Archives for category: Education Reform

Colorado: Voters Like Their Public Schools

November 11, 2025 //

Paula Noonan of Colorado Capitol Watch reported on a nearly statewide sweep of school board elections by pro-public school parents. This vote of confidence in public schools is even more remarkable in light of the heavy spending by pro-charter school advocacy groups.

In addition, Colorado’s Governor Jared Polis is an enthusiastic supporter of charter schools, having opened two himself. Michael Bennett, one of the state’s U.S. Senators, is also a champion of charters, a former superintendent of the Denver public schools, and plans to run for governor. The mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, is a former Teach for America activist and state legislator, who supports charter schools and authored a harsh teacher evaluation bill.

Mike DeGuire, former principal in Denver Public Schools, uncovered the dark money supporting the “reform” candidates. They include billionaires Philip Anschutz, the richest man in Colorado, Reed Hastings of Netflix, and John Arnold, former Enron trader.

Despite this lineup of big money and political heavyweights, the public in key districts chose their public schools.

She writes:

Swoosh — that’s the sound of money flushed down the toilet by Denver Families Action on their expensive-but-weak candidates for Denver Public Schools Board of Education. Bravo — that’s the sound of praise from Denver voters for Denver’s public-school teachers.

The mission of Denver Families Action led by Clarence Burton and Pat Donovan was to flip the Denver Board to a pro-choice, pro-charter majority. Many experts in the public-education sector see pro-choice advocacy as a lead-in to school vouchers.

In Denver, charter schools essentially serve the purposes of private school voucher programs. These schools and networks get tax dollars to operate their schools but have private, unelected school governance. The oversight of hundreds of millions of public dollars spent by these charters is at stake. Wealthy elite donors plunk down additional millions of dollars to support these education programs with accompanying tax write-offs.

Meanwhile, DPS had to close neighborhood schools recently due to low population and dropping revenues. The disruption from these school closures played out in Xochitl Gaytán’s southwest District 2. Gaytán was the only incumbent endorsed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. She is on record as rejecting future neighborhood school closures. She defeated her Denver Families’ opponent 57% to 42%, a big number with a big message.

Amy Klein-Molk ran against former district employee Alex Magaña in a head-to-head for the at-large board seat. Magaña had an ongoing dispute with DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero over the administration of Beacon innovation network of middle schools. Marrero found mismanagement and acted to dissolve the network. Beacon sued the district and lost. Klein-Molk crushed Magaña 55% to 44%, a nice 11-point spread.

Further confounding school district elections, Douglas County voters turned out its conservative majority. The “community not chaos” slate will seek to refocus the district away from contentious political issues, of which there are many and good luck with that. The slate emphasized teacher recruitment and retention based on a stable, positive work environment. Like other metro area districts, declining enrollment in older neighborhoods and increasing populations in newer neighborhoods create important, bottom-line challenges around opening and closing schools.

Pueblo County put up a split decision in its hotly contested school board races pitting public teacher-backed, public school-supporting candidates against parents rights, Christian education-oriented conservatives. In District 60, one candidate from each side won. In District 70, two public-school supporting candidates won and one non-aligned candidate took a seat.

In resounding support for providing good nutrition for school children, voters across the state supported propositions LL and MM. State residents on the high end of income, $300,000-plus, will contribute more tax dollars to the food-for-all school meals program by reducing state income tax deductions. This change will produce $95 million to fill the funding gap in the nutrition program.

What’s interesting about this result is 785,000 voters said NO to the tax increase in MM, or 35%. About 8% of Colorado taxpayers earn more than $300,000 per year, so quite a few people voted to allow wealthier individuals to keep their charitable contributions at the higher level. That’s the base of people against any tax increases for any reason.

Based on these overall results, several implications emerge where public education connects with taxation and the 2026 governor election connects to public education policy.

Great Ed Colorado and other groups will seek to offer a tax initiative of some sort to bring more money into the state’s school finance budget. The school nutrition vote put 65% of voters into the “we will nourish the kids with food” camp. It’s unknown whether nourishing kids with food also extends to nourishing kids with learning.

The governor’s race between U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Attorney General Phil Weiser contains the public education and tax increase intersection. The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, TABOR, creates much of Colorado’s taxation and state finance problems. The federal government’s animus to our state politics puts another kink into how Colorado can fund Medicaid, public schools, and an array of other needs adequately.

