The Guardianwrote about an extraordinary case in Texas, in which the Trump administration and two Texas judges meted out the equivalent of life sentences for those who participated in an anti-ICE protest that turned violent.
The Trump administration used the trial to show that it would seek draconian punishment for those who protested against its policies. The prosecutors treated the protestors as Antifa, the dread and shadowy anti-fascist group that has no address.
The Guardian described the protest, which turned violent:
Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.
After a three-week trial, a jury found eight of nine protesters guilty of “providing material support to terrorists”, among other crimes. For the Sotos, this “material support” included owning a “printing press” used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club, the federal government argued. The couple had already left the scene by the time guns were drawn. All eight of the defendants sentenced so far have received unusually harsh sentences – 30 to 100 years – essentially life in prison.
The Guardian article focused on a married couple, Elizabeth and Ines Soto. They were not at the scene when guns were drawn. But agents found a printing press in their home, where they printed leftist literature. Elizabeth was a member of the Emma Goldman book club. Elizabeth was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Her husband will be sentenced on July 1.
The protestor who fired a weapon, Benjamin Song, was sentenced to 100 years in prison.
Certainly, it is unlawful to bring a weapon to a demonstration and unlawful to fire it at an officer of the law. Slashing tires and attacking property is illegal.
Yes, those involved in acts of violence should go to prison. Those who commit crimes should go to prison. But their sentences are wildly disproportionate to their crimes. In the case of the Sotos, it is not clear that they committed any crime.
Michelle H. Davis of “Lone Star Left” closes out her coverage of the Texas Republican convention. Her incisive reporting demonstrates the lunacy and cruelty that now dominate Texas Republicans. Well, at least they didn’t adopt a resolution to give the death penalty to any woman who dared to have an abortion. That’s something.
She writes:
The Republican Party of Texas is a party of hate and a party of cruelty. They were built in smoky back offices and pulpits in the early 1970s on the Moral Majority and the New Right. Then, they conquered Texas through the shady legal maneuverings of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. The men at the top built an empire of corruption and theft. Theft of our water, theft of our clean air, theft of our labor.
Texas Republicans have long had everything they’ve wanted. For decades, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have gotten poorer. But it’s not enough. They have to keep people voting for them somehow. Dumb down education. Appeal to the most extreme elements. That’s all they have left.
In 1964, the John Birch Society found its moment at the Republican National Convention. Barry Goldwater didn’t fully embrace them. But he didn’t reject them either. When Nelson Rockefeller stood at that podium and named the John Birch Society alongside the Ku Klux Klan as examples of extremism that the party should refuse, the crowd booed him off the stage. Goldwater then declared, “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
Goldwater was a total shit.
The Birchers never went away. And over the next sixty years, what was once considered the lunatic fringe became the Republican mainstream. The “deep state.” The “new world order.” Conspiracies about globalists, infiltrators, and enemies within. It’s the same playbook.
Which brings us to the 2026 Republican Party of Texas Convention.
The “Abolish Abortion” plank failed the final vote in the platform. That’s the one that would have handed the death penalty to any woman who received abortion care. Any woman. A minor. A rape survivor. Doesn’t matter. But don’t mistake that for a victory, because the men who stood on that convention floor and pushed for it are still on the ballot. Including:
Rep. Bret Money (R-HD02). You can donate to his Democratic opponent, Fatima Muse, HERE.
Rep. David Lowe (R-HD91). You can donate to his Democratic opponent, Yisak Worku, HERE.
But what did pass on the platform?
Banning IVF. Banning Sharia Law.
In 2026, the Birchers write the Republican Party platform.
Why IVF? Well, because they say this is a person:
But, actually, that ⬆️ is a mouse embryo I found on Google. But if women who are struggling with fertility are not allowed to have IVF in Texas anymore. 1- It will eventually spread to other states, and 2- what kind of repercussions will come from this?
America already has a history of this.
The Indian Adoption Project, beginning in the early 1950s, adopted Native children out primarily to non-Indian families to reduce reservation populations. By the time Congress finally acted, approximately one-third of all American Indian children had been removed from their homes. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 was the legislative response, and the right has been trying to gut it ever since.
First of all, they already tried this in the 2015 Legislative session during the last time Muslim panic swept the state of Texas. During that time, Beth Van Duyne, the then-mayor of Irving, was directly responsible for the statewide outrage and upset. This was simialar to the Muslim panic after 9/11. Maybe, not that bad. But the Republicans go back and forth between which marginalized group they hate most each year. This year, it happens to be Muslims.
When you Google “What is Sharia Law,” you get a lot of different answers, so hear it directly from Rep. Salman Bhojani (D-HD92):
From the Republicans’ perspective, it really boils down to ignorance and bigotry. Just like the “Show Me Your Papers” bill. Just like the DEI bans. Same rhyme, different verse.
All the Texas transplants, pretending to be Texans.
Now, don’t get me wrong, we love our transplants. They add to the vibrant culture that makes our state so unique. But nothing chaps my hide more than a bunch of dudes that moved here in their 40s rambling on about how THEY represent Texas values more than ME. Like, sirs, I have a grandfather and a great-uncle in the square the day JFK got shot, and they were both born in Dallas.
And all of these Republicans, the wealthy ones, who came here to get into politics or nepo-baby their way into their daddy’s corporation that came to Texas for the low taxes, they think the Texas spirit is all about taking as much as you can for yourself, while screwing everyone else at the bottom, and hurting anyone different from you.
Senate Majority Leader Tan Parker, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stood at that podium and invoked the Alamo. He talked about faith, family, liberty, and the God-given right of free people to govern themselves. He said Texas is proof that freedom works.
Parker has been rated as one of the most dangerous anti-choice legislators in Texas. He’s endorsed by both Texas Right to Life and Texas Alliance for Life. His legislative priorities in 2025 centered on capital markets packages and making Texas a hub for financial services, because when women are dying from abortion ban complications, and Texas has a maternal mortality rate that rivals that of developing nations, but Parker’s focus is on helping rich people move their money here faster.
