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Why LAUSD Chose an Insider as Its New Superintendent

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2026 //
6

The elected board of the Los Angeles Unified School District recently chose Andres Chait, a veteran educator, as its new superintendent, succeeding Alberto Carvalho, who is under investigation in relation to an AI contract.

Chait has served in the LAUSD for nearly three decades. He started as a kindergarten teacher and rose through the ranks. His own children are students in the district.

From my experience, I think this is a wise decision. Many big-city districts went through a long period of disruptive reform, in which they selected inexperienced outsiders to “shake up” and “reform” the district. Most of these disruptions failed, as the outsider fired experienced educators and spent at least one year learning what educators do. Alan Bersin in San Diego, Joel Klein in New York City, and Michelle Rhee in the District of Columbia come to mind, though there were many more. The Broad Superintendent’s Academy was dedicated to churning out such superintendents, indoctrinated in the belief that schools with low scores should be closed, not helped, that state takeovers were a cure, not a harsh and futile measure, that veteran teachers were slackers.

Choosing a respected insider guarantees stability, not disruption.

The Los Angeles Daily News told the story. Open the link to read it.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, California, Education Reform, Los Angeles

California: Right-Wing Candidate Leads in Race for State Superintendent of Schools

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2026 //
9

Sonja Shaw, a right-wing school board president, came in first in the race for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in the recent election in California. She received 25% of the vote and is heading for a run-off against Richard Berrara, also a school board president, who received about 19% of the vote.

Shaw was supported by the far-right group Moms for Liberty. She was been outspoken in opposing transgender athletes who compete against females.

Howard Blume wrote in The Los Angeles Times:

Sonja Shaw — a Trump-aligned Republican whose public profile rose as she became identified with culture-war causes, including banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports — has emerged as the leading vote-getter in the June primary for California’s superintendent of public instruction.

With all precincts at least partially reporting Wednesday, Shaw, with 24.9% of the tallied votes, was well ahead of Democrat Richard Barrera, who had 18.9% of the votes. Even with vote-counting ongoing, that lead would be difficult to surmount.

Both Shaw, 43, and Barrera, 59, are school board presidents.

Shaw heads the elected Board of Education for Chino Valley Unified in San Bernardino County, a diverse but substantially conservative inland portion of Southern California…

Among its high-profile actions, the Chino Valley board majority put forward a policy that would require parents to be notified if their child expressed gender-identity issues at school. Shaw and her allies also approved a policy that allows parents to challenge the content of library books.

In the primary, Shaw was greatly helped by a candidate field that included seven Democrats, including veteran legislators and local school district officials…

Barrera heads the school board of San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district, serving an area with liberal leanings, but that is also politically diverse.

An obvious difference for Barrera was a $5-million independent campaign on his behalf from the California Teachers Assn., which he acknowledged Wednesday morning.

“The CTA campaign made all the difference and it’s based on a long track record and partnership that I’ve had with educators in San Diego,” Barrera said.…

Barrera sees the teachers union support as emblematic of a positive vision he has for education that will unite most voters around his campaign in November…

Positioned in a runoff against one Democrat — in a state where Democrats dominate — makes for a challenging campaign for Shaw.
“Tonight is not the finish line,” Shaw said. “It’s the beginning of the final stretch.”

Categories Administrators, superintendents, California, Elections, Ethics, Gender

Houston: Superintendent Mike Miles Helped Broker a $1 Million Deal with Charter Network

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2026 //
2

The Houston Chronicle exposed a scandal involving Houston’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles.

The Chronicle reported:

State-appointed Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles played a central role early in negotiations for a nearly $1 million contract between a Texas charter school network and a for-profit Colorado consulting firm, according to records obtained by the Houston Chronicle.

Miles used his private Gmail during those talks, emails show, sending a proposal with the consulting firm’s cost breakdowns; flagging a major price increase; and directing where contract documents should be sent.

The firm’s services — plus the free use of HISD’s curriculum and training by Miles himself — were intended to help the charter system replicate HISD’s controversial reforms and turn around several of its struggling campuses.

