Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, summoned hundreds of generals and admirals to an in-person meeting to lecture them. Hegseth spoke to them condescendingly to remind them that he is Secretary of War, not Secretary of Defense (which is not true because only Congress can rename a Department). He spoke about raising standards for height and weight and said he didn’t want “fat generals” in command (does that crack about weight apply to the Commander-in-Chief?). He wants regular tests of physical strength for all members of the service set to male standards and if women can’t meet them, tough.
Hegseth ignored the reality that wars today are not won by brute strength but by intelligence, wisdom, experience, and training. Warriors are flying incredibly complex airplanes that require technological skills and mental sharpness. Battles are fought by soldiers operating computers, shooting down drones and missiles, and guiding weapons with precision to their target. The hand-to-hand combat that Hegseth imagines is obsolete.
The generals and admirals must have been seething to be talked down to by Hegseth, whose highest rank in the Army National Guard was major.
He lavished praise on the Trump policy of banning diversity, inclusion, and equity, ignoring the fact that the military is a prime exemplar of the success of DEI. Just recently, he abolished a program that has recruited women into the military with great success for decades.
When he finished his speech, he waited for applause but the audience didn’t put their hands together.
Trump gave a frightening speech, saying that the greatest threat was “the enemy within.” Shades of Joe McCarthy! Trump, of course, never wore his nation’s uniform, nor have his sons. He managed to get five draft deferments based on a letter from a podiatrist who rented space in one of his father’s shopping malls. In other words, he is a draft dodger.
The military is supposed to protect our nation from hostile foreign enemies but Trump believes that the worst enemies today, the worst threats to the nation, are what he calls “radical left lunatics.” He told the military brass that America’s military should use its big cities as “training grounds” for the troops.
That sounds like martial law to me.
No other President has gone before the leaders of the military to ridicule his predecessor, to rail against his political foes, and to praise himself lavishly.
What’s frightening is that Trump seems eager to use the troops to put down domestic protests. If he can manufacture domestic violence, he has telegraphed that he will not hesitate to send in the military with orders to use “full force,” that is, to gun down civilians. Shoot to kill.
Many viewers must have thought of the brave farewell speech of General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Trump’s first term. A week before he gave this speech, Trump said he should be put to death.
Milley said:
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
“Every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, guardian and Coast Guardsman, each of us commits our very life to protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price. And we are not easily intimidated.”
A warning to people in big cities. Protest peacefully. Wave signs. Sing songs. Chant. Don’t bring weapons to protests. Do not disrespect the troops. Do not provoke them into using their weapons.
Trump wants you to fight with the troops. Don’t take the bait. He wants you to throw rocks and draw fire from them. He wants a Reichstag fire to use as a pretext to suspend elections.
Keep your eye on Byron and Erika Donalds in Florida. Byron is running for the governor’s job as the MAGA candidate, while his wife is making a bundle as the queen of charter schools. As prescient pols figured out long ago, the school choice biz can be very lucrative.
Erika Donalds has long been a leading face of school choice in Florida, even as her husband Byron has risen through the GOP to become a major political player. Now a new story dug up by Will Bredderman at Florida Bulldog shows how Donalds is a model of how folks in the charter school world can make a bundle.
The couple got together while Byron was still with his first wife (a public school teacher who still seems a bit grumpy about the whole business). He hooked up with the Tea Party, and Erika became an investment banker. Her school choice origin story is that in 2013, her second child had some sort of run-in with a teacher at school, and Donalds, unsatisfied with administrative response, put the child in a private school and transformed into an advocate for school choice.
Donalds has had a hand in the founding of a multitude of groups. She helped start Parents ROCK (Rights of Choice For Kids). When Ron DeSantis took office in 2019, Donalds helped launch School Choice Movement, a group that pushed for policies that would cut the throat of public education, including one that said charters must be approved by the state, not a local district; the group has since gone silent.
Back in 2015, while she was still serving as a school board member, she helped launch the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, meant to be a conservative alternative to the Florida School Boards Association. They started with four members– Donalds, Jeff Bergosh, frequent collaborator Shawn Frost, and Bridget Ziegler, future co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who called Donalds the face of charter schools in Florida. Tina Descovitch, another M4L co-founder, would later join FCSBM and was the president when they folded in May 2020, just a few months before the founding of M4L.
Donalds served on the Florida Constitution Revision Committee (along with Jeb Bush edu-pal Patricia Levesque), the group that tried to sell Amendment 8, yet another attempt to kneecap public schools. Fortunately, the Amendment was such a deceptive con job, a judge threw it off the ballot.
In 2021, for the first and only time in all records to date, the Optima Foundation reported payingErika Donalds a salary of $183,326. However, her husband did not report this income in his disclosures to the U.S. House Ethics Committee in either 2021 or 2022, despite filing an amended report the latter year.
But the congressman did report his wife earned more than half a million dollars in total salary between 2020 and 2022 from a firm called “Educator Solutions.” The Optima Foundation-run charter schools’ reports to the Internal Revenue Service show that they paid Educator Solutions $6,930,584 during those same years, while the foundation itself paid the company $2,783,216, all for “payroll services.”
State filings reveal that “Educator Solutions” is in fact a fictitious business name registered to ESI Technical Inc., a company founded by State Rep. John Snyder (R-Stuart), whose father William Snyder was the longtime Martin County sheriff until earlier this year. Snyder’s financial disclosures show he has earned nearly $700,000 from ESI Technical since 2020, the year he was elected, and he has consistently identified the Optima-linked charter schools as ESI’s biggest customers. Snyder has come under fire for promoting policies favorable to charter schools while profiting from their operations, but no outlet has previously reported his company’s financial relationship with Erika Donalds.
Bredderman also notes that in 2023, three of Optima’s flagship schools fired the Donalds firm, apparently due to “deficiencies” in accounting.
Open the link to finish reading. One would have to be an accountant to decipher the many overlapping organizations in the Ed-reform-school choice business. School choice in Florida is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Pete Hegseth recently reopened a historical controversy by conferring the Medal of Honor on U.S. troops that were killed more than a century ago at Wounded Knee.
Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that twenty men who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre would keep their medals, despite more than a century of controversy over them. The defense secretary who preceded Hegseth, General Lloyd Austin, had ordered a review of the awarding of those medals to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.” Hegseth today called the men “brave soldiers” and said: “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.”
It’s fitting that Hegseth, a political appointee whose tenure has been marked by incompetence, would defend the awarding of those particular Medals of Honor, because they were awarded to cover up the incompetence of political appointees that led to the deaths of at least 230 peaceful Lakotas, as well as about twenty-five soldiers who were caught in their own crossfire.
The road to Wounded Knee started in 1884, when voters angry that the Republicans had sold out to big business elected Democrat Grover Cleveland to the presidency. The first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War, he promised to lower the tariffs that squeezed ordinary Americans in order to protect big business. Horrified at the growing opposition to a government that worked for those industrialists who would soon be called “robber barons,” Republicans began to circulate pamphlets as soon as Cleveland was elected, claiming that lowering the tariff would destroy the economy and warning that voters must return Republicans to power or face economic ruin.
In 1888, Cleveland nonetheless won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but after an extraordinarily corrupt campaign, Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison won in the Electoral College. This is “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” the editors of a pro-Harrison newspaper boasted. They predicted that “business men will be thoroughly well content with it.”
Knowing that the popular mood had turned against tariffs and the party that protected them, Harrison Republicans looked for ways to cement their control over the government.
Adding to the Union new states they believed would vote Republican would give them two more seats per state in the Senate, as well as a seat per state in the House of Representatives, and thus three more electors in the Electoral College, for each state has a number of electors equal to the number of senators and representatives combined. Between November 1889 and July 1890 the Republicans added five new states to the Union. They added Washington, Idaho, and Montana. They also divided the huge Dakota Territory in two, creating North Dakota and South Dakota. The new states should give the Republicans ten new seats in the Senate, Harrison’s men noted happily.
But the western half of what was supposed to become South Dakota belonged to the Lakotas. In 1889 the government forced the Lakotas to sign treaties agreeing to sell about half of their land and to move closer to six agencies on smaller reservations in what would soon be a new state. The government promised rations, health, care, education, and help with transitioning to a farming economy in exchange for the land, but that plan ran afoul of politics almost immediately.
The War Department and the Department of the Interior had fought over management of the Indigenous peoples in the U.S. for decades. Reservations were overseen by an “Indian agent,” who was in sole charge of spending the tens of thousands of dollars Congress appropriated to fund the various treaties the government had negotiated with different tribes. From that money, the agent was supposed to contract for food, clothing, tools, and supplies, as well as for the building of schools, mills, warehouses, and so on. Until 1883 this had been a plum political position, awarded to a political loyalist with the expectation that providing promised rations to Indigenous Americans was the least of his concerns: he was expected to spread that money to political allies to shore up their support.
The Army hated this system. If political appointees mismanaged their work, it was Army officers and their men who had the dangerous job of fighting angry warriors. Politicians noted that the Army all too often killed indiscriminately, and they refused to give up their power. But military men resented that political mistakes could cost soldiers their lives.
In 1883, after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, Congress had passed the Civil Service Act that was supposed to do away with awarding government jobs based on political patronage. Cleveland had taken that charge seriously and had installed agents instructed to fulfill their job description. Harrison’s men, though, knew they needed western votes to hold control of the newly admitted states, and they spun the system back to one based on patronage.
Their most unfortunate appointment was that of Daniel Royer to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Royer was a staunch Republican, but he was also a failed medical man with a budding drug addiction and little knowledge of Lakotas. After he arrived in October 1890, the Lakotas named him “Young-Man-Afraid-of-Indians.”
Since being corralled on the six smaller reservations the previous year, the Lakotas had endured a deadly influenza epidemic that swept the U.S. and much of Europe and killed a number of Lakotas who were already weak from respiratory viruses. Then, hot winds in summer 1890 had burned dry first the Lakotas’ vegetable gardens, then their crops, and finally, the native hay crop.
White settlers suffering in the same drought abandoned their new homesteads and went back east. Hungry and desolate, Lakotas had to stay. Then a new census count came in lower than expected, and government officials cut their rations. Destitute and in real danger of starvation, some Lakotas turned to a new religious movement, the Ghost Dance, that promised to bring back the world of game and plenty that had been theirs before the coming of easterners.
The Ghost Dancers never hurt their non-Indigenous neighbors or threatened their property, and few settlers paid them much attention. But Royer interpreted the religious enthusiasm as a sign of an approaching war. Less than a week after arriving at Pine Ridge, Royer warned his superiors in the Interior Department in Washington, D.C., that he might need troops to keep order.
General Nelson Miles of the U.S. Army, who commanded the Division of the Missouri that included Pine Ridge, went to the reservation, where the Lakotas explained their crushing circumstances and suggested that neither Royer nor his predecessor had been much help. Miles brushed off Royer’s panic and told the Lakotas they could dance as they wished. When Royer told the Lakotas the next day that they must stop participating in the Ghost Dance, they laughed at him.
Back East, President Harrison and his men were focused on the 1890 midterms. Despite popular demand for a lower tariff, in a raucous session in October, Republicans in Congress actually raised tariff rates, promising voters that the higher rates of the McKinley Tariff would finally make the country boom.
A month later, angry voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed the Democrats a majority of more than two to one. Republicans hung onto power only through their lock on the Senate. There, the admission of the new states made up for losses elsewhere, and the Republicans had four more senators than their opponents did.
But of those four, three had voted against the McKinley Tariff. So the survival of the tariff hung on just one vote: that of a senator from South Dakota. In the nineteenth century, senators were chosen by the state legislature, and it looked at first as if the Republicans had won South Dakota’s. But then news broke that ballot boxes had been tampered with. Suddenly, the legislature was in play for all parties. Whoever won would control South Dakota’s Senate seat and the fate of the McKinley Tariff.
The Ghost Dance had continued to spread across the South Dakota reservations, and Royer was growing increasingly frightened. Some of the other agents were also agitated, sending back to their superiors letters full of exaggerated rumors. But Miles and officers stationed at the forts in South Dakota, all of whom had first-hand experience with the Lakotas, denied that the Lakotas were planning a war. Instead, the officers blamed the Lakotas’ anger on the mismanagement of food and supplies by the political appointees at the Interior Department. As soon as the agents addressed the Lakotas’ very real suffering, they said, the Ghost Dance movement would fade.