The man flew in from Pennsylvania, wrapped himself in the Texas flag, invoked the memory of the men who died at the Alamo, and has spent nearly two decades making life harder for the working Texans he claims to represent.
The full platform will be posted on the Republican Party of Texas website in the coming weeks. Read it. Share it. Make sure every voter in your life knows exactly what these people are planning.
Because we already know what’s coming in the 90th Legislative Session. They’ve written it down for us. Frozen embryos have more rights than the mothers who made them. Muslims are the designated enemy of the cycle. A Texas that looks less like the state we love and more like the fever dream of a John Birch Society pamphlet from 1962.
They are telling us exactly who they are.
The question is whether we’re going to let them keep doing it.
We can stop them by flipping the Texas House. Democrats need a net gain of just 14 seats to break Republican control, and the candidates to do it are on the ballot right now.
The greatest mystery in Texas is why people who aren’t rich continue to elect Republicans, who do nothing for them other than to whip up culture war issues.
Michelle H. Davis reports on the latest state convention of the Texas Republican Party. You should read this to understand their thinking, or lack thereof. One candidate promises to investigate George Soros. Another asks the audience how they feel about Texas becoming a Muslim state. The big event was that hard-right Governor Greg Abbott brought an elephant to parade around, and the elephant pissed before he left the convention. Davis thought the act was symbolic of what Republicans do to ordinary Texans.
She is very witty writer. You will enjoy reading her account of the very unserious swindlers who run the state.
She writes:
Undoubtedly, by now, you’ve seen the biggest news of the Republicans’ Convention. Governor Abbott closed his speech by bringing out an elephant, which promptly peed all over the floor. It was performance art. A perfect representation of what the Republican government in Texas has been doing to the people for years.
It’s rumored that some of the people in the front rows could hear Abbott cackle, “Ha! It’s raining,” as the incident occurred.
Attendance for the Republican Party of Texas’ (RPT) Convention was way down. Notably, at one point yesterday, only 38 people were watching the live stream. (And one of them was me, lol.)
Then, if you follow the Texas Democratic Party on social media, you may have seen this meme they shared of Senator Bettencourt’s quote on the polling environment.
The Convention has thus far been a disaster. Today is the final day. I’ll have the report on that tomorrow, which means we’ll be pushing out our Meet the Candidate article this week to Monday (stay tuned). Yesterday, they elected the new Chair of the Republican Party of Texas.
D’Rinda Randall, new Republican Party of Texas Chair.
So, this is really interesting. And it’s also a lot to unpack. First, you have to understand that the RPT elects a new Chair every two years. And by the time their cycle is up, they always have some faction against them, and they get pushed out. Abraham George is out. Before him, it was Allen West. Before him, it was James Dickey. And so on. Typically, Republicans break their own bylaws to elect their favored chair. I’m not sure if that happened this time. My emails are open.
Randall was the Vice Chair under Abraham George. Like with the Democratic Party, the Chair and Vice Chair must be of opposite genders. Randall is the first Republican woman to chair in Texas since 2003. Stick a pin in that, we’ll circle back around.
The Vice Chair who was elected to serve under Randall is David Covey. You may remember that Covey ran a multi-million dollar campaign against Dade Phelan (R-HD21) in 2024, had Trump’s endorsement, and still lost. He was a loser.
Now, it’s important to understand where the Republican Party is with women’s rights in 2026. Not just women’s rights, but with women being seen as people.
Check out this report from CBC News earlier this week at the Erika Kirk Christian National Convention in San Antonio, where a bunch of women said they were willing to give up their right to vote:
To impose the death penalty on any woman who receives abortion care, even minors and rape survivors.
To ban IVF.
To ban all egg and sperm donation clinics.
It’s all connected.
Don’t you find it strange that at the same time, Republican women are talking about freely giving up their right to vote, the willingness to sacrifice their lives for an ectopic pregnancy, and that all of a sudden, the Republican Party of Texas would elect its first woman in over 20 years?
Of course, the Republican rumor mill is going wild with conspiracies. Before we jump on that bandwagon, we’ll have to see how they can cannibalize each other in the coming months.
The keynote speakers woke up, showed up, and said nothing.
One of yesterday’s keynote speakers was Ken Paxton, and he looked awful. He might have been hungover. He shuffled out on stage, slouching, looking like he just woke up, no excitement, no energy, just, “I’m here.”
The speech itself was a masterclass in saying nothing for eight and a half minutes. Trans panic. Biden. Chuck Schumer. Open borders. The radical left. You’ve heard it. You’ve heard it a thousand times. He called James Telerico “Low T-arico,” “Sixgender Jimmy,” and “Talifreako.” He was like a middle schooler who thinks he’s the funniest kid on the bus.
He didn’t talk about the cost of living. He didn’t talk about gas prices. He didn’t talk about the rising unemployment rate. Or the increasingly difficult access to healthcare.
Paxton, who hails from North Dakota, said the words “Texas values,” then he talked about culture war garbage. It’s hard to believe that anyone takes this man seriously.
Or Dan Patrick, who, besides, said on stage, Talarico was going to hell, came out wearing a black pleather jacket and matching boots.
Of course, it will never beat this jacket ⬇️, but it was a close second.
Black pleather turtleneck and matching boots, in June, in Houston, and explained, unprompted, that it was his “time travel suit.”
Sir, it is 95 degrees outside, and you look like a community theater villain.
He ran two campaign ads on the convention floor. The first one was Paul Revere warning colonists that the British were coming, except the British were James Talarico, an 8th-generation Texan, unlike Danny, who is from Maryland. The second one was the Alamo. Because nothing says “I’m in touch with modern Texas voters” like reaching back to 1836.
Then he recited the Alamo, the lyrics to a Johnny Cash song from 1960. He just said them, without rhythm, not singing them. He stood on that stage in his time-travel turtleneck, performed a Johnny Cash song, and presented it to the delegates of the Republican Party of Texas as a history lesson. It was really weird.