The mystery behind the scandal is why anyone would want to adopt Mike Miles’ top-down scripted curriculum. Its main effect is to drive away students and teachers. Test scores are up, to be sure. Miles’ greatest accomplishment seems to be raising a cohort of trained seals with higher scores who have never experienced love of learning.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Houston, Scandal, Texas

Texas Superintendent Goes Viral in Defense of Teachers, Books, and Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2025 //
10

John Kuhn is the superintendent of schools in Abilene, Texas. He was hired by the Abilene school board in April 2024. He previously served as superintendent in three small districts in Texas. The Abilene board introduced him this way

Dr. John Kuhn brings 27 years of proven experience in public education to Abilene ISD. Prior to joining the Abilene ISD team, Dr. Kuhn most recently served as Superintendent of Schools for Mineral Wells ISD. He has also served as superintendent of Perrin-Whitt CISD and as a high school principal, assistant principal, teacher, and bus driver in the Mineral Wells and Graford Independent School Districts.

I met John Kuhn at a conference of the Network for Public Education about a dozen years ago. At that time, he was superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt Distrist, which has about 320 students, half of whom are economically disadvantaged.

John is one of the most eloquent champions of public education that I’ve ever met. I remember him saying, “Send me the kids you don’t want. Send me the kids who don’t speak English. Send me the kids who are struggling to learn. Send me the kids with disabilities. I’m in a public school and we will teach them all.” Or words to that effect. I’m hoping he will be a keynote speaker at our next conference in Houston in April 2026. He’s the leader we need!

He posted this letter on his Facebook page and it drew a massive response and national attention.

Gosh where to begin? I’m eligible to retire in January, and I don’t want to because I feel like I owe the good people who hired me and this great community at least a few years of blood sweat and tears. I work for a great school board in a city I’ve absolutely fallen in love with. But holy moly do I want to pack it in right now. The burden is heavy.

Yesterday I spent hours at an update listening to the impacts on teachers and admins at public schools of bill after bill passed by our lege. Did you know that one bill says teachers are going to be required to catalogue every book in their classrooms? Kindergarten teachers have hundreds of tiny books. With what time? When?

Did you know that another bill says nurses can’t provide any health care whatsoever and counselors can’t provide any emotional support whatsoever without a written permission slip from parents? The bill language is so poorly written that—despite what it clearly says in black and white English—the bill author sent out a clarification saying nurses can provide a band-aid to a kid who is bleeding. He wouldn’t have to send out a clarification if they wouldn’t pass dumb bills—but legislators have been convinced by political groups who hate public schools that everyone inside them are wicked, evil people.

Did you know about the other new bill that says school administrators who work on the side as refs or one-act-play judges at any school anywhere are subject to a $10k fine per offense for working those jobs if they each individually don’t present a contract to their school board.

That doesn’t apply to me, but I know tons of APs and principals who ref and judge student drama contests. In fact, there’s a huge shortage of both, so if they didn’t do it, we’d be in an even bigger bind in trying to put on games. Again, the bill author had to put out a “clarification” claiming the bill doesn’t mean what it clearly says.

Because they refused to listen to the input of our educator groups—groups, by the way, that they are trying to get defunded because they consider them “taxpayer funded lobbyists” for representing school districts and municipalities.

There is a political movement to pull the teeth of local officials at schools and on city councils and county commissioners courts so that all we have is centralized state leadership. So local yokels like yours truly have to be continually demonized and legislated into submission.

I haven’t even talked about vouchers draining our public schools of resources so those education dollars can go toward private schools that aren’t subject to the crushing bureaucracy. I haven’t event talked about the new testing bill—the one that replaces STAAR with the 3x per year Death STAAR that, like its predecessor tests is solely owned and controlled by the TEA commissioner and is not norm-referenced so Texas student results can be compared to other states, which would keep things honest and prevent the manipulation of student results for political narrative-building.

