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The Biggest Liar in Texas

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
3

Michelle H. Davis writes a blog called “Lone Star Left,” where she chronicles the usually corrupt politics of Texas. In this post, she eviscerates Governor Abbott, who loves to brag about the economic success of his state. She calls him out for ignoring the people who are nott part of the state’s prosperity.

She writes:

Today, our feckless leader gave a State-of-the-State Address at the Baylor Club in Waco. Now, if you didn’t know, the Baylor Club is a prestigious private social club nestled within McLane Stadium, offering floor-to-ceiling panoramic views of the stadium, downtown Waco, and the Brazos River.

While many Texans are choosing between groceries and insulin, Abbott delivers big promises from an elite club perched over McLane Stadium. That should tell you all you need to know. 

It was about an hour long, so I watched it for you. Below, I’ve broken down everything he said and what he conveniently left out. 

He began the speech by bragging about having dinner with Governor Glenn Youngkin and then told him that Texas’ budget for building roads was $146 billion. He claimed Youngkin dropped his spoon, saying it was bigger than Virginia’s entire budget. He went on to say that Texas had the “largest road building fund in America.” 

It’s only partly true. According to TXDOT’s 10-year plan, we have allocated about $101.6 billion for projects and $45 billion for maintenance. But this road-building bonanza feels stupid without high-speed trains. Seriously, what are we doing? 

Trains would alleviate traffic, carbon emissions, congestion, and get us from Dallas to Houston in just 90 minutes. It’s faster and greener than driving, but we’re investing all our money in roads? 

Modern marvel, or not, no one likes this shit: 

But Republicans do it all for the fossil fuel industry. 

In related news, ConocoPhillips, headquartered in Houston, plans to lay off 25% of its global workforce. 

Then, he stoked the bigwigs in Waco for a little bit. 

Abbott discussed Waco’s significant economic success, noting its high job numbers and record-low unemployment. 

The unemployment rate in Waco in July was 4.1. In DFW, it was 4.0. In the Austin area, it was 3.5. So, really, it’s comparable to Texas. 

What he failed to mention at this invite-only event was that the poverty rate in Waco is about 24.3%, nearly double the state’s average. Or that in some neighborhoods in Waco, it’s as high as 38%. Meanwhile, 57% of Black children in Waco live below the poverty line.

And that’s the optics, right there. While Abbott spoke from his panoramic perch, over half of Waco’s Black children struggle to make ends meet. This is the story of what Texas has become under Republican control. 

It wouldn’t be a boastful Abbott speech if he didn’t brag about Texas’ economy. 

He always does this. 

Texas is the #1 state for doing business.

Texas is the #1 state for economic projects.

Texas is the #1 state for economic development.

Texas is the #1 state for exports.

Texas has a GDP $2.7 trillion.

But he never talks about how we’re the worst for basic health. Or how we have the most uninsured adults in America. Texas sits 43rd for overall child well-being. And 22% of Texas kids are hungry. In fact, over 5 million Texans don’t know where their next meal is coming from. He also forgot to mention that there’s a housing insecurity crisis, and that Texas cities rank the worst for air quality.

They wine and dine behind glass walls and chandeliers, as Abbott brags to the wealthy. The Baylor Club is a fortress of privilege where the powerful toast each other on gold plates, high above the city streets. 

Down below, children go to bed hungry, their bellies gnawing at them while Abbott gloats about GDP. Senior citizens, the same ones who built this state with their hands and backs, are being taxed out of their homes, cast onto the streets, the newest members of the unsheltered community.

How could you hear that and not burn with anger?…

Then, Abbott told the biggest, most monstrous lie of them all. 

I had to clip this 30-second video for you to see it. Otherwise, you might not believe a whopper this big. 

Abbott claimed that since the 2021 storm (Uri), they have bolstered the Texas electric grid, and it has remained perfect. He went on to say that since 2021, no Texan has lost power due to a deficiency in the grid. 

This is flat-out false. This is such a fucking stupid lie, do I even need to fact-check it? 

Ask the 2.3 million CenterPoint customers in Houston who lost power for over a week after Hurricane Beryl in July 2024. Or the nearly 1 million Texans left in the dark by the Houston derecho just two months earlier in May 2024. Families sweltered in the heat, elderly neighbors died waiting for oxygen refills, and Abbott wants to call that a “perfect” grid?

What he’s really doing is splitting hairs. ERCOT didn’t order rolling blackouts in those disasters. The distribution system collapsed. In other words, the wires and poles failed instead of the generators. But tell that to the family sitting in the dark with spoiled food and no air conditioning. To everyday Texans, it doesn’t matter whether it’s ERCOT or CenterPoint. The lights are off, the fridge is warm, and the Governor is lying.

This isn’t a story of resilience. It’s a story of deregulation, neglect, and profit over people.

Abbott claimed the Legislature made a “generational investment” in water. 

Also, bullshit. We talked about this in June: Did the 89th Legislature Address Texas’ Water Problems?

Voters will decide in November whether or not we make that investment, which will not be nearly enough money to cover the extent of Texas’ water problems, but it’s a start. 

