Archives for category: Democracy

When I worked in the federal government during the administration of President George W. Bush, I learned a lot about how the civil service functions. I was Assistant Secretary for Education Research and Innovation in the U.S. Department of Education. A small number of people in my office were political appointees. The vast number were civil servants.

The highest ranking civil servants were designated SES–Senior Executive Service. Only the very best civil servants reached that rank. These are people with long and distinguished careers. They are the best of the best. Like most civil servants, they are nonpartisan and they have lifetime tenure.

Miles Taylor informs us that Trump has just turned these top civil servants into at-will employees. He can fire them for any reason or no reason.

This is part of his Project 2025 plan to remove resistance to his total control of the government.

Miles Taylor was Chief Of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term. He famously wrote an op-d for The New York Times with the byline “Anonymous,” describing his role in “the resistance” inside the Trump administration.

Miles Taylor wrote on his Substack blog “Defiance”:

The president did something yesterday that almost no one noticed. He signed an order that will allow him to fully hijack (and politicize) the federal government, like never before.

While the country was looking elsewhere, Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to convert roughly 8,000 of the federal government’s most senior career officials into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.

The order is called “Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service,” a name obviously engineered to be skimmed past. And surprisingly, almost everyone obliged. The coverage that followed dutifully reported that thousands of workers are now “easier to fire,” which is true and also misses the point entirely.

The point is that these are the top lieutenants across the federal government. In other words, these are the people serving right under Trump’s political appointees (the ones he assigns to run federal departments and agencies). Presidents get “their people” to reshape policy priorities. And Americans count on the rest of the government staff, the career officials, to carry out the workings of those agencies and follow the law faithfully and impartially. Trump has just upended that centuries-old system.

His executive order would, in effect, triple the number of people inside of government who he can personally toss out on a whim, as easily as his own top henchmen. It’s a breathtaking takeover of the machinery of state. And if it’s not challenged in the courts, it will make it easier for Trump to weaponize almost every agency under his purview.

The number of “political appointees” in the executive branch hovers around 4,000. Think of these as the top jobs. Each president comes in and spins up an HR operation to bring in ideologically-aligned folks to fill those roles, most of which are in charge of running key departments, agencies, boards, and commissions across the federal government. You can see them all here in what’s called the “Plum Book.” They serve at the pleasure of the president and can be hired and dismissed at will.

That was the kind of role I was in as DHS chief of staff in the first Trump administration. I wasn’t protected by anything other than the president’s favor. That’s why — when you make a decision to speak out about wrongdoing — you’ve got to be prepared to quit or be fired. You have no protections if you fall out of favor with the president. Unfortunately, that’s why you see so many Pam Bondis and Todd Blanches, eagerly doing whatever Trump wants. They know how easy it is to lose their job.

That four thousand number is important. It’s the practical measure of a president’s direct grip on the executive branch. Everyone underneath those positions, some two million civil servants, has historically been insulated from political whim by removal protections dating to the reforms that ended the spoils system back in the 1800s. Those protections are the entire reason a new president inherits a functioning government, rather than giant shell of a machine to reconfigure each time we have a national election.

Yet Trump just took 8,000 of those highest-ranking career officials and effectively turned them into potential shock troops. They are no longer protected workforce. The office directors, deputy directors, chiefs of staff, senior advisers, and people who draft regulations and decide who receives federal grants have been stripped of their protections, which means Trump can dispose of them whenever he wants and for whatever reason. Add that to the 4,000 appointees he already controls, and the universe of executive-branch officials who now serve entirely at his pleasure has, in functional terms, roughly tripled.

The White House disputes this with a smirk. These remain “career” positions, they insist. They are not technically political appointments. Strictly speaking, this is correct. But as the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service put it, that’s “a distinction without a difference.” It’s now just a meaningless category. The president can toss them out as easily as his own, hand-picked loyalists. And surely the White House is already thinking about how they’ll short-circuit the “merit” process to restock those vacant roles with campaign aides and January 6 rioters.

The chilling effect has begun either way, before any of these 8,000 people have been replaced. An official who can now be fired this very afternoon for “subversion of presidential directives” — the order’s own language — does not need to be hand-picked to understand what is now expected of him or her. The threat does all the work. And the result is that Donald Trump has expanded the ranks of his political army almost instantly.

What just happened is almost certainly illegal. A coalition of federal employees unions are, I hope, prepared to fight hard. There already have been against similar orders. Here’s why they need to take this one down.

The president’s authority to pull positions out of the protected civil service comes from a provision of Title 5 that lets him make only “necessary exceptions” from the competitive service. That word, “necessary,” was something government managers were keenly aware of when I was in the executive branch. Job categories could only be reclassified in extenuating circumstances — basically where it was urgently necessary to create a position that wasn’t selected through the normal competitive service system.

Reclassifying 8,000 senior careerists to make them fireable at will is not “necessary” for good administration. It’s the total opposite of the merit-based system the laws exist to protect in the first place. Indeed, the rights being stripped away are supposed to be written in stone, e.g. the right to notice before firing, the right to appeal to an independent board, etc.. A president cannot use a magic wand to erase the very protections Congress wrote into law. They were put in place for this exact reason, that is, to prevent presidents from either party from simply firing all the top people across government and stuffing agencies with inexperienced, political bootlickers.

Upon reading it, I found the most revealing detail to be how the order was seemingly written to escape scrutiny. A rule this consequential would normally have to go through what’s called the Administrative Procedure Act, requiring a period of public comment, a reasoned justification, and review by a court that can strike it down as arbitrary, if needed. But Trump didn’t want that. He wanted to wave his wand. So the White House performed a quiet bit of engineering. They wrote the rule to make the president himself (not the Office of Personnel Management) the official who formally moves positions into this new category because the president, unlike an agency, is not technically bound by that Act. They might as well have admitted their goal was to break the law.

The famously brutal English king Henry VIII didn’t need to appoint every man in his court to make every man in his court afraid. All he had to do is make them aware that he might swing the axe at any time. In America, we’ve spent more than a century building a civil service so that the people who enforce our laws answer to the law and not to the mood of one man. Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump tried to change that.

All I can tell you now is this: we’re going to help fight it. Stay tuned.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Help spread the defiance by sharing this

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Jobs, Trump

The Ghost of Eli Broad, Still Haunting Public Schools

By dianeravitch

July 27, 2026 //

Mike Simpson posts amazing memes on Twitter and BlueSky. He calls himself “Big Education Ape.” He makes the point with his illustrations.

Here is one of his best: THE GHOST OF ELI BROAD: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF VULTURE PHILANTHROPY AND THE ONGOING DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION.

I wasn’t able to copy some tables and graphics. Please open the link to read the post in full.

Eli Broad was one of the billionaires who was eager to tear apart public education and remake it. I referred to him, the Waltons, and the Gates Foundation as “the Billionaires Boys Club,” which was chapter 10 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

Eli Broad’s distinctive contribution to the corporate reform movement was his Broad Academy, where aspiring superintendents were “trained” with his ideas. All expenses were paid, and trainees got to hobnob with others. They also had the Academy’s help in job placement; many “graduates” of the Broad Academy were placed as superintendents in big-city districts, imbued with the ideology that schooling was a business, that low-performing schools should be closed and replaced by charter schools. Eli and his wife Edythe were both graduates of the Detroit Public Schools, but they were not grateful for what they learned.

In 2009, when I was writing the book, I was not aware that the Billionaire Boys Club had many more members and that some were women. There was Alice Walton, Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, John Arnold, Joel Greenberg, Daniel Loeb, Jeff Yass, and many more. I posted a far longer list of the super-rich underwriting the privatization of public money in my book Slaying Goliath.

I once was invited by Eli Broad to meet at his gorgeous apartment in New York City, overlooking Central Park. He wanted to know why I was critical of his efforts. He told me that he knew nothing about teaching or curriculum, but he knew a lot about business management and organization. His belief was that public schools could improve by better management.

Mike Simpson performs a public service here by updating the legacy of Eli Broad.

He writes:

How a billionaire’s “vision” became a scandal-soaked legacy — and why it refuses to die, now dressed in Yale’s ivy

There’s a particular kind of audacity required to spend a quarter-century systematically dismantling public education, leave a trail of federal indictments, billion-dollar procurement disasters, and devastated communities in your wake — and then get your name engraved on a building at Yale University. That, in essence, is the story of Eli Broad, the Broad Academy, and its reincarnation as The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. If you were hoping the death of Eli Broad in 2021 would finally close this chapter of American education history, well — ghosts don’t follow rules. And this one has a $100 million endowment.

Part I: Venture Philanthropy — When Billionaires Play School

Let’s start with the concept that makes all of this possible: “venture philanthropy.” It sounds benign — even noble. In practice, it means a billionaire who made his fortune in housing construction (KB Home) and insurance (SunAmerica) decided he understood public education better than educators, parents, communities, or — heaven forbid — children.

Eli Broad’s core thesis, launched formally in 2002 with the Broad Superintendents Academy (BSA), was elegantly simple and catastrophically wrong: public school systems are just badly managed corporations, and what they need is corporate managers.

Not teachers. Not child psychologists. Not community leaders. Corporate managers. Preferably ones with MBAs, military command experience, or backgrounds in supply-chain logistics. Because nothing says “I understand the developmental needs of a seven-year-old” quite like a background in restructuring defense procurement contracts.

The curriculum reflected this philosophy with almost comedic precision:

10% — Actual education: pedagogy, curriculum, child development
90% — Corporate operational reform: fiscal optimization, data-driven accountability, labor relations, and what the Academy euphemistically called “reform accelerators” — which, translated from the original MBA-speak, meant privatization strategies

The program was free to participants — tuition, travel, lodging, all covered. Because when you’re deploying an ideological army, you don’t charge the soldiers.

Part II: Yale Said “Yes” — And Charged It to Prestige

In 2019, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation committed $100 million to Yale University to transform the independent, unaccredited Los Angeles operation into The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. The transition was completed in 2020, and the unaccredited LA entity was quietly sunsetted — like a getaway car abandoned after the heist.

The rebranding was masterful. Suddenly, the same ideological pipeline that had produced federal convicts, FBI raid subjects, and a generation of “disruptors” who disrupted primarily the educational lives of low-income children of color was now operating under the imprimatur of one of the world’s most prestigious universities.