Anyway, I go to a conference all day listening to this stuff the day after Republican Charlie Kirk is murdered and months after a Democratic state senator is murdered, and I just keep thinking, is it worth it? I can retire and keep to myself until I die of old age. I can just fish every single day. I can travel. I can camp. I can sleep in.

And I get to my hotel room and find some social media commenter calling my teachers “demons” because they assigned an chapter of the amazing book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as a reading passage for a freshman honors English class. This is a book written in the voice of a nine-year-old boy who lost his dad on 9/11 in the terrorist attack on the twin towers. It’s an award winning book. But the passage has the word “shit” in it. And it has a vulgar term that I’m told the teacher was unfamiliar with it. And it has a crude joke about talking butts, which I was a nine-year-old boy and that’s the kind of crudeness we giggle at, so the author was pretty spot on. It also has the word “pussy” but that was what the kid called his cat, but the Facebook post highlighted it as part of making a case that this book was inappropriate.

Thing is, it’s likely valid that this book should be restricted to older kids—17 and 18 year olds. It’s worth noting that this was assigned to only the honors kids because the other passage that the class was reading—also related to 9/11–was at too easy a reading level. So these poor teachers are trying to find something for advanced kids to read, and they don’t have time, and they’re making a good faith effort to push kids to Meets and Masters because they care (and if our A-F grade is too low, there is outrage over that too). And they pick this award-winning book. They decide one “shit” is tolerable. They aren’t offended by the word “pussy” because it literally isn’t a bad word in the context. They get it approved by a colleague.

And they are called “DEMONS.” (Ironically, in the comments of the outrage post, they’re also called “assholes,” which is literally worse than “anus,” which is one of the words the parent highlighted and took offense to, but nobody scolded the commenter for that vulgarity. What’s good for the goose… Commenters also typed “wtf” and “WTH,” which mean “what the fuck” and “what the hell” but nobody accused them of “grooming” children. Selective outrage, anyone.

Who needs this? Is everybody serious? Does everyone just feel absolutely compelled to post their moral superiority online by attacking perceived enemies they’ve never met or shared a meal with.

Our country is no longer capable of living in community. We’ve been driven to our corners. It is barely possible to be a public servant anymore. I totally get why our city manager retired.

My teachers aren’t demons. They may have made a mistake in assigning this book to 15-year-olds rather than 17-year-olds, and for that there are people online saying they need to be fired. Today Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close is likely temporarily coming off our library shelves while we review our book challenge policies. Read the book. It’ll make you cry.

We can’t win in public ed anymore. This is absolutely ridiculous. If I make it to December, it’s gonna be a miracle. I don’t need your sympathy replies, either. I’ll hang it up when I have to for my family and my health, and I’ll stick it out if I feel like I want to. In the meantime, I just want you to know I’m sick of politicians playing divisive politics and leaving local public servants to clean up the mess. Public schools are apolitical entities with the job of teaching kids to think critically and become awesome humans. We aren’t perfect. We have missteps, because we are human organizations. But don’t call my teachers DEMONS while you cuss in the comments.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Censorship, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Texas

Texas: Some of the Worst-Performing Charters have Some of the Highest-Paid Superintendents

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
3

ProPublica has been working with The Texas Tribune to cover politics–but especially education–in the Lone Star State. In their latest report, they discovered that three charter districts had some of the highest paid superintendents in the state, despite the poor performance of their schools. In some of them, teachers were low-paid and teacher turnover was unusually high.

The report begins:

Three charter school superintendents who are among the highest paid in Texas are overseeing some of the lowest-performing districts in the state, newly released records show. One of them is at risk of closure by school year’s end.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune previously revealed that board members at Valere Public Schools had paid Superintendent Salvador Cavazos up to $870,000 annually in recent years, roughly triple what it reported publicly to the state and on its website. Two other districts the newsrooms covered, Faith Family Academy and Gateway Charter Academy, also substantially underreported the compensation paid to their top leaders.

