Archives for category: Creativity
« Older Entries

Trump’s Insane War on Science

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2026 //
7

The New York Times published this excellent article by Jeneen Interlandi about the Trump administration’s mad effort to defund and distort science. Our nation’s leadership in science has been extraordinary. Our scientists have led the world in discovering cures for diseases, extending the human life span, exploring space and the oceans, and extending the bounds of knowledge. This is a gift article, meaning you can open it without a subscription. You should open it to see the many photographs and illustrations.

Interlandi writes:

Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, science, medicine and public health have been hijacked by a cadre of grifters and ideologues and by the politicians in obvious thrall to both. Federal institutions have been all but dismantled. Researchers have been defunded en masse and the universities that support them deliberately destabilized. Discourse on crucial scientific questions and key public health challenges has been stifled. And along the way, trust has been broken between scientists and the nation’s leaders — and the people that both are supposed to serve.

It’s tempting to view this undoing as temporary. Americans love science and revere innovation, almost as a rule, and politicians of every stripe have spent the better part of a century promoting and protecting both. However imperfect the resulting system was, hardly a modern convenience exists that can’t be traced back to it — central air-conditioning, the internet and ChatGPT; polio vaccines, statins and weight-loss drugs; the human genome sequence and CRISPR gene editing. The National Institutes of Health alone generates about $2.50 in economic returns for every dollar of investment. It’s also the largest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world and until recently was the envy of scientists across the globe.

The president’s attacks on this legacy have been relentless and all encompassing. He has turned the federal health department over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer. For months, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget all but froze operations at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His newly established so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired thousands of civil servants from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a process that was wildly disorganized, frequently unlawful and needlessly cruel. Global health initiatives were also eviscerated.

Stacked against these measures, the administration’s explanations — which focus on cutting waste and eliminating so-called woke politics from science — have been inadequate and disingenuous.

It can be difficult to imagine a future in which American science does not prevail. But, as the president’s many critics have warned, institutions like the C.D.C., F.D.A. and N.I.H. will be far more difficult to rebuild than they have been to destroy — especially if their intended beneficiaries lose all faith in them or forget why they existed in the first place.

The current administration seems to understand as much. Top officials have taken pains to describe the nation’s scientific bodies as corrupt and ineffective and the nation’s scientists as elitist and excessively woke. “Science and public health have achieved much more than current leaders seem to recognize,” said Tom Frieden, the author of “The Formula for Better Health” and president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. “We actually know a lot about how to make America healthier. But very little of that knowledge is in line with what the current administration has done so far.”

Nowhere is this disconnect on fuller display than in the long war against H.I.V. Forty years ago, the infection was a mystery and a death sentence. Today, thanks to a combination of biomedical breakthroughs and diligent, boots-on-the-ground public health (testing, education, robust social safety nets), it is a chronic but manageable condition that really flourishes only among society’s most marginalized groups.

The first Trump administration vowed to finally end the American H.I.V. epidemic no later than 2030 by doubling down on prevention efforts in the hardest-hit communities. The resulting initiative has clearly paid off: Transmission rates are down in the targeted ZIP codes, according to the National Minority AIDS Council, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the virus’s spread. Racial health gaps are narrowing as a result, and because prevention is cheaper than treatment, money is being saved.

The second Trump administration seems determined to reverse course anyway.

On March 20 of last year, Kathryn Macapagal, a clinical psychologist and a faculty researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, was sitting at her in-laws’ dining room table when her phone and laptop began pinging and ringing furiously.

Ping. The Adolescent Trials Network, a huge research apparatus focused on treating and preventing H.I.V. infection in teenagers and young adults, was abruptly closed. The network was responsible for several studies that Macapagal and her colleagues were collaborating on.

Ping. A close colleague’s 10-year study on H.I.V. and substance use in L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers and young adults was suspended. So was another project on reducing H.I.V. risk in relationship.

Ring. Another of her projects, on how to improve the measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys, was also done for. So were at least two fellowship programs for early-career scientists who wanted to specialize, as she did, in L.G.B.T.Q. health and dozens of other projects affecting just about everyone she worked with or knew professionally.

Her husband, Dan Fridberg (also a scientist, also reliant on N.I.H. funding), paced frantically behind her as she announced each new bit of carnage. “At this rate, you’ll be out of a job by dinnertime,” he said. “Oh, my God. What are we going to do?”

“I cannot go there right now,” she replied. She was determined to remain calm. She was also too stunned to panic, although in truth, she was not surprised. Her research sat in just about every one of the administration’s cross hairs: All of her projects included the new red-flag terms, and most of the researchers on her staff fell into at least one disfavored category. All of their salaries (including hers) were reliant on N.I.H. funding, and all of their jobs were now gravely imperiled.

And not just theirs: Federal grants were the lifeblood of academic research. They supported scientists and students, institutes and administrators. They covered overhead costs. It was not uncommon for one person to be funded by several grants, nor was it rare for professors like Macapagal, working at elite universities like Northwestern, to be wholly dependent on grants that had to be renewed every few years. It was a deeply precarious arrangement, sustained for decades by the certainty that, come what may, the federal government would honor its commitments.

When the dust finally settled, four of Macapagal’s grants had been terminated, nearly a quarter of her salary was gone, and a project she had spent many months developing was on seemingly permanent hold. As they struggled to make sense of what was happening, she and her colleagues found themselves drawing grim battlefield analogies: It was as if a bomb had gone off and some of them were dead on the field and others, like her, were maimed. “One colleague who lost everything told me that he thought I actually had it worse,” she said. “Because, you know, if you’re going to die, it’s probably better to do it quickly.”