But with control of the South Dakota legislature hanging in the balance, Harrison was leaning toward sending in troops. Settlers liked the military, which brought contracts and government money into the chronically poor West. On November 20, 1890, troops marched into Pine Ridge.
Alarmed, Ghost Dancers rushed to the Badlands, where they could defend themselves.
For the next month, Army officers worked to bring them back to Pine Ridge. Then, on December 15, just as it seemed they had convinced them to return, a police officer murdered the famous leader Sitting Bull at Standing Rock Reservation on the northern edge of the state, and his panicked kinfolk fled south to Pine Ridge to take shelter with the renowned negotiator Red Cloud. Army officers were afraid the band would take news of Sitting Bull’s death to the Lakotas in the Badlands, derailing the negotiations, and set out to intercept them.
On December 28, on the southern side of the state, two members of the Lakota band overtook two Army scouts watering their horses and told the scouts they were on their way to Pine Ridge. The scouts informed their commander, who intercepted the Lakotas with guns and demanded an unconditional surrender. After the Lakotas agreed, the troops and the tired and hungry Lakotas set off for Pine Ridge. That night, they camped inside the reservation at Wounded Knee Creek.
During the night, a new commander, James Forsyth, took over. Dead set on a show of force, he insisted on disarming the Lakotas before they set off for the agency. Many of the young men refused to give up their guns, which were the only way they could feed their families through the winter. As soldiers tried to wrench a gun from a man’s hands, it went off into the sky. “Fire! Fire on them!” Forsyth screamed.
The soldiers did. The first volley brought down the men who were being disarmed, as well as about twenty-five of the soldiers themselves, who had moved into a circle around the Lakota men and boys during the course of the morning. In the haze from the gun smoke, Lakota men grabbed weapons from nearby soldiers and dove for the dry creek bed that ran behind the camp, hoping to hike along it and escape. The women and children had been separated from the Indian men during the morning. When the firing began, women ran for the wagons and horses.
But they could not escape. Over the next two hours, frenzied soldiers hunted down and killed every Lakota they could find. Soldiers trained artillery on the fleeing wagons as troops on horseback combed the hills for fugitives. Some of the escaping women were ridden down three miles from the encampment. When the wagons stopped moving, the soldiers moved the guns to the creek bed and shot everyone who moved. Within a few hours, at least 230 Lakotas, mostly women and children, were dead.
The outcry against this butchery started in the Army itself. Miles was incensed that the simple surrender of a peaceful band of Lakotas had become what he called a “criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children.” He demanded an inquiry into Forsyth’s actions. Miles’s report was so damning his own secretary asked him to soften it.
But President Harrison’s administration was in terrible electoral trouble, and his men wanted no part of an attack on soldiers that would imply that Harrison’s agents had first created a war and then mismanaged it. They dismissed Miles’s report with their own, which blamed the Lakotas for the massacre and concluded that the soldiers had acted the part of heroes. In spring 1891, President Harrison awarded the first of twenty Medals of Honor that would go to soldiers for their actions at Wounded Knee.
In the end, though, all of the political maneuvering by Harrison’s men came to naught. After weeks of squabbling, the South Dakota legislature rejected the Republican candidate and named an Independent senator who caucused with the Democrats. And in 1892, Harrison lost the presidency to Grover Cleveland, who promised lower tariffs and a return to civil service reform.
A reader who uses the name Quickwrit parses the Constitutionnand finds that Trump is doing today exactly what King George did to the colonists.
Quickwrit writes:
WHAT TRUMP IS DOING TODAY is the very same thing that our Declaration of Independence lists as the violations of liberty that triggered our Declaration of Independence. Take a look:
The King used armed forces to control American cities and towns, without first asking permission from the legislatures; quoting the Declaration, it says: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” Just like King Trump sending armed National Guard units into our cities today.
The King replaced local police with his armed forces. The Declaration says: “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
The King’s armed forces were protected from killing civilians: “For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.” People die today in ICE custody, and nothing happens.
The King ignores civil courts: “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.”
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices.”
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.”
“He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained.” Today, not only do governors of Red States do nothing without Trump’s approval, neither does Congress.
The Declaration also says that we also declare our independence from the King for his:
“cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world’ (just like Trump’s tariffs);
“depriving us in many cases of the benefit of Trial by Jury” and “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences” (just like Trump deporting people without trial to be imprisoned in foreign nations).
The Declaration says Americans are breaking away because the King has opposed immigration that is vital to America’s economic growth, by “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.” Already in 1740, laws had been passed to grant “natural born” citizenship status to immigrants who lived there for seven consecutive years.
The King has also been “redistricting” Americans out of their right to representation: “He has refused to pass Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.” Just like the redistricting going on today.
Americans today truly need to read the history of our Revolution and what went into and is actually in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Read the ACTUAL WRITINGS of our Founding Fathers, not just listen to or read the “analyses” of political talking heads on today’s TV and social media.
That kind of reading takes time, and too few Americans today are willing to spend the time.
Trump announced on Saturday that he intends to send the military to Portland to restore safety and to protect ICE agents.
The Mayor of Portland says the city is safe. He doesn’t want troops. The Governor of Oregon agrees. But Trump has a fixation with that city. He hates Portland because there was a protest and riot there against him a few days after Trump won the election of 2016. The riot went on for days; stores were vandalized, windows smashed. Over 100 people were arrested. Almost nine years later, Trump still wants to punish Portland, and no one can stop him.
President Donald Trump said Saturday that he will send troops to Portland, Oregon, and to immigration detention facilities around the country, authorizing “Full Force, if necessary” and escalating a campaign to use the U.S. military against Americans that has little modern precedent.
Trump said in a social media post that he was directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide troops to what he dubbed “War ravaged Portland” as well as “any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”
Saturday’s announcement appeared likely to set up a first test for a White House effort targeting left-wing protest groups. It came just days after Trump signed an executive order directing the nation’s full counterterrorism apparatus against domestic political opponents despite long precedent restricting such a move.