The state determined that all three of those districts have had failing or near-failing levels of performance in recent years. The ratings, released last month by the Texas Education Agency, also show that charter schools make up the majority of the districts that have repeatedly had “unacceptable” performance, though they account for a small portion of public schools across Texas. The agency published two years’ worth of accountability ratings for the state’s public and charter schools that were previously undisclosed due to litigation.

Faith Family Academy, a Dallas-area district with two campuses, was one of eight charter school districts that are now on track to be shut down at the end of the school year after receiving a third consecutive “F” rating. Board members paid superintendent Mollie Purcell Mozley a peak annual compensation of $560,000 in recent years to run the district, which has about 3,000 students.

Education experts said they were troubled that the underperforming charter networks the newsrooms identified would invest so heavily in superintendent compensation instead of areas with a more direct impact on student achievement.

“I don’t know what metrics the board’s reviewing to say that this is performance that would warrant this amount of pay,” said Toni Templeton, a research scientist at the University of Houston. “What we know from academic literature is when you put resources closest to the students, the students benefit the most. And the superintendent’s position is important, but it’s pretty far from the kids.”

The state’s “three strikes” law mandates that the state education agency automatically shut down a charter school district that has repeatedly failed to meet performance standards.

School leaders have a 30-day window to contest the ratings with the state education agency if they believe there were errors. The state will then release final scores in December that will determine whether failing campuses will be forced to close.

Keri Bickerstaff has sent four of her five children to school at Faith Family Academy but pulled most of them out after prekindergarten. She said she was shocked and saddened when she learned about the district’s payments to Purcell Mozley from ProPublica and the Tribune. At her children’s school in Waxahachie, south of Dallas, Bickerstaff observed crowded classrooms and felt that the teachers lacked experience and left the school at high rates. She was surprised that the superintendent had been paid so highly.

“I was under the impression that funding was an issue,” Bickerstaff said in an interview.

Purcell Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but in an Aug. 14 letter to parents and staff posted on the school’s website, she stated that the district planned to appeal the state’s rating. “While this rating is disappointing on its face,” Purcell Mozley wrote, “we want our community to know that we have conducted a thorough review of our performance data — and we strongly believe that our true score for 2025 reflects a solid C rating.”

Another small charter district in Dallas, Gateway Charter Academy, has two strikes against it after receiving a combination of “F” and “D” ratings over the last three school years. If the district receives another low score next year, it too will be forced to shutter its two campuses that serve around 600 students.

State education records show Gateway has been plagued by teacher turnover, with as many as 62% of its instructors leaving the district in recent years. The district has paid teachers about $10,000 less than the statewide average while paying superintendent Robbie Moore more than $426,000 in 2023, according to tax records— nearly double his base salary of $215,000.

Gateway and Moore did not respond to requests for comment. After it was originally contacted by the newsrooms about the previously undisclosed compensation, the district posted a new document on its website that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore.

While there are no state regulations limiting how much school districts can pay their superintendents, state lawmakers have tried to change that for years. Lawmakers filed at least eight proposals during the most recent regular legislative session that would have constrained administrators’ pay and severance packages at public and charter schools, but none passed. That included a bill authored by Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a Republican from Corpus Christi, that would have capped a superintendent’s income to twice that of the highest-paid teacher in the district.

Hinojosa filed another bill during a special session that began in July that would have allowed superintendents to earn up to three times as much as the top-paid teachers when their district scored an “A” rating. But if a district earned a “D” or “F” rating, a superintendent’s income could not exceed that of the top-paid instructors. The measure failed to reach a committee for discussion.

“If teachers are held accountable for student performance, administrators should be too,” Hinojosa said in a statement.

Although Valere received a “D” rating for the past two years, its board has compensated Cavazos hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on top of his base salary, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the country, the ProPublica and Tribune investigation found…

Holding Charter Schools Accountable

Texas’ A-F rating system was established in 2017 and uses metrics such as standardized test scores to grade each district and campus on student achievement, school progress and success with closing socioeconomic achievement gaps.