Of the 1.2 million people living with H.I.V. in the United States, more than 60 percent are Black or Latino. Transgender women, gay and bisexual men and teenagers and young adults of color face the greatest overall risk of contracting the virus in any given year.

Those inequities are no mystery: less access to health care, more social stigma and a negative feedback loop, wherein a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities begets a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities. But resolving them is no small feat.

In the years leading up to 2025, as she tried to do exactly that, Macapagal was consumed by several thorny challenges. A troubling dichotomy had emerged since the medication that prevents H.I.V. transmission (known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) first became widely available. Within the gay community, middle-aged white professionals had embraced the treatment as an ordinary component of overall health and wellness. But younger adults, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities still had not.

“It’s not unlike birth control when it was first introduced,” said Jim Pickett, a board member of TaskForce, an L.G.B.T.Q. youth center on Chicago’s West Side and a collaborator of Macapagal’s. “It’s pretty straightforward as a treatment, but it’s attached to all of this cultural baggage that makes it challenging to get across.”

In 2018, when PrEP was approved for adolescent use, Pickett and Macapagal began searching for ways to overcome these challenges. They knew teens would be an especially tough sell. Health care systems intimidated the boldest of them, sexual identities were still developing at that age, and this particular form of protection could easily become a source of embarrassment or even shame.

They enlisted, among others, Skai Underwood, TaskForce’s dance instructor and youth engagement specialist, in their quest.

Underwood, who was assigned male at birth, knew by the age of 5 that she was a girl but did not medically transition until her early 20s. She was intimately familiar with the shame and isolation that gay and transgender people often faced — how even friends and family would signal their rejection when you declared yourself, how that rejection could lead you to retreat inward. Her goal was to help TaskForce teens resist that impulse, so that instead of hiding, they might thrive.

To her, the solution to Macapagal’s public health conundrum was clear: If you wanted to teach teenagers — or anyone else — to take safe sex seriously, you had to convince them that there was something to protect in the first place. “What it really comes down to is self-love,” she told me when I visited TaskForce in November.

With that in mind, she, Macapagal and Pickett created a two-pronged public health initiative called PrEP-4-Teens. The first prong involved a media campaign linking safe sex to empowerment and joy. The second wove an L.G.B.T.Q. sexual education curriculum into a suite of community-building activities. “They basically come together to dance and make art,” Underwood said. “We celebrate queer identity, and then in between all of the fun, we teach them how to protect themselves.”

The program’s early results were promising: Among other things, participants came away with an understanding of PrEP and a sense that it was no more shameful to use than condoms or birth control. But before they could scale it up or study it in greater depth, a new administration began.

On his first days in office, the president issued a flurry of executive orders rolling back transgender rights and bringing federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to an abrupt end. By many accounts, the DOGE officials tasked with carrying out those orders had little to no understanding of the projects they were supposed to evaluate. “They seem to have confused D.E.I., which is about diversifying the work force, with health equity, which is about reducing health disparities in marginalized communities,” Amy Knopf, a professor at Indiana University’s School of Nursing, told me. “They’re making it so that you can’t study certain groups without violating these edicts. But you can’t really tackle H.I.V., or any number of other conditions, without looking at those exact groups.”

In the weeks after the March 20 Massacre (as some of them had taken to calling it), Macapagal and her colleagues began working furiously to cover as much and as many of their salaries as they could. The main conference space morphed into a war room of sorts, as her boss, Brian Mustanski, tried to match any open position or bit of unused grant money he heard of with whichever recently defunded staff member who was qualified.

Macapagal’s job was saved by one colleague who stepped up without even being asked. “We have some money that we’re not using yet and some work that you could definitely do,” the woman explained. “Let me add you to that project.” Macapagal accepted and for many months afterward would tear up just recalling the kindness.

In April the federal government froze some $790 million in funding for Northwestern, without notice or explanation. The university was apparently being accused of antisemitism and racism over its diversity initiatives, but it was unclear whether the freeze was related to those charges, and no one seemed to know when or whether or how the funds would be restored. Researchers would have to tighten their belts as much as possible, university officials explained, while they tried to sort out the situation.

Among other things, the new strictures meant that Macapagal would not be able to pay Pickett for all the work he had done on her projects. He had presided for decades over a community center that prided itself on perseverance, and he took the news in stride. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make do.” But she felt awful.

Nobody outside the scientific community seemed to realize what was happening. Friends and family had all tried to reassure her that everything would be fine in the long run, that she just needed to hang in there until the midterms or the next presidential election. She found it exhausting to explain how irreversible the damage was. They had lost years of research in a matter of weeks. Whole labs had been closed, and successful, decades-long careers ended — and none of it appeared to have anything to do with the quality or import of the research itself. The decisions were political and ideological. They were also arbitrary and needlessly cruel.

Trust had been broken as a result, at just about every level of the scientific enterprise (between study participants and scientists, between scientists and universities and between universities and the federal government). Whatever came next, it seemed extremely unlikely to her that any of them, let alone all of them together, would be able to just pick up where they had left off.

In the meantime, those who were left — the maimed but still breathing — leaned on one another. When they were advised to pre-emptively change the language in their public-facing documents, Macapagal and her colleagues did the edits together, grousing in unison over the aggravation of revising terms like “inclusion criteria” and the moral grossness of erasing the word “transgender” from their work.

It was not the first time their field had been forced to make such compromises; the eldest among them remembered culling words like “gay” and “sex” back in the early 1990s. But this was different. In the past, even if they had to change a word or two, they still got to do their research. Now Macapagal found herself contorting a study on H.I.V. vaccine misinformation (her attempt to get ahead of the hesitancy that had plagued Covid vaccines) into something else entirely.