Right-wing politicians have long criticized Portland for the way it has handled racial-justice protests as well as its homeless population, tolerating encampments in the central part of the city. But Trump will again encounter the dynamic he faced when he deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles — a military activation in a state run by a Democratic governor who objects to the decision and could have grounds to fight it in court.
Trump’s announcement, which was posted on Truth Social while the president was at his private golf club in Northern Virginia, appeared to have come as a surprise to the Pentagon, with several officials saying they know little more than what the president included in his post.
One official familiar with the discussion Saturday said defense officials were seeking clarity on what Trump desires. The official, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about private planning. The Pentagon released a statement a few hours later, saying defense officials “stand ready to mobilize U.S. military personnel in support of DHS operations in Portland at the President’s direction.”
The statement, by spokesman Sean Parnell, said the “Department will provide information and updates as they become available.”
Another person familiar with ongoing discussions said midday Saturday that some Pentagon officials had discussed troops being sent to Portland at some point but were scrambling to make sense of what’s next.
“You know what I know,” that person said, alluding to the president’s announcement on social media.
Among the uncertainties, it was not immediately clear whether Trump plans to deploy active-duty troops or National Guard members, or both, to Portland. As is the case in similar discussions with other cities, there are legal limits to how he can do so.
There was also no clarity about the timing of any potential deployment.
Asked for more details about the potential deployment, the White House did not answer questions but responded with a list of incidents that had recently taken place outside Portland’s ICE field office, including federal charges of arson, assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.
“Despite the crime and neighborhood pushback caused by the months-long protest, Oregon Democrats still refuse to do anything about it,” the White House said in a statement.
Protesters have been demonstrating for weeks at an ICE processing center in the city in objection to Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts. The Department of Homeland Security on Friday said that “rioters in Portland, Oregon have repeatedly attacked and laid siege” to the facility.
Protests outside the facility reignited this June, with the Portland Police Bureau declaring a riot after demonstrators blocked the driveway and threw objects like rocks and bricks at the facility and federal agents, according to local news media accounts and social media videos. Portland police arrested more than 20 people connected to the protests after multiple federal officers were injured.
But on Saturday, the streets outside the Portland ICE facility remained largely empty in the hours after Trump made his announcement. Two homeless men slept on the sidewalk. A handful of passersby took photographs of the building, and a few talked to each other about how their experiences felt nothing like the “war-ravaged” city described….
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek (D) was one of 19 Democratic governors who signed a letter to Trump last month opposing his deployment of the National Guard over governors’ objections. At a Saturday afternoon news conference, Kotek said she learned of Trump’s plan to deploy troops from social media and spoke to the president afterward.
“Portland’s doing just fine, and I made that very clear to the president this morning,” Kotek said. “Our city is a far cry from the war-ravaged community that he has posted about on social media, and I conveyed that directly to him.” Kotek said she doesn’t believe Trump has the authority to deploy federal troops on state soil: “I’m coordinating with Attorney General Dan Rayfield to see if any response is necessary, and we will be prepared to respond if we have to.”
Both local and state-elected Oregon officials rejected Trump’s plan.
“The number of necessary troops is zero, in Portland and any other American city. Our nation has a long memory for acts of oppression, and the president will not find lawlessness or violence here unless he plans to perpetrate it,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson (D) said in a statement. Wilson was elected last year on a platform of moving homeless Portland residents into a temporary shelter.
Wilson said at a news conference Friday evening that the city had seen a “sudden influx” of federal agents in recent hours, including armored vehicles, which Wilson called a “big show.” Wilson was flanked by other city and state officials, who said it wasn’t clear which agency the federal authorities were from but urged the public stay calm and refuse to “take the bait.”
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), who has criticized Trump’s domestic military deployments, said Saturday on X that the president “wants to stoke fear and chaos and trigger violent interactions and riots to justify expanded authoritarian control. Let’s not take the bait! Portland is peaceful and strong and we will take care of each other.”
I was very sad to learn, via a note posted on Facebook by Gene V. Glass that David C. Berliner has died.
David was one of the most honored research psychologists in the nation. You can open his resume online and see the many times he has received awards or served in prestigious positions. I won’t recite his bio.
Instead I want to praise him as a wise and insightful friend. I learned from him and was very happy that we forged a strong bond in the past few years.
David was an acerbic critic of the past two+ decades of what was called “education reform.” David laughed at the nonsensical but heavily funded plans to “reform” education by imposing behaviorist strategies on teachers, as if they were robots or simpletons.
David had no patience with the shallow critics of America’s public schools. He respected the nation’s teachers and understood as few of the critics did, just how valuable and under-appreciated they were.
But he did have patience with me. He appreciated my change of views and offered encouragement. Knowing that he had my back made me fearless.
I will miss my friend. So will everyone else who cares about the future of American education, not as a business venture, but as our most important civic responsibility. .
Leonie Haimson is a public school activist in New York City who fights for smaller class size, student privacy and against privatization of public funds.
She wrote on her blog:
Please email Comptroller Lander and ask him to audit DOE charter rent spending and lack of matching funds for public schools – more on this below.
ask the comptroller to audit DOE’s charter rental payments now!
Last Thursday, September 18, 2025, several large charter school networks held a protest rally in Cadman Plaza and a march across the Brooklyn Bridge to push for the continued expansion of the charter school sector. This was apparently provoked by the fact that the leading candidate for Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said he opposes allowing more charter schools to open, especially since they have reached their legal cap in NYC under state law.
Liz Kim, reporter at Gothamist, got hold of a tape of a speech that Eva Moskowitz, CEO of the largest charter school chain, Success Academy, gave to her Charter Management Staff and 158 new teachers, exhorting them to attend this march and rally, and to make at least five “phone-to-action” calls to their elected officials.
In the speech, Moskowitz harshly reprimanded those who had not yet done so: “You did not do the phone-to-action because you thought, ‘This is not very serious,’” she said. “So I want to just reset for all of you. It is an existential threat.” And:
“We have faced threats throughout the last 20 years, we have a core competency in political threats, unfortunately. But this is one of these moments where there is heightened risk, policy risk, political risk, and so we are going to do what we’ve always done, which is to stand up for children and families in a massive way in Cadman Plaza to speak our minds and to make sure that government works for children and families. … government doesn’t naturally work for the people. It has to be forced and made to work for the people. So we’re doing two things. One is this parent mobilization, and the second is our phone to action campaign.