Abbott claimed that they prioritized small businesses with the new “DOGE law.” A spin if there ever was one. It’s a new bureaucratic agency added to the Governor’s office, which will look for “ways to make regulations more effective, streamline the regulatory process, reduce department costs, and increase public access to regulatory information.”

If you followed along with Lone Star Left during the weeks where we watched the Texas budget hearings, you may remember that every Texas agency is running on outdated computer systems (if they aren’t still using paper), they are all understaffed, they are in buildings that are falling apart, and most government employees aren’t even making a livable wage. 

Republicans have already run every inch of this state into the ground, and the idea that they are going to use a new government agency to run it into the ground even further is ludicrous. 

Running our state agencies in such an inefficient, broken-down way doesn’t save money. It raises costs. Outdated systems, paper records, and skeleton crews result in Texans waiting longer for services, errors piling up, and agencies paying more in overtime and contract work to keep the lights on.

Republicans are really bad at governing. 

The human toll is brutal. Employment turnover in some state agencies runs as high as 50%. Think about that, half the workforce gone, year after year. When you’re constantly training new people instead of keeping experienced staff, services collapse. And nowhere is this clearer than in our Health and Human Services agencies.

These are the people who process Medicaid applications, SNAP benefits, and health services for children and seniors. Understaffed offices and burned-out employees mean months-long backlogs. Families in crisis are told to wait for food assistance. Elderly Texans often lack home health care due to a shortage of caseworkers. Disabled children get lost in the system while Abbott’s donors laugh from the Baylor Club balcony.

This is intentional sabotage. Republicans have hollowed out the very agencies that keep Texans alive. Then they use the dysfunction as an excuse to privatize more, deregulate more, and funnel more contracts to their cronies. The suffering of everyday Texans is the plan.

Governor Abbott said the Texas Legislature fully funded public schools. 

The basic allotment (the base per-student funding) sat at $6,160 from 2019 through 2024. 2025’s package adds $8.5B with strings and only a modest BA bump debated (far short of inflation, per district leaders). Many districts still report deficits and cuts. “Fully funded” is another flat-out lie.

But when your audience is a bunch of wealthy CEOs who paid $2,000 a plate to get in to hear you speak, lies like that don’t matter. Surely all of those CEOs are sending their kids to private school, on the taxpayer’s dime, with the shiny new vouchers Mr. Let-Them-Eat-Cake got for all his wealthy donors. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to vote this motherfucker out. 

Every year he lies a little bigger, every year he sells us out a little deeper, and every year the gap between those sipping cocktails at the Baylor Club and those wondering how to feed their kids grows wider.

The truth is, the wealth inequality in Texas right now is more drastic than the wealth inequality in France shortly before their revolution. You know what happened then.

And I’ll leave you with this, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 

“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”

So let’s be ready. Let’s be angry. And let’s be organized. Because November 2026 is coming, and it’s time to flip this state.

Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Texas, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider Reviews A Powerful New Book

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2025 //
8

Mercedes Schneider reviews Kristen Buras’ new book about a Black high school that was closed against the wishes of the community it served. The book is What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press). Buras describes a school whose teachers went beyond the call of duty to help their students. If you care about education, if you care about social justice, you should read this book. I did not post the review in full, so please open the link to finish reading.

Mercedes Schneider writes:

I was born in 1967 in Chalmette, Louisiana (St. Bernard Parish), a suburb of New Orleans so close to the city that is is the actual site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.

I did not know that my father moved to Chalmette in the mid-1950s as part of the “white flight” from New Orleans. 

I did not know why the St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line was so starkly white on the St. Bernard side and black on the Orleans side.

I did not know that the black teachers at my all-white elementary and middle schools were part of an effort for local officials to dodge federal mandates to racially integrate the schools (as in integrating the student body).

(I do remember seeing what I think was one black student in the special education, self-contained classroom of my elementary school– such an unusual, remarkable event that it puzzled my young mind to see him as a student assistant in the cafeteria, and the moment remains clearly in my memory to this day.)

I did not know that when I moved to a more rural section of St. Bernard Parish as I started high school that the African-American residents “down the road” knew full well of the dangers of trying to reside in certain sections of the parish (namely, Chalmette and Arabi).

I did not know that the school-superintendent uncle of one of my favorite teachers tried circa 1961 to create an “annex school” near the Arabi-New Orleans city line in order to enable white parents in the city to avoid racial integration by using school vouchers from New Orleans to enroll their children in an all-white public school just across the parish line.

I did not know that the proliferation of parochial schools in New Orleans was fueled by white flight from the New Orleans public schools.

I did not know that the reason I attended an all-girls public middle- and high school was for local officials to try to sham-integrate the St. Bernard public schools but to keep “those black boys away from our white girls.”

There’s a lot that I did not know and did not begin to learn until I was in my twenties and started asking questions.

But there were a lot of lessons that many white adults in my life tried to instill in me, lessons that indeed needed some serious questioning:

“You know property values will drop if the blacks start moving into a neighborhood.”

“It is better for a white woman to have a physically-abusive white boyfriend or husband than a black one, even if he does treat her well.”