The center today operates two flagship tracks, both tuition-free:

The 2026–27 MMS cohort is already being assembled, per the center’s own Instagram, described as “leaders committed to reimagining” public education — which, given the network’s history, should be read as a threat as much as a promise.

Beyond the programs themselves, the center has launched an aggressive data aggregation initiative — a centralized repository hosted on GitHub tracking superintendents across more than 10,000 of the nation’s 13,000 public school districts, aggregating over 180,000 data points across 23 states. The stated goal is academic research. The unstated goal, critics argue, is mapping the vacancy pipeline for the next generation of Broad placements.

Part III: The Damage Ledger — Twenty-Five Years of “Disruption”

Let’s be precise about what the word “disruption” meant in practice. A landmark 2022 longitudinal study published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis tracked two full decades of Broad Academy graduates and delivered findings that would be devastating — if anyone in the venture philanthropy world were capable of embarrassment:

No statistically significant positive effects on district spending, student completion rates, or test scores
Broad-trained superintendents had 18% shorter tenures than non-Broad peers in equivalent districts
The only statistically significant footprint left behind? A sustained, measurable trend toward increased charter school enrollment and sector privatization

In other words, after 25 years and hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars, the Broad Academy’s measurable legacy in public education was: more charter schools and shorter superintendent tenures. That’s it. That’s the product.

The Human Cost

The abstract numbers become concrete when you look at specific communities:

Oakland & Detroit saw aggressive charter expansion and centralized fiscal management that critics argued deepened structural deficits and fractured community trust for generations.

Chicago experienced the largest single wave of school closures in modern U.S. history — 50 neighborhood schools shuttered in 2013 under Broad-network-affiliated Barbara Byrd-Bennett — triggering federal civil rights complaints alleging the closures disproportionately harmed low-income students of color.

Seattle watched Broad graduate Maria Goodloe-Johnson (BSA Class of 2003) get fired in 2011 following a state audit revealing $1.8 million in public funds funneled into a contracting program that provided little to no actual services — with investigators concluding she exercised a “severe lack of oversight” despite early warnings.

Part IV: The Scandal Hall of Fame — From Procurement Fraud to Federal Prison

Here is where the story transitions from ideologically troubling to criminally spectacular.

John Deasy — The iPad That Broke LAUSD

Deasy (BSA Class of 2006) championed a $1.3 billion initiative to put Apple iPads loaded with Pearson software into the hands of every LAUSD student. The rollout failed within days — students bypassed security filters almost immediately — but the procurement scandal was far worse than the technical failure.

Internal records revealed that Deasy and his deputies had close personal and professional ties to Apple and Pearson executives prior to the bidding process, raising serious allegations of a rigged procurement cycle. The FBI seized boxes of district records. Deasy resigned in 2014. The district eventually abandoned the program and settled for millions in refunds.

His post-resignation career? He was immediately hired by the Broad Center as a Superintendent-in-Residence — coaching the next generation of urban leaders. Because in this ecosystem, failure is a credential.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett — The Federal Prison Graduate

Byrd-Bennett’s career arc is the Broad model in miniature: leave Cleveland in fiscal distress, leave Detroit in structural chaos, get hired as a “turnaround expert” in Chicago, execute the largest school closure wave in American history, then get indicted on 20 counts of federal mail and wire fraud.

Federal investigators proved she steered $23 million in no-bid contracts to SUPES Academy and Synesi Associates — the very consulting firms she had worked for immediately before taking the CPS helm. Internal emails laid bare her motive with a candor that would be almost admirable if it weren’t so brazen: she needed the money because she had “tuitions to pay and casinos to visit.”

In exchange, she was promised a 10% kickback disguised as future consulting fees funneled into trust funds for her twin grandsons. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four and a half years in federal prison.

Robert Runcie — The Perjury Arrest

Runcie (BSA Class of 2009) took over Broward County Public Schools — the nation’s sixth-largest district — and oversaw a culture of severe administrative bid-rigging around an $800 million capital bond program, with independent investigations revealing contracts steered to pre-selected corporate entities.

Following the 2018 Parkland school shooting, which exposed deep systemic lapses in district safety infrastructure, a statewide grand jury investigation led to Runcie’s arrest by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement on felony perjury charges in April 2021 — prosecutors proving he lied under oath about communications regarding procurement contracts.

He resigned in exchange for a $743,000 separation agreement. Paid by taxpayers.

Alberto Carvalho — The AI Echo of the iPad Disaster

If the Deasy iPad scandal was the defining Broad-era procurement catastrophe of the 2010s, Alberto Carvalho’s LAUSD tenure became its 2020s technological sequel — almost as if the universe decided one billion-dollar tech procurement disaster per decade wasn’t sufficient.

Carvalho, a celebrated figure on the corporate-reform speaking circuit who regularly headlined Broad Center leadership panels, aggressively championed a contract with “AllHere,” a tech startup contracted to build a multi-million dollar AI student-chatbot tool for LAUSD. The project collapsed into total insolvency. The startup’s founder was indicted for fraud. Federal investigators traced systemic steering of contracts that bypassed traditional public bidding protections.

In early 2026, FBI agents raided Carvalho’s personal residence and district offices. He was placed on paid administrative leave and subsequently resigned — a modern, tech-era echo of the Deasy iPad scandal, separated by exactly one decade and approximately zero lessons learned.

Part V: The Carousel — How Failed Superintendents Get Recycled

One of the most structurally revealing features of the Broad model is what happens after a superintendent fails. In a normal accountability framework, catastrophic failure — federal indictment, FBI raids, mass community protests, historic labor strikes — would end careers.

In the Broad ecosystem, it typically accelerates them.

The recycling mechanism operates in three predictable stages:

Stage 1 — The Soft Landing: Departing executives are caught by the philanthropic safety net. Foundations like Broad, Walton, or Gates place them into well-funded “fellow,” “executive coach,” or “senior advisor” roles at charter management organizations or policy think tanks. The local political dust settles. The national network maintains their status.

Stage 2 — The Headhunter Buffer: National executive search firms — operating with screening frameworks that prioritize corporate operational metrics over community approval or longevity — present the executive to a new school board in another state as a “courageous, battle-tested change agent.” The fact that the “battle” was largely against the parents and teachers of the previous district is presented as a résumé enhancement.

Stage 3 — The Next Major District: Re-hired at a higher salary, with stronger contractual protections, and a golden parachute clause ensuring that the next failure will also be financially comfortable.

Mike Miles left Dallas ISD under multiple internal investigations and extreme executive turnover, founded a charter network, and was then directly appointed by the Texas Education Agency — which had dissolved Houston ISD’s elected school board — to run the entire Houston district with even fewer democratic constraints than before.

Jean-Claude Brizard left Rochester under a 95% teacher vote of no confidence, was immediately recruited to lead Chicago Public Schools (the nation’s third-largest system), triggered the historic 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike within 17 months, was pushed out with a $250,000 buyout, and transitioned smoothly into senior advisory roles at national education foundations.

The pattern is not a bug. It is the feature.

Part VI: Buying the Boardroom — How Venture Philanthropy Captured School Governance

The Broad playbook cannot function under genuine democratic oversight. A superintendent who closes 50 neighborhood schools, eliminates teacher tenure protections, and converts public schools into privately managed charter networks will be fired by an elected school board that answers to the community — unless that school board has been pre-selected to not do that.

The solution was elegant and corrosive: buy the school board elections.

Because local school board races historically required minimal campaign capital, the injection of billionaire wealth fundamentally altered the political landscape. The money flows not directly to candidates (which faces statutory limits) but through Independent Expenditure Committees and Super PACs — allowing unlimited spending on sophisticated polling, negative television ads, and targeted digital saturation.

In Los Angeles, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and allied donors regularly poured $5 million to $10 million per election cycle into LAUSD board races — specifically to achieve a “pro-reform majority” that would protect executives like John Deasy and later Austin Beutner (a former investment banker with no education background whatsoever) from community accountability.

In Oakland, independent groups funded by the California Charter Schools Association outspent local parent-teacher associations 10-to-1, successfully seating board members who routinely approved charter petitions and fiscal consolidation plans drafted by Broad Residency staff embedded in the central office.

When even this proved insufficient — when local civic resistance made winning democratic elections too expensive or unpredictable — the network pivoted to eliminating the elections entirely:

Chicago: Mayoral control legislation allowed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to single-handedly install Broad executives without board confirmation.
Houston: The Texas Education Agency dissolved the elected school board entirely and replaced it with a state-appointed body, allowing direct installation of Mike Miles.
Detroit: The short-lived Education Achievement Authority bypassed the traditional school board to implement a centralized, non-unionized reform experiment under Broad graduate John Covington.

The structural message is unambiguous: the corporate management model and democratic accountability are incompatible. When democracy gets in the way, the solution is to remove democracy.

Part VII: The Network Map — 1,000 Alumni and Counting

The Broad Network now comprises more than 1,000 alumni spanning major urban school districts, charter management organizations, state education agencies, and venture philanthropy foundations — with its heaviest concentrations precisely where the playbook finds the most fertile ground:

California remains the densest hub, with alumni embedded throughout LAUSD, Oakland Unified, and San Diego Unified central offices, as well as major CMOs like KIPP SoCal, Aspire Public Schools, and Green Dot.

Texas has become the fastest-growing hub, with Houston ISD under state-appointed Miles serving as the current flagship experiment, alongside significant placement within Dallas ISD, Fort Worth ISD, the Texas Education Agency, and massive charter entities like KIPP Texas and IDEA Public Schools.

New York serves as the “soft landing” capital of the network — hundreds of alumni operating within Wall Street-adjacent education foundations, charter advocacy groups, and elite national search firms headquartered in Manhattan.

Illinois and Pennsylvania — Chicago and Philadelphia specifically — remain high-density environments where teams of Broad Residents are embedded in central operations managing financial stabilization, facilities restructuring, and school assignment data systems.

Meanwhile, the network has largely migrated out of direct superintendencies — where the political friction is high and the tenure is short — and into the broader ecosystem where influence is durable and accountability is minimal: senior director roles at the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; high-level education consultancies like Watershed Advisors and Instruction Partners; and, of course, The Broad Center at Yale SOM itself, where the current MMS cohort is being trained to carry the philosophy forward.