And our goal is to send elected officials, two million messages. Now, teachers, you’ll do a network one now and then when you get to your schools, you’ll do a local one. But I have to say that I was a little disappointed in the network, because only 25% of the network was doing the phone to action. …And you know, would be natural for you not to understand we have these nice offices, Aren’t they nice? Very nice.
You guys [work] for a not for profit, you are highly compensated. You could say, What? What? Me worry? What’s there to worry about? But there’s a lot to worry about, and this is not a theoretical worry. We lived through eight years of Bill de Blasio. The first thing he did when he became mayor is he threw out three of our schools.”
This is untrue. De Blasio did not kick out three of her schools; he rejected three Success charter co-locations that had been proposed by Bloomberg before he left office but not yet implemented. De Blasio also accepted co-locations for five other Success charter schools.
In any event, after a barrage of negative television ads, DOE officials were browbeaten into finding and renting private space for these three Success charter schools at city expense for $5.4K – $11K per student. By last year, the number of Success charter schools rented directly by DOE had risen to nine, with buildings added under both Mayor de Blasio and Mayor Adams, at a cost of $14.3 million annually. By renting these buildings directly and failing to ask Success to rent the buildings themselves, they are sacrificing 60 percent reimbursement from the state for those expenses.
At the meeting, Moskowitz was clear that she was requiring all network staff and teachers to both make phone calls and participate in the rally:
“When we ask you to do phone to action, you kind of do it. You can’t make people chase you down. … we’ve kind of gotten loosey goosey here and just know your managers are going to hold you accountable to an extraordinary standard of performance. … When your network are giving a directive, I think we’re getting a little democratic here. We are quite hierarchical.
There is a chain of command, and when your boss asks you to do something, assuming it’s not unethical or a question of conscience, you do the task. Are we clear? I do not want to have to chase people down for phone to action. Is there some argument or particular reason? Anyone live in New Jersey? Okay, that’s not an excuse. I hate to tell you, list your 120 Wall Street address and get it done. ….”
She then told her staff and teachers to take out their phones and make all five phone calls to elected officials right then and there.
According to a report in Labor Notes, Success Academy employees were also required to send emails to elected officials, and were ordered to “submit screenshots of these emails to their managers to confirm they had sent them.”
Success Academy was not the only charter chain to make participation in the rally mandatory for staff, parents and students. It was also required by the Zeta charter chain, founded by Emily Kim, former attorney for Success Academy. A document sent to staff at Zeta Charter Schools made this clear:
“100% attendance expected from all Zeta families, students, and staff. Each student must attend with a parent/guardian to ensure the safety of every child. Students cannot attend the rally without an adult family member or authorized chaperone.”
Students, their parents and staff had to arrive at Zeta at 6:30 AM to get on the bus to Cadman Plaza, according to the schedule. If parents wanted to bring their younger children, they had “to bring their own seats for the bus ride to the rally,” presumably meaning they had to pay for their own transportation to get to Cadman Plaza.
Teachers at Zeta were told it was their responsibility to get parents to attend:
“All teachers must ensure 100% completion through family follow-up calls Mon., Sept. 8th- Wed., Sept. 10th. Your Principal and Operations Director will share a school-wide tracker to follow up and log all family calls accordingly.”
There is a real question about whether mandatory attendance at a political event or forcing teachers to make political phone calls is legal. The day after the rally, on Friday, John Liu, Chair of the Senate NYC Education Committee and Shelley B. Mayer, Chair of the Senate Committee on Education sent a letter to NY State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa and John King, Chancellor of State University of New York, whose agencies authorize and oversee charter schools.
Senators Liu and Mayer expressed “great concern that many charter schools in New York City cancelled classes and pressured students, families, and staff to participate in a political “March for Excellence” on September 18, 2025. We urge the state to conduct a thorough investigation into potential violations of state law.”
They also pointed out how“canceling classes during a school day and forcing families and students to engage in a political rally is an egregious misuse of instructional time and state funds. We urge SUNY and the State Education Department to exercise their oversight authority and fully investigate this matter to determine any possible violations of state law, and if such violations are found, to claw back a portion of state per capita funding from each school administration that engaged in this event, and to take steps to ensure future misuse of student’s precious school time does not continue.”
Though they didn’t specify any laws that might have been broken, in 2023 Governor Hochul signed into law Senate Bill 4982, which prohibits employers from coercing employees into attending or participating in meetings where the primary purpose is to communicate the employer’s opinions on religious or political matters. The law also holds that the courts may impose monetary penalties on employers who do this, and that employees can seek “equitable relief and damages” in court if they do.
In any case, this is not the first time that Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy have been found guilty of breaking laws. Repeatedly, her charter schools have been shown to deny students their legal rights, violating their privacy, and pushing out those who do not make the grade either in terms of behavior or test scores. A sample of these documented violations are listed at the end of this blog post.
Evidence of inflated charter rental payments and missing matching funds
Another issue of great concern is how charter schools now drain more than $3 billion dollars annually from the DOE budget, plus charge more than a hundred million dollars per year to DOE in rental subsidies. NYC is the only district in the nation that is obligated to either co-locate charters in public schools or help pay for their rent in private buildings. This applies to all new and expanding charter schools since 2014, after they go through a perfunctory appeal process, according to a law pushed through by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo and the charter lobby. The amount spent on their rental expenses by DOE has risen sharply over time –though 60% of these expenditures are supposed to be reimbursed by the state.
In 2019 and 2021, Class Size Matters issued two reports that provided evidence that DOE had overspent on rental assistance to charter schools by $21 million. We also revealed suspicious charges for rental subsidies paid by DOE to several charter schools, including those run by Success, that owned or subleased their own buildings.
In one case, the rent for two Success Academy charter schools housed at Hudson Yards increased from approximately $793,000 to over $3.4 million in one year – more than quadrupling , causing DOE to pay $3 million in rental subsidies for those two schools alone in 2020.
We also found that public schools co-located with charter schools were owed millions of dollars in matching funds for facility enhancements, compared to the amounts required by state law. From 2014 to 2019, 127 co-located public schools were owed a total of $15.5 million.