Sen. Bennet has received gobs of campaign money from wealthy east coast and west coast money-people who support school choice, charters and probably vouchers. Their preference is for public schools to turn charter or, better yet, private. Sen. Bennet will have to explain exactly how that will work in Colorado. Does he want more than $10 billion in public tax dollars to move to oversight by unelected charter boards with schools presenting curriculum that doesn’t meet state standards? Will he support changes to TABOR to bring in more tax dollars for school finance?

Attorney General Weiser will have to address the same questions with concrete offers. Right now, he supports a “livable wage” for teachers and down-payment assistance for teachers to live where the teach. He will “stand strong” for public schools and against privatizing. But will he go after TABOR reform and counter lack of transparency in charter-school governance?

This election gives hints. Voters supported the public in public schools and providing students with nourishment to flourish in school. The next election will decide whether public schools will flourish in teaching and learning as well.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.

To get a sense of the infighting, extremism, and partisanship that shaped many of Colorado’s school board races, read Logan M. Davis’ account of the outcomes in many other districts. His account appeared in the progressive Colorado Times Recorder..

Categories Colorado, Education Reform, Elections, Supporting public schools

Chalkbeat: Union-Backed Candidates Sweep Denver School Board, Beating Big-Money Charter Supporters

By dianeravitch

November 10, 2025 //

The big money promoting privatization in Denver tried to capture the Denver school board, but was defeated by candidates endorsed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association.

Chalkbeat Colorado reported:

Denver school board candidates backed by the teachers union won all four open seats Tuesday, unofficial election returns show, making it likely the board’s current balance of power will hold.

Eleven candidates were vying for four seats on the seven-member Denver school board.

Union-backed candidates won by commanding leads in three of the races and a solid lead in the fourth, according to unofficial returns. Two of the three incumbents who ran for reelection, Michelle Quattlebaum and Scott Esserman, lost their seats.

Teachers union-backed board members have controlled the board of Colorado’s largest school district for the past six years. Members who support charter schools and other education reform strategies gained a bigger foothold in 2023 and had a chance to flip the board majority this year.

Now, the board will continue to be composed of four members who were endorsed by the teachers union and three who were backed by reform interests.

Denver Classroom Teachers Association President Rob Gould called the early returns on Tuesday a victory of “people over money.” Like in past elections, reform groups were on track to outspend the teachers union, according to the latest campaign finance reports.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Colorado, Democrats for Education Reform, Denver, Education Reform, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Unions

Why Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Paused the Full Funding of SNAP

By dianeravitch

November 9, 2025 //

If Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Alito or Justice Thomas had puta stay on the orders of lower federal courts to fully fund SNAP–the program that pays fo feed 42 million impoverished Americans, we could safely conclude that they are cruel and don’t care whether poor people can afford a meal.

But it was shocking on Friday night to learn that it was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson–one of the most liberal members of the High Court–who ordered a 48-hour stay in the lower court’s order to fully fund SNAP.

How could this be?

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and noted Constitutional scholar, explains that Justice brown was acting strategically and hoped to outmaneuver the conservative majority.

Follow his reasoning. Open the link and finish reading his analysis.

He wrote:

A very quick explainer on what (and why) Justice Jackson issued an “administrative stay” in the SNAP case late on Friday night, and on what’s likely to happen next

STEVE VLADECK

Welcome back to “One First,” a (more-than) weekly newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support, and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks:

I wanted to put out a very brief post to try to provide a bit of context for Justice Jackson’s single-justice order, handed down shortly after 9 p.m. ET on Friday night, that imposed an “administrative stay” of a district court order that would’ve required the Trump administration to use various contingency funds to pay out critical benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

It may surprise folks that Justice Jackson, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the Court’s behavior on emergency applications from the Trump administration, acquiesced in even a temporary pause of the district court’s ruling in this case. But as I read the order, which says a lot more than a typical “administrative stay” from the Court, Jackson was stuck between a rock and a hard place—given the incredibly compressed timing that was created by the circumstances of the case.

In a world in which Justice Jackson either knew or suspected that at least five of the justices would grant temporary relief to the Trump administration if she didn’t, the way she structured the stay means that she was able to try to control timing of the Supreme Court’s (forthcoming) review—and to create pressure for it to happen faster than it otherwise might have. In other words, it’s a compromise—one with which not everyone will agree, but which strikes me as eminently defensible under these unique (and, let’s be clear, maddening and entirely f-ing avoidable) circumstances.