The new ratings come after a lengthy legal battle between Texas public school districts and the TEA over changes to the education agency’s ratings system. Districts twice sued Mike Morath, the TEA commissioner, to stop the release of the scores after the agency announced plans to revamp the system in 2023. The lawsuits successfully kept the scores from public view until this spring, when a state appeals court overturned a ruling in favor of the districts, setting the stage for the release of performance ratings for the 2022-23 school year in April, and ratings for the two most recent school years in August after a separate decision by the same appeals court.

The ratings affect charter schools and traditional public schools in different ways. A traditional public school district can potentially face state intervention after one of its campuses receives five years of failing ratings. The new TEA records show that there are five such districts at risk. By comparison, the state is required to automatically shut down an entire charter district that receives three years of failing scores.

Supporters often point to the “three strikes” law as evidence that charter schools are held to a higher level of performance standards than public schools.

The regulation, which was introduced in 2013, is one of many guardrails that has been put in place since charter schools were authorized in the 1990s with far less state oversight than public schools. Charter schools, for example, were originally shielded from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws until reports of leaders engaging in self-dealing and profiteering gradually prompted lawmakers to act.

Brian Whitley, a spokesperson for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said that Texas holds charter schools “more accountable, more quickly” when they don’t meet performance expectations, including through automatic closures.

Private schools are set to receive a similar level of protection from the laws that govern how traditional public schools spend their money: Under a landmark school voucher bill the Legislature passed this spring, the state plans to direct at least $1 billion public dollars to private education in the coming years. Earlier this month, an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune revealed more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest at Texas private schools that likely would have violated state laws had the schools been public.

These sorts of conflicts of interest and familial business entanglements have been common among at least two of the three charter districts that have made outsize payments to their leaders.

Records show that Gateway Charter Academy has hired employees related to administrators, including Moore. According to Gateway’s 2017 financial audit, Moore also married an “instructional coach” in the district that year. Records show that the coach’s compensation increased from $75,000 to $221,000 during the 2022-23 school year, after she was promoted to director of curriculum development. She did not respond to requests for comment.

At Faith Family Academy, Gene Lewis, one of the founding board members who hired Purcell Mozley and reviews her performance, is also her uncle, according to bond documents. Lewis’ wife also sits on the board of a separate entity that oversees the district, according to Faith Family Academy’s tax filings.

Lewis and his wife did not respond to requests for comment.

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Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Texas

Sacramento: How Could a Charter School Misuse $180 Million in Two Years?

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2025 //
6

Diana Lambert of Edsource reported that Jonathan Raymond, the former Superintendent of the Sacramento School District, agreed to take over the leadership of a “troubled” charter school called Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools. The school enrolls adults, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants.

Wow, was it ever troubled!

Good for Raymond for taking on the challenge of fixing the school! The first thing he did was to dismiss the entire board.

The school owes the state $180 million dollars for money it should not have received or misspent. Most of the teachers were unqualified or were hired because they were friends or family of board members.

And on and on, demonstrating the need for the Legislature to establish oversight and accountability for charter schools, which the California Charter Schools Association has opposed for years.

Lambert wrote:

Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools opened in Sacramento in 2014 with high ideals — to help adult students, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants, to earn a diploma, improve English language skills, or learn a trade. 

Now, the school is one reason state legislators are considering increased charter school oversight.

The charter school has been the subject of investigations and critical news reports since shortly after it opened its first campus. But, instead of increased oversight, the school was allowed to expand to more than 50 sites with 13,700 students and a budget of $195 million.

WHAT THE AUDIT FOUND
  • Twin Rivers and other organizations did not provide adequate oversight.
  • Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools received more than $180 million in K-12 funds it was not eligible to collect and must now repay.
  • Graduation rates were so low they brought down the state’s graduation rate by half a percentage point.
  • Charter school leaders wasted taxpayer dollars on gifts and trips.
  • School leaders hired friends and family for jobs they weren’t qualified to hold.
  • Most teachers did not have the appropriate credentials to teach K-12 classes.