She found herself making other changes, too, including dyeing her pink hair back to a soft brown. “It might be safer for me to not be so out there with how I look,” she said. Some of her friends and colleagues were taking similar precautions. They were losing facial piercings and gay pride stickers. They were also changing slide deck images to include more white people, even when the conditions they studied did not, for the most part, affect white people. It felt gross because it was gross, but what else could they do? They had families and mortgages and work that they still wanted to complete. They knew people who had been doxxed and threatened — and worse — just for studying gender-affirming care. And they were anxious and, in some cases, afraid.

As spring bled into summer and the university explained that it could no longer provide offices with free coffee or free tissues, Macapagal turned a worried eye to her lab and began doing what she could to help people secure other jobs. It was a risky gamble: If they left and her funding was then restored, she’d be hamstrung. But she thought of the group as a kind of family, and she wanted to protect whomever she could.

Her lab manager, Andrés Alvarado Avila, was here on an H-1B visa, and if his funding was cut, he would have just 60 days to find another job, secure an exception or return to Mexico. Her project coordinator, Zach Buehler, was only a few years out of college. She found herself wondering if it was fair or right to encourage him down a career path whose future looked so bleak. Like many of her lab members, Alvarado Avila and Buehler were gay men. As anachronistic as it sounded, she could not help but worry about what that might mean for their futures, in an America that was less recognizable by the day and that seemed to be coming for them all.

In the past year or so, scientists funded through the National Institutes of Health have developed potential treatments for pancreatic cancer, broken the logjam on Huntington’s disease, shepherded a male birth control pill through clinical trials and saved a baby’s life with the first personalized gene editing procedure. In a different time and place, any one of those breakthroughs would have been hailed as the triumph of an epoch and might have lured a new generation of talent to the cause of scientific research.

Instead, six years after the pandemic began and one year into the second Trump administration, we have the opposite: seasoned scientists fleeing the profession (or the country) and younger prospects deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicines those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.

What seems clear is that Americans have entered a grim new era, one in which science itself is a political weapon, rather than a tool for the collective good. It would be simplistic to argue that the two — science and politics — should be wholly disentangled. (As a human endeavor that involves trade-offs and requires public support, science is inherently political.) But real data and hard, neutral facts still drive the work that most scientists do, and the best of that work should still frame public discourse and, ideally, inform public policy. And right now, it does not.

Last June the F.D.A. approved the latest version of PrEP: an injection that patients would need to receive only twice a year and that appeared to work even better than its predecessors at preventing infection. In July the N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, laid out yet another strategy for eliminating H.I.V. in the United States. Rather than pour limited resources into more basic research, his agency would simply deploy existing PrEP medications. “Why is there any reason to wait?” he asked on his podcast. “Why don’t we just really commit to ending the H.I.V. epidemic, actually doing it with the tool kit we have now?”

The director’s epiphany frustrated H.I.V. specialists. He was right about the import of using existing tools more effectively. But many of them, including Macapagal, had been working on exactly that challenge when Bhattacharya’s agency cut their funding back in March. What’s more, almost all of the current administration’s stances — not only on science but also on health care and public health, immigration and social safety nets — were anathema to his stated goals.

If health officials really wanted to extirpate H.I.V. from the United States, they would increase access to health care, ramp up testing and education and fortify the social safety net.

At every turn, Trump and his deputies did the exact opposite. They tried to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for H.I.V. testing, treatment and prevention services. They cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars and played chicken with Democrats over Affordable Care Act subsidies. They also weakened the social safety net, sowed terror in immigrant communities and upended public health programs just about everywhere.

If those policies persisted, even as the newest PrEP medication was made commercially available, H.I.V. would continue to linger. “Most of what we’ve done to beat back AIDS comes down to this extremely fragile safety net that is right now being destroyed,” Dr. Jon Mannheim, a pediatric H.I.V. specialist who sometimes collaborates with Macapagal, told me when I visited Chicago in November. Illinois was facing one of the largest Medicaid cuts in the nation, and his clinic was already bracing for impact. Among other things, he worried that fewer social workers would be hired for even less pay than before.

Without them, he said, the whole system might collapse. Patients who lost health insurance would have a harder time getting into the fail-safe programs meant to keep them on PrEP (and to keep AIDS at bay). The pregnant women he treated would lose their main point of contact for a whole suite of stabilizing services. “I don’t know how many babies would have to be born with H.I.V. for the federal government to care,” he said. “But I guess we’ll find out.”

In the meantime, his Latin American patients were still avoiding the clinic altogether, months after ICE had descended on the city. He had lost several of them to follow-up care over the summer. The one that troubled him most was a 10-year-old girl from Venezuela who lived in a car with her mother and whose H.I.V. infection might have already progressed to AIDS. “I have not seen her in months,” he said. “She could be dead by now.”

A few miles away in Chicago, the TaskForce community center was facing similar challenges. It had lost some $500,000 in anticipated funding, thanks not only to state and federal budget cuts but also to a new reluctance among donors. “We heard a lot of, ‘Hey, these dollars that we thought that we could give you we actually can’t now, because you’re L.G.B.T.Q., which is a no, and BIPOC, which is also a big no,’” said the center’s director, Chris Balthazar, using an acronym for “Black, Indigenous and people of color.”

It was getting by, but the strain of moving through the world with so many targets on its back was starting to show. One of its regulars, a 15-year-old Haitian boy, had nearly taken his own life after his parents were abruptly deported. And Underwood had detected a new reluctance in some of her L.G.B.T.Q. students. They were not expressing themselves as freely as they did before, she thought. Some mentioned creeping anxieties, when she asked. Others talked about fear.

