I don’t know how this story escaped me, but when I saw it, I was shocked. I thought I had become numb to whatever Trump does or says, but my reaction to this story proves it’s not true.
I’m shocked and stunned to learn that he is suing the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes for journalism for libel because it awarded one to The New York Times and The Washington Post for stories about the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. When Trump complained to the board that the stories contained many factual inaccuracies, the board reaffirmed its awards.
Before Trump was elected in 2016, he had been involved in 3,000 or more lawsuits. That’s his style.
President Trump on Wednesday celebrated a ruling from a judge allowing his lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board to proceed.
In a decision Wednesday, a Florida judge ruled Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the body, which awards the annual Pulitzer Prize recognizing the year’s best journalism, can proceed.
Trump, after he left office following his first term, sued the board in 2022 in connection with Pulitzers that had been awarded for stories about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The president, in a Truth Social post Wednesday, called the ruling a “major WIN in our powerful lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding the illegal and defamatory ‘Award’ of their once highly respected ‘Prize,’ to fake, malicious stories on the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, by the Failing New York Times and the Washington Compost, the Florida Appellate Court viciously rejected the Defendants’ corrupt attempt to halt the case.”
“They were awarded for false reporting, and we can’t let that happen in the United States of America,” he continued. “We are holding the Fake News Media responsible for their LIES to the American People, so we can, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Lawyers for the board had asked the judge in January to pause consideration of the case until after Trump was no longer president.
In a statement to The Hill on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Pulitzer Board said “allowing this case to proceed facilitates President Trump’s use of state courts as both a sword and a shield — allowing him to seek retribution against anyone he chooses in state court while simultaneously claiming immunity for himself whenever convenient.”
“The Pulitzer Board is evaluating next steps and will continue our defense of journalism and First Amendment rights,” the spokesperson said.
The lawsuit about whether the case should be heard then went to an appellate court in Florida.
Politico reported recently that one of the judges who ruled in Trump’s favor had applied to the Trump administration for a promotion before the judgment. After the decision was rendered, he got the promotion.
This is a headline I never expected to write. But it’s no joke. Republicans are pushing the idea of adding Trump to the nation’s pantheon of great presidents: Washington, Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, and Lincoln.
A crazy idea, no? Some Republicans are taking it very seriously. They consider Trump a demi-god, more significant to them than Eisenhower or Reagan. And what a way to “own the libs”!
The idea has resurfaced since Mr. Trump returned to office. A congresswoman from Florida sponsored a bill in January to “direct the Secretary of the Interior to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial.” It was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources, which has yet to act on it.
In March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in an interview with Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, that “they definitely have room” for Mr. Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore.
Wait. Is this possible?
As with all things Trump, it can be hard to decipher the difference between everyday rhetoric and future action. But those in charge of the memorial are taking such overtures seriously.
Trump has so many firsts. First convicted felon to be elected. First President to be impeached twice in one term. First President to use the Oval Office to sell merchandise and use the office to enrich himself through cryptocurrency, which he both sells and regulates and massive real estate development deals (resorts and hotels) which The Trump Organization has contracted to build, especially in the Middle East. Selling the opportunity to meet or dine with the President for $1 million-$5 million per person.
The National Park Service said there was not enough room on the face of the monument to add any more. But NPS can be overruled by the Secretary of the Interior.
Molly Ivins was a brilliant journalist in Texas, who died far too young (62). We could surely use her wit and insight right now. She wrote for many publications, including The Texas Observer, The New York Times, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She also wrote a nationally syndicated column.
Ivins wrote an article about school vouchers in 1997 that was prescient. All her dire predictions about vouchers were right on target. The strangest part of the debate is that state legislatures now debating vouchers are totally indifferent to the problems they create.
Editor’s Note: The Texas Observer published this column in its April 11, 1997, edition under the headline: “Texas: Laboratory for Lunacy.” That year’s private school voucher proposal narrowly died at the Lege.
Three strikes and you’re out? Watch Texas spend more on prisons than it does on schools. Thinking of making your tax structure more regressive? Come to the Lone Star State and see how it’s done.