I. How We Got Here

Everyone agrees that, among the many increasingly painful results of the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can no longer spend the funds Congress appropriated to cover SNAP—a program that helps to fund food purchases for one in eight (42 million!) Americans. Everyone also agrees that there are other sources of appropriated money that the President has the statutory authority to rely upon to at least partially fund SNAP benefits for the month of November. The two questions that have provoked the most legal debate is whether (1) he has the authority to fully fund SNAP; and (2) either way, whether federal courts can order him to use whatever authorities he has.

The dispute in the case that reached the Supreme Court on Friday involves a lawsuit that asked a federal court in Rhode Island to order the USDA first to partially fund SNAP for November, and then to fully fund it. Having already ordered the USDA to do the former, yesterday, Judge McConnell issued a TRO ordering it to do the latter (to fully fund SNAP for November)—and to do so by the end of the day today.

Even as the President seemed to be giving inconsistent public statements about what the federal government was going to do, the Justice Department appealed Judge McConnell’s ruling to the First Circuit—and also sought a stay of that ruling pending appeal. And given the urgency of the timing, it asked the First Circuit to issue an “administrative stay”—a temporary pause while the court of appeals decided whether to issue a more indefinite stay for the duration of the government’s appeal. (For a longer explainer of the difference between an “administrative” stay and a stay pending appeal, see this post.)

With the First Circuit not having ruled on the administrative stay by late Friday afternoon, the Justice Department went to the Supreme Court for both of the types of relief it had sought from the First Circuit—a stay pending appeal and an administrative stay while the Court considered the former. Shortly after that filing, at 6:08 p.m. ET, the First Circuit publicly declined to enter an administrative stay—issuing a two-page order explaining why. As the order concluded, “The government’s motion for a stay pending appeal remains pending, and we intend to issue a decision on that motion as quickly as possible.”

That kicked the ball squarely into the Supreme Court’s … court (sorry; it’s late).

II. Why It Was Justice Jackson’s Problem

All emergency applications are filed in the first instance with the “Circuit Justice” assigned to that particular court of appeals/geographic area. For the Boston-based First Circuit, that’s Justice Jackson. And with one equivocal exception, every “administrative” stay of which I’m aware has come from the Circuit Justice, not the full Court. Thus, the onus was on Justice Jackson to either enter the administrative stay herself, or risk being overruled by the full Court.

In an order circulated to the Court’s press corps at 9:17 p.m. ET, Jackson issued the administrative stay sought by the Trump administration. But her order says a lot more than the typical administrative stay—which usually contains nothing other than boilerplate. As Jackson wrote, “Given the First Circuit’s representations, an administrative stay is required to facilitate the First Circuit’s expeditious resolution of the pending stay motion.” Thus, she stayed the two orders from Judge McConnell “pending disposition of the motion for a stay pending appeal” in the First Circuit, “or further order of Justice Jackson or of the Court.” And as the order concludes, “This administrative stay will terminate forty-eight hours after the First Circuit’s resolution of the pending motion, which the First Circuit is expected to issue with dispatch.”

The first thing to say about this order is that I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. Circuit Justices don’t usually explain administrative stays, and certainly not with this much detail about the timing. Here, Justice Jackson is clearly telling the First Circuit to hustle—a message I am sure the court of appeals will receive and act upon.

As for why Justice Jackson did it, to me, the clue is the last sentence. Had Jackson refused to issue an administrative stay, it’s entirely possible (indeed, she may already have known) that a majority of her colleagues were ready to do it themselves. I still think that this is what happened back in April when the full Court intervened shortly before 1 a.m., without explaining why Justice Alito hadn’t, in the A.A.R.P. Alien Enemies Act case. And from Jackson’s perspective, an administrative stay from the full Court would’ve been worse—almost certainly because it would have been open-ended (that is, it would not have had a deadline). The upshot would’ve been that Judge McConnell’s order could’ve remained frozen indefinitely while the full Court took its time. Yesterday’s grant of a stay in Trump v. Orr, for instance, came 48 days after the Justice Department first sought emergency relief.