She wanted to prevent those feelings from dimming the light she saw in each of them, but it was complicated. Self-expression and personal safety could cut brutally against each other for a gay or transgender teen, and a lot of her TaskForce students had bigger worries, in any case. They did not always have enough food to eat or safe places to stay; winter was coming, and they needed warm coats. “It’s OK,” was sometimes all she could think to tell them. “This is nothing new. We’re just going to keep on jumping these hurdles, one at a time, until we’re free and clear.”

By the start of 2026, Macapagal and her colleagues had settled into an uncertain quiet. The university’s funding was unfrozen in December, and thanks to a couple of lawsuits, most of the grants that her group had lost were in the process of being restored. But confusion still reigned: When would that money be disbursed? Would researchers be given additional time to complete their work? What would happen when those grants came up for renewal in the coming year?

No one seemed to know, but the N.I.H. was still expecting annual progress reports from all its grantees in the meantime. “We are supposed to tell them what we did with the money they gave us and what progress we’ve made in our research,” Alvarado Avila explained. “But they did not really give us the money, and our biggest barrier to progress has been them. How do you say that in a way that’s diplomatic?” The institute where Macapagal worked had 30 fewer staff members now and lots of empty offices and cubicles. One conference room had become a storage facility for the H.I.V. and sexually transmitted infection test kits that they had planned to send to study participants.

“These are supplies that your tax dollars paid for, to get people tested for H.I.V. and S.T.I.s in the context of a research study,” Macapagal said. “And now they’re just sitting there, and like any medical kit, they will eventually expire.” She was torn about the future. On the one hand, she could not help but hope. State officials had expressed interest in partnering with her and TaskForce to expand the Prep-4-Teens program, and she had just applied for yet another N.I.H. grant based on the agency’s stated interest in using implementation science to conquer H.I.V.

On the other hand, hope seemed a delusional response to the events of the past year. Word was that new grant applications would ultimately be decided on not by fellow scientists, as had always been the case, but by political appointees who had apparently effectively taken over the N.I.H. Macapagal had spent nearly all of her adult life cultivating expertise in behavioral health and disease prevention and then training the next generation to do the same. She could not help but wonder now what the point of any of that had been.

She still wanted to show up for her team. She believed that the work was important, and she knew that Alvarado Avila, Buehler and their peers were its future. But truth be told, she was also thinking about going into private practice.

Alvarado Avila was holding off on applying to graduate programs for now, in part because prospects were skimpy for noncitizen scientists who wanted to stay in the United States and also because he had watched ICE agents descend on Chicago and raid the communities around him. He had also watched them kill an unarmed woman in Minnesota — who was a mother and a poet and a white U.S. citizen and who happened to be a lesbian — and his heart was sick and he was angry.

“They say that by focusing on marginalized groups, we are discriminating against everyone else,” he said. “But those are the communities most impacted by these issues. They say visa holders like me are stealing jobs from Americans. I don’t think they understand that, one, for a specialty visa, you have to prove to the government that you can do the work and, two, we contribute to a tax system that we have no assurance that we will get back from.”

More and more, he wondered what fighting back looked like and whether it was incompatible with a career that forced you to erase whole categories of people from your work or treat words like “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” as toxins instead of virtues. More and more he wondered if America, where he had lived, studied and worked for most of his life, was still the place for him.

Buehler, for his part, had applied to more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, almost all of them focused on exactly the kind of research he was doing in Macapagal’s lab. “I love this work,” he told me. “I really want to create the kind of programs that I wish I’d had when I was coming up.” He knew the risks, knew that he was probably consigning himself to a path marked by deep uncertainty and that he would find neither glory nor gratitude on the other side of that struggle. But he also knew that perseverance was the key to progress. And the way he saw it, resilience could be an identity, too.

Categories Creativity, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Bad Bunny, Love, Family, Redemption, Recognition

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
5

Julian Vasquez Heilig watched the half-time performance of Bad Bunny at the NFL’s Suprrbowl and was moved to tears.

Here is why:

Some of us watched the halftime show and cried. Others changed the channel. That difference tells you everything.

If you were scrolling through Facebook or other media after the Super Bowl, what you saw depended entirely on your sphere of inclusion. Some timelines were full of joy, pride, and tears. Others filled instantly with the familiar chorus: worst halftime show ever, too political, too foreign, controversial, divisive, not for “real Americans.” Algorithms did what they always do, amplifying outrage in some spaces and celebration in others. 

What struck me most wasn’t the criticism itself, but how ready so many were to dismiss what they hadn’t even tried to feel, while others were overwhelmed by recognition. For many Latino viewers, that split wasn’t shocking at all, because it echoed a lifetime of us being told we belong in some rooms but not others, sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, often disguised as concern, taste, or tradition.

What made this rejection cut deeper is that it didn’t begin after the performance ended. It began weeks before the game, when commentators openly questioned whether this show would “connect,” a word that so often means conform, flatten, or assimilate. No one ever wondered aloud whether Kid Rock was American enough, even when his music is built on grievance, exclusion, and nostalgia for a past that never belonged to everyone. His belonging was assumed. His presence never put on trial.

At the same time, Latino culture was quietly framed as foreign, no matter how many generations it has lived here, worked here, fought here, and died here. Our music was treated like a visitor, our language like an interruption, our joy like something that needed justification. The stage was never neutral. The judgment was never waiting for the music. It had already been made, long before the lights came up. But what unfolded on that field at the Super Bowl refused to ask for permission. 

So let’s talk about what I noticed.