It wasn’t until the California State Auditor’s Office released a report in June, commissioned by state legislators, that the level of impropriety at the school became apparent.

The 80-page state audit found that the adult school received $180 million of K-12 funding for which it was not eligible, assigned teachers to classes they were not credentialed to teach, and avoided standardized testing by eliminating the 11th grade. 

The audit also found that school leaders spent $1.96 million on a three-day trip for staff to San Diego for professional development, $80,000 on a leadership conference in Maui, $33,000 a month to lease a semi-professional ballpark, and more than $145,000 on gifts for students.

“The Highlands audit has underscored for us the need for greater accountability on the part of charter authorizers of all sizes, to conduct more thorough oversight that is not solely reliant upon a charter school’s annual audit or a charter school’s assertions,” said Cassie Mancini, legislative advocate for the California School Employees Association at a state Senate hearing on Assembly Bill 84, a charter oversight bill, in July.

Legislators, charter school advocates and charter school authorizers have been working to revise two competing charter school bills with the goal of merging them into one. 

Adult charter gets K-12 funds

Many of the problems the audit found at Highlands Community Charter seem to stem from how the school leaders interpreted the rules around a unique federal program that allows adult charter schools, working in partnership with a Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act agency, to receive K-12 funding, which is significantly higher than adult education funding…

Highlands Community Charter had a graduation rate of 2.8% and its California Innovative Career Academy, or CICA, had a rate of 16.9%. Highlands opened CICA, an independent study school, in 2019…

A large number of underqualified teachers and large class sizes, averaging 51 students per teacher, may have contributed to the poor academic performance of the school’s students, according to the audit. The state has no limit on class sizes in charter high schools.

At the time of the audit, only 53 of the school’s 250 teachers had a K-12 credential, said Bill McGuire, who served as executive director of the school during the year of the audit. He blamed the lack of appropriately credentialed teachers on inaccurate information from credentialing officials.

The charter school owes $180 million to the state. It’s asking for some sort of write-off since the money is gone. The authorizer, Twin Rivers, collected $12.9 million in fees but didn’t seem to oversee much.

A scam? An error? A rip-off? Call it what you will. California and every other state needs to establish meaningful oversight and accountability for charter schools. A huge amount of money was spent since the school(s) opened in 2014, and very few people were educated.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, California, Charter Schools, Funding

New Hampshire: Governor Selects Nonpartisan Bureaucrat as Superintendent

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2025 //
5

Former Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire made a horrible choice for state school superintendent. He picked Frank Edelblut, after beating him in the election. Edelblut is a homeschooler of his 10 children with a low opinion of public schools. He successfully promoted vouchers and every other kind of school choice. He didn’t see the point of public schools.

The overwhelming majority of students in New Hampshire attend public schools. As soon as vouchers passed, most of them were used by families whose children never attended public schools. In other words, the state is spending many millions of dollars to subsidize the tuition of students already enrolled in private schools, whose families could afford the tuition.

Sununu was replaced by Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte. She did not reappoint Edelblut. Instead, she selected Caitlin Davis, a 15-year veteran of the state Department of Education. The selection of Davis was cheered by members of both parties, as well as the teachers’ union, no doubt thrilled to be rid of Edelblut.

Unlike Edelblut, she is unlikely to attack public schools but will collaborate with all sectors.

Davis, who most recently served as the director of education analytics and resources, had worked in the department for 15 years. She built a reputation as a neutral, data-driven financial expert, often sitting before lawmakers on the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee or Finance Committee to brief them on complicated budget spreadsheets. And she vowed to lead the department as a nonpartisan executive, carrying out both lawmakers’ and the governor’s policies without injecting her own politics…

In seeking the job, Davis styled herself as an experienced administrator. Near the start of a multi-hour confirmation hearing Tuesday, Executive Councilor Joseph Kenney, a Wakefield Republican, asked Davis whether she considered herself a “passionate educator” or a “passionate bureaucrat.”