Part VIII: Yale — Laundering a Legacy in Ivy

Let us be direct about what the Yale partnership accomplishes that the standalone Los Angeles operation never could: institutional legitimacy laundering.

The Broad Academy, operating independently, was unaccredited, ideologically transparent, and easy to critique. Its graduates were called “Broadies” — a term used by both allies and critics — and the pipeline was visible enough that parent groups, teachers’ unions, and education researchers could track, document, and organize against it.

The Broad Center at Yale SOM is something different. It is now embedded within one of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions, granting an Ivy League master’s degree, hosting fellows in New Haven, and publishing peer-reviewed research. The same corporate management philosophy that produced federal convictions and FBI raids now arrives in urban school districts wearing a Yale credential.

The center’s new data aggregation initiative — tracking superintendents across more than 10,000 districts, aggregating 180,000+ data points — is framed as academic research. Critics see it as something more operational: a comprehensive national vacancy map for the next generation of Broad placements, now with the algorithmic sophistication that the original Los Angeles operation could only dream of.

The 2025-26 Fellowship cohort of 17 fellows is already gathering in New Haven for weeklong modules at Yale SOM. The 2026-27 MMS cohort is being assembled. The pipeline flows.

The Synthesis: What Twenty-Five Years Actually Taught Us

Here is what a quarter-century of Broad-style education reform has empirically demonstrated:

The Promise: The Reality

Corporate management improves district outcomes/No measurable positive effect on test scores, graduation rates, or spending efficiency”

Disruptors” bring needed change/18% shorter tenures; accelerated community fracture

Charter expansion improves options/Statistically significant increase in privatization; no demonstrated academic gains

Data-driven accountability improves teaching/Curriculum narrowing; teaching to the test

Free consulting support helps districts/Permanent embedding of private ideology on public payroll

School board reform improves governance/Systematic dismantling of democratic accountability

The most damning verdict is not the federal indictments — though those are damning. It is not the FBI raids — though those are spectacular. It is not even the $23 million in no-bid kickback contracts or the billion-dollar iPad disasters.

It is this: after 25 years, hundreds of millions in philanthropic investment, and the placement of Broad-trained executives in over 160 school systems, there is no credible empirical evidence that any of it helped a single child learn to read better.

What it did produce — measurably, statistically, reproducibly — was more charter schools, shorter superintendent tenures, and a revolving door of well-compensated executives cycling between urban districts, consulting firms, and Ivy League fellowship programs while the communities they “disrupted” rebuilt themselves from the wreckage.

Epilogue: The Ghost That Won’t Be Exorcised

Eli Broad died in April 2021. His foundation subsequently announced it would spend down its assets and close. The Los Angeles operation was already gone, folded into Yale two years prior.

And yet — the ghost persists. It persists in the 2026-27 MMS cohort assembling in New Haven. It persists in the 180,000 data points tracking superintendent vacancies across 10,000 districts. It persists in the career of Mike Miles, currently running Houston ISD under state protection from democratic accountability. It persists in the aftermath of Alberto Carvalho’s FBI-raided departure from LAUSD — a scandal so structurally identical to the Deasy iPad disaster of 2014 that it reads less like history repeating and more like history plagiarizing itself.

The Broad Center at Yale SOM is not a reformed version of the Broad Academy. It is the Broad Academy with better branding, an Ivy League address, and a GitHub repository. The philosophy is identical. The network is intact. The pipeline flows.

The only thing that has genuinely changed is the zip code — from Los Angeles to New Haven — and the price tag of the credential being handed to the next generation of disruptors preparing to be deployed into the public schools of America.

Eli Broad may be gone. But his ghost has tenure.

And unlike the superintendents he trained, it shows no signs of an early exit.

Sources:

: The Broad Center institutional history, curriculum breakdowns, alumni scandal documentation, EEPA 2022 longitudinal study findings, and school board funding mechanics — as documented in comprehensive public education policy research and investigative reporting compiled in the source brief above.
: EdSource — “FBI raid of Los Angeles Superintendent Carvalho’s home, office may be linked to student AI chatbot” (2026) — edsource.org
: Los Angeles Times — “How probe into failed startup led to LAUSD superintendent investigation” (March 1, 2026) — latimes.com
: Yale School of Management — “The Broad Center Announces 2025-26 Cohort of the Fellowship for Public Education Leadership” — som.yale.edu

Master Source List: The Ghost of Eli Broad & The Broad Center at Yale

🏛️ The Broad Center at Yale SOM — Official Sources

$CITETitleSourceLinkThe Broad Center — Official Program Overview Yale School of Management som.yale.edu/centers/the-broad-center Master’s in Public Education Management — Admissions Yale School of Management som.yale.edu — MMS Admissions Broad Center Announces 2025-26 Fellowship Cohort Yale School of Managementsom.yale.edu — 2025-26 Fellowship Broad Center Announces 2025-26 Master’s Cohort Yale School of Management som.yale.edu — 2025-26 MMS Cohort

📊 Academic Research & Empirical Studies

$CITETitleSourceLinkThe Case of Broad Superintendents— Full EEPA Longitudinal Study (2022) Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis / Tom Dee tom-dee.github.io — EEPA-Broad.pdf New Study: Broad Supes Made No Difference, Other Than Increasing Charter Schools Diane Ravitch’s Blogdianeravitch.net

🗞️ Investigative Journalism & Policy Criticism

$CITETitleSourceLink Critics Target Growing Army of Broad Leaders Education Week edweek.org The Broad Foundation’s Impact on Public Schools Facebook — Oakland Parent Sharon Higgins Analysis facebook.com — Broad Foundation Analysis

⚖️ Barbara Byrd-Bennett — Federal Conviction (Chicago)

$CITETitleSourceLink Former Chief Executive of Chicago Public Schools Sentenced to More Than Four Years in Prison U.S. Department of Justice — Official Press Release justice.govBarbara Byrd-Bennett — Full Coverage Archive WTTW Chicago Public Media news.wttw.com Barbara Byrd-Bennett — Wikipedia Overview Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

⚖️ Robert Runcie — Broward County Perjury Arrest

$CITETitleSourceLinkFDLE Arrests Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie for Perjury Florida Department of Law Enforcement — Official Release fdle.state.fl.us Former Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie Avoids Trial — Perjury Charge Dropped CBS News Miami cbsnews.com/miami State Drops Perjury Charge Against Former Broward Schools Superintendent Miami Herald miamiherald.comPerjury Charge Dropped Against Ex-Broward Schools Superintendent NBC Miami nbcmiami.com

🤖 Alberto Carvalho — LAUSD FBI Raid & AllHere AI Scandal

$CITETitleSourceLinkFBI Raid of Los Angeles Superintendent Carvalho’s Home and Office May Be Linked to Student AI ChatbotEdSource edsource.org How Probe Into Failed Startup Led to LAUSD Superintendent Investigation Los Angeles Times latimes.com

📌 Quick Citation Reference Guide

For the article sections, citations map as follows:

Broad Center Yale programs → , , ,
EEPA 2022 empirical study → ,
General Broad criticism & history → ,
Byrd-Bennett federal conviction → , ,
Runcie perjury arrest → , , ,
Carvalho FBI raid / AllHere AI → ,

⚠️ Research Note: Several additional primary sources — including the original EEPA journal publication, the Jeffrey Hubbard California Supreme Court ruling, the Maria Goodloe-Johnson state audit, and the Jean-Claude Brizard Chicago strike documentation — are recommended for deeper verification. Additional searches can be run to surface those specific primary documents on request.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry

Randi Weingarten: Why We Are Fighting for a Better Society for All

By dianeravitch

July 27, 2026 //

This is one of Randi Weingarten’s best speeches. She delivered it at the 2026 Convention of the American federation of Teachers on July 26 in Washington, D.C.

Not only does she identify income inequality as a dire threat to our democracy, she speaks one of the greatest lines I have ever read:

Mr. President, you don’t own July Fourth. You own Jan. 6.

Randi points out that the dramatic income inequality of our times is destroying the middle class. Unions build a strong middle class. The large increase in the number of billionaires is it a sign of a healthy society; it is a sign of gross inequality.

As more people slip out of the middle class or hang on by their fingertips, our social problems get worse.

How do we restore a thriving middle class? Encourage the growth of strong unions.

She reminds us that today only 1 of every 10 workers belongs to a union. Union workers are paid more, significantly more, than non-union workers. In mid-century America, when 1 in 3 American workers were in a union, we had the largest middle class and the lowest income inequality. And she says, “That’s why, in the long term, growing the union movement is key to solving America’s affordability crisis.”

Rightwingers have done their best to eviscerate unions. And they have won significant victories in the courts.

But, despite the obstacles, the AFT is growing. It now has the largest number of members in its history: 1.875 million members. Al Shanker and Sandy Feldman would be proud of that accomplishment.

Unions are key to a better life.

Randi said in her address:

We plan our conventions years in advance. When we decided to hold this convention in our nation’s capital, to coincide with the celebration of America’s founding 250 years ago, who would have thought that the grievances that led to the American Revolution would be so relevant and relatable today? Or that America would have a new kind of aristocracy based on mind-blowing wealth?

In the United States, there are now 1,000 billionaires—and the world’s first trillionaire—at a time when nearly half of American households—46 percent—don’t earn enough to make ends meet.

This wealth imbalance—the top 1 percent having as much wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent of Americans combined—has led to a power imbalance that affects the lives of everyone in our country. These oligarchs influence policy. They have the power to undo social progress. To sway financial markets, monopolize the media, buy elections and undermine democracy.

In an earlier period of extreme wealth inequality, the country elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his New Deal programs lifted millions of Americans out of poverty.

This time, the country elected Donald Trump, and well …

Remember that warning—about the barbarians at the gate? Well, the barbarians aren’t at the gate, they are inside, including at the highest levels of government.

The president and his cronies are abusing government powers to punish political opponents. Every day they find new ways to attack voting, presumably to entrench themselves. Their war on working-class Americans includes stripping collective bargaining rights from 1 million federal workers, including members of our union, in the biggest act of union-busting in U.S. history. All while engaging in the most blatant corruption in modern American history to enrich themselves.