Sugarcane as the Opening Wound

Bad Bunny did not open with spectacle. He opened with a field covered in sugarcane, not just a backdrop, but a world presented on the field. The plants stood tall, swaying as if carried by an unseen breeze, but what most people didn’t realize in the moment is that nearly 400 humans were carefully costumed as sugarcane, blending into the scene with astonishing precision. Tall. Quiet. Unflinching. Heavy with memory. Sugarcane is how so many people of color came to the Caribbean, through chains and colonial economies that fed empires while consuming lives. It is the crop that reordered entire islands around extraction, turning land into profit and people into labor, and normalizing suffering as an economic necessity.

In Puerto Rico, sugarcane marks the moment when native Taíno worlds were shattered, not faded, not replaced, but violently erased. Declared “extinct,” even as their descendants lived on in bodies, in words, in bloodlines history tried to deny. To begin with sugarcane was to begin with truth instead of fantasy. It was to say our joy has a history, and that history was paid for with survival, endurance, and refusal to disappear.

From Fields to the Streets

The performance moved from the sugarcane fields into a different kind of economy altogether. From the fields into the cultural economy of the streets. Tacos on griddles, fruit drinks poured by hand, small businesses that exist because families willed them into being to suppor their families. What once took everything now gave way to spaces that feed people and keep memory alive through work that is chosen, not imposed. It was a quiet but powerful shift, from wealth taken to culture made, from plantations to livelihoods, from what was stolen to what was built and shared.

The Casita

From extraction to shelter. From labor to life. From history imposed to culture chosen. The Casita was not nostalgia placed on the field for sentiment. It was survival made visible, a place where memory rests without apology. I recognized it instantly because The Casita is a central feature of Bad Bunny’s current DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS world tour, and I saw it myself at his concert in Mexico City in December 2025. 

When it appears during the concert and now the Super Bowl, the entire feeling of the space changes. The arena stops feeling like something meant to be consumed and starts feeling like a neighborhood gathering, like a block party where everyone knows why they’re there. Ricky Martin, Jessica Alba, Karol G and Cardi B and Pedro Pasqual were spotted on The Casita porch at the Super Bowl. For a song, the focus shifted inward, toward intimacy, memory, and shared recognition rather than outward toward scale or spectacle.

Familia Without Age Limits

Then there was a wedding, and everything softened. Children stood beside elders, small hands near hands worn smooth by time. Adults moved between them, linking generations without needing to explain why. No one was ornamental. No one was hidden or pushed to the margins. This was not a beauty showcase designed for perfection and polish. It was a life showcase: messy, intimate, and unmistakably real.

After the vows a salsa performance broke out in the wedding party. In Latino culture, dance moves through generations like inheritance, passed the way names and recipes are passed. Young people hear rhythm before they speak, absorbing belonging before language. Grandparents hum songs older than memory, melodies tied to places they left, places they carry, places that never really let them go. Teenagers take those sounds and bend them toward the future, making something new without breaking what came before. When that wedding appeared on the field, it wasn’t spectacle. It was continuity. It was culture saying, softly but firmly, we are still here together, and we are not done loving.

Spanish Without Apology

Bad Bunny sung and spoke Spanish the entire performance. He did not translate. The screen did not translate either. In fact, my TV screen didnt even get the Spanish lyrics right. And still, the message landed. For Latino families, this moment felt deeply familiar, because they translate everything else every day. At school. At work. In hospitals. In courtrooms. In moments where clarity is demanded of us but rarely offered in return.

This time, the burden was not on us. It wasn’t defiance. It was dignity. It was a reminder that our language does not need permission to exist, and that when language is treated as a threat, the issue is not understanding. It is whose comfort has been prioritized for far too long.

Bad Bunny at the Album of the Year grammy

Then Bad Bunny paused one of the biggest stages in the world to do something profoundly delicate and human. In the middle of a performance steeped in Latino/a history, memory, and pride, he handed one of his recently won Grammy Awards to a five-year-old child actor. The gesture was quiet, unhurried, and unmistakably intentional. It was meant to represent a younger version of himself, but it also reached far beyond biography. In that moment, the Grammy became a symbol of possibility placed gently in the hands of the future.

For many watching, that was the first moment the tears came. Not because it was sentimental, but because it felt like restoration. In communities where so much has been taken—land, labor, language, and often the right to dream publicly—the act of handing something earned to a child carried enormous weight. It said that success does not have to end with one generation, that recognition can be shared, and that pride can be inherited. 

When the Flags Rose

And then it happened. The moment that broke something open. Flags from across the Americas rose, and the field turned into a family reunion. Bad Bunny spoke the names of them all. Music, movement, and memory collided in a fiesta on a field, joy too big to hold only 100 yards of field. You could feel it traveling living room to living room, chest to chest.

This wasn’t spectacle. It was release. It was the sound of people recognizing themselves all at once, across borders, accents, and histories that have always been connected.

Daring and Well Executed

Some viewers said they didn’t understand what was being said. That, in itself, is a statement about whose histories we teach and whose we erase in this nation. Nothing about this performance was accidental. It was layered, intentional, and deeply rooted in memory, lineage, and love.

So no, this wasn’t the safest halftime show ever, and it certainly wasn’t the worst. It was one of the most daring because it chose truth over comfort and belonging over approval. It trusted that love, memory, and pride could fill a stadium without asking permission.

And for families watching together, something special happened. Memories. Parents thought of grandparents who never saw themselves reflected on this stage. Representation. Children saw peers performing and honored. Wisdom. Elders watched their roles honored. 

