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8-Year-Old Boy Starved and Beaten to Death. His Mother Allegedly Was Home-Schooling Him.

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2026 //
4

This is one of the most horrifying stories of child abuse that I have ever read.

The parents of 8-year-old Isaiah Harrison thought he was too fat. The child was about 200 pounds. They kept him home from school, starved him, beat him, tortured him. When he died, they wrapped him in Saran Wrap and put his body in a freezer. At the time of his death, he weighed 65 pounds.

His mother claimed she was home-schooling him online. County officials and school officials failed to check on his condition.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

Pictures of Isaiah Harrison from 2024 show a bubbly, heavyset boy with a toothy smile and full cheeks.

Isaiah’s aunt, Charlene, said in court this week that her 8-year-old nephew was mischievous, often sneaking food in the middle of the night. He loved Domino’s pizza, video games and cats. Sometimes he would hide snacks in his family’s couch cushions…

By the time Isaiah’s remains were found inside a small freezer in his parents’ bedroom last October, he weighed just 65 pounds, according to L.A. County Deputy Medical Examiner Robin Parks. In 12 months, she estimated, he’d lost two-thirds of his body weight.

Prosecutors allege Isaiah’s rapid weight loss and mounting injuries happened over the course of a year inside a Lynwood apartment, when the boy was rarely seen in public and often kept chained to a piece of furniture, according to testimony delivered this week at a preliminary hearing on murder and torture charges against his parents and grandmother.

How he was able to waste away without anyone — including school officials or the county’s child welfare agency — raising alarms remains an unanswered question….

The boy’s parents — Destiny Harrison and Daniel Monzon, both 25 — and his grandmother Ana Carcamo-Zarceno, 46, were arrested after the boy’s body was found last year. They were held to answer on murder and torture charges Thursday after a four-day preliminary hearing in Compton, and face either life in prison or the death penalty if convicted at trial. They have pleaded not guilty…

Coroner’s records list Isaiah’s cause of death as a bacterial infection resulting from pneumonia, but other significant factors included blunt force trauma injuries and the impacts of long-term restraint. Monzon’s younger sister, who lived in the apartment, told a social worker that the defendants often restrained Isaiah with ropes and chains to prevent him from misbehaving or going into the kitchen for food, according to a videotaped interview played in court.
She said in the recording that it was Carcamo-Zarceno’s idea to withhold meals as a punishment, often denying food over Isaiah’s tearful pleas.
“Please, please I just want something, I’ll do anything,” the hungry 8-year-old boy would beg, according to his sister, whose identity The Times is withholding because she is a juvenile.
Often, his sister said, Isaiah was kept chained up overnight as punishment and left to urinate or defecate on himself. Rather than washing his clothes, Isaiah’s parents would throw them out whenever he soiled himself, according to his sister, who said eventually the boy was left to sleep naked while restrained.
Sheriff’s deputies later recovered a long rope and a black chain in the apartment, authorities have said. Isaiah’s sister testified that the boy was repeatedly punched, kicked and beat with hangers and wires….

The complaint accused L.A. County’s child protective services agency of failing to investigate the home “despite numerous alarming reports of abuse and cruelty.”
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Isaiah’s relatives, also alleges the Lynwood Unified School District failed to investigate his alleged repeated absence from the classroom. Claypool alleged that two family members had told the school that Isaiah was at home and not able to go to school.
“That should have been a massive red flag to Lynwood that something is not right with Isaiah and he might be in danger,” said Claypool, who argued the warnings should have launched an investigation under California law. “Is he going somewhere else? Is there a problem at home? Is he sick or ill? None of that was done here.”
Relatives said Destiny Harrison was home-schooling Isaiah with a computer program. The school district did not respond to a request for comment. An attorney for Lynwood Unified argued in a court filing that the lawsuit failed to specify who within the district had reasonable suspicion of child abuse and would be considered a mandated reporter under the law.

Categories California, Childhood, Evil, Health, Home Schooling, Parents

Why You Should Attend the NPE Conference This Weekend!

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
4

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, explains why this NPE conference will be stellar.

She writes:

A community governs its public schools. Neighbors elect a board, set a budget, and decide what their children learn. That is exactly what privatization threatens, and it is what NPE’s national conference is built to defend. Over two days, September 26–27, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe near Houston, more than 40 sessions take on the fight from every angle. Here’s a taste of what’s on the schedule.

Vouchers and charters. In “Beating Vouchers in Court,” Derek Black, Jessica Levin, Fred Jones Jr., and Sharon Krengel will walk through recent wins in Montana, Utah, and Ohio, where voucher programs were declared unconstitutional. They will also review the live challenges in Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida, and Missouri. In “A View from the Trenches,” two Florida school board members and an Arizona teacher offer a candid account of what universal ESA vouchers have already done to how public education is funded and governed. And a session on the federal tax-credit voucher scheme, set to launch in January 2027, lays out what advocates in opt-in and opt-out states can do right now. 

In “Taxation Without Representation — Using a Conservative Argument to Combat Charter Schools,” Gregory Walace, Alison Chaplar, Betsy Flanagan, Daniel Marcano Jr., and Jennifer Simões will show how that framing sparked a grassroots movement, moved public opinion, and helped drive proposed legislation. “What’s Next for Charter Schools? A Review of Charter Strategies Across State Lines,” Patti Everitt, Gregory Walace, Carol Burris, and Dave DeMatthews lead an interactive look at how charters keep expanding in key states with few guardrails and little public engagement, which national initiatives fund that growth, and the research and messaging advocates can share across state lines to push back.