The latest brainstorm to afflict our friendly pols in Austin is school vouchers. Consider the beauty of this nifty scheme as it might eventually be worked out under the guidance of the Texas Lege. To improve the public schools (I swear, that’s how the advocates are advertising this lunacy):
■We give vouchers to all the students who are already in private or religious schools around the state. Right there, before anybody else even gets a voucher, we will have taken, say, $1 billion out of the budget for our public schools. Shrewd move, eh?
■We also give all the kids now in public school a voucher, thus theoretically enabling these children to attend the schools of their parents’ choice: Unfortunately, private schools might find themselves under no obligation to accept any of our kids; they could be rejected because of their religious affiliation, their disabilities, on the grounds that they’re not bright enough, because the school administrators don’t like their looks—any reason not specifically excluded by law.
The Texas Freedom Network, a normally sensible group of good guys, is running around like Paul Revere, trying to alert the citizenry to this dread downside of the school voucher idea. “Proposed voucher legislation would allow private schools to recruit the best athletes and students at taxpayer expense.” Folks, we’re talking football now! I knew you’d be concerned. Quel horrifying thought: The whole high school football tradition is in dire peril. Stop the madness now!
On a more sober note, the good private schools we’d all like to send our kids to already have waiting lists a mile long. No public school kid is going to St. John’s in Houston or St. Mark’s in Dallas with a voucher clutched in his or her little hand; those schools cost $10,000 a year, and our little school voucher won’t cover half the cost.
Now maybe, just maybe, some upper-middle-class folks might be able to afford a fancy private school with a voucher to help, but working-class and middle-class kids are going to be stuck just where they always were. Why should we spend public money to help just that one thin slice of the population when it won’t improve the public schools?
The rural kids are really going to get burned by this idea. As you may have noticed, almost all private schools are in cities. Hundreds of rural school districts don’t have a single private school, but because of the way state education financing works, they’d still lose thousands of dollars from their budgets for the public schools without a single kid going to private school.
I realize this means nothing to our Legislature, but it should be mentioned that the whole idea is rankly unconstitutional.
All in all, this concept is so bad that it has an excellent chance of passing the Legislature. Much as we would like to help the rest of the nation by demonstrating once more just how stupid ideas work out in practice, couldn’t we give this one a miss?
In case you’re wondering who is pushing this dingbat notion, it’s the religious right, the same charmers who helped elect the right-wingers who now grace the state Board of Education. If you haven’t checked in on the state board lately, you really should. It’s a lot of fun—fruitcakes unlimited, flat-Earthers, creationists, all manner of remarkable specimens. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that there’s even a bill in the Lege to replace it with an appointed board again.
You may recall that we’ve had this fight before. In keeping with my Theory of Perpetual Reform, I now favor an appointed board. Last time, I favored an elected board. What I really favor is the idea that no matter what we try, in about ten years, it’s always a mess again and we need to try something else.
Speaking of matters educational, let me take on a sacred cow that is long past its prime: local control. Have you noticed that the people who consider local control of the schools a sanctified arrangement are the same people who are always complaining about how terrible the schools are? If local control is such a great idea, then how come the schools are so bad? Have we considered the possibility that maybe local control is the problem?
A truism of the everlasting education debates is that someone somewhere has already solved whatever the problem is. Someone somewhere is always doing a brilliant job of teaching physics to inner-city kids, or teaching music to a bunch of rural kids in the 4-H who have heretofore considered Loretta Lynn classical music, or getting bored suburban brats excited about Herman Melville.
The problem is that we can’t seem to replicate the successes in the schools across the board because there is no across the board. Instead, there’s local control. Sometimes it’s superb, granted. But often, it’s hopelessly knot-headed. Ask the folks in Dallas—they’ve had some lulus lately. It seems to me just possible that maybe what we need to do is take education out of the hands of insurance salesmen, Minute Women and other odd ephemera of the electoral process and put it in the hands of… well, educators.
The U.S. Senate just passed Trump’s massive budget bill, which renews tax cuts for the rich and makes deep cuts to Medicaid, about $1 trillion. Three Republican Senators voted against it: Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Susan Collins of Maine. Vice-President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. Many hoped that Lisa Murkowski of Alaska would also oppose the bill but the leadership bought her off by adding special exemptions and benefits for Alaskans.