He called Democrats “socialist, leftist, communist, and idiots,” in that order. He declared that the entire transgender rights movement is just a plot to make Republicans argue with each other.
This is the Lieutenant Governor of Texas. This is a man who is one heartbeat from the governorship. This is who shows up in a pleather turtleneck and recites Johnny Cash and condemns his political opponents to eternal damnation in front of a live audience.
Texas values, from the mouth of a Marylander.
But peel back the costume and the lyrics, and you find a frightened man. He spent a big chunk of that speech begging Republicans not to stay home and doing the math out loud. Talarico starts at 45%. He only needs six more points. If Republicans aren’t unified, if rural turnout softens, if the sore losers stay home. Dan Patrick knows exactly what happens.
The man in the time travel suit is scared.
Good.
And speaking of weird.
Mayes Middleton, for those keeping score at home, is a billionaire from Galveston who has purchased every office he has ever held. State rep. State senator. And now, Republican nominee for Attorney General of Texas, because when you have that kind of money, the next rung on the ladder is just another check to write.
At the Convention, Middleton took the stage and delivered what can only be described as a greatest hits collection of things that are not real problems in Texas. I don’t know what else to expect from nepobaby billionaires who have only ever harmed their own lives. He announced he will investigate George Soros on day one. He announced he will “attack Sharia law” as organized crime.
He compared Nathan Johnson and James Talarico to Santa Anna. Somehow, the Democrats are to the left of Santa Anna. He said that. Out loud. Into a microphone.
And then, because he apparently needed you to know he is a relatable family man, he told a story about his four-year-old daughter calling him “MAGA Mayes” after watching too much TV. He thought that was charming.
His opponent, Nathan Johnson, is a Dallas state senator with a long legislative record. Middleton’s record is a checkbook. But in the Republican Party of Texas in 2026, that’s apparently enough.
The only nepo-baby more out of touch than Mayes Middleton is Bo French. Yes, also a nepo-baby. Republicans love electing men with soft hands.
Bo French is the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, which, if you don’t know, regulates the oil and gas industry. It does not regulate Muslims. It does not regulate DEI. It does not regulate the Green New Deal. It regulates oil and gas.
Bo French does not appear to know this.
He asked the crowd (and this is a direct quote), “Do you want Texas to become a Muslim state?” At a Railroad Commissioner speech. He just needed you to know that was on the table. That was a concern he had about the Railroad Commission.
He cited Genesis. He cited Proverbs 14:34. He explained that God’s command to exercise dominion over the earth is actually a mandate for responsible oil and gas extraction. The Bible, Bo French has determined, is pro-drilling.
The bar was on the floor, right next to the elephant puddle.
Low attendance. A new party chair elected amid swirling conspiracies. A hungover Senate candidate workshopping middle school nicknames. A Lieutenant Governor in a pleather time travel suit who performed Johnny Cash and sent a man to hell. A billionaire who has never earned anything listing things that aren’t real problems. A Railroad Commissioner candidate who is very concerned about the Muslim takeover of oil and gas regulation. And an elephant that peed on the floor while the Governor of Texas watched.
This is a party that is performing. And the performance is getting sloppier, louder, and more desperate by the year, because underneath all of it, Dan Patrick’s math is right. They know how close this is. They know what’s coming. And they have nothing to offer the people of Texas except fear, nicknames, and Johnny Cash lyrics they didn’t write.
Meanwhile, Texans are losing farms and losing access to healthcare. Paying more for everything. And the people responsible for that spent three days in Houston talking about George Soros and Sharia law and what gender God is.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2026 Republican Party of Texas.
They’ve been pissing on you for years and calling it rain. The elephant just finally did it in front of everyone.
Congress just added another $70 billion to the budget of ICE and the Border Patrol. Meanwhile, there are no apparent efforts to improve living conditions at ICE detention centers. There seems to be an intention to make life miserable so that detained people ask to be deported. ICE is given leeway to arrest anyone, regardless of their lack of any criminal record. Even citizens and others with valid papers have been held in detention for weeks or months. So much for deporting “the worst of the worst!”
In 2024, Narges Dehghani fled Iran for the United States. She had been a dissident, fighting against the regime, and had been detained, violently interrogated, and sexually assaulted by Islamic Republic agents. In America, she hoped to finally find freedom. Instead, she has been held for fourteen months at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center.
When Dehghani arrived at the Eloy Detention Center, in Arizona, she was “emotionally, mentally and physically wrecked” from her journey to the US-Mexico border. During her intake assessment, she told a psychologist that she was having suicidal thoughts and was immediately put on “suicide watch” in solitary confinement, where she remained for three days. “It’s not like a treatment; it’s a punishment,” Dehghani told the Arizona Daily Star. “That place is not a place you should put a human being.”
Dehghani shared her story with Emily Bregel and Emily Hamer for their excellent series “Inside ICE Detention,” produced by the Daily Star and Lee Enterprises,which examines the impact of detention on immigrants without criminal records. Bregel and Hamer’s reporting found that “ICE is misusing and overusing solitary confinement in ways that violate immigrants’ rights and ICE’s own policies.” Over the past seven months, they have interviewed more than thirty detainees.
“The people who are in detention centers are largely not criminals—about 70 percent of them have never been charged with any kind of crime at all,” Hamer told me. “We wanted to look at the conditions that people are facing in detention because it’s civil detention. It’s not criminal. The conditions are not supposed to be as bad as prison, legally, and yet Eloy Detention Center in Arizona basically looks like prison.”
Last week, the pair published a piece documenting the increasing use of solitary confinement in detention centers to coerce detainees into self-deporting. “ICE is subjecting them to really harsh conditions so that they’ll just give up,” Hamer told me. “We have had detainees tell us that guards are telling them, ‘That’s my whole objective, is to make your time in here as miserable as possible so that you self-deport,’ which is unconstitutional.”