Takeovers are where democracy gets stolen outright. Houston high schoolers will describe how they organized against the HISD takeover. Parents from Houston (CVPE) and Fort Worth (FORT) share how they are fighting to win their voice back. An Indianapolis panel will dissect the sharpest trick of all — an elected board left in place, but stripped of control over buildings, transportation, and property taxes. “The Struggle to Govern Ourselves” will confront the research showing takeovers overwhelmingly target majority-Black districts, while organizers from New Orleans share hard-won lessons from years on the front lines. And in “The People’s Board,” presenters will take on Student Outcomes Focused Governance, the corporate model quietly sidelining elected members in board after board.

Follow the money. Maurice Cunningham, Mercedes Schneider, Mike DeGuire and David Armiak teach their best techniques for tracing dark-money networks back to the billionaires and foundations bankrolling privatization in two sessions. Other sessions map the private firms profiteering off vouchers and spotlight Wisconsin’s campaign to get voucher and charter costs printed right on taxpayers’ bills. 

The money grabs keep getting more creative. Texas advocates expose SB 1882 “partnership” charters as a fast-track privatization grift. Another panel takes on corporate tax breaks — energy-hungry data centers now the worst offenders — draining billions from schools. And with 17 states cutting or capping property taxes in 2024–25, national and state experts lay out how to defend the local revenue public schools depend on.

Faith, nationalism, and the classroom. Sessions on building school–congregation partnerships and mobilizing faith leaders in hostile states sit alongside a hard look at Christian Nationalism and its playbook for defunding and reshaping public education.

The newest battlegrounds. Randi Weingarten joins experts to debate AI’s role in classrooms — cognition, privacy, mental health, and the environment. A separate panel takes on ed-tech overreach and the lawsuits challenging how it commercializes student data. And student organizers from SEAT share how they’ve carried the fight to school boards, the legislature, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

The skill builder sessions are the reason you will leave with more than notes. Charles Siler, a former Goldwater Institute lobbyist who helped build the privatization playbook before turning on it, joins Manny Garcia to teach what messaging actually moves people. Rachel Coyle and Susan Spicka show how to win over hostile legislators. Others cover new-media strategy, gathering community input at scale, and getting real press traction beyond the press release. 

The keynotes anchor it all: Diane Ravitch and Texas AFT’s Zeph Capo open Saturday; Southern Education Foundation CEO Raymond Pierce speaks at lunch; investigative journalist Katherine Stewart headlines Sunday brunch; and Howard University’s Dean Emerita Leslie Fenwick closes us out.

You’ll meet the students, parents, teachers, clergy, researchers, and organizers who are actually winning in courtrooms, at statehouses, and on ballots. Privatizers have the money. We have the people, the passion and the plan. Register now here, book your room here in the hotel block, and join us in Conroe, Texas, right outside Houston.

I can’t promise that hotel rooms are still open but Carol will help you if you made a terrible mistake and forgot to sign up.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Childhood, Closing schools, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Failure, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Parent Groups, Privatization, Religion, School Choice

Inside the Collapse of a “Montessori Ponzi” Scheme

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2026 //
6

In the new world of school choice, parents have to be savvy shoppers. Opening up K-12 education to all comers, regardless of their background or qualifications, is a risky business. And when the “business” of school is run for profit, parents should beware. They and their children are usually pigeons, drawn in to fatten the founders’ bank account.

Claire Suddath of The New York Times dug deep into the story of a chain that expanded too quickly and became “a $440 million fiasco.”

I attach a gift article so you can read the story in full. It is not behind a paywall.

Suddath wrote:

A man with a vision set out to revolutionize preschool. It became a $440 million fiasco.

Ten years ago, a Montessori enthusiast named Ray Girn had a vision. He wanted to bring high-quality, child-led education to as many babies and toddlers as possible, with a chain of for-profit schools that would grow at the pace of a tech start-up. He spoke about doing for preschools “what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved,” and he raised $335 million from investors, including venture capital and private equity firms, to make it happen.

For a while, Mr. Girn’s schools, which operated under the brand Guidepost Montessori, appeared to be successful, with 150 locations that served tens of thousands of children. But they also ran up an astonishing $440 million in losses. The parent company, Higher Ground Education, filed for bankruptcy in June 2025 and shuttered about 60 schools.

In Oregon, parents received an email notification on a Sunday afternoon that their school effectively no longer existed. In Wisconsin, a father went to drop off his 5-month-old son at a Guidepost only to find it had closed. In California, a mother learned that her children’s Guidepost had been sold and that its Montessori curriculum would be replaced with artificial intelligence. Guidepost teachers and parents lit up Facebook and Reddit groups with horror stories — allegations of neglect and mistreatment that made a lot more sense now that everyone knew how mismanaged the company had been.

For-profit education ventures are notorious for disappointing investors and leaving parents fuming. But even in this context, the Guidepost story is striking. “Schools close sometimes, but usually not this many, and not all at once,” said Rebecca Winthrop, who directs the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

What could have caused such a collapse? More than two dozen former teachers, administrators and corporate employees told me that they were deeply concerned by the company’s business model. Seven independently described it as a pyramid scheme. “We were calling it the Montessori Ponzi scheme internally,” said Alex Richardson, a teacher at Guidepost’s first school, in Orange County, Calif.