Please email Comptroller Lander and ask him to audit these programs
Shortly after the release of our second report, in March 2022, Senator John Liu, Senator Robert Jackson, and Rita Joseph, chair of the Council Education Committee, sent a letter to Comptroller Brad Lander, urging him to audit this spending, based upon our troubling findings. I recently learned that no such audit has been conducted. An analysisalso shows that Lander has audited fewer DOE programs than any other NYC Comptroller since 2003 at this point in office.
We are now engaged in examining DOE own reports of their spending on charter school rent, which continues to rise sharply higher each year, as well as their continuing failure to provide sufficient matching funds to public schools for facility upgrades and repairs.
Please email the Comptroller now and urge him to launch an audit on these programs before he leaves office in January, by filling out the form here.
Where it says, “Your Suggestion,”please write:
“I urge you to audit DOE spending on charter rent, especially charter schools that own or sublease their own buildings, as well as charters whose buildings DOE rents directly and thus is unable to receive 60% reimbursement from the state. Also please audit the lack of public school matching funds, as there is evidence that they continue to be owed millions for facility upgrades.”
Feel free to rephrase this in any way you like.
On my blog, at the end of this post, is a list revealing the documented pattern of Success Academy violations, including failing to provide students with their mandated services, repeatedly suspending them for minor infractions, violating their privacy, and pushing them out when they do not conform to rigid behavioral expectations or do not score high enough on standardized exams.
2. If you haven’t already, please also fill out this brief survey on class sizes at your school this year. So far, from the unscientific sample of teachers and parents who have responded, class sizes have increased in as many schools as have decreased, despite the fact that more than 700 schools received funds to lower class size. If DOE is simply pushing up class sizes in the schools that did not receive this funding, that would be a matter of great concern.
After raising a national profile by taking MAGA ideas to absurd extremes, Ryan Walters resigned yesterday, going out in a blaze of ignominious display.
John Thompson explains:
For months, I’ve been hearing predictions that State Superintenent Ryan Walters would not serve out his term. Originally, the rumors had to do with the questionable legality of his actions. Recently they have focussed on the Republicans, who once supporteded him, but who are now fed up with his antics.
Since I submitted this piece, yesterday, Walters said “he is ‘excited’ to step down and accept his new position. He said his goal is to ‘destroy the teachers unions.’”
Walters announced he will become the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance (which says it has 2,748 teachers enrolled.) He proclaimed: “For decades, union bosses have poisoned our schools with politics and propaganda while abandoning parents, students, and good teachers. That ends today. We’re going to expose them, fight them, and take back our classrooms,” said Walters in a press release. “At the Teacher Freedom Alliance, we’re giving educators real freedom, freedom from the liberal, woke agenda that has corrupted public education. We will arm teachers with the tools, support, and freedom they need, without forcing them to give up their values. This is a battle for the future of our kids, and we will not lose.”
Below is background information on how Walters got to this point.
What’s been happening to American public schools lately is different: more coordinated, more creative, and blanketing the nation. Pressure on what kids learn and read is coming from national parents’ movements, the White House, the Supreme Court.
Rosin further explains that Ryan Walters “has pushed the line further than most.”
Walters recently announced an ideology test for new teachers moving to Oklahoma from “places like California and New York.” And, although the Oklahoma Supreme Court has issued a temporary stay on Walters’ standards, he’s “tried to overhaul the curriculum, adding dozens of references to Christianity and the Bible and making students ‘identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results.’”
The first of two podcasts review how Walters has “already succeeded in helping create a new template for what public schools can be.” Part two will go even deeper into how “Walters and a larger conservative movement seem to be trying to redefine public schools as only for an approved type.” As he said, “If you’re going to come into our state … don’t come in with these blue-state values.”
Rosin starts with Walters’ “Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism,” and his claim, “For too long in this country, we’ve seen the radical left attack individuals’ religious liberty in our schools. We will not tolerate that in Oklahoma.” He said this in a video sent to school administrators who were supposed to play it for every student and every parent.
This mandate, however, is the opposite of his approach when he was an award-winning “woke” middle school teacher. Rosin interviewed two of Walters students, Shane and Starla, about his “parodies,” that were called, “little roasts.”
Shane, a male conservative, compared Walters’ “little roasts,” such as “Teardrops on My Scantron,” to those of Jimmy Kimmel.
Starla, a lesbian. said of her teacher, “He was woke! (Laughs.) He was a woke teacher.” And she praised his teaching about the civil rights movement.
Rosin reported that today’s Ryan Walters is “unrecognizable” in comparison to the teacher they knew. And, “Shane compared it to how you’d feel about your dad if he remarried a woman you didn’t like.”
In 2022 , when running for State Superintendent, pornography was Walters’ issue. He strongly supported HB 1775, which was a de facto ban on Critical Race Theory. It forbid teaching things like, “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
Walters’ top target was a high school teacher, Summer Boismier, who, in response, covered her bookshelves with butcher paper. But she also posted a QR code for a Brooklyn library, which had books that Walters said were pornography. Boismier resigned, but Walters successfully asked the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke her teaching certificate. He said, “There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom. Ms. Boismier’s providing access to banned and pornographic material to students is unacceptable and we must ensure she doesn’t go to another district and do the same thing.”
After being labeled a pedophile, Boismier started to get serious threats. Then the Libs of TikTok started a campaign against alleged gay teachers who were supposedly “groomers,” prompting bomb threats.
Then, as Rosin explained, “state Democrats called for an impeachment probe, and Walters leaned in harder.” For instance, Walters ramped up his campaign against teachers unions who he called a “terrorist organization.”
Walters also claimed that a “civil war” was being fought in our schools.
Rosin reported on how Walters gained a lot of attention “when he said teachers could cover the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where white Tulsans slaughtered hundreds of Black people, but they should not, quote, ‘say that the skin color determined it.””
Then, “Walters accused the media of twisting his words. He said that “kids should never be made to feel bad or told they are inferior based on the color of their skin.”
Trump responded on Truth Social, “Great job by Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters on FoxNews [sic] last night. Strong, decisive, and knows his ‘stuff.’” And, “I LOVE OKLAHOMA!”