Instead, by keeping the case for herself and granting the same relief, in contrast, Justice Jackson was able to directly influence the timing in both the First Circuit and the Supreme Court, at least for now. She nudged the First Circuit (which I expect to rule by the end of the weekend, Monday at the latest); and, assuming that court rules against the Trump administration, she also tied her colleagues’ hands—by having her administrative stay expire 48 hours after the First Circuit rules. Of course, the full Court can extend the administrative stay (and Jackson can do it herself). But this way, at least, she’s putting pressure on everyone—the First Circuit and the full Court—to move very quickly in deciding whether or not Judge McConnell’s orders should be allowed to go into effect. From where I’m sitting, that’s why Justice Jackson, the most vocal critic among the justices of the Court’s behavior in Trump-related emergency applications, ruled herself here—rather than allowing the full Court to overrule her. It drastically increases the odds of the full Supreme Court resolving this issue by the end of next week—one way or the other.

I am, of course, just speculating. But if so, I think it’s both a savvy move from Justice Jackson and a pretty powerful rejoinder to the increasingly noisy (and ugly) criticisms of her behavior from the right. Given the gravity of this issue, it makes all the sense in the world for a justice in Jackson’s position to do whatever she could to ensure that the underlying question (must the USDA fully fund SNAP for November?) is resolved as quickly as possible—even if that first means pausing Judge McConnell’s rulings for a couple of days. If the alternative was a longer pause of McConnell’s rulings, then this was the best-case scenario, at least for now. And regardless, imposing this compromise herself, rather than forcing her colleagues to overrule her, is, to me, a sign of a justice who takes her institutional responsibilities quite seriously, indeed—even when they lead away from the result she might otherwise have preferred if it were entirely up to her.

III. What Comes Next?

Open the link now to find out what is likely to happen to the funds that feel 42 million low-income Americans.

Categories Education Reform

Pennsylvania: Democrats Sweep School Board Races, Ousting Extremists

By dianeravitch

November 6, 2025 //

In Pennsylvania school board races, extremists who provoked battles over culture war issues were ousted. One winner said that parents looked forward to the days when school board meetings were “boring,” not divisive.

Pittsburgh’s NPR station WESA reported:

A slate of Democratic candidates won four seats on the Pine-Richland school board last night and unseated one incumbent with ties to a statewide movement of conservative education leaders.

The sweep capped an Election Day marked by Democratic victories in school board races statewide.

Pine-Richland electee Randy Augustine and his peers on the Together for PR slate won over voters with slogans like “excellence over extremism.”

“School board positions are theoretically supposed to be non-partisan, non-political positions,” Augustine said. “A number of the school board members were trying to push a political agenda, focusing on culture war issues, not focusing on the students.”

The Republican-led school board initiated policies that gave board members the final say over which books were included in school libraries and challenged books with LGBTQ characters. The district’s teachers union issued a vote of no confidence in the majority of school board members this spring.

“ It was becoming toxic, and the turmoil, I think, was spreading,” said fellow Together for PR winner Melissa Vecchi. “People just wanted to see it back to boring.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Parent Groups, Pennsylvania

Joseph Stiglitz: A Critical Moment for Democracy in the World

By dianeravitch

November 5, 2025 //

Joseph Stiglitz is a distinguished economist and is a Nobel laureate in economics. He has written eloquently about the benefits of increasing equality by taxing the richest people in the world.