For a few luminous minutes, the biggest stage in America felt like a home open to everyone, a casa abierta. And when Bad Bunny held out a football and the words appeared—“Together we are America”… it wasn’t a slogan. It was a recognition. Across a record 135,000,000 living rooms and kitchens, across generations gathered on couches and around tables, there may not have been a dry eye at all. There was only the quiet certainty that we are still here, still together, still carrying one another forward—together—on a stage that, for one night, felt unmistakably like the Benito Bowl.

Bad Bunny holds football with message of unity

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a Bad Bunny fan who believes that music is one of the most powerful archives of social truth. A nationally recognized policy scholar and education advocate, he examines culture not as entertainment alone but as a lens through which people understand belonging, resistance, and possibility. From his first encounter with “Vete” in a late-night Puerto Rican lounge at La Concha on Friday, December 6, 2019, to standing inside a packed Mexico City arena during the DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS World Tour, observing how crowd energy, memory, and identity move together, he approaches Bad Bunny’s work with the same curiosity he brings to public policy. For him, these moments are not just concerts or cultural events; they are data points of feeling and meaning, asking the same enduring question that guides his scholarship: What does this moment reveal about who we are, who gets to belong, and who we are becoming together?

Categories Creativity, Democracy, History, Joy, Love

Bruce Springsteen Writes a New Song: “The Streets of Minneapolis”

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2026 //
9

Count on America’s bard Bruce Springsteen to rise to the occasion with a new song:

The Streets of Minneapolis

Categories Art, Creativity, Minneapolis

Coney Island Polar Bear Plunge: Today!

By dianeravitch
January 1, 2026 //
13

This morning I went with four friends to Coney Island in Brooklyn for the Annual Polar Bear Plunge. Hundreds of people (or more) showed up to take a dip in the ocean on a frigid day.

The sun was shining brightly, but the air temperature was in the high 20s, and the “real feel” due to gusty winds, was only 6 degrees.

The atmosphere was festive. Swimmers came with friends to cheer them on and offer them towels and blankets when they emerged from the water.

Some were in silly costumes. Some wore funny head pieces. None carried a mock Statue of Liberty into the water. Women and girls were in bikinis. They stripped off their warm clothes and their shoes and ran into the Atlantic Ocean.

There was a mood of hilarity about the madness of the event. Everyone was smiling or laughing or both. People run into the water. Some run out as soon as they have gotten wet. Others actually swim. Some splash around.

A lifeguard keeps watch, and a police boat is anchored about 100 yards beyond the swimmers.

The Coney Island Polar Bear Club sponsors the event every year to raise money for local charities. Their members swim all year round; the huge crowd of swimmers shows up only on January 1, to welcome in the New Year.

For two hours, politics, heated partisan issues, and acrimony were cast aside as a diverse crowd of Americans frolicked in the ocean.

I asked one young woman in a tiny bikini how it felt to jump in. She said “Exhilarating! The water was warmer than the air.”

Another young woman peeled off her clothes and stripped to her bathing suit, accompanied by three friends. She said it was her first Polar Bear Plunge. I asked why she was doing it. She said, “If I can do this, I can do anything.”

A handsome African-American man gathered a crowd as he danced around in his bathing suit, getting psyched to jump in. He told the crowd that it was his first time. He jumped up and down, kicked his legs in the air, yelled “Here I go!” And he ran straight into the ocean.

I wanted to wait until he emerged, because we were leaving, but he was cavorting in the water, having a great time. We left, bound for a hot and filling Chinese meal, at a tiny restaurant on Fort Hamilton Parkway in Brooklyn.

This is a joyful event. Join us next year if you can. I won’t swim with you but I will be glad to cheer you on.

Audrey, Hope, Maureen, me, Mary.
Getting ready to suit up and take the plunge
It was really, really cold.
Her first plunge on New Year’s Day
Dressed as a polar bear, ready to take the plunge
The swimmers had a great time!
Psyching himself up for his first January 1 swim
Doing his pre-swim high kicks, and off he goes!
Like most swimmers, they ran into the ocean as fast as they could
With the Ferris wheel in the background, a nylon igloo stated the obvious.

Categories Creativity, Humor, Joy, New York City

The Scientific Breakthrough of the Year!

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2025 //
2

Every year, Science magazine highlights the most innovative development of the year. While the United States retreats from efforts to protect the environment, China surges ahead with the use of American technology.

Here is its selection for 2025:

BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR

The rise of renewables

Solar panels armor a hillside in China’s Anhui province, parting only for an access road. Distant ridges host wind turbines, another fast-growing component of an energy revolution that has helped ease air pollution and slow the growth of China’s carbon emissions.  GEORGE STEINMETZ

This year—for the first time—the world produced more energy via renewable sources than with coal. The meteoric rise of these greener energy technologies, particularly in China, has brought us tantalizingly close to the turning point where annual global carbon emissions plateau and even decline. “To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable,” wrote Science News Editor Tim Appenzeller—“a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.”

While renewable technologies were pioneered in the U.S., it was China’s industrious production of them that changed the game. The country now makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries. Increased production led to lower prices and increased demand, which in turn fueled even more production and even lower prices. As a result, “wind and solar became the cheapest energy in much of the world,” Appenzeller noted. Instead of investing in renewables because they are environmentally friendly, countries—and individuals—started buying them up because they were more affordable. “That change in motivation may be the most important breakthrough of all, ensuring that this year’s inflection points are just the beginning,” he concluded.

But there is one notable exception: the United States. “The U.S. is now squandering an opportunity to reap the benefits of its own technology, ceding the income and the geopolitical power to a nation that repeatedly puts technological prowess above politics,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp in an accompanying editorial. While much of the world continues to increase its renewable energy capacity, “the U.S. marches boldly backward toward the past,” Thorp wrote.