Maksim Borisov, a twenty-two-year-old who faced persecution in Russia for being gay, spent more than a year in ICE detention. At one point, a guard presented him with papers and repeatedly pressured him to self-deport. When he refused, he was thrown into solitary confinement. “This is torturing. They’re torturing me,” Borisov said. “I never broke any law, and I’m being punished because I don’t want to die in my country.”
We continue to see stories about American military attacks on small boats in the Caribbean or the Pacific. We read that our planes destroyed a boat carrying drugs and drug dealers. How do we know whether the boat was carrying drugs? No evidence is presented. How do we know that the men killed were drug dealers, not fishermen? We don’t. We have to trust Pete Hegseth.
Dominic Preziosi, editor of Commonweal, says that without evidence, the attacks on small craft might be “simply murder.” Commonweal is a liberal Catholic journal that is thoughtful and definitely worth reading.
He writes:
Now that his appeals have been denied, former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte faces trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. Duterte is charged with killing alleged drug addicts and dealers during his terms as mayor of Davao City and as president from 2016 to 2022—about six thousand people, though some estimates put the total closer to thirty thousand. Duterte dispatched police death squads to carry out his campaign of extrajudicial executions, which was condemned at the time by rights groups around the world and by Catholic leaders in the Philippines, who called it a “reign of terror.” Duterte once bragged of having stabbed someone to death, and while president said he would “be happy to slaughter” three million drug addicts in the country if he could.
Donald Trump was an early admirer of Duterte. In April 2017, three months into his first term, Trump called Duterte to praise him for his murderous crackdown. “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” he enthused. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing.” Just a month before that, the U.S. State Department had criticized Duterte in its annual human-rights report, citing “apparent governmental disregard for human rights and due process.”
There are unmistakable echoes of Duterte’s “unbelievable job” in the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which was launched last September under the pretext of protecting the “American homeland” from drug cartels and so-called narcoterrorists. In fifty-eight attacks by drone and aircraft—the most recent on May 26—nearly two hundred people have been killed. In at least one instance, U.S. forces returned to kill survivors clinging to the wreckage of a vessel already struck. The U.S. military has also used aircraft painted like a civilian plane to carry out some of the attacks. Both of these would qualify as war crimes. Wary of being linked to human-rights violations, allies like Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have stopped sharing intelligence that they think could be misused by the United States to target vessels. Shortly after the attacks began, Arizona senator Mark Kelly and several other Democratic lawmakers—all of whom served in the military or intelligence community—issued a joint statement reminding service members that they do not have to obey illegal orders.
In none of the boat strikes has the military seized drugs or produced evidence that those it killed were involved in the drug trade. Many of the victims appear to have been fishermen or other laborers. This hasn’t stopped Trump from demonizing those killed or members of his administration from releasing celebratory video clips of vessels being destroyed from high above. Vice President J. D. Vance has cracked that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world.” In defending the campaign, called “Operation Southern Spear,” Hegseth uses bizarre theocratic rhetoric, warning that “Christian nations, under God” cannot be led astray by “radical narco-communists.”
Trump, meanwhile, spouts nonsense about the targeting program’s effectiveness. He has claimed that the strikes have prevented twenty-five thousand cocaine-related deaths in one year, though experts say that there have not been that many such deaths over the past fifty years in total. He has baselessly declared that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” since the killing spree began. He has failed (repeatedly) to distinguish between cocaine and fentanyl—which has taken a deadly toll on Americans, but which enters the country via land routes and is not transported by sea. Meanwhile, traditional interdiction—stopping suspicious vessels, confiscating drugs, arresting traffickers, all while refraining from indiscriminate killing—continues to be the most effective means of disrupting shipments.
But in many ways that is all beside the point. The strikes are wrong on legal, ethical, and moral grounds. The administration’s contention that the United States is at war with “narcoterrorists”—an argument that builds on the spurious reasoning of the Bush administration to justify its use of torture in the “global war on terror”—doesn’t permit it to launch lethal attacks on civilians. Even John Yoo, the former Bush official who devised that reasoning, has qualms about the Trump administration’s rationale for killing people in international waters. “Never before in the country’s history has the government asserted this type [of] power,” Seton Hall law school professor Jonathan Hafetz told The Guardian. “This is a clear example of unlawful killing by the United States.”
The Pentagon’s internal watchdog recently announced it will investigate the boat strikes, but that it will only evaluate “the joint process for targeted vessels”—how the military conducts the attacks, leaving aside the matter of their legality. While Duterte may have to answer for his crimes, no American official involved in killing civilians at sea—from Trump and Hegseth on down—will face trial in an international court, since the United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. The families of two Trinidadian fishermen killed by the United States have filed suit against the administration in a Massachusetts court, but it’s hard to know how their case will fare given that foreign nationals are not protected by federal law. Yet their charge seems beyond dispute: “[The attacks] were simply murder, ordered at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”
Timothy Snyder is an expert on European history. He taught for many years at Yale University and held a prestigious chair in European history. In 2025, he accepted a chair at the University of Toronto. His Substack blog is titled “Thinking About…” This important essay appeared in May 9. Nothing Snyder says here has changed.
The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.
On April 20th I was asked to speak in New York about ethics and power. My thinking, which I expressed in a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, on this little video, and in the media, was that our utterly unethical war was also utterly self-destructive. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide. The term was since come into more general use, and readers have been asking me to spell it out.
Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.
It is hard to see this clearly. Even as we oppose individual Trump adventures, we hope that in some way they are based on some understanding of the national interest. They are not. To get the perspective we need to see the nature of this anti-strategic self-slaughter, it will help to consider thirteen traditional bases of state power.
1. Statehood. A superpower must, at a minimum, be a modern state. This means that it must be an arrangement that includes, via law and other institutions, a larger body of citizens within a common endeavor. There is no sign that the Trump administration regards the United States of America as a state. It treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise.