“I suppose I’m a passionate bureaucrat, but I don’t like the term bureaucrat,” Davis replied. “… When you use the term bureaucrat, I think you take away all of the effort that state employees and the legislators and the citizens are putting into the system.”

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Categories Administrators, superintendents, Home Schooling, New Hampshire, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Trump Strips Protection from 58 Million Acres of Wilderness

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2025 //
32

Henry David Thoreau wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau understood that as humans we need to be nourished by contact with or immersion in the natural world. Environmentalists understand this. They fight the inexorable march of what we call progress, which clear-cuts forest and paves over what once were boundless plains. Today, most of us get into a car and drive for hours to connect to wilderness. And we find solace in those encounters.

Most presidents take pride in the number of acres of wilderness that they have saved for future generations and the number of national monuments they designated to preserve unique natural formations. Not Trump. Trump has been openly hostile to environmental protection and to any measures that reduce the risks of climate change.

Yesterday the administration announced that it was opening up 58 million acres for commercial development.

Lisa Friedman wrote in The New York Times:

The Trump administration said on Monday that it would open up 58 million acres of back country in national forests to road construction and development, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to repeal the 2001 “roadless rule” that had preserved the wild nature of nearly a third of the land in national forests in the United States. Ms. Rollins said the regulation was outdated.

“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common-sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule,” Ms. Rollins said in a statement. She said the repeal “opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests.”

Environmental groups said the plan could destroy some of America’s untouched landscapes and promised to challenge it in court.

The unspoiled land in question includes Tongass National Forest in Alaska, North America’s largest temperate rainforest; Reddish Knob in the Shenandoah Mountains, one of the highest points in Virginia; and millions of acres of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho.

“Most Americans value these pristine backcountry areas for their sense of wildness, for the clean water they provide, for the fishing and hunting and wildlife habitat,” said Chris Wood, the chief executive of Trout Unlimited, an environmental group.

Businesses are eager to chop down the timber. There’s profit in those untouched forests, maybe even tracts for homes. The word “pristine” in not in their vocabulary.

Tags
Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Alabama, Albuquerque, Cruelty, Deregulation, Disruption, Environment, Extremism

Texas: State Agency Clears Mike Miles of Charges

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2024 //
3

Several months ago, Texas journalists reported that millions of dollars were transferred from charter school accounts in Texas to charter school accounts in Colorado. Their stories said that Houston superintendent Mike Miles was bolstering the finances of one of his Colorado charter schools.

Miles was appointed as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District as part of a hostile state takeover of HISD. State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath was installed by Governor Greg Abbott, and Morath imposed Miles on HISD.

When Miles came under fire for financial irregularities, the state investigated. Who is the state? Mike Morath, the same guy who appointed Miles.

Guess what? The state report cleared Mikes.

Are you surprised?

The Texas Tribune reported today:

The Texas Education Agency has cleared acting Houston school district Superintendent Mike Miles of wrongdoing after he was accused of improperly diverting millions of dollars in state funds to his Colorado charter school system.

After reporting from Spectrum News and The Texas Observer prompted calls for an investigation earlier this year, the education agency concluded on Tuesday that neither Miles — who the agency picked to lead the state’s largest school district last year — nor his charter school network, Third Future Schools, “violated any applicable Texas laws,” according to the 29-page investigation report.

The investigation found, in part, that checks directed from a partnering Texas school district to Third Future Schools’ Colorado address went there because the Colorado location handles accounting services for the network’s Texas branch, which is run independently. But, the checks were eventually deposited in the Texas branch’s bank account.

“Based on the evidence obtained and analyzed during the investigation, there is no merit to the allegations contained in the media reports that state funds were being inappropriately diverted from public school students in Texas,” the report notes.

The agency is closing the investigation, and “no further action will be taken” at this time, the report says.

In an email sent to the Houston school district community on Tuesday, Miles called the earlier reporting “a baseless distraction and an attempt to undermine and discredit the good work happening” in the schools.

“Now we can do what we always do and move forward on behalf of our students,” Miles said.