The attacks—on unions, on working people, on public education, on higher education, on the public good, on democracy—didn’t start with Trump. They’ve been decades in the making, going back to the 1971 memo by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell that successfully plotted corporate dominance in American politics. And the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that fueled the massive surge of “dark money” in elections—which has now been supercharged by the court’s ruling last month that blew up whatever campaign finance limits were left. And its 2018 Janus decision that anti-union forces hoped would drive a stake through the heart of public sector unions. Project 2025 became the playbook to enact this extremist agenda. This year’s Callais decision not only gutted what remained of the 1965 Voting Rights Act but did so in time to affect the 2026 elections. Then there’s the bare-knuckled crusade to destroy public education and higher education. Just look at Christopher Rufo’s tweets, or his unabashed declaration years ago that “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

And I haven’t even gotten to Big Tech and artificial intelligence.

Yes, the other side has enormous power. But this is what they don’t have: the power of the people.

That’s not a mere slogan; it’s the potential to work together, to bargain together, to protest together, to vote together, to act together to bring about change—real, lasting, life-improving change. That is the power and potential of our movement and of the AFT.

Our union stands at the intersection of the ways that regular people gain and exercise power in our democracy—through public education, unions and voting.

The skills and knowledge people secure through public and higher education expand opportunity—that’s power. Union contracts improve economic well-being—that’s power. Elections—voting for people who answer to their constituents, not wealthy donors—that’s power.

It’s power not just for ourselves, but for our students, our patients and our communities. Power to build what Martin Luther King Jr. called the “beloved community”—an America where hate has no home. Where the trans nurse, the Palestinian teacher, the Jewish student, and every person regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender or place of origin, feels welcome, safe and valued.

We use our power for good—against chaos, cruelty and corruption. We care, we fight and we show up—for a better life for all. Oh, and one more thing: We get shit done!

We are a fighting union. To quote the president of Texas AFT, Zeph Capo, “Our members will forgive us if we fight and lose, but they’ll never forgive us if we don’t even fight.”

Look at what we have fought for, and won, in these last two years—despite constant challenges.

Through the AFT’s student debt clinics and our other activism, we have helped more than 1 million borrowers, many of them our members, get $78 billion in student debt forgiven! That is life-changing; people can start a family, buy a home, save for retirement.

The AFT has filed more than 25 lawsuits against the illegal actions of the Trump administration. If I talked about all of them, I would blow everyone’s bets on the length of the speech. So here are just a few: The Trump administration tried to stop any school—pre-K through college—from doing anything that could be construed as advancing diversity, equity and inclusion, essentially erasing 60 years of civil rights law. And it sought to condition all federal funding for schools on compliance with its dictates. We sued, and we won. We challenged the administration’s policies to detain and deport noncitizen students and faculty for participating in protected political speech. Again, we won. We sued to stop the administration from stripping federal funding from universities and to stop its efforts to control curriculum, hiring and speech. You guessed it—we won.

And then there’s the collective bargaining victories. Like for better wages—from Boston to Kansas City, from Chicago to Los Angeles and so many more. That’s the union difference: Union workers’ wages are 11 percent higher than nonunion workers. Unionized teachers earn 24 percent more in states with collective bargaining, and education support professionals earn 13 percent more.

And as we speak, the city council in New York City is voting to provide every United Federation of Teachers-represented paraprofessional a $10,000 “Respect Check” that the union has relentlessly fought for.

Life is better with a union.

It goes beyond wages. Take the United Educators of San Francisco, whose successful strike this year led to winning premium-free healthcare not only for members but for their families.

And paid parental leave. Kudos to our affiliates in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Fairfax County (Va.), New York City and Oregon for making great strides to help families thrive.

And safe staffing. The UFT has had some incredible wins through arbitration. And in New Jersey, our healthcare union, Health Professionals and Allied Employees, has negotiated 14 contracts in a row with enforceable safe-staffing provisions. And now one of our newest affiliates, Hawaii Nurses and Healthcare Professionals, has created a broad coalition to do the same.

And we have a sacrosanct commitment to retirement security. After a generation-long battle, we won passage of the Social Security Fairness Act that gave millions of public workers the full benefits they had earned but been denied. Our New York unions made great progress this year to fix Tier 6; now younger workers who had inferior pensions can retire in their late 50s. And AFT Massachusetts, AFT Pennsylvania and our Alaska affiliates are making progress on retirement security as well.

There’s also what we have fended off. The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers reached an agreement to stop the cuts of 340 school-based positions for the coming school year. In Utah, a labor coalition including AFT Utah gathered more than 250,000 signatures and got the Legislature to repeal a ban on public sector bargaining. AFT New Hampshire has a mean game of whack-a-mole—defeating right-to-work, school vouchers and campus carry legislation, and successfully challenging a law that restricted teachers’ rights to teach and students’ access to honest history. In New York, our unions—United University Professions and the Public Employees Federation—and a broad community coalition successfully fought to keep SUNY Downstate hospital open after years of threatened closure, and they secured $1.1 billion to upgrade and expand facilities and services.

These are fights we’ll have to keep waging. The Republicans’ Big Ugly Bill cuts $1 trillion in Medicaid, makes the largest cuts to nutrition assistance in history, triples the cost of student debt for tens of millions of Americans, and threatens hundreds of rural hospitals with closure—all to give $1 trillion in new tax cuts to the richest 1 percent. State and local budgets are seeing the strain. We’ll keep fighting, school district by school district and hospital by hospital.

Then there is artificial intelligence—the most seismic industrial revolution of our time. From UUP in New York to the University Professionals of Illinois, we’ve won strong contract language so AI won’t be used to take our jobs, replace our professional judgment, or evaluate or discipline us.

And density matters: Like New York State United Teachers in education, Oregon’s density in healthcare is making a difference. The Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals secured the largest raises in its history—nearly 35 percent over four years for registered nurses. And OFNHP and HNHP in Hawaii have aligned all their contract expiration dates for the next Kaiser battle.

And then there is the protection of our students, our patients and our neighbors from brutal immigration tactics, like the recent fatal shootings by ICE agents in Texas and Maine of two men who should be alive today. Healthcare locals in Oregon won legislation to protect healthcare facilities from immigration enforcement. Educators across the country have fought for their students’ release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. Our Twin Cities union family peacefully and courageously stood up to the occupation and harsh immigration enforcement that led to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and terrified thousands of immigrant families. We were there with mutual aid—food, diapers, rent money, books, toys and safe passage for children to and from school.

The AFT is always at the ready to help—like with our program for states and locals in crisis. Right now, we are helping our members in Florida, who are in the bull’s-eye of anti-union attacks intended to wipe them out. Let me be clear: We are with you every step of the way. And we’re investing in our affiliates through our MOVE grants, which affiliates are using as fuel to engage members, connect with community and strengthen their power.

This is what the power of the people looks like: caring, fighting, showing up and getting shit done.

This administration is waging a war on knowledge, from school voucher schemes, to erasing rather than facing history, to selling the Department of Education off for parts, to its all-out assault on higher education. Here, too, we’re not just fighting back; we’re putting forward big ideas.

The AFT and the American Association of University Professors have launched a national higher education campaign. We’re fighting to keep vital research funded and against attacks on academic freedom. We won collective bargaining rights for higher education employees in Maryland and made strides toward free college in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. In April, the AFT and AAUP released “A Blueprint for Strengthening and Transforming Higher Education”—and we launched it in Texas, because that is ground zero in the attacks on critical thinking.

Through AFT Healthcare’s Code Red campaign, we’re working to secure safe staffing limits, enforceable workplace-violence standards, and contracts that help recruit and retain frontline caregivers. That’s good for patients and for healthcare workers.

And on AI, we have a multifaceted plan: from limiting screens and child-facing AI for young students, to a tech tax to hold tech companies accountable for the massive disruptions their products are creating, to contract language, to our National Academy for AI Instruction to help educators master AI so AI doesn’t master us. AI is not going away, so we’re going to fight for the protections that matter to our members, our families and our communities.

And of course, we give out books, 11 million and counting, to children and families through our Reading Opens the World program.

All this is why the AFT is bigger, badder and more big-hearted than ever.

The AFT is the fastest-growing union in the AFL-CIO. Since our last convention, we have organized 173 more units, with close to 60,000 new members in these new locals. New affiliations have deepened our work in states like Hawaii, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. And many existing locals have grown as well.

I am thrilled to announce that, despite everything that’s been thrown at us, we have hit a historic milestone: We proudly represent more members than ever before. Today the AFT is 1.875 million members strong!

People see the value of belonging. They see that we’re a fighting union—and that we get shit done! It’s amazing. You are amazing. And we are not going to let up. Too few people have the benefit of a union.

Half of all nonunion workers want to join a union, but only 1 in 10 workers in the U.S. belongs to a union. Americans are 14 times more likely to have an Amazon Prime membership than to be a member of a labor union.

In the mid-20th century, when 1 in 3 American workers were in a union, we had the largest middle class and the lowest income inequality. That’s why, in the long term, growing the union movement is key to solving America’s affordability crisis.

But what do we do now? We’ve got to win elections. And here’s why.

As I said, 46 percent of households—55 percent of households of color—did not earn enough to make ends meet in 2024. And inflation has soared since then. That means there’s not enough to put food on the table, gas in the tank and still cover rent. It means constant stress and struggle.

Our members see it every day in the people they teach, heal and protect.

And our members feel it.

This winter we surveyed AFT members about the financial issues that keep them up at night, and 7,500 responded. Nearly three-quarters report living paycheck to paycheck, and more than a third say they are unable to cover all of their monthly bills.

There are few things worse than the fear of not being able to provide for your family. Reading our members’ responses took me back to my teenage years when my father was laid off. I remember my parents whispering about which bills they had to pay now and which they could hold off on until he found work. They tried to protect my sister and me from knowing, but there’s no hiding anxiety that deep.

Millions of Americans believed Trump’s promises to end inflation and make America affordable again on “day one.” It’s “day 542” since he took office. Is anybody paying under $2 a gallon for gas like he promised? What happened to the “DOGE dividend checks”? Or your tariff rebate check? After they got rid of the Obamacare tax credits, have they fixed healthcare?

Trump isn’t worried about being able to afford healthcare, housing or anything else. Since returning to the White House, he has raked in more than $2.2 billion, through what government watchdogs call unprecedented corruption and self-dealing.

The president has called the affordability crisis “bullshit.” And he has said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” But he has made it worse.