2. National interest. Another minimal requirement of superpower would be a sense of why that power must be used. The Trump administration exhibits no interest in the good of the people. Theorists of international relations have differed as to how leaders understand national interests; we are intellectually unprepared, however, for a situation in which the leader simply does not care about either the state or the nation.
3. Succession. Again, for a state to maintain itself as a superpower, it must maintain itself over time. The basic requirement of such continuity is a succession principle, a means by which authority is transferred from some people to other people while institutions continue to function. In the United States, democracy enables succession. Historically, there are means of succession, for example by dynasty (or dynastic adoption, as in second-century Rome) or by the decision of a politburo, as in China or the USSR (in the US this would be a capitalist politburo, the sort of oligarchical coven that got us JD Vance). Getting from democracy to such different arrangements would end the American republic. Trump aspires to stay in power indefinitely, and says so. By putting the vote in question, he puts America in question, and thus American power.
4. Elites. For states to thrive and to accumulate and maintain power, the right people have to be in charge. There is no perfect means to achieve this, and there is the inevitable tension, as the Roman Stoics and others have noted, between the skills needed to rise to the top and those suited to serving some general interest. And those who rise to a position of authority will try to pass it on to their children; the Roman Catholic Church went to the extreme of insisting on priestly celibacy to block this tendency. Historically, powerful states seek ways to enable qualified people to serve in positions of authority, regardless of birth. Ancient China had an examination system. Napoleon established the principle of merit in both civilian and military life. The United States had a civil service that was the envy of the world as well as a military that was its most meritocratic institution. The Trump administration has chosen to disable the civil service and to purge the military command of people of quality. This process has been carried out by people who are themselves wildly unqualified to hold any sort of office, let along cabinet positions. To see where we are, we must understand that people such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, about whom one might raise other objections, had no business accepting their nominations, since they lack any qualifications. The fact that such people could be considered, let alone appointed, is a marker of superpower suicide.
5. Education. In a deeper sense, a superpower must have a mechanism to refresh its society, and thus its politics and administration, by preparing its population to understand the challenges of the world. This administration has done the contrary. University students are forbidden to gather and to speak their minds; university administrations are threatened with retaliation if they allow their faculty to teach freely; libraries around the country, including in military academies, are purged of useful books; public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved; an unregulated internet is allowed and indeed encouraged to transform the public sphere into a realm of emotions and recriminations.
6. Science. The rise of great powers often involves an alliance between politics and science. The ancient Mesopotamians were astronomers whose systems of describing the heavens still mark our ways of thought; so were the Mayans. The Romans managed to operationalize Greek science to build, defend, and cure. The Renaissance was, by no coincidence, also the age of exploration. Modern imperial powers built state institutions to fund science and attract scientists; the United States from the 1940s was the outstanding example of this trend, and science (often as practiced by immigrants) was the most important basis of American superpower. Current American policy is to fund science on the basis of primitive ideological taboos, and to discourage young scientists from immigrating to the United States. Senior scientists are also leaving; a colleague in a central position in US science just told me that he is leaving the country in part because the overall environment is better in other places. It is also US policy to cast doubt on basic scientific observations, such as that of human-caused climate change.
7. Energy. Human groups that pioneer new forms of energy technology rise; those that do not fall. This might be the most profound truth of our history; a magnificent forthcoming bookdemonstrates the significance of energy transitions at the most profound level, that of the history of life on earth itself. Humans who mastered fire could consume more energy themselves. Humans who domesticated dogs could use their energy to hunt mammoths. Humans who domesticated plants could turn solar energy to their own purposes. Humans who understood weather and climate could turn wind energy to the purpose of exploration and conquest, as did the Vikings. The United States was established on the cusp of a transition to hydrocarbon energy: coal, oil, natural gas. These forms of energy are now becoming obsolete, not only in ecological but also in economic terms. And yet this administration has chosen to cancel America’s energy transition and subsidize technologies that have no future. This is superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form. And nothing could benefit America’s chief rival, China, more than this choice.
8. Technology. It requires little effort to associate technology with the rise of great powers. Military achievement is associated intimately with innovation; from the spur to the machine gun, the causal relationship is not really contestable. While the United States spends gigantic amounts of money on weaponry, the Trump administration has chosen to focus on weapons from the past rather than of the future. Trump’s idea is battleships named after himself based on what he remembers of a movie. The plans for “Trump-class” battleships are a mixture of the fictional and the vulnerable, which does reflect the man. The notion is to invest untold amounts of money into a kind of weapon has been understood to be obsolete since 1943, and which if somehow built would be highly vulnerable to weapons other countries now have. This strategic atavism draws the United States away from national security in its most basic sense. The shape of modern warfare is revealed by the high-tech war between Russia and Ukraine, especially in Ukraine’s successful self-defense. The Trump administration chose to ignore the lessons of that war and to demean and defund America’s Ukrainian ally, to the detriment of American interests and American warfighting.
9. Diplomacy. This art, celebrated by great powers, has been trashed by the United States. It cannot be practiced without understanding other countries, as the most focused American diplomats have stressed (for example, Henry Kissinger, who can hardly be excused of softheartedness). It has rested, in the American and other cases, on the deliberate construction of a diplomatic corps where people train in languages and trade in knowledge. Under the Trump administration, the foreign service has been trashed. The principle of diplomacy, such as it is, is that other countries will do what we want because we are big and bad. This has not worked. The bizarre notion that the president can himself “make deals” is the sign of a religious cult; like most cults, its activity is the generation of ever more creative excuses for the lack of performance. There is no evidence that Trump knows how to negotiate, and abundant evidence that he does not: for example, defeat in trade wars with China; personal vulnerability to the preferences of Russian leaders, and the disaster of Iranian nuclear enrichment, of which Trump himself is the chief sponsor. In practice, critical negotiations, with Iran and elsewhere, have been put in the hands of two people, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with close personal relationships with the president and obvious economic stakes in the relevant conflicts. The diplomacy of the Huns was far more sophisticated than this. It is hard to overstate how primitive the current American approach is, and how much joy it brings to America’s enemies.