Combined with the impact of Trump’s tariffs — which the White House has argued will help pay for the bill’s tax cuts and new spending — the bottom 80 percent of households would see their take-home incomes fall, according to the Yale Budget Lab.
“The right way to understand this bill is it is the largest wealth transfer from the poorest Americans to the richest Americans in modern history,” said Natasha Sarin, the Budget Lab’s president.
Shortly before the bill passed, I received two reports on the education section. Contrary to earlier reports, the Republicans restored vouchers. Apparently they satisfied the objections of the Senate Parliamentarian or decided to ignore them.
Leigh Dingerson, public school advocate who works for “In the Public Interest,” sent out this update shortly before the Senate passed the bill. The biggest takeaway: Vouchers are in again.
For the last 24 hours (more, actually), the Senate has been voting on a slew of amendments to the bill. Most are going down along party lines. At the same time, the Senate parliamentarian has been reviewing the bill for germaneness. She has struck out several provisions including, initially, the voucher language (this was Friday). But it was reinserted Saturday morning. Since then, some tweaks to the voucher language were made in an effort to win over some reluctant senators. Each time the language was changed, it had to go back through the parliamentarian.
This morning at about 2:15 am, Senator Hirono, along with Senators Reed, Kaine and van Hollen, presented their amendment on the floor of the Senate — an amendment to strike the voucher section altogether. That amendment needed 51 votes to pass. It got 50. All the Democrats voted in favor. All Republicans with the exception of Senators Fischer, Collins and Murkowski opposed it.
The voucher language currently in the bill has some important differences from where it started. Here are some key changes to the bill:
The tax credit is permanent, and now unlimited. There is no federal ceiling on how much can be spent. Republicans removed the $4 billion volume cap on the total amount of donations.
But!! Current language limits the amount a donor can get a tax credit on: The text now allows any individual to donate to an SGO for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit worth $1,700 (rather than 10% of adjusted gross income originally).
States can now “opt in” to the program and must provide a list of approved scholarship granting organizations. And the bill clarifies that SGOs can only administer school vouchers within their state. This eliminates our worry that an SGO in Florida, for example, could hand out vouchers in Nebraska.
The Senate has removed the provision asserting that there shall be no Federal control over private or religious schools. In other words, the door has been opened to federal regulation of schools funded with federal vouchers.
The bill provides broad authority for the Secretary of Treasury to regulate the program, including explicit authority to regulate scholarship granting organizations and opening the door to regulate private schools.
So as you can see, there have been a lot of changes, some good, some bad.
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The NATIONAL COALITION FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION released the following statement:
National Coalition for Public Education Denounces Senate Vote on Private School VoucherProgram in “OBBB”
Today, the Senate voted to include an uncapped national private school voucher program in its budget reconciliation bill. This represents the first time a majority of the lawmakers in the U.S. Senate have ever supported sending public dollars to private schools. Now that both chambers have voiced their support for private school voucher provisions, it is likely to become law this year, forcing tax dollars to support private religious schools that can pick and choose who they educate and discriminate explicitly against students with disabilities.
Vouchers divert critical funds from public schools, which 90% of American families choose for their children to attend. Vouchers often go to students who never attended public schools in the first place, which drains taxpayer funds to subsidize private school tuition for well-off families who could afford it without money from the government. Under this harmful program, there will be no accountability for money sent to private schools, nor would the private schools be bound by key provisions of federal civil rights laws, which public schools follow.
If this becomes law, the federal government will give a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to people who give money to use for payments for children to attend private schools or be homeschooled. This was not done previously with any other 501(c)3 donation in our history, and no other non-profit classified as a 501(c)3) would benefit from this one-to-one tax lowering scheme.
America’s public schools educate all students in every community. Private schools that take taxpayer-funded vouchers, however, often discriminate against students for any number of reasons, including based on their disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, English language ability, academic abilities, disciplinary history, ability to pay tuition, or what their family looks like. The language that was in the House-passed bill about private schools maintaining policies that do not take into account whether or not a student has an Individualized Education Program (though these are not full protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) was stripped in the Senate bill and supporters of the voucher provision criticized this language.