“Interracial marriage is cause for a family disowning a child.”

“The city is a wreck because blacks are lazy and destroy everything.”

As I began reading about New Orleans officials’ cross-generational efforts to obliterate the black middle class in New Orleans (by, for example, by destroying multiple black owned businesses in order to build both the Desire housing project in 1956 and construct Interstate 10 in 1966), I felt like I had been lied to for decades– and my views as a white child and young adult repeatedly manipulated in order to purposely cement in me a sense of white superiority that no amount of personal maturity would ever shake.

Nevertheless, I am happy to say that such twisted, misplaced superiority is indeed and forever shaken in me and shown to be the mammoth lie that it is– the very lie that happens to fuel the white saviors who would impose themselves on black communities– including the center of the community:

The community school.

The community should be the final word on its schools, and when it is, those schools are successful, even in the face of racially-imposed hardship and intentional, multi-generational deprivation of basic resources, including physical space, current textbooks, and even ready supplies of toilet paper. 

Such is the story of George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans– a school created as part of a school complex and housing project and build in New Orleans, Louisiana, to intentionally be a segregated school despite its opening post-Brown vs. Board of Education.

In her book, What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press), Dr. Kristen Buras offers to readers a detailed history and daily life of G. W. Carver High School in New Orleans, from its inception to its white-savior closure in 2005, post-Katrina, when the state of Louisiana refused to grant the returning Carver community a charter to operate their own school. Buras details what no pro-charter, education reformer discussed at any length as regards traditionally-black New Orleans public schools: the repeated, intentional, multi-generational, systematic fiscal neglect of both the schools and the black community in New Orleans.

In contrast, Buras not only discusses these issues; she brings them to life through her numerous interviews with Carver faculty and staff, a life that begins even before Carver High School opened its doors in the 1958-59 school year.

Right out of the gate, the community served by Carver High School– families residing in the Desire Housing Project– had to face the reality that the project homes were poorly constructed and were starting to fall apart due to a lack of concrete foundations on swampland, no less.

Indeed, the location of what was known as the “Carver Complex” was originally a Maroon colony for escaped African slaves in a backswamp area that 1973 Carver graduate describes as “really not made for residential living.”

Separate was not equal, but to the Carver community, it was theirs, and in the midst of profound racism, the faculty and staff at Carver High devoted themselves to their students and the students’ families, who also happened to be their neighbors.

What speaks loudly to the teacher commitment to Carver High students, as Buras notes, is their multi-decade commitment. Despite being chronically underfunded and under-maintained across its almost-fifty years pre-Katrina, Carver High School had a very low teacher turnover.

In What We Stand to Lose, readers are introduced to the precise and disciplined teachings of music teacher Yvonne Busch, who was known for offering free music lessons during summer break. Former student Leonard Smith produced a documentary about Busch, who retired in 1983 after a 32-years at Carver. We learn of the 38-year career of social studies teacher, Lenora Condoll, who wanted so much for her students to experience the larger world that she organized fundraisers to take her students on Close-Up trips to Washington, DC, and who, on a practical note, showed students that they could make a dressy wardrobe out of a few basic items, including her “black, cashmere skirt.” We meet Enos Hicks, head coach of track and football and athletic director once Carver High opened. By that time, Hicks had been teaching for twenty years already. When Hicks’ students saw “his bag of medals” for track and field, they believed that they, too, could excel and receive their own medals.

These are real teachers whose legacy is undeniable among Carver alumni. They inspired their students to hold their heads high in self-respect despite the cultural pressures and dangers to be pressed into a Whites Only mold of “forever less-than.”

Carver High School was at most 30 minutes from my own high school. I had no idea such quality against the odds was so nearby.

To continue reading the review, open the link.

Categories Bigotry, Closing schools, Creativity, Cruelty, Disruption, History, Injustice, Lies, Louisiana, New Orleans, Racism, Teachers

DOJ Lawyer Accused Harvard of “Indifference to Anti-Semitism.” As an Undergraduate, He Wrote a Paper from Hitler’s View

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2025 //
3

The Boston Globe reported a startling story. Michael Velchik, the lawyer leading the charge against Harvard University for alleged “anti-semitism,” wrote a paper from Hitler’s perspective when he was an undergraduate at Harvard.

Hilary Burns and Tal Koran wrote:

The cornerstone of the Trump administration’s justification for cracking down on Harvard University is that the Ivy League school has allegedly allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.

“The choice was made, let’s not give federal taxpayer dollars to institutions that exhibit a wanton indifference to antisemitism,” the lawyer defending the government’s case said in federal court in July.

Inside the war on Harvard

Yet that lawyer, Michael Velchik, when he was a senior at Harvard 14 years ago, submitted a paper for a Latin class written from the perspective of Adolf Hitler, according to three people studying in the department with knowledge of the incident. The assignment was to write from the perspective of a controversial figure, but Velchik’s choice of Hitler so unnerved the instructor that he was asked to redo the assignment.