There was pushback when it was learned that “one of the few Bibles that met Walters’ criteria is the “God Bless the USA Bible.” It was “endorsed by Lee Greenwood and President Trump. It sells for $59.99.”
As the first part of the podcast came to an end, it reviewed Walters’ recent setbacks.
The U.S. Supreme Court stopped Oklahoma’s plan for the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The Oklahoma Supreme Court has paused the Bible plan. And the special test by Prager U. for teachers from California, New York, and other “woke” states, faces legal challenges.
And Walters was lambasted after sexually explicit images of naked women were seen on a screen inside his office.
Part two will give Walters a chance to tell his side of the story. Rosin previews his response by quoting him: “Yeah, they’re outrageous liars.”
Walters spent most of his energy promoting evangelical Christianity in the public schools. He wanted Bible-based lessons, the Ten Commandments in every classroom, and prayer in the schools. He was an outspoken MAGA guy and tried to insert doubts about the 2020 election in the social studies curriculum.
The final straw may have been the time recently when Walters conducted a meeting with members of the State Board of Education in his office and two attendees saw pornography on his television screen. Walters meanwhile had been ranting about pornography in school libraries.
Mike DeGuire is a veteran educator in Denver. He says it’s time to take stock and assess the damage that “reform” has inflicted on students and public schools in Denver.
Is public education a public or a private good? This issue is at the heart of the school choice debate sweeping the country.
Advocates for school choice are advancing policies that move us toward the privatization of our schools, treating our children’s futures as commodities rather than community investments. This well-funded bi-partisan coalition promotes privatization through charter school expansion, vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts. Republicans use the words “parental rights, freedom and competition,” while neoliberal Democrats brand it as “innovation and expanding opportunity.”
Public education is one of the last shared institutions that binds us together across race, class, and geography; when we weaken it, we weaken democracy itself.
The result is the same for communities when privatization becomes a reality in red states with vouchers or in blue cities where most charter schools are located. Vouchers segregate schools by class and race, diminish the importance of community, and severely limit funding for public schools.
Charter schools operate like private schools, create competition for students, often have unelected boards. Additionally, the charter schools, not the community, get to determine who enrolls, who stays, and what kind of learning takes place. As marketplace ideology takes over, public dollars and democratic control move from local neighborhood schools to private boards and political operatives.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) shows how this movement works in a blue city, and why it matters now in Trump’s vision of America’s education system.
Different slogans, same destination
On the right, and in most Republican-led states, legislatures enacted policies to privatize education with vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) designed to route public funds to private and/or religious schools. Often, these tactics originate with model bills written and promoted by the American Legislative Council (ALEC) and their allies. The goal is to let public dollars “follow the child,” which means diverting them away from democratically governed school districts.
On the neoliberal Democratic side, the mechanism is the charter-centric “portfolio model.” Local school boards often elected with large amounts of pro-reform money approve policies to close or “restart” neighborhood schools. Then they open new charters, bring in “operators” deemed to be “effective,” and the district “manages” the schools and their networks like an investment portfolio.
This storyline was supercharged under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, which rewarded states for removing barriers to charter growth and for aggressively initiating school “turnarounds.”
The overlap with Republicans and Democrats is structural. Both sides define schooling as a marketplace and shift authority from elected school boards to private actors, like charter boards, appointed authorities, and national nonprofits. In their book, “Wolf At the Schoolhouse Door,” Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire describe “how Republicans and Democrats joined to support failed policies whose ultimate goal was to eliminate public education and replace it with a free-market approach to schooling.”
Charles Siler, who worked as a lobbyist for the libertarian Goldwater Institute, told the Washington Post that “Charter schools are part of the incremental march towards full privatization. In many ways, charter schools are the gateway to total public-school dismantling.” Since vouchers are unpopular with the public and some lawmakers, Siler continued, “privatizers have to engage in incrementalism, and they use different names to create a sort of moving target.”
Both camps sell the public on privatization by claiming that “failing test scores” prove neighborhood schools, especially those serving Black and Brown students, are broken beyond repair. They argue the racial achievement gap is proof that these schools must be shut down and replaced with charters through “school choice.”
This narrative is deeply misleading. First, decades of research show that standardized test scores mostly measure socioeconomic status and neighborhood inequality, not the quality of individual schools. Poverty, housing insecurity, and systemic racism drive disparities, not the mere fact of attending a district school.
Second, the research demonstrates that replacing schools with charters has not closed achievement gaps. Denver Public Schools illustrates the point: after years of churn, closures, and huge charter expansion, racial disparities in achievement persist. Black and Latino students continue to score lower on state tests than white peers — not because they are “trapped in failing schools,” but because privatization has siphoned resources from their neighborhoods, destabilized communities, and ignored root causes.
Bipartisan funding for similar goals
The funding networks and foundations knitting these free-market agendas together are deep-pocketed and bipartisan. For instance, the conservative Walton Family Foundation underwrites charter startups and charter facilities nationwide, spending well over $1 billion on this effort. The majority of their political spending goes to Republican causes, with over 2/3 of their PAC money going to Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers.
In his book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” journalist Christopher Leonard describes how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Koch-funded right-wing group, creates model legislation which can be introduced in state legislatures. Many of these bills aim towards privatizing schools by implementing voucher programs.
City Fund raised millions, largely from Netflix founder Reed Hastings and hedge fund manager John Arnold, to spread charter schools in over 40 cities through portfolio management systems and by bankrolling local political action groups. While Hastings supports Democratic causes, he is opposed to teacher unions and believes that local school boards should be abolished. Arnold, also a Democrat, gifted the KIPPcharter network millions, and like many billionaires today, is seen as cozying up to the Trumpadministration for influence.
The Bradley Foundation and ALEC financed the policy and political infrastructure for vouchers and ESAs for decades. The Bradley Foundation, the Colorado-based Coors family, and the Koch foundation were three of the six billionaire families that funded Project 2025, which has been the playbook for Trump since he took office in January.
Many of these same philanthropic and political dollars fund both a Republican voucher push and a Democratic-branded charter expansion — two lanes of the same privatizing highway.