Public schools are a cornerstone of American democracy. NCPE condemns Congress diverting billions of dollars away from public education and toward discriminatory, ineffective private school vouchers
Steve Hinnefeld reports that the cost of vouchers soared in Indiana to $497 million. Most of the students using vouchers never attended public schools. Most of the voucher money subsidizes affluent students at private schools that choose their students.
That’s the verbal sleight-of-hand behind the phrase “school choice.” schools choose, not parents or students.
In Indiana, as in Ohio, the state constitution calls for a uniform system of public schools:
“Article 8, Section 1. Knowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to encourage, by all suitable means, moral, intellectual, scientific, and agricultural improvement; and to provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.”
But the Republican governor and legislature have authorized charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools.
The voucher program started in 2011 with only 4,000. Recently the legislature removed income limits. The state now subsidizes 76,000 students. That number is expected to grow now that the program is universal.
In 2024-25, students could receive vouchers if their family income was no more than 400% of the limit to qualify for reduced-price school meals. That’s about $230,000 for a family of four, more than three times the Indiana median family income, so most families qualified. The 2025 expansion will help the state’s wealthiest families pay private school tuition.
Nearly one million students are enrolled in Indiana public schools.
Dr. Jeremy Faust is an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. He is also the editor-in-chief of MedPage Today and author of the Inside Medicine newsletter on Substack.
This post appeared on his blogInside Medicine. Dr. Faust demonstrates that RFK Jr. lied at his Senate hearings when he pledged not to inject his anti-vaccine views into national policy. As Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he is a danger to public health.
Dr. Faust writes:
Along with several colleagues, I watched large portions of this week’s CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) so that you didn’t have to. Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and I debriefed afterwards. Our conversation is above.
Closed captions (㏄) and a transcript option (📄) can be found beneath the video playback control bar above. (Note: this session is free for everyone, thanks to recent upgrades that make this all possible. If you’d like to support this work, click here.)
Some adjectives came to mind while watching the meeting: Surreal. Embarrassing. Kafkaesque. In place of seventeen highly respected voting members, all fired by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, were seven new characters whose opinions ranged from unhinged (several of the members) to reasonable (mainly voiced by Dr. Cody Meissner).
Various members asked questions that revealed incomplete understandings of the legal process around these votes. One member wasn’t sure whether or not she had a conflict of interest. Random conspiracy theories got air time, while vetted scientific materials created by CDC scientists were literally removed from the meeting’s website, after having been posted earlier in the week.
Indeed, we learned during the meeting that the CDC’s briefing document on the safety of thimerosal in vaccines was removed because Secretary Kennedy’s office (i.e., RFK Jr. himself) did not approve of it. That of course means that the error-ridden, cherry-picked data in another presentation on the topic by an outside speaker (a longtime RFK Jr. ally) was approved. It was a dystopian nightmare.
The quasi-good news is that the committee voted in favor of flu shots for everyone ages 6 months and up (whew). They also voted to add a second RSV immunization option. Here are those recommendations (lightly adapted from CDC language):
One dose of clesrovimab, a monoclonal antibody for infants whose mothers are not protected by maternal respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccination. Clesrovimab is one of two RSV monoclonal antibody products available (including for the Vaccines for Children Program).
Routine annual influenza vaccination of all persons aged over six months who do not have contraindications.
The bad news is that the committee also voted to recommend that influenza vaccines that use thimerosal (a safe preservative in relevant concentrations) not be used. This won’t do anything to improve vaccine safety, but it did escalate pseudoscience to national policy. This is remarkable. In every previous ACIP vote, comprehensive data has been presented before a vote. In this case, one friend of RFK Jr. gave a talk (whose contents were not vetted or fact-checked by CDC scientists) before a national vote. It also may eventually be used as a rationale for denying vaccines to people around the world, because preservatives are needed to keep multi-dose vaccine vials from becoming contaminated, especially in settings where the chain of refrigeration may not be complete. Also, the CDC’s own experts were not permitted to speak on this, nor was their briefing document permitted to remain online. My heart goes out to the dedicated CDC scientists who had to sit through this. Here’s a screenshot I took during the meeting yesterday during Lyn Redwood’s (right) unvetted, highly problematic presentation on thimerosal. That poor CDC scientist (left) looks like a hostage.