When Higher Ground opened new Guidepost schools, it often received large advances from landlords to improve their properties. As long as the company kept expanding, it seemed from the outside as if it were thriving. But when it came time to repay the landlords, and growth was no longer an option, the company collapsed. By the end, some Guidepost locations were losing $50,000 a month.

Mr. Girn is still active in the education industry. Last year, he and his wife, Rebecca Girn — the other founder of Higher Ground and its general counsel — welcomed me at a converted ranch-style house outside Austin, Texas, where they’ve already opened another school, called Fulcrum. Their three children are among the students…

Guidepost was not the first school chain that Mr. Girn had run at an unsustainable pace. Back in 2003, when Mr. Girn, a Canadian native, was a psychology and philosophy student at the University of Toronto, a friend suggested he come work at a school in Orange County called LePort Montessori. It was founded by a wealthy bariatric surgeon, Peter LePort, who sat on the board of the Ayn Rand Institute. Mr. Girn had no formal training in education, but he ran a Rand-focused club on campus. That was enough for Mr. LePort, who hired him to help start a new elementary school.

Mr. Girn became devoted to the Montessori method, which encourages children to direct their own lessons, with teachers as guides. “It’s as close to perfect as human education has ever gotten,” he once said at an Ayn Rand Institute conference. Traditional schools stifled children’s innate love of learning, he thought, and day care programs could be especially oppressive. “They’re literally putting the child behind bars, moving them from rocker to high chair to container,” he said. Montessori could free them.

In 2009, Mr. Girn became the chief executive of LePort. He envisioned turning the company into a national chain (“We had the opportunity to become the child care provider for SpaceX,” he said). But he was more focused on growth than Mr. LePort was comfortable with. In 2016, Mr. Girn was fired.

He resolved to try again, this time with a chain of schools that he could control. He and Ms. Girn formed Higher Ground and hired several of LePort’s corporate staff members. Some LePort parents soon followed, including Greg Mauro, a founding partner of Learn Capital, a venture firm known for backing education start-ups. Learn Capital invested about $1 million, and Mr. Girn opened his first two Guidepost schools. Within three years, the company had 27.

Guidepost employees describe these early schools as thoughtfully planned. White-walled classrooms were outfitted with charming, toddler-sized furniture made of pale, unfinished wood. “Everyone cared so deeply,” said Kiana Kometani, who in 2019 became the first head of school at a Guidepost in Folsom, Calif. Teachers spoke about fostering each child’s intellectual curiosity, of giving them agency before they could tie their shoes.

Mr. Girn was a skillful pitchman. He promised parents something rare: the rigorous education of a high-end preschool, but with the hours of a commercial day care. Most Guideposts were in wealthy places — Walnut Creek, Brooklyn Heights — and appealed to the kind of dual-income families who could afford the equivalent of a small sedan in preschool tuition.

“Guidepost catered to the elevated intellectual type,” said Emily Tkaczibson, who paid about $4,000 a month for her two children to attend a Guidepost in Tigard, Ore. “We would have recommended the school to anybody.” Matthew Espie, another parent in Tigard, considered himself “lucky” that his youngest child got off the waiting list after only 10 months.

There were signs, though, that the company was trying to do too much too soon. Mr. Girn expanded abroad, opening schools in Hong Kong and mainland China in 2019. Mr. Richardson, the Orange County teacher, said around that time, three Chinese toddlers came to his school for reasons that were never explained. None of them spoke English, and the Guidepost teachers didn’t speak Mandarin.

“One toddler would stand there and cry and say the same word over and over again,” Mr. Richardson said. “We learned later that she was yelling for her mom, but at the time we didn’t know. We couldn’t understand her enough to help her.”

Please open the link and finish reading this fascinating article. Turning education into a business opportunity is dangerous.

Categories Childhood, Education Industry, For-Profit, School Choice

Florida Couple Homeschooled Their Grandchildren While Confining Them to a Truck and Sexually Abusing Them

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2026 //
13

In Florida, a couple were arrested and charged for keeping their four grandchildren confined in a truck for six years and allowing them to be sexually abused during their long confinement.

The good news (sarcasm) is that they homeschooled the children by enrolling them in Khan Academy online classes.

Did the couple know they were eligible for $32,000 in voucher payments to pay for all their educational expenses from the state of Florida? Maybe they did and were collecting. Why pay for the Khan Academy classes when the state will pick up the bill?

The New York Times reported:

A grandmother and her fiancé are accused of trapping four children for six years inside a semi truck’s cab, where the children endured sexual abuse, malnutrition and neglect, prosecutors in Florida said on Tuesday.

Starting in 2019, the victims, two girls and two boys who now range in age from 11 to 15, slept on a top bunk without all fitting on the mattress, the authorities said in an arrest warrant. They urinated in a plastic cup and defecated in a grocery bag, the warrant said.

One child scarred her hand permanently when hot noodles burned her, and she was not taken to the hospital, the warrant said. One girl contracted a sexually transmitted infection, the warrant said.

“This is just straight evil, and a scourge on our society,” Mark Glass, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said during a news conference held on Tuesday.

The victims are the biological grandchildren of Keysha Monique Epps, 51, of Atlanta, according to Jae Williams, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, which filed charges against the suspects.

The ordeal began when Ms. Epps and her fiancé, Tamra Marshon Stewart, 37, of Jacksonville, Fla., traveled with the children from Atlanta to Miami, James Uthmeier, the state’s attorney general, said during the news conference. Ms. Epps was a licensed semi truck driver, Mr. Williams said.

The couple served as primary caregivers for the children, and they all lived inside the truck’s cab.