10. Alliances. Great powers have allies. To be sure, they might change these alliances rapidly for reasons of interest, as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire famously did. The whole history of the Roman Empire, for that matter, was one of active diplomacy with neighboring barbarians (as the Romans saw matters); archaeology bears witness to the arrangements that were made. The history of modern European empires was also one considered alliances, as the architects of American superpower understood. Under the Trump administration, useful allies are mocked and marginalized for no reason other than personal whimsy and a sense of grievance. Because there is no sense of state or national interest, there can be no understanding that alliances are of service. Trump feels annoyed because he is losing a war and removes US troops from Germany; those troops are there to enable the United States to win wars. I personally cannot think of any other example in which the leaders of a great power behaved in this way, presumably because these kinds of choices are inconsistent with the maintenance of power. The United States now seems to be treating as “allies” middle eastern countries that have nothing to offer except their own interests in the use of American armed forces in their own region, permanent engagement in the disastrous politics of oil, and financial opportunities for people personally close to Trump.
11. The international system. Postwar America did something far more impressive than build a system of alliances; it essentially created a set of laws, rules, and norms that allowed American power to maintain itself and to expand. The European Union and NATO, so abused by the Trump people today, were indirect and direct results of American policies intelligently designed to maximize American trade and security interests. But the achievement was far broader than that, and indeed historically unprecedented: the construction of laws and conventions that kept one country in the center of the world. Today, the Trump people make themselves at the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference and similar gatherings and complaining that the rules are against them — the exact opposite was the case, because America made the rules. In deliberately destroying its own international system, this American government is improving the position of its rivals China and Russia, who have been calling for exactly this to happen, but who lacked the ability to make it happen.
12. The idea of victory. A superpower wins in confrontations, at least some of the time. This administration loses again and again, and is seen to lose by others. Trump announced that his main weapon of influence would be tariffs, but then lost his trade war with China, leaving Beijing more powerful and more emboldened. The Russo-Ukrainian war is a curious case. It would serve the interests of the United States in prosperity and stability for Ukraine to win; but under Trump the United States has switched its policy to one of support for Ukraine to support for Russia. So it has lost in that way. But since the United States has made that pivot, Ukraine has performed ever better in the war, and Russia has performed worse. And so the United States, amazingly, has managed to be the loser in the same war a double sense: by failing to see its own interests, and then by failing to fail. The Iranian war is an obvious strategic defeat in every traditional sense; insofar as there were any American objectives, they were not achieved. Trump’s policies have left Iran with more enriched uranium in the hands of a more radical regime which holds new sources of economic power in the world. In the current situation, in which military options have been self-humiliatingly exhausted, the useful instruments would be those that involved communicating with the Iranian people or influencing Iranian society. Those institutions existed until very recently; they were willfully demolished, to great fanfare, in early 2026.
The United States is now governed by people who celebrate defeat in symbolic terms characteristic of states in disastrous decline. Consider Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the rescue of a US pilot as the resurrection of Jesus. The screaming blasphemy of this might distract us from its strategic helplessness. Christological images of this sort are used as propaganda to transform defeat in the real world into victory in some imaginary one. The US lost the war in Iran. Among other things it was not able to sustain an air campaign. The downing of a US fighter meant than an individual mission failed. It is happy news, of course, that the pilot survived. But the notion that this was a “literal miracle,” as Hegseth claimed, brings the United States, sadly, into the tradition of losers who use Jesus to claim to be winners. An historical example of this was Polish Romanticism, with its idea that the collapse of a republic (chiefly due to wealth inequality) made of Poland the “Christ of Nations.” Donald Trump’s own self-deification has to be seen in similar terms: a president who could assert power in this world would not have to claim that his real authority comes from another one. His fantasies of the total destruction of Iranian civilization are part of an apocalyptic panorama that is inconsistent with decent politics.
13. Finances. Though not the most interesting historical subject, budget disaster stands behind many of the most notable collapses of state power, ancient and modern. Under Trump our national debt now approaches $40 trillion. National debt is higher than GDP of the country for the first time since the end of the Second World War. That is a notable point of comparison: it is normal to run big deficits when facing the challenge of the scale of a world war. We are running huge deficits for an entirely different reason: because we decline to tax wealthy individuals and corporations. That is not an approach that is consistent with fighting and winning wars, nor with maintaining the social services that allow a modern society to function. More profoundly: it reflects an approach to politics — government as customer service to the very wealthy — that leads us from power to ethics.
The war can lead us to a diagnosis of superpower suicide. Wars cannot be won by people who have no idea what they are doing, because they have no frame of reference (such as the nation or the state) beyond their own feelings. They cannot be fought well when the wrong people are making the daily decisions and the wrong weapons are being deployed. They cannot be reasonably brought to an end when there is no practice of diplomacy and no notion of the value of alliances and no concern about corruption.
But even a strict focus on power will lead us back to justice. But just as the war is only a symptom of superpower suicide, so superpower suicide is only a symptom of a still deeper condition, the one that must be addressed.
Even if all we cared about were American power, we would have to ask ourselves how to undo the distortions of democracy and the drastic inequalities of that enabled world-historical levels of strategic buffoonery. After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable.
The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.
*****
PS. If you would like to help Ukrainians defend themselves from Russia’s criminal war of aggression, please consider contributing to the Sky Defense campaign. For worse but also for better, as the Ukrainians have shown us, this is a time when civil society campaigns can contribute to general security.
Trump has spent a lot of time rescuing, pardoning and trying to reward the people who joined him in attempting to overturn his election loss in 2020. He is a giant baby. He is a sore loser. He lost decisively, and he refuses to accept it. More than 60 federal and state courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, rejected his appeals because there was no evidence of election fraud.