Categories Creativity, Environment, International, Science

Peter Greene: The Case for “Slow School”

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2025 //
18

I have said before that I love Peter Greene. He has turned his four decades of experience as a high school English teacher into a compendium of wisdom. He knows when to listen carefully to new ideas and when to throw them out with the garbage. He usually says what I have been thinking, but writes it up better than I could. This is one of those wonderful pieces that are trademark Peter Greene.

He writes:

Last week I had a bluesky post blow up, a simply referral to Dana Goldstein’s New York Times pieceabout how nobody reads whole books in school any more. It’s a good piece, pretty fairly balanced even as it points out the role of technology, Common Core, and testing in the decline of whole-book reading (and allows some folks to try to defend the not-very-defensible). 

The article itself drew well over a thousand comments, most of them supportive of the idea of reading whole books. The responses to my post were a more mixed bag, with responses that included variations on “Students would read more books if they were assigned good stuff like [insert your fave here] and not crap like [insert author who bugs you and/or Shakespeare here].” Also variations on “Aren’t books over, really?” and its cousin “I didn’t read any books and I am just swell.”

Goldstein gives Common Core a few graphs of defense, because the world still includes people who think it’s great. I am not one of those people, and I have filled up a lot of space explaining why. But in the drop in book reading we can see a couple of the long-term ill effects of the Core (including all the versions hiding in states under an assumed name).

One problem is the Core’s focus on reading as a set of discrete skills that exist in some sort of vacuum absent any content, like waves without water or air. The Core imagined reading as a means of building those skills, and imagined in that context that it doesn’t matter what or how much you read. If today’s lesson is on Drawing Inferences, it doesn’t matter whether you read a scene from Hamlet or a page from a description of 12th century pottery techniques. You certainly don’t need to read the entire work that either of those excerpts came from. Read a page, answer some questions about inferences. Quick and efficient.

And that emphasis on speed and efficiency is another problem.

The Big Standardized Test doesn’t just demand that students get the right answer. It demands that they come up with the right answer RIGHT NOW! And that scaffolds its way backwards through the whole classroom process. The test prep emphasizes picking the One Correct Answer to the question about the one page slice o’writing, and it emphasizes picking it quickly. There is no time allotted for mulling over the reading, no time for putting it in the context of a larger work, certainly no time for considering what other folks have thought about the larger work.

To read and grapple with a whole book takes time. It takes reflection, and it can be enhanced by taking in the reactions of other readers (including both fancy pants scholars and your own peers). I reread Hamlet every year for twenty-some years, each time with a different audience, and I was still unpacking layers of ideas and language and understanding at the end. I taught Nickel and Dimed for years, and the book would lend itself very easily to being excerpted so that one only taught a single chapter from it; but the many chapters taken together add up to more than the sum of their parts. And it takes a while to get through all of it.

If you think there is more value in reading complete works than simply test prep for reading “skills,” then you have to take the time to pursue it.

It is easy as a teacher to get caught up on the treadmill. There is so much you need to cover, and only so much time. There were many times in my career when I had to take a deep breath and walk myself back from hammering forward at breakneck speed. And education leaders tend only to add to the problem and pressure (the people who want you to put something else on your classroom plate rarely offer any ideas about taking something off to make room).

And look– I don’t want to fetshize books here. We English teachers love our novels, but it’s worth remembering that the novel as we understand is a relatively recent development in human history. Some works that we think of as novels weren’t even first published as books; Dickens published his works as magazine serials. And reading novels was, at times, considered bad for Young People These Days. For that matter, complaints about how Kids These Days don’t read full works takes me back to a college class where we learned that pre-literate cultures would sometimes bemoan the rise of literacy– “Kids These Days don’t remember the old songs and stories any more.”

Reading entire works is not automatically magical or transformative. But there is a problem that comes with approaches to comprehending the world that emphasize speed rather than understanding, superficial “skills” over grappling with the ponderable complexities of life. The most rewarding relationships of your life will probably not be the ones that are fast and superficial. And I am reflexively suspicious of anyone who does not themselves want to be seen, heard, or understood on anything beyond a swift and shallow read.

If education is about helping young humans grasp the better version of themselves while understanding what it means to be fully human in the world (and I think it is) then students need the opportunity to grapple with works that mimic the depth and size and complexity of real humans in the real world.

The case has been made for slow school, analogous to the slow food movement, and it can have its problems, like fetishizing a selective view of tradition. But I like the basic idea, the concept of slowing down enough to be able to take in and digest large slices of the world. That should certainly take the form of engaging students with complete works, but I expect that it can take other forms as well.

Test-centric schooling has narrowed and shallowed our concept of education in this country, and while there has never been a reason to stop discussing this issue over the last twenty years, much of the conversation has moved on to other issues, like the current emphasis on culture panic and dismantling the system. But we can do better, dig deeper, tap richer educational veins, if we are just honest about our goals and our obstacles. I hope we’ll get there before my children and grandchildren get too much older.

Categories Common Core, Creativity, Education Reform, Freedom to Read, Literacy, Literature, Real Education

Zohran Mamdani’s Inspiring Victory Speech

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2025 //
20

On election night, Zohran Mamdani gave the following speech, celebrating his victory and also the multicultural coalition that made his victory possible. He is now the Mayor-elect of New York City. He is 34 years old, the youngest Mayor in more than a century. He was born in Uganda to Indian parents. His father is a professor of African Studies at Columbia Unicersity, his mother is a noted film-maker. He is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Sciebce–a selective public high school–and Bowdoin College. He was elected to the State Assembly in 2032, representing the Astoria district of Queens

This transcript was published by The Guardian..