And in an email to a peer about 18 months later, as he was preparing to enter law school, Velchik wrote that he‘d enjoyed Hitler’s autobiography and political manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” more than any other book he’d read recently during a year of travels, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by The Boston Globe. He did not mention Hitler’s perpetration of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered. 

Velchik — who holds two degrees from Harvard, one from the college and one from the law school — was the sole lawyer arguing the case for the White House in July. The portrait that emerges from interviews with students who knew him at Harvard, colleagues, and friends, as well as from emails he sent to a peer in his early 20s, is of a young man who is extremely intelligent, at times provocative, and unapologetically confident in his intellectual prowess.

To finish the story, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Higher Education, Hypocrisy

Justice Department Pursues Personal Data on Trans Individuals

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2025 //
2

Forget the economy. Forget inflation. Forget the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. What really animates the sick and sorry Trump administration is medical care for transgender youth. Now, there is an issue that involves the peace and prosperity of the nation–NOT!

My view: it’s none of my business. Issues like abortion and trans rights should be decided among patients, families, and doctors. Not by politicians. Not by me.

The Justice Department is harassing providers of care for young people who are transgender and demanding their personal data.

The Washington Post reported:

The Justice Department is demanding that hospitals turn over a wide range of sensitive information related to medical care for young transgender patients, including billing documents, communication with drug manufacturers and data such as patient dates of birth, Social Security numbers and addresses, according to a copy of a subpoena made public in a court filing this week.

The June subpoena to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia requests emails, Zoom recordings, “every writing or record of whatever type” doctors have made, voicemails and text messages on encrypted platforms dating to January 2020 — before hormone therapy, puberty blockers and gender transition surgery had been banned anywhere in the United States.

About half of states have since passed laws prohibiting all or most gender treatment of minors. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a Tennessee ban did not violate the Constitution.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said last month that the Justice Department had issued more than 20 subpoenas seeking to hold “medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology” accountable. It is highly unusual for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to announce such legal activity. Bondi did not identify who received the subpoenas, what information the government sought or what potential law violations it is investigating.

According to seven people familiar with the subpoenas, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution, the subpoenas targeted care for patients younger than 19 and went to providers in states that still allow gender care for minors, as well as states where it has been banned. The subpoena, as well as public statements by Bondi’s chief of staff, indicate the federal government is attempting to build cases against medical providers that allege they may have violated civil and criminal statutes while providing care that was legal in their states.

Jacob T. Elberg, a former federal prosecutor specializing in health care fraud, said Bondi’s statement suggests the government “is using its investigative powers to target medical providers based on a disagreement about medical treatment rather than violations of the law.”

Elberg, now a law professor at the Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law at Seton Hall University, said that the subpoena itself is not wildly broad for a health-care-fraud case. But he noted that under a federal privacy law, the Justice Department must show that any information it demands on patient identities is relevant to a legitimate law enforcement probe.

Categories Bigotry, Evil, Extremism, Gender, Health, Justice, Science, Trump

Mississippi: Federal Judge Enjoins State Ban on DEI

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2025 //
7

I am reposting this news because the earlier version did not have a link. I added additional information about the decision and the Judge.

This decision blocks all efforts to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the state of Mississippi. If ever there was a state that needs DEI to heal from the burden of a racist history, it’s Mississippi.

The Mississippi Free Press reported that Federal District Judge Henry Wingate blocked the implementation of the state’s ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public schools.

Mississippi’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools remains blocked after a federal judge granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction in an Aug. 18 decision.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi also denied the defendants’ requests to dismiss the case, calling the defendants’ points “moot.”

“This Court generally agrees with Plaintiffs’ view of the challenged portions of (House Bill 1193).

It is unconstitutionally vague, fails to treat speech in a viewpoint-neutral manner, and carries with it serious risks of terrible consequences with respect to the chilling of expression and academic freedom,” U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate wrote in the Court’s decision.

The law, which the Mississippi Legislature approved and Gov. Tate Reeves signed in April, prohibits Mississippi public schools and institutions of higher learning from teaching, creating or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The Republican-backed law also bans schools from requiring diversity statements or training during hiring, admission and employment processes in educational institutions.

Public institutions are also not allowed to teach or “endorse divisive concepts or concepts promoting transgender ideology, gender-neutral pronouns, deconstruction of heteronormativity, gender theory (or) sexual privilege,” the law says.

H.B. 1193 would prohibit public schools from requiring diversity statements or training in hiring, admission and employment processes at educational institutions.

Preliminary injunctions are dependent upon four qualities: “a substantial likelihood of success on the merits; the irreparable injury to the movants if the injunction is denied; whether the threatened injury outweighs any damage that the injunction might cause the defendant; and the public interest.”

Wingate Highlights Threat to Academic Freedom

Judge Wingate also granted the plaintiffs’ request to add class action claims to the lawsuit, meaning the injunction will apply to teachers, professors and students across the state. The plaintiffs’ lawyers sought the addition after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June limited the ability of federal judges to grant sweeping injunctions.

Judge Wingate was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa and received his law degree from Yale Law School. He was appointed as a federal district judge by President Ronald Reagan.