Recently, democratic countries from the Global North and South – including Brazil, Chile, Norway, and Spain – came together at the United Nations not just to reaffirm their commitment to democracy, but to develop an agenda which would sustain and enrich it.The membership of this group, Democracia Siempre (Democracy Always), has increased enormously since it first met a year ago. The group’s growth reflects its members’ recognition that democratic backsliding is gathering pace around the world. This is particularly true in the country that has often claimed to be the oldest and strongest democracy: the United States, where there has been a sustained attack on the constitutional order lately.Both within countries and internationally, the rule of law is being trampled, leading to rampant corruption, violations of basic human rights and due process, and systematic erosion of institutions. Longstanding safeguards for our liberties and well-being are being dismantled before our eyes, with academic, press, and other freedoms under attack.In these dark times, Democracia Siempre is a ray of hope. Its members remain committed to defending democracy and the rule of law, setting an example for the timorous who have been cowed by Trump’s bullying. They have made it clear that national sovereignty and democracy are not something to be traded away. They refuse to follow the path of Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.As an economist who has studied why we have far higher living standards and longer lives today than 250 years ago, I understand the importance of Enlightenment values and the role of science in enabling us to understand the world around us. The unprecedented material progress we have achieved in the modern age stems from our commitment to reason and freedom.Enlightenment thinkers taught us that we can design institutions to co-ordinate individual actions, facilitate co-operation, and make our societies work better. This matters, because humans are social beings. We have always been able to do far more working together than alone, and in our highly urbanised, globally integrated society, we have no choice but to co-operate. Also, among the critical institutions that we inherited from the Enlightenment are those that enable us to ascertain and assess the truth, without which neither our economy nor our democracy can function well.Democracy and the rule of law are an essential bulwark against abuses of power and are fundamental to the preservation of our human rights. History shows what happens when they are abandoned or dismantled.The UN itself was created to help ensure peace on our planet after World War II. Since we share one world, peace, stability, and common prosperity require a world body, international law, and multilateral co-operation.This summer, as Democracia Siempre’s second global meeting approached, 43 Nobel laureates from a wide variety of disciplines signed a letter of support, both for the initiative and for an agenda to achieve its goals. That agenda includes strengthening institutions, addressing income inequality, and tackling online mis- and disinformation. Critically, the signatories affirmed their commitment to reason. Their worldviews may differ, but all agree that facts cannot, and must not, be falsified. All know that it was adherence to Enlightenment values that led to their own Nobel Prize-winning discoveries.Our reasoning about the world must be based on facts, and those come from scientific research and objective news gathering. High-quality information and journalism are necessary to inform the public, promote constructive civil engagement, and preserve democracy. Freedom of expression is an internationally recognised human right. Like academic freedom, it plays an indispensable role in ensuring government accountability and preventing the kind of agglomeration of power that undermines democracy.Yet actions by governments in many countries have had a chilling effect on these freedoms. Those in power have used defamation suits and other means to silence journalists, while massive technology companies allow their platforms to amplify mis- and disinformation, polluting the information ecosystem. Generative AI threatens to make matters worse, and those training the models have been stealing information produced by the legacy media and others. As a result, they have little incentive to produce high-quality information themselves. Technologies that could improve how we disseminate and process information are instead likely to degrade our information ecosystem even further (hence Democracia Siempre’s focus on this issue).An essential feature of democracy is that everyone’s voice counts – one person, one vote. But this cannot be the case when a few multi-billionaires control what has become the global town square.Checks and balances inevitably break down in the face of yawning economic inequality, because political inequality follows, with oligarchic interests using their resources to bend rules in their favour.But addressing inequality is critical for another reason: If democracies are to function well, the body politic must exhibit at least a modicum of solidarity. Yet today’s extreme inequalities, combined with a hyper-polarising media ecosystem, have eviscerated social cohesion.For too long, many took democracy and human rights for granted. We now know that was a mistake. Sustaining and improving these institutions takes continual effort. The Democracia Siempre movement provides hope that this still can be done.The following Nobel laureates signed the letter of support for Democracia Siempre:Maria A Ressa, Nobel laureate, Peace, 2021; Klaus von Klitzing, Nobel laureate, Physics, 1985; Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, Literature, 1986; Óscar Arias, Nobel laureate, Peace, x1987; Elias J Corey, Nobel laureate, Chemistry, 1990; Richard J Roberts, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 1993; José Ramos-Horta, Nobel laureate, Peace, 1996; William D Phillips, Nobel laureate, Physics, 1997; Jody Williams, Nobel laureate, Peace, 1997; Louis J Ignarro, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 1998; Anthony J Leggett, Nobel laureate, Physics, 2003; J M Coetzee, Nobel laureate, Literature, 2003; Shirin Ebadi, Nobel laureate, Peace, 2003; Aaron Ciechanover, Nobel laureate, Chemistry, 2004; Barry J Marshall, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2005; John C Mather, Nobel laureate, Physics, 2006; Edmund “Ned” Phelps, Nobel laureate, Economics, 2006; Andrew Z Fire, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2006; Roger D. Kornberg, Nobel laureate, Chemistry, 2006; Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate, Literature, 2006; Eric S Maskin, Nobel laureate, Economics, 2007; Mario R Capecchi, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2007; Martin Chalfie, Nobel laureate, Chemistry, 2008; Jack W Szostak, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2009; Leymah Gbowee, Nobel laureate, Peace, 2011; Tawakkol Karman, Nobel laureate, Peace, 2011; May-Britt Moser, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2014; Edvard I Moser, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2014; Joachim Frank, Nobel laureate, Chemistry, 2017; Richard Henderson, Nobel laureate, Chemistry, 2017; Michel Mayor, Nobel laureate, Physics, 2019; Gregg L Semenza, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2019; Sir Peter J Ratcliffe, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2019; Roger Penrose, Nobel laureate, Physics, 2020; Guido W Imbens, Nobel laureate, Economics, 2021; Annie Ernaux, Nobel laureate, Literature, 2022; Narges Mohammadi, Nobel laureate, Peace, 2023; Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate, Physics, 2024; Daron Acemoglu, Nobel laureate, Economics, 2024; Gary Ruvkun, Nobel laureate, Physiology or Medicine, 2024; Oleksandra Matviichuk, Center for Civil Liberties, Peace 2022; His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Nobel laureate, Peace, 1989. — Project Syndicate