Nevertheless, the new voting members of the committee patted itself on the back for its “transparency” in an email sent to the media after the meeting. Here’s what it said (bold added by me for emphasis):
“Honesty, transparency and compassion with regard to public health. These are the three pillars that we, the new ACIP members, are guided by. Our central duty is to protect public health, and we understand that we must answer the call for reestablishing confidence in the scientific examination process. This committee strongly supports the use of vaccines, and other countermeasures, predicated on evidence-based medicine, including rigorous evaluation and expansive credible scientific data, for both safety and efficacy.”
I’m sorry but this is bullshit. The committee undermined vaccine confidence by scaring people about thimerosal. Also, the notion that the proceedings were transparent or expansive simply was not borne out by the facts. This committee specifically suppressed work by CDC scientists. It also failed to publish the language of national vaccine policy votes in advance, which is probably illegal. Claiming all of these virtues as though they were innovations while actually undermining them by turning away from the prior committee’s genuine commitment to those principles is what the kids call “gaslighting…”
Closing Thoughts.
The ACIP meeting was a bizarre spectacle. It was as bad as feared, if not worse. Reasonable science from CDC experts was presented side-by-side with debunked misinformation presented by RFK-allied anti-vaxxers. Other times, only one side (the unscientific side) was permitted to present. What we witnessed was a circus, masquerading as dignified proceedings. (Well, mostly.) The whole thing would be hilarious, but for the stakes. Lives are on the line. Scientific integrity is under attack. Transparency is now just a buzzword, a stand-in for a newly discovered opaqueness from this once-august committee, whilst it claims the opposite.
Once again, I urge Senator Bill Cassidy—a physician now being routinely humiliated by his vote to confirm Secretary Kennedy based on false promises—to stand up against this attack on science.
Open the link to read the important material I omitted, in the form of downloads and videos.
In 2022, school districts, parents, and public school advocates filed a lawsuit against the state’s EdChoice voucher program. Yesterday, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page ruled that vouchers for private schools violate the state constitution.
The Constitution of Ohio says that the General Assembly is responsible for funding a thorough and efficient system of common schools. Common schools are public schools. It explicitly prohibits the use of public funds for religious schools.
Judge Page issued the first ruling on the lawsuit, known as the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit, which challenged the constitutionality of vouchers. The plaintiffs were a group of dozens of public schools and the Coalition for Adequacy and Equity of School Funding. The state will appeal this ruling. For now, those who led the lawsuit are thrilled.
“We are pleased that the court affirmed what we have been saying all along,” William Phillis, executive director for the Coalition for Adequacy and Equity of School Funding, said. “The EdChoice private school voucher program, which has been diverting hundreds of millions of much needed tax dollars from public schools to private schools, is unconstitutional.”
Phillis was behind another lawsuit over Ohio’s schools in the 1990s, which ruled Ohio’s system of funding schools did not adequately live up to the Constitutional requirements. The case, DeRolph v. Ohio, ruled the state’s reliance on property taxes and its funding system did not fulfil the Ohio Constitution’s requirement to create a “thorough and efficient system” of public schools.
Page said the state’s voucher program also fails to create a thorough and efficient system. She ruled the EdChoice program directly contributed to less funding for public schools, increased segregation in public schools as more white students participated in EdChoice, and unconstitutionally provided funds to religious schools without oversight.
There have been lots of stories and posts about the historic voucher decision made yesterday by Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page. But I want to take a step back with you, Dear Reader, and explain just how expertly the Judge laid bare the thing I’ve been spitting into the wind over for the past 15 or so years: Ohio school voucher advocates have been lying to you, the public and journalists for a generation.
Let me point out a few of the most common lies told by voucher advocates.
Ohio vouchers are scholarships. Ohio school choice advocates sometimes are too clever for themselves. Calling vouchers “scholarships” in law doesn’t make them “scholarships”. Yet that’s what these politicians insist we call them. Judge Page went right after this argument in her decision: “The idea that EdChoice establishes scholarships, not a system of schools, and that it funds students, not private schools, is mere semantics … Where EdChoice participating private schools are inexplicably receiving double the per pupil state funding than public schools, it is difficult to say that EdChoice is simply a scholarship that follows and/or benefits the student as opposed to a system that benefits private schools.”