Earlier this year, Spectrum News reported that the Texas branch of Third Future Schools — which receives funding from multiple Texas school districts to run campuses in the state — was potentially using public funds from its school in Odessa to offset financial losses at a sister school in Colorado.

The Texas Observer later reported that it had identified “additional irregularities” related to the disclosure of expenses by the charter network.

Miles denied wrongdoing and accused the previous reporting of mischaracterizing “common place financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them” and welcomed an investigation into the network’s activities.

The state’s investigators agreed with Miles, saying they found no evidence that Texas school districts deposited funds into the bank account of Third Future Schools in Colorado. Third Future Schools-Texas reimburses the Colorado location for administrative services it provides to all of the charter network, the report says.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Houston, State Takeover, Texas

Arizona: Is the State Education Chief Incompetent…Or Worse?

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2024 //
4

EJ Montini of the Arizona Republic thinks something is not quite right with Arizona’s State Superintendent of Education Tom Horne. He rejects federal funding for poor kids and promotes rightwing groups and theories. He explains:

I’m not yet prepared to call Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne incompetent, though I’d have to admit, he’s recently made a very good case for himself.

The Arizona Republic’s Nick Sullivan outlined in a blow-by-blow article the misrepresentations Horne made while trying to explain to state lawmakers what could have been the loss of millions of Title I federal dollars meant for schools that serve low-income households.

For example, Horne told lawmakers that a deadline for allocating the money had expired. The U.S. Department of Education said such a deadline does not exist.

His administration said there was no possibility of receiving a deadline waiver. The Republic contacted the feds, who, in turn, told Horne’s people it was not too late, and a waiver was subsequently granted.

It goes on. One bumbling bit of misinformation after the next.

All of which would be easy – and even logical – to write off as incompetence, were it not for some of the other things Horne has done.

A lawsuit on accountability Horne wants the state to lose

Most recently, for example, his department was sued by The Goldwater Institute after Attorney General Kris Mayes cracked down on ridiculous purchases being made by people collecting Empowerment Scholarship Account money.

Taxpayer money. Your money.

ESA recipients were buying stuff like $1,000-plus Lego sets, pianos, luxury car driving lessons, ski resort passes and much more.

Given that, new rules came into play requiring school voucher recipients to actually justify their expenses.

The parents suing with Goldwater’s help called such demands “bureaucratic hoops” and “arbitrary paperwork,” instead of, you know, common sense.

Meantime, Horne said he wants the state to lose the lawsuit. Really.

A nonprofit that teaches kids the ‘softer side’ of slavery

You might also recall how, a while back, Horne opened up the education department’s website to lessons from PragerU, an kooky, extremist nonprofit claiming to be an alternative to “dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media and education.”

About this Horne said, “It’s alright for teachers to teach controversial views as long as both sides are presented, and the problem we’ve had is in some classes, only the extreme left side has been presented, so these present an alternative.”

An alternative? One PragerU video shows an animated Christopher Columbus presenting the softer side of slavery, saying, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.”

Neither does Horne. Which is a problem.

A group that promotes book bans and quoted Hitler

Just as it was a problem when Horne spoke before a group of East Valley supporters of Moms for Liberty, a right-wing operation out of Florida that believes “liberty” involves book banning, victimizing LGBTQ children, suppressing accurate American history and more.

The group has as one of its goals filling school boards with like-minded individuals and Horne pledged to join them in their effort, saying, “That’s going to be my main occupation for 2024.”

A pledge he made even after the group got national attention when the leader of a chapter in Indiana published a newsletter for members that prominently displayed a quote attributed to Adolf Hitler: “He alone who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

Horne is an intelligent man. His official government profile proudly notes that he “graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard College and with honors from Harvard Law School.” And that he is a “classical pianist who has soloed with local orchestras” and has “taught legal writing at ASU Law School.”

All of that argues against the notion that Horne is incompetent. In fact, it seems to suggest just the opposite. Something much worse.

He does this stuff on purpose.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Arizona, Cruelty, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Funding
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