Joseph E Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a former chief economist of the World Bank, a former chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, University Professor at Columbia University, and the author, most recently, of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.

Categories Education Reform

A Smart Interview About My New Book

By dianeravitch

November 4, 2025 //

The New Books Network selected my memoir as the book of the day on October 28.

They posted this interview with me about the book. I hope you watch.

I really liked the conversation with Tom Discenna, who is a Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

Tim read the book. Very often, I have been interviewed by people who read the copy on the jacket or had questions prepared by their staff. Not Tom. He read the book.

Let me know what you think.

Categories Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ravitch, Diane

Peter Greene Reviews “An Education” in His Inimitable Style

By dianeravitch

November 4, 2025 //

If you have been following this blog for a long time, you know that in my estimation one of the best (actually the best) education bloggers is Peter Greene. Peter taught high school students for 39 years in Pennsylvania. He knows more about teaching than all the experts at the elite universities.

Best of all, he has a keen eye for flimflammery and a great sense of humor. His is one of the few blogs that makes me laugh out loud. He pierces through BS and shysters with ease. And he’s more prolific than anyone I know. Some years back, I devoted every post on one day to Peter’s writings. I consider him to be one of my teachers.

So I was immensely grateful when I discovered that he reviewed my memoirs in both Forbes and, in a different voice, on his blog Curmudgacation.

Here is his blog review:

Over at Forbes.com, I’ve posted a piece about Diane Ravitch’s new memoir, An Education. That’s my grown-up fake journalist piece; but I have a few more blog-appropriate things to say.

Most folks know the basic outline of the Ravitch career, that she was a recognized and successful part of the conservative ed reform establishment who then turned away from the Dark Side and joined the Resistance–hell, basically co-founded the Resistance.

I have never heard her talk or write much about what that change cost her, and she doesn’t really talk about it in those terms in this book, but the early chapters show just how in that world she was. Connected to all the right people, welcome at all the right gatherings, in demand as a speaker, and the people–the names just keep coming. Ravitch was in the Room Where It Happens, and not just in it, but close friends with some of the folks in it with her. And she walked away from all that.

I don’t point to that to say we should feel sad for what she gave up, but as a sign of just how tough she is. She looked at the reality on the ground and concluded that she had to change some core beliefs, and having changed them, she had to act on them. If there was more of that kind of intellectual and ethical toughness in the world, the world would be a better place. It’s unusual enough that folks on the privatizer side have often assumed that someone must be paying her off, and a handful of people on the public school side were reluctant to fully trust her.

There are other details in the book that attest to her guts and hard work. Her first book, The Great School Wars, was a history of the New York City public school system– a massive research project that Ravitch in her mid-thirties just assigned to herself, a project so thorough and well-constructed that she could use it as her PhD thesis.

There are lots of fun details in the book– imagine the young Diane Ravitch swinging on a rope ladder outside a Wellesley dorm room where a formal dinner was in progress.

The book tells the story of how she got there, how she concluded that the policies that she had believed in were simply not so. And again– many another person would have at that point either kept going through the motions, or retreated to a quiet cave, but Diane instead became an outspoken critic of the very policies, organizations, and people who had been her professional world.

Back in the early 2010s, I was a high school English teacher in a quiet rural and small town corner of Pennsylvania. I knew things were happening in education that just felt really wrong, and I went searching for answers. What I found was Diane Ravitch’s blog, which was like a gathering place for many voices of advocacy for public school. It was where I found many writers who could help me make sense of things like Common Core and NCLB’s undermining of public education.