The cab included two seats for a driver and a passenger, a bunk bed, a refrigerator, a microwave and a space for storage all packed into tight quarters, the authorities said in the arrest warrant.

“This was a prison, a rolling prison,” Mr. Uthmeier said.

One of the girls, who is now 12, said Mr. Stewart had touched her inappropriately every day for two years, the authorities said. She said her grandmother knew what was happening to her, and in one instance pretended to be asleep, according to the arrest warrant.

Mr. Stewart furnished the other girl, now 11, with candy and money after sexual encounters in an effort to keep her quiet, according to the arrest warrant. The victim “said it didn’t work,” the warrant said.

A 15-year-old boy confronted Mr. Stewart, calling him a pedophile and a child molester, according to the arrest warrant from the state’s attorney general office. Mr. Stewart punched the victims after the dispute, according to an arrest warrant filed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

The children did not attend school while with Ms. Epps and Mr. Stewart and instead used Khan Academy, a website with educational videos that is not accredited, the authorities said.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Ethics, Evil, Florida, Home Schooling, Vouchers

ProPublica: Idaho Permits “Faith Healers” to Substitute for Medical Care for Children

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2026 //
9

Should states permit parents to trust “faith healers” for their children’s medical care? Should the state do so when the child is seriously ill? Should the state stand by idly when children tested by “faith healers” die?

That is what happens in Idaho. Under the protection of freedom of religion, parents may trust their sick children to “faith healers,” even at the cost of their lives.

Audrey Dutton writes about this quirk in the law, which was once widespread, but is now legal only in Idaho.

With the growth and political clout of old-time religions, this dangerous practice may spread to other states. When does freedom of religion become deadly?

Dutton writes:

In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children can’t be charged with child neglect or manslaughter. Supporters of this protection over the years have included lawmakers who voiced support for “traditional” Idaho values.

But from at least the 1880s through the early 1970s, it was illegal for parents in Idaho to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake, newspaper archives and historical documents show.

“Every parent of any child who willfully omits, without lawful excuse, to furnish necessary food, clothing, shelter, or medical attendance for such child, is guilty of a misdemeanor,” reads the 1887 edition of Idaho territory statutes, published before statehood.

The statutes included no mention of spiritual belief as a “lawful excuse.” Three years later, the state constitution explicitly put limits on Idaho’s freedom of religion. It would not excuse “acts of licentiousness,” polygamy or other practices “inconsistent with morality or the peace or safety of the state.”

It wasn’t long before the law came down on members of the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect that arrived in Idaho in 1899 and remains active in the state. From 2015 to 2025, the sect’s congregations in Idaho experienced 15 preventable deaths of children, according to ProPublica’s reporting.

Pearl Annis was a 13-year-old girl whose parents had moved from Oklahoma to Idaho’s Magic Valley in the spring of 1915 with at least one other Followers family. The Annises and their 13 children shared “a two-room shack,” a local newspaper reported. An officer and a doctor visited the home after neighbors voiced concern. They found Pearl in bed, fully dressed and on the cusp of death.

Her father, Lurid P. “Lewis” Annis, was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of refusing to provide medical attention. Pearl was taken to the hospital, according to the news story, and died there with what today would be described as septic shock from a bowel blockage. The newspaper, which didn’t appear to follow up on Annis’ criminal charge, called the Followers church “a religious cult” and Pearl’s death a consequence of “religious mania.”

News archives and historic records don’t say how many times Idaho acted on similar cases in the decades after.

But one legal battle over lifesaving care drew attention in the 1960s, as sickness made its way through a Followers family in a Boise suburb. The mother died in December 1965. Her 4-year-old daughter died the following June.

Days after the girl’s death, a judge ordered the state to take custody of her 10-year-old brother under Idaho’s child protection law. The boy was admitted to a local hospital with pneumonia, a complication of the measles. He spent days in critical condition but survived. The judge told the father that to regain custody, he would have to be willing to give the boy medical care as the law required.

A doctor testified that without the hospitalization, the child “almost certainly would have died,” a newspaper report said.

The father’s lawyer told the judge that his sect was rooted in “faith that God will heal the sick.” The law in the 1960s was clear, though: a parent had a duty to protect their child’s health, no exceptions. The judge told Samuel’s father: “The law governs conduct. Religion governs opinion.”

But the legal landscape was about to shift. It came with little public attention.

During a full-on rewrite of Idaho’s criminal code in 1971, the Legislature added a section that said the state could not bring endangerment charges against someone “who chooses for his child treatment by prayer or spiritual means alone.” Legislative records don’t make clear how the wording originated. The passage of another law one year later, affirming the “spiritual means” language and applying it to other crimes, has been credited to the Christian Science church, another Christian denomination with Idaho members.

(The Christian Science website says the church’s practice of “healing in the way Christ Jesus taught” is not “faith healing” and that members are free to choose any form of healthcare. The church also supported Oregon’s full removal of its faith-healing exemption in 2011.)

Faith-healing exemptions soon became widespread nationally. The trigger was the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, which set out to standardize the nation’s child welfare system by giving states grants to more effectively investigate reports of child abuse.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare interpreted the law as requiring states to have a faith-healing exemption to qualify for the grants — an interpretation that records from the time don’t explain.

Open the link and keep reading to learn how federal law changed to deal with “faith healing.”

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Religion, Safety, Separation of church and state

John Merrow: Dolly Parton explains Why She Started the Imagination Library

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2026 //
5

John Merrow interviewed Dolly Parton about her program called the Imagination Library. she loved to read and she wanted to inspire the same love of reading in children.