Denver: a “portfolio” laboratory
Denver is often cited by education reformers as a national model as it implemented unified enrollment, systematic school closures, and rapid charter school growth. But the backstory behind who paid for these policies is less sanguine. A Network for Public Education report details how Denver Public Schools became a neoliberal “experiment,” using a web of nonprofits and political groups to expand charters and restructure the school district.
Both Republicans and Democrats contributed large amounts of money in Denver school board elections to promote corporate reforms, such as teacher pay for performance, school choice systems, and enrollment zones. In the 2017 DPS school board election, billionaires gave huge sums to the Denver candidates favoring charter school expansion. According to a report from the Network for Public Education Action, these included “Colorado billionaires Phillip Anschutzand Kenneth Tuchman, and out-of-state billionaires John Arnold of Texas and the Alice, Jim and Stuart Waltons of Arkansas.”
Both sides define schooling as a marketplace and shift authority from elected school boards to private actors, like charter boards, appointed authorities, and national nonprofits.
Meanwhile, years of churn and school closures left communities reeling. Even reform-friendly analyses concede that the “portfolio model” era meant opening lots of charters and closing or “replacing” dozens of neighborhood schools. Researchers studying this model have cited significant concerns with the efficacy of the model, including equity issues, narrow reliance on test scores, instability and churn, tensions among schools, and loss of democratic control and community voice.
In a 2016 article, progressive education advocate David Osborne documented that “Since 2005 [Denver] has closed or replaced 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters.”
The billionaires’ money helped maintain a pro-charter majority school board until 2019 when teacher union-backed candidates were elected because of organized community backlash to the reforms and unrest after a teacher-led strike that year. That shift caused alarm bells among the billionaire backers of the pro-charter movement. They moved quickly to expand their funding to two political action groups in Denver.
RootED and Denver Families for Public Schoolsreceived over $38 million from Reed Hastings’ City Fund organization, which they used to promote their pro-charter agenda through grants to charter schools, local think tanks, and other community groups. Their efforts paid off in the 2023 school board election, when three of their endorsed candidates won their elections after Denver Families Action spent nearly $1 million to promote their campaign.
Outside spending has transformed Denver board elections into major dark money funding events, with the 2023 election hitting $2.2 million, just shy of the 2019 record of $2.3 million.
In an op-ed for Charter Folks, Clarence Burton and Pat Donovan, leaders for Denver Families for Public Schools, described their plans to repeat the 2023 wins in the upcoming November 2025 school board election. They may spend some of their vast resourcesfrom City Fund to sway voters.
In the next four years, DPS faces continued enrollment declines, and district leaders seem inclined to approve more closures to rebalance finances. That is the portfolio playbook’s endgame: when money is scarce, close neighborhood schools and expand privately run options. If successful in electing their endorsed candidates, Denver Families Action is poised to help that happen.
Do charters drain district resources? What the evidence says
District leaders and parents feel the fiscal squeeze when enrollment flows to charters. Fixed costs don’t disappear just because 5% or 10% of students leave. Research consistently warns that losses to enrollment can trigger costs that are not fully “variable” — you can’t cut 1/20th of a teacher or 1/10th of a bus route. Studies from New York and other locales estimate significant per-pupil losses in host districts as charter school share rises.
A policy brief from the National Education Policy Center summarizes the structural mechanisms that occur with fixed costs, diseconomies of scale, and shifting student composition. The brief describes how “a network of philanthropists and wealthy donors have reshaped the political economy of school finance, advocating for school voucher policies, charters, and privatization in the face of declining public-school enrollments.”
Pro-charter think tanks argue the picture is “mixed,” especially longer-term if districts close schools and cut staffing, the very things communities have fought against. But even those reviews concede there are short-term inefficiencies and significant harms. In practice, these policies mean closures, layoffs, and program cuts in neighborhood schools.
This bipartisan push undermines neighborhood schools, deepens inequality, and places corporate interests above the common good.
Trump-world raises the stakes
Under President Trump’s second term, privatization is not just encouraged; it’s federal policy. A January 29, 2025, White House directive ordered the Education Department to steer states toward using federal formula funds to support K-12 “choice” initiatives, which was a direct push for vouchers and related schemes.
Trump’s “Agenda47” likewise spotlights universal school choice as a signature plank, tied to dismantlingprior civil-rights guidance and reshaping federal oversight. Plans to weaken or abolish the Education Department are framed as clearing the path for parental choice.
Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon increased the federal department budget for charter schools by $60 million to a historic record of $500 million. At the closing session of the National Democratic Governors Association meeting, McMahonstressed to the governors they should open charterand micro-schools to promote more competition. This is the Republican Lane, wide open.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 promoted federal tax credits for vouchers, which are now approved federal legislation. The CEO of Democrats for Education Reform is pushing Democratic governors to use these new federal vouchers to expand learning opportunities for economically disadvantaged students or lose “free federal money.”
The policy highway already built by the neoliberal Democrats (charter growth, closures, portfolio management) has made it easier for a voucher-first administration to push public taxpayer dollars out of democratically governed systems. That’s the interlock: Democrats normalized the market; Trump-world aims to privatize the whole store.
The bottom line
Denver is not an outlier — it’s a warning. A bipartisan coalition normalized the idea that public education should be run like an investment portfolio, where schools are opened, closed, and “reconstituted” based on technocratic dashboards and political spending. The Trump administration’s voucher agenda, promoted for decades by the Koch brothers and other conservatives accelerates the same logic, now directs federal policy to help states route public dollars out of public governance altogether.
If we believe education is a public good — funded equitably, governed democratically, and accountable locally — the public must see charter expansion and vouchers as two halves of the same privatization project. When education is treated as a public good, it is essential for democracy, civic participation, economic stability, and social cohesion.
Every child deserves an equal chance in life. Therefore, education must remain a public good — not a marketplace where opportunity is limited to the school’s choice of selecting students. The question isn’t whether our schools should be run like private businesses. It’s whether we are willing to fight for education as a right, not a privilege.
And, if the public cares about our children’s future,they need to vote, organize, and promote legislation accordingly.
Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., is the vice chair of Advocates for Public Education Policy. He has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, executive coach, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career. He also worked as a leadership consultant for several national education organizations, and as an educator effectiveness specialist with the Colorado Department of Education. His writing is also featured on a4pep.org.
Diane Ravitch's blog 