The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands.

Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.

Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.

I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few. New York, tonight you have delivered. A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.

On 1 January, I will be sworn in as the mayor of New York City. And that is because of you. So before I say anything else, I must say this: thank you. Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past.

You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership. We will fight for you, because we are you.

Or, as we say on Steinway, ana minkum wa alaikum.

Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.

To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too. This campaign is about people like Wesley, an 1199 organizer I met outside of Elmhurst hospital on Thursday night. A New Yorker who lives elsewhere, who commutes two hours each way from Pennsylvania because rent is too expensive in this city.

It’s about people like the woman I met on the Bx33 years ago who said to me: “I used to love New York, but now it’s just where I live.” And it’s about people like Richard, the taxi driver I went on a 15-day hunger strike with outside of City Hall, who still has to drive his cab seven days a week. My brother, we are in City Hall now.

This victory is for all of them. And it’s for all of you, the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force. Because of you, we will make this city one that working people can love and live in again. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics.

Now, I know that I have asked for much from you over this last year. Time and again, you have answered my calls – but I have one final request. New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know.

We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who sacrificed so much. We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn.

To my campaign team, who believed when no one else did and who took an electoral project and turned it into so much more: I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude. You can sleep now.

To my parents, mama and baba: You have made me into the man I am today. I am so proud to be your son. And to my incredible wife, Rama, hayati: There is no one I would rather have by my side in this moment, and in every moment.

To every New Yorker – whether you voted for me, for one of my opponents or felt too disappointed by politics to vote at all – thank you for the opportunity to prove myself worthy of your trust. I will wake each morning with a singular purpose: to make this city better for you than it was the day before.

There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same.

And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears.

Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy.

And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.

Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

Tonight we have stepped out from the old into the new. So let us speak now, with clarity and conviction that cannot be misunderstood, about what this new age will deliver, and for whom.

This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt. Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia: an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than 2 million rent-stabilized tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal childcare across our city.

Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come. This new age will be one of relentless improvement. We will hire thousands more teachers. We will cut waste from a bloated bureaucracy. We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered.

Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a department of community safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on. Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception. In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another.

In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.

And we will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong – not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.

No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election. This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.

For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on 1 January, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.

Now, I know that many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour.

They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game any more. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.

After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.

We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.

So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us. When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them. A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.

If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all. And we must chart a new path, as bold as the one we have already traveled. After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate.

I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.

And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.

We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great.

Our greatness will be anything but abstract. It will be felt by every rent-stabilized tenant who wakes up on the first of every month knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before. It will be felt by each grandparent who can afford to stay in the home they have worked for, and whose grandchildren live nearby because the cost of childcare didn’t send them to Long Island.

It will be felt by the single mother who is safe on her commute and whose bus runs fast enough that she doesn’t have to rush school drop-off to make it to work on time. And it will be felt when New Yorkers open their newspapers in the morning and read headlines of success, not scandal.

Most of all, it will be felt by each New Yorker when the city they love finally loves them back.

Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the rent together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and free together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal childcare.

Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together. New York, this power, it’s yours. This city belongs to you.

Categories Courage, Creativity, Elections, Hope, Immigration, New York City

Azar Nafisi Will Speak at Wellesley College on October 29! You Are Invited to Attend!

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2025 //
0

The celebrated author Azar Nafisi will speak at Wellesley College on October 29 at 4 p.m. as part of the annual Diane Silvers Ravitch 1960 lecture series. She will speak in Alumnae Hall. Dr. Nafisi will answer questions after the lecture.

Her topic: READ DANGEROUSLY: THE SUBVERSIVE POWER OF LITERATURE IN TROUBLED TIMES.

Drawing from her life between Iran and the U.S., Nafisi will explore how literature defies repression—whether under the Islamic Republic or the rise of Trump. In times of crackdown on women, culture, minorities, and rights, literature opens spaces of freedom where authoritarianism seeks to closethem. Today, imaginative knowledge is more vital than everin the fight for democracy.

The lecture will be live-streamed.

Azar Nafisi wrote one of the best books I have ever read: Reading Lolita in Tehran.

The book was a sensation. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Dr. Nafisi was born in Tehran. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma. She returned to Iran in 1979, after the Iranian Revolution, and taught English literature at the University of Tehran. In 1981, she was expelled from the university for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil.

She returned to the U.S. in 1997 and acquired American citizenship in 2008.

She has written many books about literature and how it can change our lives.

The public is welcome and admission is free.

I hope to see you there!

Categories Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, International

We Have Lost a Dear Friend: David C. Berliner

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2025 //
25

I was very sad to learn, via a note posted on Facebook by Gene V. Glass that David C. Berliner has died.

David was one of the most honored research psychologists in the nation. You can open his resume online and see the many times he has received awards or served in prestigious positions. I won’t recite his bio.

Instead I want to praise him as a wise and insightful friend. I learned from him and was very happy that we forged a strong bond in the past few years.

David was an acerbic critic of the past two+ decades of what was called “education reform.” David laughed at the nonsensical but heavily funded plans to “reform” education by imposing behaviorist strategies on teachers, as if they were robots or simpletons.

David had no patience with the shallow critics of America’s public schools. He respected the nation’s teachers and understood as few of the critics did, just how valuable and under-appreciated they were.

But he did have patience with me. He appreciated my change of views and offered encouragement. Knowing that he had my back made me fearless.

I will miss my friend. So will everyone else who cares about the future of American education, not as a business venture, but as our most important civic responsibility. .

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Creativity, Education Reform, ESSA

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
« Older Entries