She began sending free books to the children in her county in Tennessee. Some of their families couldn’t afford to buy a book. No matter their family income, every child received a free book with their name on it, once a month for five years.

Dolly became known as “the book lady,” a title she cherished. She wanted to do good in the world, and she did. Her book program expands to children across Tennessee, then across the United States, then to other countries.

By the time of her death, she had given away close to 300 million books. She loved being “the book lady.”

She didn’t do it for fame or praise. She did it because she wanted every child to learn to read and to love reading.

As I have previously written, it’s hard to think of any sort of philanthropy carried out by other people of great wealth.

Categories Childhood, Literature, Philanthropy, Tennessee

Dr. Paul Offit On the Absurdity of Trump’s Vaccine Recommendations

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2026 //
1

Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In this interview, published by Medpages, he explains why Trump’s vaccine recommendations are crazy.

Offit: What Donald Trump said made about as much sense as when he said we all should drink bleach and expose ourselves to UV light to treat COVID. Maybe he’s not the guy to go to, to get the best medical information.

Trump: Effective immediately, my administration’s recognizing gold-standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases, along with the MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella], which hopefully will be split up. You have the MMR, we want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times. Together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective. So the MMR, we want to have separate — separate visits, separate times. The vaccine being broken into three separate single doses and vaccines being administered in separate visits.

Offit: So, here’s where this all comes from. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher, published a paper in the journal The Lancet of eight children who had received the combination measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, and then within a month supposedly developed signs and symptoms of autism. Now, that paper was ultimately retracted.

Nonetheless, the day after he published that paper, Andrew Wakefield held a press conference and he said, “I think this vaccine should be separated into its three component parts to lessen the risk of autism.” And so when I was on the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices between 1998 and 2003, we were asked to vote on whether or not this vaccine should be separated into its three component parts, which made no sense. I mean, if the vaccine doesn’t cause autism, then separating it into its three component parts won’t make it less likely to cause autism. We were forced to basically have that vote and we all unanimously voted no.

So, the first measles vaccine came into existence in the United States in 1963, the last best measles vaccine in ’68. The mumps vaccine came into existence in 1967, the first rubella vaccine in 1969. Those three vaccines were combined in 1971 and have been used safely for the last 50 years. We have an enormous amount of information showing that those single vaccines when given singly are no safer and no less effective than when you give the vaccine as a combination.

So the combination vaccine is safe, it’s effective, and it means children get two shots instead of six. This is an administration that constantly talks about giving fewer shots and then makes a recommendation to give more shots.

Trump: And I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.

Offit: Would love to see the proof that President Trump has of a bottle of soda being poured into a little child’s body. The standard dose of vaccine for children is 0.5 mL. That’s roughly a 10th of a teaspoon. If you look at a multi-dose vial, which would contain say 10 doses, that would be one teaspoon of fluid. A soda bottle contains about 2,000 mL, or said another way, it contains 4,000 doses of vaccine. What is he talking about?

I think the most amazing aspect of that particular press conference is that the media who was standing there listening to him didn’t all burst out laughing. It’s just a ridiculous thing to say. And if he says he has proof of it, great. Let’s see that proof.

Trump: Very importantly, vaccinations to hepatitis B, COVID-19, and influenza, among others, are no longer recommended for all children.

Offit: So, in January, beginning of January of 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put out a schedule, which was a made-up schedule that was ultimately defeated by a federal court action in March of 2026. But in that schedule, RFK Jr. said that there were three vaccines that basically are optional, shared clinical decision-making. You could choose to get them or not choose to get them reasonably. And those were the influenza vaccine, the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID vaccine, and the rotavirus vaccine.

Now there was another category, the so-called high-risk vaccine category, which President Trump alluded to there, which included the hepatitis A vaccine, the hepatitis B vaccine, RSV, the respiratory syncytial virus, as a monoclonal antibody, and the meningococcal vaccines. Well, everyone is susceptible. I mean, there are arguably some high-risk groups, but everyone is susceptible to those diseases. That’s why everyone is routinely recommended to receive them.

A choice not to get those diseases is a choice to put your child at risk. That’s why they’re routinely recommended. I mean, who’s at high risk for hepatitis A? Anybody who ever eats at a restaurant. The notion that there’s a high-risk group is just absurd. In 1991, we, the United States, recommended a universal hepatitis B vaccine for every child born in this country. At the time in 1991, there were roughly 16,000 cases of hepatitis B in children less than 10 years of age.

This is an AIDS virus. This is a virus that can be transmitted relatively casually because it’s a virus that lives on surfaces for up to 7 days. So sharing towels, sharing washcloths, sharing toothbrushes, sharing razor blades, can put a child at risk of hepatitis B. Those other 8,000 children less than 10 who got hepatitis B from places other than their mother weren’t getting it because they were intravenous drug users. They weren’t getting it because they were sex workers. They were getting it because chronic hepatitis B infections are common in this country and it’s easy to come in contact with someone who could infect you.

Now, if you’re infected in the first year of life, if you’re infected while traveling through the birth canal of a mother who is infected, then you have a 90% chance of going on to develop cirrhosis or liver cancer.

So we dramatically decreased the incidence of hepatitis B in children less than 10, virtually eliminating it because of that recommendation more than 30 years ago. Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. want to loosen the reins there to once again let hepatitis B back into a situation where it can cause cirrhosis, meaning chronic liver disease or liver cancers. It’s an incredibly unconscionable thing to do.