There are several people who were responsible for my finding an audience (or the audience finding me) but it was Diane’s blog that got me my earliest connections to audiences. I didn’t know any of these folks, didn’t have any of the connections that hold together movements. At my first NPE conference, the most common question I got was some version of “Who the heck are you and where did you come from?” Diane’s network had made it possible for me to find my connections with a larger movement.

I’m just one example of how Diane’s extraordinary generosity in sharing her platform allowed all sorts of supporters of public education from all across the country to connect and support each other. It’s a notably different approach to leadership than, say, making a movement all about yourself in an attempt to collect personal power on the backs of followers instead of lifting everyone up to be a leader and activist in their own little corner of the world.

The book provides part of answer to where a person like Diane comes from, where that kind of intellectual and ethical courage and diligence come from. And it also provides a clear, compact explaining of where modern ed reform has gone wrong, from the toxic test-and-punish approach of NCLB to the billionaire-driven privatization push to the culture panic debates currently raging. If you want to hand someone a quick simple explainer of what has gone wrong, you can do worse than the last few chapters of this book.

At 223 pages, this is a brisk read but an illuminating one. I highly recommend it

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Trump Is Renovating the Lincoln Bathroom

By dianeravitch

November 3, 2025 //

The burden of office must rest heavily on Trump’s shoulders. But foreign policy and economic policy are not what captures his imagination and passion. He loves decorating and renovating.

The Washington Post reported that he has undertaken the upgrade of the Lincoln bathroom.

What’s really cool is that Trump replaced the green tile with white marble and changed the hardware on the bathtub, the shower, and the toilet to gold. Gold! Trump’s favorite material.

Trump’s press secretary said earlier that Trump’s biggest priority right now is his $300 million ballroom, which at 90,000 square feet will overshadow the entire White House, a mere 55,000 square feet. He demolished the East Wing of the White House without submitting plans to the commissions that usually review changes to historic sites. In Trumpian fashion, he acted without informing anyone or asking approval from any official body.

Melania is not around to chime in. She’s living in the Trump penthouse in New York City and shows up only for special events. The New York Times reported that the First Lady was in D.C. for fewer than 14 days of Trump’s first 108 days in office. She is in absentia.

So Trump is having fun as the Master Decorator of the White House. He’s not wasting his time getting involved in the government shutdown. He’s leaving that to his friends in Congress. He is surely not concerned about the potential cutoff of food stamps for 42 million people because he thinks most of them are Democrats. Ditto for the fate of health insurance.

He knows what matters most for him.

Emily Davies and Dan Diamond write:

President Donald Trump on Friday unveiled yet another White House design project: an overhaul of the Lincoln Bathroom, sharing 24 images that highlight his choice of marble accented with golden handles on the bathtub, shower and toilet.

“I renovated the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House,” Trump wrote Friday afternoon on Truth Social. “It was renovated in the 1940s in an art deco green tile style, which was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era. I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble.”

He revealed the work on his way to spend the weekend at his club in Mar-a-Lago — a trip that comes as pressure rises to reopen the government as tens of millions of people are bracing for their food stamp benefits to be interrupted as a result of the partisan standstill.

It’s a gift article so you can open the link and read it all.

Categories Education Reform, Trump

The Most Annoying Story of the Month About Schools

By dianeravitch

November 3, 2025 //

Every so often, I read a story about education that is truly annoying. The most recent one is in The Atlantic. It was written by Idrees Kahloon, a staff writer at the magazine. It is titled “America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy.” The subtitle is “Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.”

As a historian of American education, I have read the same story hundreds of times. In the 19th century, these warnings that children were not learning anything in school were commonplace. The cry of “crisis in the schools” appeared frequently in every decade of the 20th century. We are only 25 years into this century, and similar views appear in the popular press regularly.

Long ago, attacks on the schools were intended to produce more funding for them, or higher standards for those entering teaching..

Now they serve the purposes of those pushing privatization of public schools, those who are promoting vouchers, charters, homeschooling, and every other way of destroying public schools.

Test scores have fallen! The culprit? Smart phones! Social media! Low expectations! Low standards! Bad teachers! Bad Schools!

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law of 2002 raised standards and expectations but it raised them absurdly high, to a literally unreachable goal. A rebellion formed among those who didn’t think it possible that “all students” would reach “proficiency” by 2014.