Trump’s tariffs sent the strong economy he inherited into a slump, even with an AI bubble. His trade wars are costing American families $1,000 more every year. He started a costly war against Iran that has left us worse off than when it started. Trump said taxpayers wouldn’t pay “one dime” for his ballroom, but it turns out we’re on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.

We’re not holding our breath for the president to deliver on his promises to lower costs. We’re fighting for economic security and to put more money in our members’ pockets—like the 1 million borrowers we’ve helped get Public Service Loan Forgiveness relief. Our Fight for Affordability builds on that work, with resources to help navigate medical and credit card debt and on other support people are legally entitled to but may not know about.

And we are working with allies in Congress on bold solutions, like increasing the minimum wage to $25 and passing the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act, which would exempt 104 million lower-income adults from federal taxes—paid for by millionaires paying a fairer share. We’re pushing for increased funding for public schools and colleges. We’re fighting back against the draconian cuts to Medicaid and to rural hospitals. Millions of children risk going hungry because of the heartless changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the Big Ugly Bill; we are fighting for every single one of them.

But we need majorities in statehouses and in Congress this year, and ultimately the White House, to secure the foundational changes we seek.

Threats to Democracy

We face another grave danger: dire threats to democracy. I know, some of you are thinking, here she goes. But really, when is the erosion so much that we can’t get our freedoms back?

I remember the scoffing when terms like “authoritarian” were first used. And I have been asked repeatedly about why I used the term “fascist” in the book I wrote, Why Fascists Fear Teachers.

Unfortunately, the answer is clearer every day.

I don’t actually care what you call it, but I care very much about what Trump is doing. He is weaponizing the justice system to target political opponents, journalists and dissenters. He is sending armed forces trained for war to police American cities, especially to Democrat- and Black-led cities. He is using the presidency for his own benefit and to enrich himself and his family. He is trying to obstruct free and fair elections to maintain power.

Donald Trump keeps trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He urged on the Jan. 6 rioters and pardoned even those who brutally attacked officers bravely protecting the Capitol.

He is aggressively testing the legal and constitutional limits of presidential power.

Then there are the lies. It started with crowd size but now he lies about everything—about election results, the economy, his critics, the war in Iran. Even the botched paint job on the Reflecting Pool.

And sadly, instead of uniting the country to celebrate the great American experiment of democracy, what did Trump do for the 250th? He held what he described as “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”

Mr. President, you don’t own July Fourth. You own Jan. 6.

I speak and write about democracy a lot because education is vital to understanding, and understanding is vital to acting. If we don’t heed the warnings from the generals who worked for Trump in his first term; if we don’t recognize the hallmarks of authoritarianism—fear, division, isolation and apathy; if we don’t learn the lessons of tyrants, how do we the people have the shared understanding and the urgency to organize and mobilize for democracy to work for working people.

As I wrote last year, fascists fear teachers because they fear a well-educated citizenry. They fear what educators do—the teaching of critical thinking, of honest history, of pluralism—because their brand of greed, power and privilege cannot survive in a democracy of diverse, educated citizens. We see it in the book bans. In the attacks on DEI. In the efforts to control what schools and universities can and cannot teach. And in the attempts to rewrite and whitewash history.

To be clear: Fascists don’t just fear teachers—they fear, loath and try to silence all of us who stand up for democracy, dignity, fairness and opportunity for all.

And stand up we must.

Americans are losing faith in democracy. Seven in 10 U.S. adults say they are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working in the country. Young Americans in particular feel the country is on the wrong track.

I understand the disappointment. But we cannot give up on democracy. Winston Churchill was right when he said in 1947, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

But we must improve it. As John Dewey said, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

Look at where democracy is being born anew: In Hungary, where this spring 80 percent of voters turned out to reject Viktor Orbán’s far-right agenda, ending his 16-year grip on power. In South Korea, where labor unions spearheaded mass protests and nationwide “strikes to defend democracy” after the president declared martial law. And here at home, at May Day and “No Kings” protests in small towns, suburbs and cities across America, where millions of people turned out to say we will not stand by while democracy is dismantled.

We are not helpless to change what is wrong. We can build a better future and a stronger democracy. But that requires winning in November.

Elections

As big and bad and big-hearted as we are, neither bargaining nor bullhorns alone will get us out of these treacherous times.

To get a working-class tax cut, to pass living-wage legislation, to get limitless money out of politics, to fix the healthcare system, to strengthen education, and to restore vital safety net and climate programs, we have to win majorities in 2026 and the White House in 2028. We have to elect people who support working people, leaders with real plans to make life better.

Strengthening public schools and stopping the reckless runaway train that private school vouchers are becoming should not be a partisan issue. Ensuring everyone who works can earn a living wage should not be a political issue. Fighting so everyone has access to high-quality, affordable healthcare should be a human priority, not one party’s priority. Shoring up Social Security to keep seniors out of destitution should have universal support. Addressing the climate crisis that threatens all humanity should unify all humanity.

Perhaps one day these issues will be bipartisan.

But sadly, the reality is that since Trump’s first term, Republican officeholders’ support for our priority issues averaged just 8 percent, while Democrats averaged 95 percent. Do I wish that was different? Of course. And do I wish Democrats were bolder? I do. But Republican leaders don’t even seem to want to try.

This election will decide whether we are a country governed by the people or ruled by the powerful. A country of opportunity or oligarchy. A country whose people live in freedom or in fear.

Do we want a future where billionaires and a trillionaire continue to grow their wealth at the expense of working people? Or one where working people earn a decent wage, support their families and take a vacation once in a while?

Do we want a future in which classrooms lack resources and life-changing research is abandoned? Or one in which we can nurture the potential of every student and continue to lead the world in bold discoveries?

Do we want a future where big healthcare corporations put profits over people? Or one in which every person—every person—has access to healthcare, and healthcare professionals have the resources, staffing and power to help their patients?

Do we want a future ruled by tech bros and robots? Or a future grounded in dignity and humanity?

Do we want a future in which elections are rigged to maintain one-party control and government is for sale to the highest bidder? Or one in which every person’s vote matters and government serves the people?

That’s what’s at stake in November 2026. And the future we want is within reach. We can win majorities in the House and in the Senate and in state capitals. Majorities who will act on our priorities.

But only if we vote, get others out to vote, and protect the vote. That’s why we are committing to our most ambitious election program ever.

Here’s the math: 1.3 million AFT members and their families live in a place where there is a competitive race in November. 600,000 of us are in battleground gubernatorial states. 464,000 live in the states with the seven top U.S. Senate battleground races. We need to flip four seats to win a Senate majority that works for working folks. And we have more than 1,000 members and voting family members in 86 critical, competitive congressional districts. We only need a net gain of three seats to win a working folks’ majority in the U.S. House. Can we do it?

With the AFL-CIO, we have a goal of reaching 2 million new voters. That means the AFT has to turn out about 200,000 more householders than in the last election. That means we need 28,000 volunteers to make calls, knock on doors and get out the vote—28,000 out of 1.875 million. Can we do it?

And it’s not just about getting out the vote in this election but also about protecting the vote. That’s why we are launching a new Democracy Defenders election protection program. We are recruiting 5,000 members to make sure that people can exercise their right to vote free from intimidation. Our Democracy Defenders will be part of the 50,000 people the AFL-CIO is recruiting for this critical work. Can we do it?

People power can win, but we need to be all in, and that means we need you to be all in. No one can do everything, but each of us can do something to win in November and achieve the better future we fight for.

So are we going to vote? Are we going to get out the vote? Are we going to protect the vote?

Conclusion

That’s the energy and commitment we need to achieve the America we dream of: An America where everyone has opportunity and economic security. An America where everyone’s dignity and freedoms are respected. An America whose democracy not only endures but finally lives up to its noble ideals.

I’ve spoken often this year about Martin Luther King Jr.’s final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Since January 2025, we have experienced a lot of chaos, fear and division.

Lately, I find myself drawn to another piece of King’s wisdom—that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I still believe that, and I hope you do too.

But the arc doesn’t bend on its own. It bends toward freedom and opportunity through the work you do every day making a difference in people’s lives—in classrooms, at the bedside, in our communities. You bend the arc. Unions bend the arc. Voting bends the arc. The power of the people bends the arc toward justice.

On this 250th anniversary of our nation, that is our responsibility. That is what I am asking you to do, what I am asking us to do—this bigger, badder, big-hearted union and our 1.875 million members.

And when we do, when we bend that arc, we will change the trajectory of our nation and secure a better future for all, from sea to shining sea. Thank you.

Watch the full speech

https://www.aft.org/media/oembed?url=https%3A//youtu.be/oIASmJ3ZO70&max_width=0&max_height=0&hash=Sadl1eN7tbOr37C7SenWNH-Hx34YmVOAuIc7CHYyQyQ

Categories Academic Freedom, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Justice, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Trump Administration Admitted in Court That It Cancelled Major Grants for Political Reasons

By dianeravitch

July 25, 2026 //

The person who is elected President usually says on election night that he will govern on behalf of the American people. He makes a point of obligation to be respectful for all Governors, to send FEMA to any state that has suffered from natural disasters, regardless of whether they vote for him or his rival.

Trump has said frankly that he hates his enemies. He sometimes doesn’t pretend to care about states that did not vote for him.

Aaron Parnas of the Parnas Perspective points out that the Trump administrative made decisions about environmental grants based solely on whether the states supported him in the 2024 elections. This involved billions of dollars in grants.

Parnas wrote:

A major constitutional violation, confirmed in court. The Trump administration admitted in court filings this month that it canceled 284 Biden era clean energy grants worth billions of dollars based solely on whether the recipient state voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and had two Democratic senators. A lawyer for the Energy Department conceded that none of the terminations were based on any programmatic, statutory, cost reduction, or performance related factor, directly contradicting Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s June congressional testimony that no decisions were made on politics. The Energy Department disputes any contradiction, saying Wright was distinguishing between the review process and the timing of the cancellations, but hundreds of additional grants the department had itself recommended for cancellation were left untouched simply because they sat in states that backed Trump.