Trump: Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today in those times. People were much healthy and of course the high rates of autism now observed did not exist.

Offit: So, those were not the glory times. I’m not sure what he’s talking about when he’s saying that the incidence of autism has increased because of an increase in vaccines when that’s not true. The reason that the diagnosis of autism has increased is, most importantly, we’ve changed the definition. It’s now autism spectrum disorder, which includes a much wider spectrum of children. Two, we have better diagnostic tests.

It’s at least 80% genetic. Not all of it is heritable genetics. There are de novo or spontaneous mutations. There are factors associated with maternal health, with maternal infections during pregnancy, with maternal drugs taken during pregnancy that increase the risk of autism. But you don’t hear about any of that because people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump have taken the autism story hostage to support their own false beliefs — false, immutable, science-resistant beliefs — that vaccines are the cause.

That is the single best studied environmental influence on autism and it’s not it. So why are we still spending money on this fruitless dead-end hypothesis? We could be spending money on far more promising leads. By doing what RFK Jr. and President Trump are doing, by taking autism hostage for their own anti-vaccine efforts, all they’re doing is hurting children with autism.

After the executive order came out, the sun came up the next day. Parents took their children to the pediatrician’s office. Pediatricians gave them their vaccines according to a schedule, the recommended childhood schedule that is science-based. And the sun came up the next day and the next day after that. I think that this will largely be ignored. I think that state health departments and governors in states are largely going to ignore this. And we can then move past this in much the same way we move past President Trump’s recommendation to drink bleach to try and treat your COVID.

Check out this related video: RFK Jr. Falsely Claims Measles Vax Causes Deaths ‘Every Year’

The interview was conducted by:

Gregory Laub is the Senior Director of Video and currently leads the video and podcast production teams.

Gillian Booth is a Senior Social Media Manager for MedPage Today. She is based in Philadelphia.

Categories Childhood, Health, Medicine, Safety, Science, Trump

Arkansas: “Abstinence Only” Approach is a Failure for These Teen Moms

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2026 //
3

The leaders of Arkansas–such as Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders–oppose abortion. They also oppose birth control. They apparently don’t teach sex education. They rely on “abstinence education,” or just say no.

But it’s not working the state has the second highest rate of births to unwed teen mothers.

The Arkansas Times reviewed a movie that explains the human consequences of this policy.

Watching “Baby/Girls,” a documentary about teen mothers in Arkansas that screened Wednesday at the Bentonville Film Festival, might be an impossible task if it weren’t for the youthful optimism of its subjects. The seriousness of what’s happened to them hasn’t sunk in, at least not in the opening scenes. They still speak in soft, girlish tones. They wear fake eyelashes, dye their hair teal. One giggles while trying to recall the word for “uterus,” the organ her baby will be emerging from in just a matter of weeks. By the end of the film, the light has gone out of their eyes.

One girl has taken off with her baby and run away from home. Another is pregnant again, on an 18-month waiting list for childcare, and desperately poor. The third, living in a dingy flop house with her boyfriend, chooses to give her baby up for adoption after leaving the infant alone on at least one occasion so she can hang out with her sisters. 

“Baby/Girls” is cinematic, but it’s a hard watch, and I don’t think the people who really need to see it — the politicians that enforce abstinence education and work to outlaw abortion, and the religious fanatics who treat sex like we’re living in Victorian England — will even bother. 

But the movie isn’t just for pro-lifers; it’s for the rest of us who need to be reminded that unplanned pregnancy is, for many women, especially teenagers, one of the absolute worst things that could ever happen, leading to a cycle of poverty, family dysfunction and more teen pregnancy. 

According to Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, “Arkansas is still 49th in the country for teen births with a rate that is almost double the national teen birth rate of 13.” (That is: On average, 22 of every 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 give birth annually in Arkansas.) 

The movie is a tastefully-done “scared straight” for the grownups in Arkansas who should be protecting these girls. I was not surprised to find on the film’s website that its creators, Jackie Jesko and Alyse Walsh, have launched a campaign advocating for sex education, birth control and better support for pregnant teens in schools, with links to Arkansas organizations including Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences’ LARC (Long-acting Reversible Contraception) Initiative.

“Baby/Girls” traces three girls — Grace, 15; Olivia, 16; and Ariana, 17 — from pregnant-and-near-bursting until their kids are infants or toddlers. They’re all living in Compassion House, a home for teen moms in Springdale, at the documentary’s start. 

The filmmakers are given incredibly intimate access to their births, family dynamics, home life, court dates and the like. We quickly learn all three grew up in terrible, neglectful situations — and their pregnancies are a continuation of a terrible, unending cycle. Grace was molested at age 3 by a man she thought to be her biological dad. Her mother was a drug addict. Olivia’s mom committed suicide when Olivia was 8 years old, and when we meet Olivia, a judge has ordered her to Compassion House because she’s decided that her grandmother’s house is not a safe place for her to be. Finally, Ariana, somehow the most well-adjusted, is the product of rape. Her mother — wire-thin and missing her teeth — is emotionally abusive and absent. 

It’s disturbing to watch the girls explain why they ever thought this would go differently. Grace watched the lives of glamorous teen moms on TikTok. They looked happy. “I wanted to feel that,” she says. Olivia simply didn’t realize that sex made babies — ”I didn’t even realize I had three holes down there,” she says, chortling. 