Someday, with time, we will look back on Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat as a low point in our history. Of course, we will look at his two terms in office as the absolute nadir of our history, as a time he spent rolling back civil rights, environmental protections, international alliances, access to healthcare, defunding medical and scientific research, bullying universities, and censoring the mass media.
Tina Peters, the former clerk convicted of participating in a scheme to chase election conspiracy theories promulgated by President Donald Trump, was released from prison Monday after the president successfully pressured Colorado’s Democratic governor into commuting her sentence.
Peters’ release was confirmed by the Colorado Department of Corrections. The state agency said it would have no more information about the 70-year-old inmate. Her sentence was shortened by Gov. Jared Polis last month after Trump waged a lengthy pressure campaign against the governor and his state.
Peters served less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence.
Peters was the first local election official to be charged with breaching security after the 2020 election. She snuck in an outside computer expert affiliated with My Pillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell — who himself denied that Trump lost the White House in 2020 — and the person copied the county’s Dominion Voting Systems computer server as it was updated in 2021.
Peters then joined Lindell onstage at a “cybersymposium” that promised to reveal proof that the election was rigged. Video and photos of the computer system upgrade, including passwords, were posted online. The move stoked false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Trump.
Peters was convicted in 2024 of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, violation of duty and other crimes by jurors in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that supported Trump. An appeals court upheld her conviction in April, but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud.
Trump had championed Peters’ case, but because she was convicted under state law, he did not have the power to pardon her. Instead, the president pressured Polis to do so, lambasting him on social media and disinviting him to a White House meeting with other governors. The Trump administration also announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and relocated the U.S. Space Command to Alabama.
Polis commuted Peters’ sentence on May 15. In a letter, he wrote that although Peters was convicted of serious crimes and deserved to spend time in prison, the sentence was “extremely unusual and lengthy” for a first-time non-violent offender.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, called the move a “dark day for democracy” and said it amounted to “selling out our state’s justice system for Trump.”
Adam Kinzinger, former member of Congress, reports on the Trump administration’s cruel policy of separating children from their parents–even when one or both of their parents are U.S. citizens.
He writes:
Report Reveals Trump Has Separated 100,000 Children From Their Parents — and 75% Are U.S. Citizens
In a brand new Brookings Institution report, researchers estimate around 145,000 U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained since Trump returned to office. About 22,000 have had every parent in the home taken into custody. More than a third of those children are under six years old.
And here is the part that should stop you cold. Only about five percent of these children have been touched by the child welfare system. The other 95 percent are scattered: some with relatives, some left the country with a deported parent, some simply unaccounted for in any government data.
The Department of Homeland Security responded with a sentence they have been recycling for a year: ICE “does not separate families.” That is the official line while 145,000 American kids are missing a parent.
In Trump’s first term, family separation at the border ended in 2018 because the country saw the photos and refused to live with it. This time around it is more than twenty times bigger, it is happening in our cities rather than at the border, and the official government response is to deny the separations are happening at all.
A group of activists in Colorado speaks out against standardized tests. Angela Engels’ article was printed in the Colorado Times Recorder.
A Message from Judy Solano, Chair, A4PEP (Advocates for Public Education Policy).
“It takes courage to speak out about the injustices in the world, especially when policy-makers funded by wealthy education reform organizations hold the power. May we all be warriors in the battle for truth.”
COLORADO TIMES RECORDER
Test-Based Accountability Is Failing Colorado’s Children
As the Colorado General Assembly wraps up the 2026 session, lawmakers once again failed to confront one of the most costly and disruptive features of public education: high-stakes standardized testing.
Key legislative proposals that would have addressed the burden of high-stakes testing were defeated again. SB26-068would have reduced CMAS standardized tests to the minimum extent possible, and HB26-1291 would have reduced teacher evaluations for non-probationary teachers from annually to every three years. Both had bipartisan sponsorship and were supported by teachers, parents, and community members, but opposed by billionaire-backed education reform lobbyists.
A memorial backed by the Advocates for Public Education Policy (A4PEP), urging Congress to return authority to locally elected school boards, as provided in the eww hearing.
These decisions deserve more than a procedural explanation.
The issue of high-stakes testing is neither marginal nor new. Since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2002, policymakers have imposed lengthy and expensive criterion-referenced standardized tests on students, then incorrectly used that data to make high-stakes decisions about teacher pay and school closures. Because test scores are most closely correlated with income, policymakers have tolerated the practice of closing schools in low-income neighborhoods at the expense of our most vulnerable students.
A 2014 study showed that Colorado’s testing requirements cost up to $78 million annually in combined state and district expenditures. Adjusting for inflation, that would equal more than $100 million today. Approximately 450,000 students spend an average of 20 hours of classroom instruction each year on these assessments — more than 9 million hours diverted away from teaching and learning.
Meanwhile, the number of students identified as at-risk has increased by 118%, more than doubling since 2000. After more than two decades, the results of this approach are clear. Achievement gaps have not closed. Teacher attrition continues to rise. Families increasingly question a system that prioritizes testing over learning, with many choosing to opt out altogether.
This is not a policy in need of minor adjustment. It is an accountability structure that has failed to deliver on its core promises — and it deserves fundamental sreplacement. And yet, it remains firmly in place. Not because the evidence is unclear, but because the accountability system itself is protected.
Standardized testing is no longer just an educational tool. It is embedded in a network of contracts, compliance requirements, testing vendors, consulting firms, and political interests backed by well-funded lobbying efforts. There are real financial and political incentives to preserve it, regardless of outcomes.
Spending more than $100 million annually on a system that continues to produce the same disparities while costing students millions of hours of learning time reinforces a governance model that rewards compliance and discourages challenge.
This climate — where profits and political interests are prioritized before children — did not emerge on its own. It has been shaped over time by a campaign finance system that rewards candidates who support policies centered on test-based school accountability.
When you see something wrong, something inhumane, don’t just say something. Do something. It’s time policymakers stop protecting harmful practices and confront the consequences of policies that continue to waste taxpayer dollars, diminish learning opportunities, and drive many of our most talented and experienced teachers from the profession. After twenty-five years, the ramifications of inaction are impossible to ignore.