Real projects and real money were caught in the fallout. The politically targeted cancellations halted funding for hundreds of energy projects, including electrical grid upgrades in California and Oregon, methane leak reduction efforts in Colorado, and clean hydrogen fuel hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest. The cuts came in October alongside a broader White House push to pressure Democratic lawmakers during a government funding standoff, with Trump publicly threatening to slash what he called Democrat agencies. Some grant recipients have since sued to try to recover their funding, and this is not the first time the Energy Department has admitted politics played a role, since a federal judge already ruled in two earlier cases that more than a dozen grants were improperly canceled for political reasons, though this latest admission is far broader and more detailed.

Democrats say it exposes a dangerous pattern with more to come. Senator Patty Murray and Representative Marcy Kaptur called the cancellations an outright un-American weaponization of government and accused the administration of corruptly abusing its power to punish states over how they voted. The controversy lands as the administration finalizes new rules, expected by October, that would give Trump’s political appointees direct control to review, block, or revoke federal grants across the entire government, worth more than a trillion dollars annually. Budget office director Russell Vought has defended the changes as necessary to ensure democratic control of spending, but critics, including antipoverty groups, scientists, and city leaders, have flooded the government with comments warning the rules would let the administration extend this kind of political targeting far beyond energy grants. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities fellow Devin O’Connor said the willingness to be this blatant in court should be taken as a serious warning about what the new framework could enable nationwide.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Politics, Trump

Trump Insults Reporters and His Critics at White House Correspondents Dinner

By dianeravitch

July 25, 2026 //

You may recall that the annual White House Correspondents Dinner was interrupted last April 25, then cancelled, after a lone gunman tried to break through security and was stopped.

The event is a venerable tradition. The April dinner was designed for 2,500 guests. The rescheduled dinner was held last night. It was slimmed down to 700 people, which included prominent figures in the media, especially those journalists who cover the White House.

The speech took place at the same time that the Trump Justice Department claims the authority to issue subpoenas to reporters for writing stories that Trump treats as leaks.

Trump did what he does best: he insulted the journalists who cover him, and he ridiculed politicians who are his enemies.

The Washington Post reported:

He said that he had once mixed up CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins, whom he said “never smiles,” with a transgender social media personality, Dylan Mulvaney, after he called the 34-year-old cable news star a “young, attractive woman.”
He said he planned to host twice-weekly fights at the White House.

“We will have sloppy Chris Christie, one of the sloppiest human beings, fighting,” Trump said to silence. “I could mention the governor of Chicago, but I’m going to mention instead Jerry Nadler. Oh my God! They’re fighting for a big piece of cheesecake, big fat piece of cheesecake.”
Then he told a joke about Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California).

“I hate some people,” he said to groans. “He’s a liar, and I called him watermelon head because he has the largest head I’ve ever seen with the smallest neck, pencil neck. How does that make a fat, ugly head on a little pencil neck?”

Trump’s entourage laughed at his vitriolic barbs, but the journalists sat in “stunned silence” as Trump attacked the journalists who cover him.

Trump proved to all who heard him that he has low regard for a free press. But he is a master of insults and disparagement.

Categories Democracy, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Trump Lashes Out at Smithsonian Museum for Refusing His Censorship

By dianeravitch

July 25, 2026 //

For more than a year, Trump has pestered the Smithsonian Museum to remove exhibits that shine attention on despicable episodes and phenomena in American history. Trump wants a patriotic version of American history.

The Smithsonian has rejected his bullying, so Trump ordered the National Park Service to place signs around the Smithsonian museums warning visitors about their bias in favor of accurate history.

The Guardian reported:

Donald Trump on Friday ordered the interior department to display signs in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that accuse the institution of inaccuracy.

The order escalates the Trump’s attacks against the Smithsonian, which he and his allies accuse of politicizing the institution by focusing too much on injustices in American history, instead of more triumphant moments such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The order directs interior secretary Doug Burgum to huddle with the National Park Service and assistant to the president for domestic policy Vince Haley to come up with some temporary signs to install along the National Parks Service-maintained sidewalks and walkways leading into the museum.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more details about what these signs would say.

The order says the signs “shall notify visitors that the museum exhibits should be renovated consistent with the findings in the report”. The signs should direct the public to other places where they can get better American history information, the order says.

The same group will also have to produce signs for the public criticizing the Smithsonian for not commemorating sufficiently the Declaration of Independence during the 250th anniversary of its adoption.

The American Historical Association, a group composed of professional historians, praised the Smithsonian Institution’s “commitment to scholarship and accuracy” in a statement earlier this month.

“Historians practice our craft with scholarly integrity according to established standards of evidence, historical inquiry, and professional practice,” the AHA statement reads. “Political interference in professional museum work threatens the accuracy of historical interpretation and erodes public trust in one of our nation’s most important institutions.”

The National Museum of American History declined to comment.

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, History, Propaganda, Trump

You Can Help Turn Texas Blue!

By dianeravitch

July 22, 2026 //

I am once again posting a fascinating account of an important district in Texas. The district is Tarrant County. It’s the third largest district in Texas. For a long time, it was reliably red. Now, we learn in Michelle H.Davis’s post, it is close to turning blue.

You can help by sending contributions of any size to candidates she describes. I was moved to send $100 to Alisa Simmons, whom she describes near the end of the post. Any of the candidates mentioned would appreciate $10, $25, whatever you can afford.

The best part of the post is that it gives you a flavor of why these races matter. Like the contest for leadership of the prison, where more than 70 prisoners have died while in custody since 2017.

Davis writes:

This is the third installment of this series, where we’re looking at election data from the largest counties to see where we need to be for our hypothetical big blue wave in November. If you missed our previous installments:

Harris and Dallas, the only counties with higher populations than Tarrant, are reliably blue and need to focus on turnout. Tarrant, on the other hand, is where the battleground is. It’s a swing county because Republicans have held the reins of county government for too long. 2026 could be the year that changes.

Twenty years ago, Tarrant County was over 75% white and the largest red county in America.

Tarrant County

And of course, we know that Demographics are not destiny, but we can see in Tarrant County that votes have been trending blue for a long time.

More than that, there’s a heavy burden on Tarrant County, just like Harris and Dallas. In 2024, 7.96% of all Texas Democrats lived in Tarrant County. And in a state as big as Texas, that’s a lot of weight to pull.

The good old boys are still hanging on.

Because here’s the thing about Tarrant County. This isn’t a story about demographics slowly working their magic while everybody waits around for the numbers to catch up. This is a county government that knows exactly what’s coming and is doing everything in its power to make sure it never arrives. They’ve gerrymandered maps. The Tarrant County jail that can’t stop killing people. The County Judge told the only Black woman on the Commissioners Court to shut up. This is what a dying regime looks like when it still has its hands on the levers.

Start with Tim O’Hare, the County Judge. Before Tarrant, O’Hare was mayor of Farmers Branch, where he made it his life’s work to run Latino residents out of town, an obsession that ended up costing that city millions in legal fees. He brought the same energy to Fort Worth. He’s taken money from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, an organization with documented Nazi ties, and he has never denounced it, not once, not even when asked directly. He led the charge to defund Girls Inc. of Tarrant County, a program that serves Black and Hispanic girls. And in April of 2025, in front of the entire Commissioners Court, he told Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Black woman, to “sit down and be quiet,” then accused her of lacking “a semblance of class.” Read that however you want.

He’s not doing this alone. Tony Tinderholt, the just-retired state rep, announced he was running for Simmons’ own Precinct 2 seat the day after the county’s gerrymandered map passed. Tinderholt is also one of the Texas House’s top recipients of Defend Texas Liberty PAC cash, and he was one of the few Republicans in the state to vote against the CROWN Act, a bill that simply says you can’t fire someone for their hairstyle.Matt Krause, another commissioner, used to represent a State House district that federal courts had once found to have been racially gerrymandered. This is the bench.

And then there’s the jail. Sheriff Bill Waybourn has been in office since 2017, and in that time, more than 70 people have died in his custody. Anthony Johnson Jr. died of asphyxiation after a jailer knelt on his back for over a minute while he said he couldn’t breathe. Two former jailers are now indicted for murder. The county has paid out more than $4.3 million settling lawsuits over deaths and abuse in that jail. When Commissioner Simmons has tried to get Waybourn to brief the court on what’s happening inside, she’s refused, calling her requests “hostile.” Waybourne has also spoken at a Turning Point USA event, an organization with its own well-documented ties to white supremacist rhetoric.

And the redistricting, the whole reason Tinderholt is running for Simmons’ seat in the first place, is because the Commissioners Court redrew Precincts 1 and 2, the only Democratic-held seats, and O’Hare admitted on camera it was to lock in a Republican majority. Simmons and her fellow Democratic commissioner had the UCLA Voting Rights Project analyze the new maps, and the conclusion was that every proposed map packed Black and Hispanic voters into a single district to dilute their power everywhere else. Lawsuits were filed. They got dismissed on procedural grounds. The map stands for 2026.

But something has shifted in Tarrant County. Democrats have been sweeping local races, and Taylor Rhemet’s win was the cherry on top.

Last year, Democrats flipped multiple school boards in Tarrant County. This year, they flipped several city council races across the county. And on January 31, Democrat Taylor Rehmet beat Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a state Senate seat that hadn’t gone blue since 1991. Not close, either. 57% to 43%, in a district Trump carried by 17 points just over a year earlier. Wambsganss outspent him by two million dollars. She’s the chief communications officer for Patriot Mobile, the outfit that’s spent the last several years funding the Christian nationalist school board takeovers.

Hispanic voters did that. In some of the heavily Latino precincts on Fort Worth’s north side, Rehmet outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by more than 50 points. That’s a mobilization story, the same one I’ve been telling you about Harris and Dallas counties, except this time it happened in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat to that seat in 35 years. Rehmet and Wambsganss go at it again in November for the full term, and if Tarrant Democrats can do what they did in January one more time, that seat is gone for good.

Down at the State House, the map is a little friendlier, if you squint.

Five Republican-held House seats anchor themselves in Tarrant County, and depending on how big this wave gets, we could see two of them flip. Maybe four. Maybe all five, though that’s the kind of year Democrats haven’t had here in three decades.

HD93 and HD96 are the two to watch first. HD94 is Tony Tinderholt’s old seat, now open since he’s bailing to run for Simmons’ commissioner spot, and Democrat Katie O’Brien Duzan is running there. HD96 has an open seat left by David Cool, defending against Democrat Ebony Turner, in a district that’s been quietly drifting for years.