But none of them got pregnant on purpose. Grace forgot to take her birth control consistently. Ariana was too embarrassed to ask her mom for condoms. For Olivia, “it just kind of happened.” On the subject of abortion, Ariana is the only one who speaks about it directly. She’s religious. It was never an option. 

Crystal, the movie’s wise sage who works at Compassion House, says that girls aren’t learning basic sex education in school anymore.

None of that matters now, as the girls’ lives come spectacularly undone once they leave the shelter and support of Compassion House and move out on their own after the birth of their kids. The girls’ lives go so horribly wrong that I almost wondered if parts of the film had been staged.

Grace, a beautiful, impossibly childish girl, runs away again to live the life of a degenerate teen, vaping and doing shots around a bonfire. She leaves her baby behind with her mother, who, with four other kids to raise, is buckling under the responsibility. Grace is mystified as to why she doesn’t want to be a mom. It’s not your fault. Society failed you, the filmmakers want us to scream. And I do, silently. 

Olivia goes away to juvenile detention for a year, missing her baby’s first steps. The second she gets her ankle monitor off after returning home, she takes off with her kid. 

Ariana’s story is the saddest because, for a moment, the filmmakers let us believe she might beat the odds. Early in the film, still at Compassion House, we see Ariana’s list of goals, written out in pencil. She wants to get her own apartment and a nursing degree, find childcare, get on food stamps. It’s an impossible list for a 17-year-old but she seems so determined and clear-eyed. 

Even with a supportive partner and a tidy home, reality catches up to her. Without a GED and no time to finish it, she can’t get a better job and can’t afford childcare. The bills are piling up. And then she ends up pregnant again. 

How did we get here? The movie is careful not to blame the obvious scapegoats — pro-lifers and right-wing politicians — and equally careful to not suggest abortion as the only or even the most immediate solution. Crystal, a woman who manages Compassion House and a former teen mom herself, says that she’s a Christian and she’s pro-choice, but “the pro-life movement won the war against abortion a long time ago.” Her role in all this is just to give these girls a chance to survive. 

I want to be mad at the film for not advocating harder for abortion access but also have to agree that teen pregnancy is a multi-headed hydra that will be solved with a lot of different approaches. Helping girls know how to identify a uterus before they start having sex seems like an obvious place to start. 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Childhood, Cruelty, Gender, Poverty

CNN: France Becomes First European Country to Ban Social Media for Children

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2026 //
4

CNN reports on a growing phenomenon: banning young children from social media. France is the first European nation to do so, and others are set to follow. This action reflects growing concern about the effect of social media on children’s attention span and exposure to inappropriate content.

CNN reported:

French lawmakers voted Tuesday to ban social media use for children under the age of 15, making it the first country in the European Union to introduce such an age limit.

Australia made history late last year when it implemented the first ban on social media for under-16s. The British government announced similar restrictions last month, expected to come into effect next year. Spain, Greece and Denmark are also planning to impose minimum age limits for social media use.

French lawmakers overwhelmingly voted in favor of the bill, which was strongly backedby France’s President Emmanuel Macron. He will now sign it into law.

“Social media will be banned for children under 15 starting this school year,” he posted on X after the vote as he thanked lawmakers for passing the bill.

“The brains of our children and our teenagers are not for sale,” he had said in a video message in January. “The emotions of our children and our teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, neither by American platforms nor by Chinese algorithms.”

Macron had ordered the French government to expedite the bill’s passage through parliament, with the aim of having legislation in place for the beginning of the new next school year in September.

It is not yet clear how the social media sites will verify users’ ages. Australia requires companies to “take reasonable steps” to prevent underage children from opening or keeping accounts, and the French government has promised to implement age controls to back up the law.

Members of the French Senate debate a draft law that aims to ban social media access for children under 15, in Paris, France, on March 31, 2026.

Members of the French Senate debate a draft law that aims to ban social media access for children under 15, in Paris, France, on March 31, 2026. Firas Abdullah/EPA/Shutterstock

Earlier versions of the legislation also included proposals for a ban on advertising promoting social media to children, including by influencers, and to require advertisements for social media platforms to carry the warning: “Dangerous products for children under 15.” However, these plans did not make it into the final bill.

The new law will be enforced by Arcom, France’s audiovisual and digital communications regulator. It is expected to apply to all the major platforms.

According to Arcom, children aged 12 to 17 in France spend an average of 1 hour and 21 minutes a day on TikTok. The regulator says the platform’s recommendation algorithm tends to promote the most “extreme” content, exposing teenagers to a continuous stream of anxiety-inducing or otherwise harmful videos.

Social media companies say they already take steps to protect children from some kinds of content.

‘Real change of atmosphere’

The proposal for a ban was welcomed by many French parents earlier this year.

“I think it’s great,” mother-of-six Geraldine Delacroix told CNN in March. “Now I’m waiting to see how it’s workable, but in any case, it’s better than nothing,” she added, noting that children could often get around existing parental controls. “Even if we block, they find ways to get around it,” she said.

In her work as a pediatrician, Delacroix has seen a growing distrust of smartphones and social media over the past decade among her patients’ families. “People are tense (about smartphones),” she said. “There’s been a real change of atmosphere.”

To finish reading the article, open the link.

Categories Childhood, Technology

Jan Resseger: Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Endangers the Well-Being of Children

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2026 //
0

Jan Resseger is a perceptive observer of policy and a passionate defender of children. She writes on this post about the myriad ways in which Trump’s signature legislation harms children. This bill will make many children hungrier, poorer, and less healthy.