Justice Henry Wingate
Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Justice, Mississippi

Trump Regime Begins to Cancel Bilingual Education

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2025 //
17

The far-right has always hated bilingual education. They think everyone should speak English, and those who don’t should be deported.

The Trump administration is setting the stage to eliminate bilingual education. This move is of a piece with their plan to deport millions of hard-working, honest immigrants who strengthen the economy.

Their goal is to restore a nation that is dominated by white straight Christian men, with a few white Christian women like Pam Bondi in leadership roles, and to banish any programs that help people improve their lot. That’s what MAGA means: a return to the “good old days” when power was in the hands of people like Trump.

The Washington Post reported:

The Trump administration has quietly rescinded long-standing guidance that directed schools to accommodate students who are learning English, alarming advocates who fear that schools will stop offering assistance if the federal government quits enforcing the laws that require it.

The rescission, confirmed by the Education Department on Tuesday, is one of several moves by the administration to scale back support for approximately 5 million schoolchildren not fluent in English, many of them born in the United States. It is also among the first steps in a broader push by the Trump administration to remove multilingual services from federal agencies across the board, an effort the Justice Department has ramped up in recent weeks.

The moves are an acceleration of President Donald Trump’s March 1 order declaring English the country’s “official language,” and they come as the administration is broadly targeting immigrants through its deportation campaign and other policy changes. The Justice Department sent a memorandum to all federal agencies last month directing them to follow Trump’s executive order, including by rescinding guidance related to rules about English-language learners.

Since March, the Education Department has also laid off nearly all workers in its Office of English Language Acquisition and has asked Congress to terminate funding for the federal program that helps pay for educating English-language learners. Last week, education advocates noticed that the guidance document related to English learning had a new label indicating it was rescinded and remains online “for historical purposes only.”

On Tuesday, Education Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said that the guidance for teaching English learners, which was originally set forth in 2015, was rescinded because it “is not in line with Administration policy.” A Justice Department spokesman responded to questions by sending a link to the July memorandum and said he had no comment when asked whether the guidance would be replaced.

For decades, the federal government has held that failing to provide resources for people not proficient in English constitutes discrimination based on national origin under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

In rescinding the guidance, the Trump administration is signaling that it may stop enforcing the law under that long-standing interpretation. The Education and Justice departments have been responsible for enforcing the law….

“The Department of Education and the Department of Justice are walking away from 55 years of legal understanding and enforcement. I don’t think we can understate how important that is,” said Michael Pillera, an attorney who worked at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights for 10 years and now directs the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Without pressure from the federal government to comply with the law, it is possible that some school districts will drop services, Pillera said, particularly as many districts struggle with financial pressures.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Immigration, Language, Literacy, Trump

Peter Greene: Why Is it Controversial to Welcome Everyone in a Public School Classroom?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2025 //
10

In this post, Peter Greene continues his coverage of a teacher in West Ada, Idaho, who got into trouble for putting up a poster that showed different colored hands in the air and said “Everyone is Welcome Here.” District leaders said the poster was unwelcome because it violated federal guidelines that banished DEI, and had to be removed. Some didn’t object to the sentiment but objected to the portrayal of nonwhite hands.

Greene wrote:

Sarah Inama has put her poster up in a new classroom.

Inama, you may recall, is the 6th grade world history teacher told by her district bosses at West Ada School District that her “Everyone Is Welcome Here” poster, complete with hands of many human shades, would not be tolerated in the district.  (I’ve been following this here, here, and here). West Ada is the largest district in Idaho, but their treatment of Inama has been spectacularly awful, both from an Awful Display of Racism standpoint, a Grotesque Mistreatment of Staff standpoint, and a Boneheaded PR Management standpoint. 

Inama went to local news and the story blew up, delivering the shame that West Ada so richly deserved. We know a lot more thanks to some stellar reporting by Carly Flandro and the folks at Idaho Ed News, who FOIAed 1200 emails surrounding this and showcasing the board’s stumbling response. You should read the resulting stories (here and here). 

The day after Inama was on the Today show, the district issued a memo entitled “Ensuring a Consistent and Supportive Learning Environment.” They decided to go with sports analogies. The Chief Academic Officer is a like a referee who enforces rules “to ensure a fair and level playing field.” And there’s this howler–

If one player decided to wear a different uniform, use a different-sized ball, or ignore the rules, the game would lose its structure, creating confusion and imbalance.

Then a report from BoiseDev that the Board of Trustees is considering making every teacher put up an “Everyone is welcome” poster– just without those multi-colored hands. Responding to BoiseDev, a district spokesperson explained:

Regarding the Everyone is Welcome Here posters, the district determined that while the phrase itself is broadly positive, certain design elements have been associated over time with political entities and initiatives that are now subject to federal restriction.

Inama told Idaho EdNews, “That’s appeasing not a political view, but a bigoted view that shouldn’t even be considered by a public school district.”

Inama was told the poster was divisive, that it was “not neutral,” that the problem was not the message, but the hands of v arious skin tones. Teachers shouldn’t have political stuff in the classroom. Inama nails the issue here

“I really still don’t understand how it’s a political statement,” she said. “I don’t think the classroom is a place for anyone to push a personal agenda or political agenda of any kind, but we are responsible for first making sure that our students are able to learn in our classroom.”