HD98, Giovanni Capriglione’s old seat covering Keller, Colleyville, and parts of Southlake and Grapevine, is open too after his retirement, with Democrat Cate Brennan running.

HD94 and HD97 round out the list, the kind of districts that turn competitive the moment turnout ticks up, exactly like it just did in SD9.

Two of these flip in a decent night. Four flip if Tarrant does in November what it just did in January. And if all five go blue, that’s no longer a wave. That’s Tarrant County telling the rest of Texas the fight is already over.

Congressional seats to watch.

Tarrant now sits inside four competitive-adjacent congressional districts, and all four have a name on the ballot worth knowing:

TX24: Beth Van Duyne vs. Kevin Burge, a Marine Corps veteran who worked in the DIA and served in Biden’s White House Situation Room. Not a top-tier flip on paper, but this is the district that got carved through Tarrant’s fastest-diversifying suburbs, and it’s the one to watch for over-performance.
TX12: Craig Goldman vs. Heli Rodriguez-Prilliman, a Fort Worth entrepreneur running her first race. Goldman inherited Kay Granger’s old seat, and this is the most Tarrant-heavy of the four districts.
TX25: Roger Williams vs. Dione Sims, who won her primary runoff outright. This district picks up Arlington and Grand Prairie, the same ground that just delivered Rehmet’s win.
TX06: Jake Ellzey vs. Danny Minton, though only a sliver of this district touches Tarrant at all, it may be the most populated part of the district.

None of these is the marquee pickup Rehmet already delivered. But they’re the four names that turn a good night in Tarrant into a great one down-ballot, and if the county keeps trending the way Rehmet has shown it can, one of them stops being a long shot sooner than people think.

Now let’s talk about Alisa Simmons, because she’s the whole ballgame.

Simmons is the Precinct 2 commissioner Tim O’Hare told to sit down and be quiet, and this November, she’s running to replace him.

Before politics, Simmons spent 12 years as a broadcast journalist and then 18 years running budgets and public safety communications for the Tarrant County 9-1-1 District, the kind of job where you learn exactly how county government works and exactly where it breaks down. She spent ten years as president of the Arlington NAACP, served as second vice president of the Texas NAACP, and sat on the ACLU of Texas board. She ran for HD94 in 2020 and lost, then won her Precinct 2 commissioner seat in 2022. Since then, she’s been the loudest, most consistent voice on that court, demanding accountability from the jail, fighting the defunding of Girls Inc., and opposing the elimination of free rides to the polls.

When O’Hare and his Republican majority redrew her own precinct to make it harder to hold, Simmons ran countywide instead. And on March 3, she didn’t just win the Democratic primary for County Judge, she buried it.

Her platform is exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s spent years watching this county’s dysfunction up close. A full Department of Justice review of jail operations, independent oversight with actual teeth, and a direct reckoning with the 76 lives lost in that facility since 2017. She’s running on affordability, on fiscal responsibility that doesn’t require dipping into reserves to cover basic obligations, and on ending what she calls the constant partisan theater that’s replaced actual governance on that court. In her own words, it’s time for the Tarrant County government to get to work instead of getting into shouting matches.

I expect her to win in November. I’m not just saying that because I like her, although I do, a lot. I’m saying it because the numbers back it up, because O’Hare’s own party is nervous enough about Tarrant that they’re gerrymandering commissioner precincts mid-decade instead of just running on their record, and because Simmons has already shown she can win a race Republicans specifically redesigned to make sure she couldn’t.

So what does it actually take to get there?

Turnout, same as always. Tarrant County has nearly 1.5 million registered voters, and the difference between a good night and a great one lives entirely in the precincts that already agree with us and just haven’t been asked to show up yet.

The Hispanic vote that swung so hard left for Rehmet in January has to swing that way again in November, and it will, if the same organizing that worked in that special election gets replicated at scale.

The Tarrant County Democratic Party fielded its broadest slate of candidates since 1994 this cycle. That’s not an accident either. That’s what happens when people stop waiting for demographics to save them and start building the infrastructure to ensure demographics actually show up.

Tim O’Hare knows what’s coming. That’s why he’s spent his entire tenure trying to outrun it instead of earning it. Alisa Simmons is the one running straight at it.

You can learn more about Alisa Simmons on her website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads.

If you’re in Tarrant County, please consider volunteering for her campaign.

Donate here if you can.

Tarrant County doesn’t need to wait for a statewide wave to matter.

It needs its own county government back, and it’s closer than it’s been in thirty years.

Rehmet already broke the seal. Simmons is next. Somewhere between two and five House seats are up for grabs. The good old boys know it, which is why they gerrymandered instead of governing.

Show up, and Tarrant stops being the excuse Texas Republicans hide behind. It becomes the county that ends them. And in 2026, Democrats take back Tarrant County.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Texas

Julian V. Heilig: The Hunger Games of Education Has Begun. Who Will Survive?

By dianeravitch

July 22, 2026 //

This is a thoughtful essay on a crucial problem: shrinking enrollments in higher education and the budget cuts to meet them. Julian Vasquez Heilig lays out the problem and the typical response. He thinks there is a better way and he describes it.

Heilig is on the faculty of Michigan State University and is a national expert on topics such as diversity, equity and inclusion.

He writes:

The warning signs are no longer theoretical. Schools are closing. Colleges are preparing layoffs. Faculty buyouts are spreading. Academic programs are disappearing. Dorm beds are sitting empty. Classrooms are thinning out. Tax revenue is weakening. State appropriations are uncertain. Consultants are being hired and paid millions to identify “efficiencies.” Boards are quietly discussing mergers and closures. American education is entering a period of deep instability.

This is not only a crisis for presidents and superintendents. It is a crisis for communities. When a school closes, a neighborhood loses more than a building. When a college cuts faculty and staff, a region loses jobs and opportunity. When families question whether education is worth the price, the consequences ripple through local economies and democracy itself.

In this article, I first define the problem. Enrollment pressure, funding instability, demographic change, and political attacks are converging across K-12 and higher education. These pressures are already producing closures and painful restructuring. But this is not only a warning. At the end, I turn to what communities can do through politics, public pressure, local organizing, accountability, and leadership selection before the choices become narrower.

The Warning Signs Are Already Here

At my own institution, public projections suggest new student enrollment could decline somewhere between 3 and 5 percent this year. If those projections hold, that would mark a return to consecutive enrollment declines after the gains achieved during my years as provost. During that period, we reversed an almost decade-long enrollment slide.

That is alarming because this moment was supposed to be the “high water mark” before the demographic cliff. WICHE projects that the total number of high school graduates will peak around 2026 and then decline steadily through 2041. Universities were supposed to be maximizing enrollment now. Instead, some are struggling while the student pool remains historically large.

In many ways, education is being pushed into an arena where resources are shrinking and the odds are being rewritten before many institutions understand the rules.

The Old Survival Strategies Are Running Out

Much of higher education survived the past several years through strategies that are becoming unsustainable. Institutions poured millions into financial aid discounting. They leaned harder into full-pay families. They expanded retention offices and predictive analytics systems. They built student success centers and advising infrastructure. They spent heavily on marketing and enrollment staff.

Ironically, retention and enrollment strategy helped save some institutions from earlier financial pressure. During my time in executive leadership, we understood that higher education had entered a new era of competition. Universities were no longer competing only over prestige. They were competing over affordability and survival.

Financial aid, student success infrastructure, and community partnerships became essential tools. Institutions that moved aggressively like Arizona State and Georgia State often stabilized themselves. Institutions that remained complacent fell further behind.

But even enrollment growth stories now face new threats. Federal research funding is unstable. State appropriations remain uncertain. Inflation is pressuring budgets. Some states like Michigan have seen stronger FAFSA activity. Yet many families are questioning the value of higher education. Political attacks have also weakened public trust while threatening research capacity and institutional autonomy.

Please open the link to read Heilig’s creative proposals for meeting the crisis.

Categories Budget Cuts, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Funding, Higher Education

I Owe an Apology to Ted Dintersmith

By dianeravitch

July 21, 2026 //

About a dozen years ago, I heard from Ted Dintersmith. I didn’t know anything about him other than that he was a venture capitalist who was interested in education reform. My hackles went up, because the term “venture capitalist who was interested in education reform” immediately conjured up images of Democrats for Education Reform,” a faux group that is dedicated to charter schools, Teach for America, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and union-busting.

When I thought about the people in this category, I thought about very wealthy men like Ravenal Boykin Curry IV, Whitney Tilson, John Perry, Ken Griffin, Jeff Yass, Daniel Loeb, Arthur Rock, Joel Greenblatt, Bruce Rauner, and Paul Tudor Jones. They are financiers who have committed millions to the cause of privatizing public schools. They are united in their contempt for public schools, teachers, and unions.

So I was wary of Ted and suspicious of his motives. And I pushed him aside, thinking he was part of the cabal of know-it-all entrepreneurs with a zeal to reform (privatize) public schools.

So, I now publicly admit that I was wrong. Ted has traveled the country, visiting schools and listening. He knows how hard teachers work, and he admires them. He has teamed up with some savvy people, like Tony Wagner and the late Sir Ken Robinson, to produce films and write books.

When I recently read his latest article, I realized that I had completely misjudged Ted. He doesn’t want to destroy public schools or privatize them. He wants to make them better. He wants students to love school and learn what they need to know to make informed choices.

He has seen some good charter schools (as I have), but he knows that a few hundred charter schools won’t lead to the transformation of tens of thousands of public schools. And–my thought–to the extent that charter schools defund public schools, they create more problems, more inequities.

So, I hereby apologize to Ted Dintersmith for prejudging him and for lumping him with the Billionaire Boys Club, those who see school transformation as a hobby.

When you read this post you will see that he doesn’t have all the answers, but he is asking the right question.

He writes:

About these notes: Always Monday. Always short. Always free. Always about civil society’s future. At times, interesting. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe here.

First, thanks for your feedback on my recent posts. My goal of late is to explore the various factors causing America to unravel. Toward a systems model of the forces undermining America’s democracy, moral compass, and social cohesion. Today, education.

For five decades, U.S. education policy has been driven by two goals: test scores and college. The No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. Then in 2010, Common Core. Obama’s rallying cry: “By 2020, the United States will once again lead the world in college completion.” Our all-consuming education focus. With massive collateral damage.

