by the state attorney general. Rather than lowering costs for families, the program has generated ballooning expenses for the state and contributed to a growing budget crisis—with no measurable benefit to students at all.

Similarly, the federal Charter Schools Program has repeatedly been shown to lack meaningful accountability, with investigations and audits documenting hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on schools that never opened or closed prematurely, and charter networks facing conservatorship over financial mismanagement and self-dealing. These outcomes are the predictable result of public dollars flowing to private operators without meaningful oversight.

Decades of research on voucher programs show mixed or negative academic outcomes, particularly in math and reading, and no evidence that vouchers close opportunity gaps. In Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, studies found declines in student achievement following expansions in voucher programs. Students in Louisiana’s voucher program experienced drops in both math and reading in their first two years, while voucher students in Indiana and Ohio performed worse than comparable peers who remained in public schools. 

The program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.

Taken together, these examples underscore why oversight and accountability are not optional when public dollars are at stake. The FTCS program includes no meaningful accountability, evaluation, or research requirements to justify an estimated $26 billion cost to taxpayers. Without data on student learning, fiscal integrity, or long-term outcomes, the public has no way to assess whether this investment is helping students or simply reshuffling them across systems while diverting resources away from the public schools that serve most children and toward unknown corporate interests.2 In effect, the program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.

Who Profits When Public Dollars Become Private Subsidies?

Another consequence of turning public education dollars into private subsidies is that it creates a lucrative marketplace for the companies that manage these voucher systems. A handful of firms have seized on state voucher expansions to secure multimillion-dollar contracts, turning what was pitched as a cost-saving policy into a business opportunity for tech and finance intermediaries. These companies often have limited experience running education programs, and in some states have faced scrutiny over operational problems, questionable spending controls, and high administrative costs. 

This track record raises questions about whether families truly benefit from FTCS’s model. It would seem the opposite: it diverts taxpayer dollars into private profit streams instead of lowering education costs for struggling families. Instead of more wasteful government contracts, these dollars should be used to improve neighborhood schools by hiring high-quality educators, increasing after school programs, expanding pre-K, and hiring mental health professionals.

A Tax Policy Not Designed to Support Education

Congress gave sole interpretive authority for this program to the U.S. Treasury Department, deliberately excluding the U.S. Department of Education and its education-specific expertise. As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact. While advocates have urged the Treasury Department to include stronger transparency, safeguards, and state authority, it is unlikely those measures will be adopted to address the program’s core design flaws.

This use of the tax code stands in sharp contrast to prior policies that successfully supported children and families. The 2021 expanded Federal Child Tax Credit helped to lift more than 2 million childrenout of poverty and reduced the country’s child poverty level to a historic low of 5.2 percent. This program will likely do the opposite. Research shows that private school voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families. Consistent with many other provisions in the law, Congressional Republicans have chosen to prioritize a tax break that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, over nearly every other form of charitable giving, such as donations to food pantries, hospitals, or community services.

By incentivizing families to exit public schools, the voucher tax credit also undermines the financial stability of those schools, particularly in rural and high-need communities. Because education funding is largely enrollment-based, even modest shifts can lead to school closures, consolidations, and reduced services. This leaves behind those families who don’t have the time or resources to navigate private systems, and asks taxpayers to reimburse private donations on top of existing public education costs.

Civil Rights Protections Are Excluded

Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In 2024, ED received 22,687 civil rights complaints, including about 8,400 related to disability discrimination, reflecting just how often students and families rely on these protections. 

These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse. This is what public accountability looks like in practice, and its success depends on ED’s legal authority and the staff capacity to respond when families ask for help.

By contrast, the OBBA does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections, even though they benefit from publicly subsidized dollars. This means that if a student experiences harassment or discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, religion, or disability, families may have little or no ability to hold private schools accountable or seek remedies comparable to those guaranteed in public schools.

Evidence from state voucher programs shows why this gap matters. An investigation in North Carolina found that voucher funds flowed to private schools that were significantly whiter than the communities they serve, reinforcing racial segregation rather than expanding opportunity. In the absence of enforceable civil rights guardrails, public funding supports exclusionary practices that would be unlawful in public schools.

The Cost to Public Schools and Communities

Ultimately, this voucher/tax credit perpetuates a broader pattern of states, in addition to the federal government, stepping back from their responsibility to fully fund and strengthen public schools. Rather than address the systemic problems that perpetuate low-performing schools, it treats educational inequity as a series of individual problems to be solved by sending public dollars to private education. No matter how the administration spins it, these programs fail to prioritize students from lower-income families while simultaneously subsidizing private education for higher-income families. It invites taxpayers to feel as though they are helping children access opportunity, while leaving the underlying inequities in public education unresolved and, in many cases, deepened.

[Open the link to see data on source of insurance.]

This tax credit is projected to cost $26 billion, which is a high price tag that instead could be doing real good in public schools. If Congress instead invested this through Title I, that money would amount to roughly $1,238 per student in schools serving low-income communities. Research shows that investments of this size improve reading and math outcomes. In other words, we know how to use public dollars to help students succeed. This policy chooses not to.

Imagine putting that $26 billion, the lowest estimated cost of the tax credit over ten years, toward Title I, the federal program that benefits most public schools. That would more than double Title I’s current funding at $18.4 billion. Title I’s flexibility allows schools to meet their specific needs to improve student achievement: more teachers, aides, professional development, wraparound services, and more. 

IDEA is supposed to fund 40 percent of each student’s special education each year, but the federal government has never met that promise. Current funding at $14.2 billion amounts to less than 12 percent of the promise. However, adding $26 billion to IDEA would almost triple current funding and completely close the gap. 

We know that the unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief packages will make a major return on investment: every $1,000 invested per student will be worth $1,238 in future earnings. That funding also required states to at least maintain their education budgets at prior funding so that the federal investment would not replace their responsibility and effort, but work together. The FTCS model completely disregards these precedents, and their values.

The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Is a Heist Taken Straight from the Right’s Privatization Playbook

The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program follows a familiar privatization strategy. It routes public dollars to private actors while stripping away the oversight, transparency, and civil rights protections that normally accompany public investment. Framed as generosity and choice, it instead creates a system in which taxpayers assume the cost while private schools and intermediaries operate largely beyond public accountability.

The program recreates many risks at a national scale. The schools and organizations receiving these publicly subsidized funds are not required to demonstrate academic results, comply with federal civil rights law, or provide transparency about how dollars are spent. Families are left without protections, taxpayers without accountability, and policymakers without evidence that the investment is improving student outcomes.

When public dollars are transformed into lightly regulated private subsidies, they invite exploitation. The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not an isolated policy choice: it follows a pattern of policies that weaken, and normalize weakening, public education while insulating private actors from responsibility. History shows where this path leads: higher costs, weaker safeguards, and fewer assurances that public investments serve the public good.

Notes

  1. The Trump administration has taken multiple actions to reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education, including firing staff and reassigning education programs and staff to other agencies through interagency agreements (IAAs) without congressional authorization. Such actions raise legal and governance concerns and further erode the education-specific expertise, oversight, and accountability that Congress has historically vested in ED.
  2. Under the OBBA, the federal tax credit for contributions to SGOs applies to individual taxpayers. The law does not provide separate federal tax credit rules for corporate contributions; whether and how corporations might participate or benefit may depend on future Treasury and IRS regulations and state tax policies. Many states currently allow corporate contributions to SGOs.
Read more about Kayla Patrick

Kayla Patrick, Contributor

Read more about Loredana Valtierra

Loredana Valtierra, Contributor

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Special Education, Trump, Vouchers
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