Public education should not revolve around protecting systems, contracts, corporate profits, or political interests. It should revolve around children. Colorado students deserve a well-rounded education that values critical thinking, creativity, and civic engagement over excessive testing and data collection. For too long, corporate education groups and privatizers have robbed students of a meaningful education and carefree childhood. This accountability model offers the illusion of control while costing Colorado a future of empowered, well-educated leaders.
Jan Resseger, social justice warrior, strongly dissents from those who want to bring back the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Defining schools by their achievement test scores is reductive. Of course we want our children to learn to read, to enjoy and understand literature, to master math, and to study history and the sciences, but a fixation on comparing school districts’ test scores blinds us to the human relations that constitute a classroom, to the social formation of children that happens at school, and to myriad other ways of thinking about what students are accomplishing at school. The temptation then is to define schoolteachers as producers of test scores and forget about all the other ways they help our children learn and grow.
Because test scores provide a simple, universal measure, we grab onto it and give it more weight than all the other factors we can’t so easily measure. Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado and director of the National Education Policy Center identifies family income, a factor entirely outside of school, as the most significant variable affecting a school district’s aggregate test scores: “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 economical inequality.”
Last week, the NY Times’ Claire Cain Miller, Frencesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh reported on a major new demographic study documenting a widespread decline over the past decade in U.S. students’ standardized test scores: “Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago… A report on the new data describes a decade-long ‘learning recession.’… Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues. Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990—then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students. Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than pre-pandemic… Test scores in low-income districts fell furthest, but affluent districts—the types of places families move to for the schools—also lost ground.”
The reporters do acknowledge a number of factors that may correlate with dropping scores, but they seem to lean toward blaming a lot of the problem on the end of No Child Left Behind. They are mistaken when they declare that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA), NCLB’s replacement, ended test-based school accountability. In fact that 2015 law just made the states, not the federal government, agree to impose sanctions on the schools that had been unable significantly to raise test scores. The reporters quote Brian A. Jacob, a professor at the University of Michigan, who believes NCLB’s fading influence has been one cause of test score decline: “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement… There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”
A prominent retired professor of education, Diane Ravitch pushed back immediately on what she understood as the bias of the recent NY Times article: “I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of No Child Left Behind-Race to the Top pressures. Sure, they increased the pressure on students, teachers, and principals, but their negative effects undermined the quality of education. Picking the right bubble on a standardized test became the goal of education. Campbell’s Law says that when a measure becomes the goal, it loses its value as a measure. Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that ‘the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’ “
Ravitch names a number of experts who have evaluated the damage wrought by the No Child Left Behind Act’s strategy: to punish schools and teachers who, supposedly, weren’t working hard enough to make all students reach test-score proficiency by 2014. The most prominent is Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on standardized testing, who, in 2017, published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. Koretz not only explains Campbell’s Law, but he shows how the pressure of test-based accountability corrupted what happened public schools across the country when the federal government threatened mandatory closure, or mandatory privatization or charterization of so-called “failing schools.”
Koretz reminds us that in places where test scores did rise under No Child Left Behind, it may not have reflected students’ academic growth. Test score gains were in many places artificially produced through test prep, the narrowing of the school curriculum, and even cheating: “Cheating—by teachers and administrators, not by students—is one of the simplest ways to inflate scores, and if you aren’t caught, it’s the most dependable.” (The Testing Charade, p. 73) His book covers the tragic Atlanta cheating scandal, and other examples when teachers read the tests in advance and prepared students to answer specific questions. Koretz describes various kinds of test prep coaching and drilling that were widespread in the NCLB era. And, “(Teachers) reported that they reduced—sometimes very substantially—the amount of time devoted to teaching science, which was not tested, in order to make additional time for prepping kids in math and reading.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 95-96)
Last week’s NY Times report on the possible causes of an overall drop in test scores over the recent decade also names two other possible causes. First, a decade ago, as schools began to provide laptops or electronic tablets to their students for online learning, students’ widespread dependence on their smartphones also became epidemic: “Something happened globally around the same time: the proliferation of devices, at home and in school. Nearly half of American teenagers now say they are online ‘almost constantly,’ compared with just under a quarter who said that a decade ago, according to Pew Research Center.” Due to the proliferation of devices, our classrooms operate differently, and our children are doing less reading of books for study and enjoyment.
Second, the reporters, explain, there was massive and well documented learning loss during the COVID pandemic: “Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly. The new data shows that scores inched upwards in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground…. The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students.”
I have never heard anyone who has been able to trace the extent of long term damage during COVID, when students’ schools were closed and many children were left while their parents were at work to learn remotely on computers. Chronic absence has been a greater problem since COVID, and something schools have struggled to overcome. No one has been able to assess how long COVID will keep affecting children who were preschoolers and young elementary students back in 2019.
Finally there is one other big factor that could also be related to falling test scores over time: states have been perpetually reducing funding for public schools. According to the most recent research from the Albert Shanker Institute: “There are 42 states (including the District of Columbia) that devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 schools than they did before the 2007-2009 recession. This seems to be a permanent disinvestment in public education.” “(U)nequal opportunity is (also) universal in the U.S. In all states, higher-poverty districts are funded less adequately than lower-poverty districts… We find that 37 percent of white students attend districts with negative adequacy gaps, compared with 75 percent of African American students and 62 percent of Hispanic students. In other words, African American students are about twice as likely as their white peers to attend school in a district with below-adequate funding, while Hispanic students are almost 70 percent more likely to do so, and Native American… students are 50 percent more likely. Similarly, African American students are over 3 times more likely than white students to attend chronically underfunded districts….” These economic factors are likely to have affected students’ learning over time.
Our society will not be able to address our economic, social, and educational injustices through No Child Left Behind-style, test-based public school accountability.
Diane Ravitch's blog 