She writes:

Huge omnibus laws filled with myriad amendments and unrelated provisions are always passed without sufficient public attention to the details and long term consequences.  House Resolution 1, which the President has called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” was an omnibus tax and reconciliation law. President Trump signed HR 1 into law just a year ago on the 4th of July. The law poses a number of threats to the well-being of children and to public schooling.  Many of us who follow public education policy are well aware of the Trump administration’s expansion of the privatization of public education with the new tuition tax credit school voucher program buried in HR 1, but other provisions of this federal law have also begun imperiling the welfare of our society’s most vulnerable children. The damage will only expand in the coming months and years.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently updated threats to children’s welfare in HR1: “Already the law is raising costs for families and taking away health coverage, food assistance, and other essentials from people who are already struggling to afford to meet their basic needs—all while showering more tax breaks on the wealthiest households and funding a violent immigration detention and deportation agenda. The law’s harm will only deepen as its more than $1 trillion in cuts for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act… marketplaces fully take effect and states fully implement SNAP eligibility restrictions and take drastic measures ahead of the federal government’s significant shift of SNAP costs to states… (T)he law’s cuts will expand the still-deep inequities long experienced by those who face the most economic discrimination and poverty, including Black, Latino, and Indigenous people and families with people who are immigrants.”

For political reasons, many of HR 1’s punitive provisions were delayed so that they will kick in only after the 2026 midterm election. The provisions with some of the most serious implications for families with children include future cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities predicts: “The harmful… megabill will take health coverage away from millions of people and dramatically raise health care costs for millions more.  The law cuts $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and ACA marketplaces… The work requirement… will take away coverage for childless adults and some parents who can’t prove that they are participating in countable ‘community engagement’ activities at least 80 hours per month.”

KFF adds: “For the first time, the law conditions Medicaid eligibility for Medicaid expansion enrollees on meeting work and reporting requirements. These work requirements, which will go into effect in January 2027, or sooner at state option, represent the largest source of enrollment declines in the law.”

There are, however, two areas in which HR 1 has already seriously impacted families with children.

Sharp Drop in SNAP Participation     It has been widely predicted that millions of families who need food assistance will, by 2028, loose access to food stamps (SNAP) due to the provisions of HR 1. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Dottie Rosenbaum and Joseph Llobrera report, however, that the sharp drop in access to SNAP has actually begun in 2026:

“Millions of people are losing food assistance through SNAP due to the 2025… HR 1.  This includes many children and others not targeted by HR 1’s eligibility restrictions.  In fact, more people are losing SNAP, and faster, than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted.  The latest data show that about 4.7 million fewer people (including 808,000 children)  participated in SNAP in March 2026 compared to the average month in fiscal year 2025… The most likely reason is the impact of HR 1’s shifting of enormous new SNAP costs to states, which they owe starting in fiscal year 2028.  CBO estimated the cost shift mandate would have no impact until 2028, but it has already led many states to erect barriers to people’s SNAP participation, such as requiring more paperwork and imposing other requirements that states often don’t have the staff to administer.”  In 2028, HR 1 requires states to start paying part of SNAP costs, and states are already trying to make participation “harder to navigate” with “more paperwork, shortening certification periods or adding more case reviews.” (Emphasis is mine.) HR 1 ‘s SNAP requirements will reduce future coverage among parents by adding a work requirement for parents and caregivers of children who are 14 years old or over.

This week the Center for American Progress released a report demonstrating that HR 1 may eventually  also reduce free school meals for children and school districts that now qualify: “When children lose access to SNAP and Medicaid, they may also lose their direct certification for free school meals. This harm expands beyond individual impacts. As a result, schools participating in the Community Eligibility Provision CEP may fall below the 25 percent of direct certified students required to qualify for the CEP, ending free school meals for the entire school or district.”

Spending on Immigration     Last July, the American Immigrant Council summed up how HR 1 would help fund the President’s expanded immigration enforcement—what we have watched during the past year: “H.R. 1 provides $170.7 billion in additional funding for immigration- and border enforcement-related activities to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP, as well as for the Department of Defense (DOD) for activities related to the military’s presence along parts of the southern border.”

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) details some of the consequences so far for children in immigrant families across the United States: “This historic ballooning of immigration enforcement funding has turbocharged family separations and child and family detention, threatening child safety and well-being. An estimated 205,000 children, 145,000 of whom are U.S. citizens, have experienced having a parent in detention… Moreover, the high level of disenrollment in SNAP and Medicaid is in part due to HR 1’s exclusion of lawfully present immigrants, such as asylum seekers and refugees, as well as the chilling effect on people whose children are likely eligible but are disenrolling because they are concerned about their participation being used against them in immigration proceedings.”

Research has shown for decades that family poverty and problems like hunger and homelessness contribute to achievement gaps as children enter school.  Thirty years ago in The Manufactured Crisis, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle declared: “the larger the proportion of citizens who live in poverty, the greater challenge for public schools.” (p. 220)

More recently the National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner explained the correlation of children’s economic circumstances with their school achievement: “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America. School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economic inequality. When children are born in the United States, their educational and life outcomes can all be predicted based on their parents’ education, income and wealth… Inequality in the U.S. is stark and enduring.”

The tangled issues buried in the mammoth HR 1, what President Trump calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” threaten the well-being of millions of poor children enrolled in our nation’s urban and rural public schools. It will be urgently important for educators and public school advocates to press Congress to correct the bill’s myriad injustices.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Democrats, Evil, Extremism, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Vouchers
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