NCLB required that all students would be “proficient,” not just at grade level, by 2014. By NAEP standards, “proficient” does not mean grade level. It means “A” performance. In no other nation in the world are all students rated “proficient” on the NAEP scale. Nor has any district or state ever reached that goal.

But the Cassandras of American education have monopolized the podium for many years, wailing that we will be an impoverished third-world country if test scores don’t rise dramatically.

Think about it. The biggest explosion of doom-and-gloom was caused by the Reagan-era report called “A Nation at Risk” in 1983. It flatly predicted that our economy was imperiled by a “rising tide of mediocrity.” But what has happened since 1983? Our economy is booming, we have not been eclipsed by other nations. We continue to be a land of innovation, creativity, scientific and medical pre-eminence.

How is our nation’s success possible, given the cry for more than 40 years that our schools are hobbling our economy and compromising our future?

Instead of complaining about our schools and lambasting them nonstop, the critics should be complaining about poverty and inequality. These are the root causes of poor student outcomes.

If the critics are worried about our future, they should shout out against Trump’s orders to withhold funding for research in science and medicine. If they really wanted great schools, they would stop diverting public funds to nonpublic schools and homeschoolers–where there are low or no standards for teachers– and make sure that every student has certified, experienced teachers, small classes, and the amenities available in every school that are typically available only in wealthy suburban districts.

No, our kids are not sliding into stupidity. If you don’t agree, I dare you to take an eighth grade math test and release your scores. You will be surprised.

The greatest generation sits in our public high schools today, unless our government continues to impose moronic policies of choice and competition that have failed for the past thirty-five years.

Categories Accountability, Data, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Fake News, Hoax, Standardized Testing, Students

President Ronald Reagan on the Dangers of Tariffs

By dianeravitch

October 31, 2025 //

President Ronald Reagan was a strong proponent of free trade and immigration. Not open borders, but a reasonable way to admit immigrants to the United States.

Trump hates to be reminded of President Reagan’s views, because they don’t agree. Trump wants to deport every immigrant who is not a U.S. citizen, and he has recklessly imposed tariffs on every other nation in the world.

Trump has disrupted the global economic order with his capricious imposition of tariffs, raising them, lowering them, on a whim. And increasing inflation for everything imported by the U.S.

The prince of Ontario in Canada posted an ad that showed President Reagan’s opposition to tariffs. Trump reacted with fury because he didn’t want the public to know that his tariffs were contrary to GOP policies, opposed specifically by Reagan, who was far more popular than Trump.

Trump insisted that the Reagan ad was phony. He raised the tariffs on Canada for daring to try to influence a pending Supreme Court decision about his power to impose tariffs without Congress.

It wasn’t a phony ad. President Reagan opposed tariffs.

Even the Wall Street Journal chastised Trump for lying about Reagan’s opposition to tariffs.

An excerpt:

The Ontario government had the temerity to buy ad time to run clips of Reagan’s 1987 remarks warning about the dangers of protectionism. Mr. Trump pitched a social-media fit in response late Thursday, claiming Ontario “fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs.”

The President said the ad was intended to interfere with the Supreme Court as it considers the legality of his claim that he can levy tariffs on anything he wants, for any amount he wants, whenever he wants. He immediately declared an end to trade talks with Canada….

Mr. Trump is wrong about the Reagan speech, and he was wrong when he said on social media that “Ronald Reagan LOVED tariffs for purposes of National Security and the Economy.” The Gipper was a free trader. In the 1987 speech, Reagan was trying to explain why he was making an exception to his free-trade policies on semiconductor imports from Japan…

It’s a shame to see the Reagan Foundation, of all places, indulging Mr. Trump’s pique with its statement saying the speech was taken out of context. Anyone who reads the whole speech can see the Gipper favored free trade, with rare exceptions for political pragmatism and national security. Reagan also backed, long before Nafta, a North American free-trade area….

Reagan knew that tariffs are taxes, while Mr. Trump pretends they are paid by foreigners. Reagan knew protectionist barriers over time breed complacency and lack of innovation. Mr. Trump thinks he’s making American manufacturing great again, when he is really hurting U.S. manufacturers by burdening them with higher costs. See American companies that use aluminum or steel.

Categories Education Reform

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Why Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Paused the Full Funding of SNAP