Some parents and students showed up at school to make chalk drawings in support. And yet many folks within and outside the district saw this as a divisive issue. How could anyone do that? Meet district parent Brittany Bieghler, who was dropping her kids off the day that parents were chalking the “Everyone is welcome here” message on the sidewalks.

“The ‘Everyone is Welcome’ slogan is one filled with marxism and DEI, there is no need for those statements because anyone with a brain knows that everyone is welcome to attend school, so there is no need to have it posted, written or worn on school grounds,” she wrote. “My family and I relocated here from a state that did not align with our beliefs and we expected it to be different here, but it seems as time goes by, its becoming more like our former state, which is extremely disheartening.”

“Anyone with a brain” might begin to suspect that everyone is not welcome here under these circumstances. And the school board itself couldn’t decide what to respond, drafting an assortment of emails that tried to show conciliation to those that were defiant and defensive, including one complaining in MAGA-esque tones that Inama was naughty for going to “new media.”

Imana resigned from her position, and by June the word was out that she was a new hire at Boise Schools. She told Idaho Ed News, 

I’m so grateful to be able to work within a district that knows the beauty of inclusion and diversity and doesn’t for a second consider it an opinion but embraces it. As an educator, it’s an amazing feeling to know your (district’s) officials, board, and administrators fully uphold the fundamentals of public education and (have) the dignity to proudly support them. I really feel at home knowing we are truly all on the same team … and that’s a team that is rooting on all of our students.

Damned straight. And just last week, as reported by KTVB news, Inama posted video of herself putting up an “Everyone is welcome here” poster in her new classroom.

(To see the video, open the link.)

So the story ends well for Inama, and that’s a great thing. This is the sort of boneheaded administrative foolishness that can drive teachers out of the profession. The unfortunate part of the story is that up the road in West Ada schools, the administration, board and a non-zero number of parents think that challenging racism is bad and saying that students of all races are welcome in school is just one person’s opinion that shouldn’t be expressed openly in a school. Shame on West Ada.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Idaho, Ignorance, Racism

Trump Orders Review of Smithsonian Museums to Remove Unpatriotic Exhibits

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
12

The Trump administration has announced plans to review the contents of exhibitions at several Smithsonian institutions. Trump has made clear that he wants all exhibits purged of negative or unpatriotic content. He wants exhibits to show only the positive aspects of American history. This is called censorship. When Trump is gone, the full story of American history will be restored the good, the inspiring but also the dark episodes where people were treated unfairly.

The Washington Post reported::

The White House will launch a sweeping review of Smithsonian exhibitions, collections and operations ahead of America’s 250th-birthday celebrations next year — the first time the Trump administration has detailed steps to scrutinize the institution, which officials say should reflect the president’s call to restore “truth and sanity” to American history.

The vetting process would include reviewing public-facing and online content, curatorial processes and guidelines, exhibition planning and collection use, according to a letter sent to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III on Tuesday and signed by White House senior associate Lindsey Halligan, Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Hale and White House Office of Management and Budget chief Russell Vought.

A White House official confirmed the plan, which was posted on the White House website Tuesday and first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

“The Smithsonian’s work is grounded in a deep commitment to scholarly excellence, rigorous research, and the accurate, factual presentation of history,” a Smithsonian spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday afternoon. “We are reviewing the letter with this commitment in mind and will continue to collaborate constructively with the White House, Congress, and our governing Board of Regents.”

The institution already planned its own content review, ordered by the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents in June amid pressure from President Donald Trump. The regents instructed Bunch “to ensure unbiased content” across the institution and report back on “any needed personnel changes.”

The board at that time affirmed Bunch’s authority amid a high-stakes standoff between the White House and Kim Sajet, whom Trump had attempted to fire as director of the National Portrait Gallery. Sajet later resigned, saying her presence had become a distraction from the Smithsonian’s mission.

It is not immediately clear whether the White House’s action will supersede the Smithsonian’s review.

The letter states that the initial review will focus on eight museums: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

To begin the process, officials requested that the museums provide information within 30 days concerning 250th-anniversary programming, current and future exhibition content, and other material.

The White House added that museums were expected to start making changes within 120 days.

“Museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials,” the letter read.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has moved quickly to overhaul the country’s most prominent arts and cultural institutions. His focus on the Smithsonian has stoked concerns about political interference at the institution, which is not a traditional government agency and is historically considered nonpartisan.
In July, painter Amy Sherald withdrew her upcoming exhibition “American Sublime” from the National Portrait Gallery, citing concerns that the museum discussed removing from the show her painting of a transgender woman posing as the Statue of Liberty. (The Smithsonian said it discussed pairing the work with a video, not removing it.)

That same month, The Washington Post reported that a temporary placard containing references to Trump had been removed from an impeachment exhibit at the National Museum of American History as part of the Smithsonian content review. The museum later updated the display to restore context about Trump’s impeachments following swift outcry from members of the public and several Democratic leaders.