Let’s start with the funnel. While the college path works out well for some, most end up on the wrong side of education’s Bell Curve. Over half go directly to career, lacking a hirable skill and often with gutted self-esteem. Of those heading off to college, half don’t finish. Of those who graduate, half don’t get any kind of dream job. A system that’s produced some 43 million adults burdened by $1.8 trillion of student loan debt.

With a boost from Harvard-educated JFK, America grew to equate a prestigious college degree with human worth. This equivalence worked its way into news stories, movies, television shows, commercials . . . and labor markets. Prestige employers (that’s you, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey) made an elite college degree the essential hiring criterion. Less glamorous companies (that’s you, Sherwin-Williams) made a college degree mandatory for promotions. Rich families push their kids from the womb toward an Ivy+ degree. Poor families want the same for their kids. University research teams (that’s you, Georgetown) produce skewed studies touting a massive $1.2 million earnings lift for college grads. The Federal government opens the spigot for readily-obtained, impossible-to-shake student loans.

We’d like to think that America’s education system levels the playing field, but it does the opposite. The SCOTUS 1973 San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez says it’s just fine for U.S. public schools to be largely funded by local property taxes. Rich kids are showered with resources’; poor kids show up to school hungry. Test scores point to an education ‘achievement gap’ that gets pinned on our teachers – not America’s staggering income inequality. The system’s winners feed elite colleges that educate more students from the richest 1% of families than from the bottom 50%. For more, read Paul Tough’s book The Inequality Machine.

With college placements as the measure of success, America’s K12 schools became college-ready test-prep institutions. Pit kids in dog-eat-dog competitions: class rank, SAT scores, AP scores, college placement. A barrage of state- and Federally-mandated multiple-choice exams that rank kids, teachers, schools, districts, and states. Clear marching orders for K12 schools – train kids to perform well on multiple-choice exams and get them off to some college.

To this day, America relies on two numbers to define the education quality of a school, district, state, nation, and human. Math and reading scores. That’s it. Don’t believe me? Just note what journalists write and what policymakers cite. We’ve pushed generations of young Americans to get those damn test scores up. No worries if we short-change career-based learning, civics, history, and art. No worries if we disenage kids and demoralize teachers. No worries if a relentless focus on rote learning crushes a child’s curiosity, creativity, joy, and agency. No worries if kids get the soul-sucking message that what matters in life is outcompeting others on pointless tasks. Education priorities that encapsulate the classic definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

During their formative K12 years, America’s kids take more than 100 standardized exams. These cost-minimizing exams are expressly designed to be graded by a computer. And if a computer can grade a task, it can do that task. In every sense, we push kids to develop rote skills that machines handle flawlessly. Already, AI aces every assignment and exam required to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard. Reading exams call for regurgitating what’s put in front of you – perfect training for conspiracy-absorbing adults. Math exams are tied to esoteric micro-procedures (e.g., factoring polynomials) that adults never use. Yet we chase these scores, for decades, making no progress, ignoring Goodhart’s Law: “Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.”

There you have it. America’s colossal education botch. Train kids to perform rote tasks. Crush out the essential human traits of curiosity, audacity, creativity, agency, and joy. Standardize what’s taught and tested to produce data that ranks and sorts — rather than helping each child develop their distinctive human potential. Most get a chronic ‘you lack proficiency’ message in a system that heaps advantage on the affluent. Botched priorities, paving the way to our current nightmare. A populace unable and unwilling to critically analyze the torrent of lies coming from the White House. A populace that holds its nose to vote for a convicted felon who rails on the ‘educated elite.’ A boiling cauldron of resentment, corruption, and anti-science vitriol. As to how this has worked out, read David Brooks’ fascinating How the Ivy League Broke America.

I don’t offer these views on education casually. For the past fifteen years, I’ve immersed myself in this world. I’ve visited hundreds of schools, and convened thousands of conversations, all across America. I celebrate the bright spots in my books (What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America) and films (Most Likely to Succeed and Multiple Choice). But I’ve seen the failure. Failure caused by an obsolete system and failed accountability measures. Our classroom teachers are heroes. It’s not easy to fight the system, but many do. Give special thanks to the teachers in your life, who persevere despite being shortchanged on pay, respect, and trust. They endure in an entrenched system that has churned out generations of young adults ill-prepared for career, citizenship, and life. A system sowing the seeds for democracy’s collapse.

Three Bold Ideas

Career-Based Learning for All: My recent film Multiple Choice showcases a mainstream public school district that immerses all high-school kids in career-based learning across a range of skills (e.g., carpentry, welding, healthcare, cybersecurity, digital media, AI). Better for the career-bound and, a bit surprisingly, better for the college-bound. The key is making career-based learning essential for all kids, not just ‘those’ kids who don’t resonate with academic curriculum.

Finland: America can learn much from Finland. Their remarkable education progress resulted from a budget crisis that forced them to choose between data and educator excellence. They dumped all standardized tests and focused on developing outstanding classroom teachers – better training, more pay, loads of respect. Finnish kids spend comparatively little time on ‘school’; even high-schoolers have just six hours of class time and homework during the school week. Lots of time for play and exploration. A well-educated populace. For more, read Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons.

Accountability: Base accountability on a child’s growing ability to create and carry out initiatives that help make their world better. Portfolios of purpose, not a checklist of counterproductive numbers. Check out New York’s Performance Standards Consortium or read Tony Wagner’s Mastery.

Bonus Idea: Long talked about, America would be well-served if every high school graduate engaged in public service — lifting up their community while developing important skills. Those going on to college bring maturity and real-world experience to years often wasted on beer pong. Those eschewing the college path are off and running with purpose and skills. Young Americans across all demographics in a melting pot that bridges our current demographic and political divides.

Nervously,

Ted

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Higher Education, Jobs, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Pastors in North Carolina Oppose “Christian Nationalism”

By dianeravitch

July 17, 2026 //

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you know that I have a strong friendship with and great respect for the Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, executive director of Pastors for Texas Children. Charlie comes to every conference of the Network for Public Education and is a strong advocate for public schools and the 5.4 million children who attend them. He believes deeply in separation of church and state, as do the 2,000 faith leaders in Texas who are part of Pastors for Texas Children. PTC was deeply involved in the voucher battle, on the side of public schools and church-state separation.

PTC has encouraged the creation of similar groups in other states. One of these groups is in North Carolina. I received this notice and thought some of you might want to participate in their zoom conversation about “Christian nationalism.”

People of Faith for Public Schools

Dear Advocates,

Though it’s still summer, our advocacy doesn’t stop! Have you been hearing about “Christian nationalism” but maybe don’t know quite what it is or why it matters to public education advocacy?

People of Faith For Public Schools, a project of Pastors for NC Children

Christian Nationalism:

What is it?

Why should we care?

How To End Christian Nationalism Zoom Book Discussion

Pastors for NC Children and Christians Against Christian Nationalism-North Carolina are co-sponsoring a 2 part zoom book discussion of Amanda Tyler’s “How To End Christian Nationalism”.

It will take place on Thursday, July 23 and Thursday, July 30 from 7-8:30pm. July 23 will look at the Introduction and Steps 1-4. July 30 will look at Steps 5-8 and the Conclusion. While we hope you read the book, you are invited to join in even if you haven’t. The discussion will include discussing the steps and how it intersects with our own experiences and life. The discussion will be led by Executive Director Rev. Suzanne Parker Miller.

ACTION ITEM: Register for the link at http://bit.ly/HTECNJuly2026

Support Our Work Today!

Thank you to everyone who has made a donation to PNCC’s ministry. WE ARE SO GRATEFUL! Would you consider becoming a monthly donor or make a one time contribution to our goal? Could your church include PNCC in their mission giving? THANK YOU!

ACTION ITEM: Donate to PNCC’s Ministry Today!

Know of congregational, denominational, or community grants or opportunities to support our work? Let us know at Fundraising@PastorsForNCchildren.org

919.346.6114

Rev. Suzanne Parker Miller, Director

Director@PastorsForNCchildren.org

PastorsForNCchildren.org

DONATE HERE!

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, North Carolina, Religion, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

The president did something yesterday that almost no one noticed. He signed an order that will allow him to fully hijack (and politicize) the federal government, like never before.

Part I: Venture Philanthropy — When Billionaires Play School

Part II: Yale Said “Yes” — And Charged It to Prestige

Part III: The Damage Ledger — Twenty-Five Years of “Disruption”

The Human Cost

Part IV: The Scandal Hall of Fame — From Procurement Fraud to Federal Prison

John Deasy — The iPad That Broke LAUSD

Barbara Byrd-Bennett — The Federal Prison Graduate

Robert Runcie — The Perjury Arrest

Alberto Carvalho — The AI Echo of the iPad Disaster

Part V: The Carousel — How Failed Superintendents Get Recycled

Part VI: Buying the Boardroom — How Venture Philanthropy Captured School Governance

Part VII: The Network Map — 1,000 Alumni and Counting

Part VIII: Yale — Laundering a Legacy in Ivy

The Synthesis: What Twenty-Five Years Actually Taught Us

Epilogue: The Ghost That Won’t Be Exorcised

Master Source List: The Ghost of Eli Broad & The Broad Center at Yale

🏛️ The Broad Center at Yale SOM — Official Sources

📊 Academic Research & Empirical Studies

🗞️ Investigative Journalism & Policy Criticism

⚖️ Barbara Byrd-Bennett — Federal Conviction (Chicago)

⚖️ Robert Runcie — Broward County Perjury Arrest

🤖 Alberto Carvalho — LAUSD FBI Raid & AllHere AI Scandal

📌 Quick Citation Reference Guide

Watch the full speech

The good old boys are still hanging on.

But something has shifted in Tarrant County. Democrats have been sweeping local races, and Taylor Rhemet’s win was the cherry on top.

Now let’s talk about Alisa Simmons, because she’s the whole ballgame.

So what does it actually take to get there?

Tarrant County doesn’t need to wait for a statewide wave to matter.

The Warning Signs Are Already Here

The Old Survival Strategies Are Running Out

People of Faith for Public Schools

Christian Nationalism:

What is it?

Why should we care?

How To End Christian Nationalism Zoom Book Discussion

Support Our Work Today!

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