In March, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate “divisive narratives” across the Smithsonian museums and “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”
The order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directs Halligan and Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, History, Trump

John Thompson: Immigrant Children in Oklahoma Live in Fear

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2025 //
4

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes about the cloud of fear that has settled over the schools, as children of immigrant families fear harm to themselves and their families.

Teachers in other districts have reported that the children of immigrant families are not showing up for school. They are afraid that the masked gunmen of ICE might suddenly appear and take them away. School is no longer a safe space.

About John Thompson:

After growing up in Oklahoma City, John Thompson earned a doctorate in American history at Rutgers University and became an award-winning author. He worked as a researcher for the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and as a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood. Thompson is a former award-winning teacher at the former John Marshall High School and Centennial Mid-High School. Now retired, Thompson lives in Oklahoma City.

Thompson writes:

Oklahoma schools find themselves in a challenging position, suddenly caught in the middle of the Trump administration’s push to deport illegal immigrants.

Schools have found themselves at the forefront of immigration debates before, but this feels different.

They face so many more challenges ranging from the threat of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to decreasing attendance rates as families choose to keep their children home to avoid the trauma associated with them. The Trump administration has withheld funding for school programs, including migrant education and services for English language learners. And State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ policies, such as trying to require schools to collect data on the immigration status of students, are further destabilizing our education system.

This isn’t the first time I’ve attended OK Justice Circle’s Breaking Bread panel and group discussions. This panel has met 14 times since 2020 in order to “increase community awareness of the lived experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in Oklahoma City area.”

The latest Breaking Bread topic, which focused on the harm state and federal policies are causing to our state’s Hispanic community, was the most emotional one I’ve ever attended during the last five years.

For instance, as a panelist was leaving for the conference, a student told her that she is studying the Holocaust and could see parallels forming between that horrific event that ultimately resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jewish people and the ramping up of our country’s immigration enforcement efforts.

An elected school board member, who represents a majority Hispanic district, reported receiving death threats.

Another urban district reported seeing an alarming surge in absenteeism.

I heard stories about how students now come to school every day with their birth certificates in their backpacks just in case ICE raids their schools. I can’t remember the last time a child had to prove they were an American citizen while in school.

These raise tough questions about what schools can do to protect the students they’re entrusted to serve.

Schools cannot politicize the issues they deal with, but they can help provide “wrap-around services” like increased access to food and or solutions to housing insecurity. They can also address the physical and mental health issues their students are experiencing. And, they can refer students to nonprofit and public agencies that have support structures.

But those solutions require trust in the law and the procedures that ICE agents are required to follow. It is really difficult to trust the immigration enforcement process right now.

The Trump administration held funding for English language services. I worry that federal leaders could one day try to take it even a step further by denying access to public school to undocumented children.

That would inflict incredible hardships on families and untold amounts damage on our state’s social and economic future.

Fortunately, Rep. Arturo Alonzo-Sandoval, D-Oklahoma City, gave me some reason for hope. Over 20 anti-immigration bills were introduced to the Legislature this year, but only one became law.

Only time will tell if the majority of Oklahomans can find the courage to push back on the policies that are causing immeasurable harm to our Hispanic neighbors.

I often find myself wondering, what would it say about Oklahomans and our integrity if we did not stand up and reject today’s cruelty?

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Freedom to Learn, Oklahoma, Trump

Jennifer Berkshire: A New Path, with Less Opportunity and Less Social Mobility

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
10

Jennifer Berkshire sums up the malicious goals that are embedded in Trump’s One Big Ugly Budget Bill. It will widen the distance between those at the bottom and those at the top. It will reduce the number of students who can pay for graduate degrees. All to assure that the very rich get a a tax break.

While the media may have moved on from the big awful bill that is now the law of the land, I continue to mull over its mess and malice. The single best description I’ve come across of the legislation’s logic comes from the ACLU’s Stefan Smith, who reminds us that the endless culture warring is all a big distraction. The real agenda when you add up all of the elements is “creating more friction for those climbing up the economic ladder in order to ease competition for those already there.” In the future that this legislation entrenches, rich kids will have an even greater advantage over their poor peers, of whom there will be now be many more. Smith calls this “reordering pipelines;” moving the rungs on the ladder further apart or kicking the ladder away works too. However you phrase it, our ugly class chasm just got wider by design.

This is why, for instance, the legislation includes seemingly arbitrary caps on how much aspiring lawyers and doctors can borrow in order to pay for school. By lowering that amount, the GOP just narrowed the pipeline of who can, say, go to med school. As Virginia Caine, president of the National Medical Association, bluntly put it: “Only rich students will survive.” Indeed, college just got more expensive and a lot less accessible for anyone who isn’t a rich student. Meanwhile, cuts to federal Medicaid funding will lead to further cuts in spending on higher education—the sitting ducks of state budgets—meaning higher tuition and fewer faculty and programs at the state schools and community colleges that the vast majority of American students attend. All so that the wealthiest among us can enjoy a tax cut.

This is also the story of the federal school voucher program that has now been foisted upon us. While the final version was an improvement over the egregious tax-shelter-for-wealthy-donors that the school choice lobby wanted, the logic remains the same, as Citizen Stewart pointedly points out:

It’s a redistribution of public dollars upward. And it’s happening at the exact moment many of the same politicians championing school choice are cutting food assistance, slashing Medicaid, gutting student loan relief, and questioning whether children deserve meals at school.

In their coverage of the new program, the education reporters at the New York Times, who’ve been pretty awful on this beat of late, cite a highly-questionable study finding that students who avail themselves a voucher are more likely to go to college. In other words, maybe vouchers aren’t so bad! Except that this sunny view misses the fast-darkening bigger picture: as states divest from the schools that the vast majority of students still attend, the odds of many of those students attending college just got steeper. That’s because as voucher programs balloon in cost, states confront a math problem with no easy answer, namely that there isn’t enough money to fund two parallel education systems. (For the latest on where the money is and isn’t going, check out this eye-opening report from FutureEd.)

Add in the Trump Administration’s decision to withhold some $7 billion from school districts and you can see where this is headed. In fact, when the folks at New America crunched the numbers, they turned up the somewhat surprising finding that the schools that stand to lose the most due to the Trump hatchet are concentrated in red states. Take West Virginia, for example, which is home to 15 of the hardest-hit districts in the land. The state’s public schools must 1) reckon with $30 + million in federal cuts even as 2) a universal voucher program is hoovering up a growing portion of state resources while 3) said resources are shrinking dramatically due to repeated rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest West Virginians. That same dynamic is playing out in other red states too. Florida, which is increasingly straining to pay for vouchers and public schools, just lost $398 million. Texas, where voucher costs are estimated to reach $5 billion by 2030, just lost $738 million. While 28 states are now suing the administration over the funding freeze, no red state has spoken up.

Shrinking chances

On paper, budget cuts can seem bloodless. Part of the Trump Administration’s strategy is to bury the true cost of what’s being lost in acronyms and edu-lingo, trusting that pundits will shrug at the damage. But as states struggle with a rising tide of red ink, what’s lost are the very things that inspire kids to go to school and graduate: extra curriculars, special classes, a favorite teacher, the individualized attention that comes from not being in a class with 35 other kids. That’s why I’ve been heartened to see that even some long-time critics of traditional public schools are now voicing concern over what their destabilization is going to mean for students. Here’s Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, warning that the explosion of vouchers in red states is going to have dire consequences, not just for students in public schools but for the states themselves:

Enrollment loss will likely reduce the quality of schools that will continue to educate most children in the state. States will be left with large numbers of students who are unprepared for college and career success. 

David Osborne, who has been banging the drum for charter schools since the Clinton era, sounds even more worried. 

Over time, as more and more people use vouchers, the education market in Republican states will stratify by income far more than it does today. It will come to resemble any other market: for housing, automobiles or anything else. The affluent will buy schools that are the equivalent of BMWs and Mercedes; the merely comfortable will choose Toyotas and Acuras; the scraping-by middle class will buy Fords and Chevrolets; and the majority, lacking spare cash, will settle for the equivalent of used cars — mostly public schools.

Meanwhile, the billions spent on vouchers will be subtracted from public school budgets, and the political constituency for public education will atrophy, leading to further cuts.

We’ve seen this movie before

Well, maybe not the exact same movie but a similar one. Anybody recall Kansas’ radical experiment in tax cutting? Roughly a decade ago, GOP pols slashed taxes on the wealthiest Kansans and cut the tax rate on some business profits to zero. Alas, the cuts failed to deliver the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. What they did bring was savage cuts in spending on public schools. As school funds dried up, programs were cut, teachers were pink slipped, and class sizes soared, all of which led to a dramatic increase in the number of students who dropped out. Meanwhile, the percentage of high schoolers going to college plunged. 

Young people in the state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward,” argues Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting experiment in Dying of Whiteness. Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans. 

But by taking a chainsaw to the public schools, the GOP also gave rise to a bipartisan parent uprising. And not only were lawmakers forced to reverse the tax cuts and restore funding for schools, but voters, who could see with their own eyes what the cuts had meant for their own kids and kids in their communities, threw the bums out the next time they had a chance. Today we’re watching as a growing number of states, with the aid of the federal government and the ‘big beautiful bill,’ embark on their own version of the Kansas experiment—slashing spending, destabilizing public schools, and limiting what’s possible for kids. They’re betting that red state voters will fall in line, sacrificing their own schools, and even their own kids, to ‘own the libs.’ That’s what the ideologues in Kansas thought too.

As I’ve been arguing in these pages, Trump’s education ‘action items’ represent the least popular parts of his agenda. Eliminating the Department of Education is a loser with voters, while cutting funds to schools fares even worse. The idea of cutting funds in order to further enrich the already rich has exactly one constituency: the rich. As the MAGA coalition begins to fragment and fall apart, we should keep reminding voters of all colors and stripes of this fact.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Cheating, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Economics, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fake, Fake News, Higher Education, Ignorance, Immigration, NPE Action Fund, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice
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