Vouchers are simply a matter of money following the student. This is the kind of EduSpeak bullshit I’ve railed against for years. As I’ve said in this space many times, when 85% of the K-12 students in your state only get 77% of the money spent on K-12 education in your state, money ain’t following the kids. It’s going to private schools. As Judge Page put it: “Where EdChoice participating private schools are inexplicably receiving double the per pupil state funding than public schools, it is difficult to say that EdChoice is simply a scholarship that follows and/or benefits the student as opposed to a system that benefits private schools.”
Vouchers have no impact on public school students. This is obvious bullshit, yet proponents make the claim all the time, even well-thought of ones like the Fordham Institute (who actually argue it helps public school kids!). See, the problem is that when David Brennan started the Ohio Voucher program nearly 30 years ago, he thought he’d be so clever. See, he would (yes, I know legislators did this, but make no mistake about it, Brennan was calling the shots) put the program’s money into the same line item as school district funding. That way, the program could never be line item vetoed, and no matter how much more money the program needed, it would always get the amount it needed because the money would just come out of the state funding for kids in local school districts, who would then have to go for more and bigger property tax levies. But in this case, that cleverness bit voucher advocates in the ass. Because Judge Page can read a spreadsheet. As she put it: “The General Assembly … passed the (Fair School Funding Plan) to fulfill its constitutional directive and address Derolph. Yet, it has shirked that responsibility, by: at best, (1) claiming that the FSFP, a plan of its own creation, is too expensive; or, at worst (2) simply refusing to fund it. Instead, the General Assembly chose to expand their system of private school funding by about the same amount as Ohio’s public schools lost through the General Assembly’s failure to fully fund the FSFP.
Vouchers are a Parental Rights issue.This line of bullshit emanates from the program’s origins — claiming that it would provide poor kids the opportunity to attend the same private schools rich kids do. However, the evidence is clear that’s simply not happening. In fact, it’s the schools — not the parents — that this unconstitutional system empowers. As Judge Page revealed for everyone to see: “Parents only choose which school they apply to. The ultimate decision to accept prospective students, and by doing so receive EdChoice funds, lies with the private school. (So) a private religious school has the discretion and ability to apply for and receive subsidies directly from the government, while at the same time discriminating against applicants on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, or other criteria.”
There will be many more opportunities to go through this historic decision and pick out bits and pieces. But I thought it was important for everyone to recognize the major policy lies voucher advocates have pushed for 30 years were laid bare by this decision.
Because at its core, Ohio’s unconstitutional voucher program benefits private, mostly religious schools at the expense of the 1.5 million Ohio kids who attend Ohio’s public schools.
On Saturday June 21, Governor Greg Abbot of Texas announced that he had signed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom in the state.
The goal of plastering the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom is promoted by Christian nationalists who want to see an official declaration that the U.S. is a Christian nation.
The Founding Fathers would be stunned to hear the assertion that the Constitution they wrote was influenced by the Ten Commandments. The First Amendment very clearly states the importance of freedom of religion, meaning that anyone could practice any religion or none at all. It also declares that government should not “establish” any religion, meaning that government should not sponsor or endorse or favor any religion.
CNN reported:
Texas’ law requires public schools to post in classrooms a 16-by-20-inch (41-by-51-centimeter) poster or framed copy of a specific English version of the commandments, even though translations and interpretations vary across denominations, faiths and languages and may differ in homes and houses of worship.
Supporters say the Ten Commandments are part of the foundation of the United States’ judicial and educational systems and should be displayed.
Its supporters said that the Ten Commandments were the foundation of the American legal system. The state of Louisiana intends to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last year by parents of Louisiana school children from various religious backgrounds, who said the law violates First Amendment language guaranteeing religious liberty and forbidding government establishment of religion.
The ruling also backs an order issued last fall by U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, who declared the mandate unconstitutional and ordered state education officials not to enforce it and to notify all local school boards in the state of his decision.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the mandate into law last June.
Landry said in a statement Friday that he supports the attorney general’s plans to appeal.
“The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our laws — serving both an educational and historical purpose in our classrooms,” Landry said.
The Founding Fathers would laugh at Governor Abbot and Landry. And Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who shepherded a similar law in Arkansas. It’s especially funny that the leader of their party has broken almost every one of the Ten Commandments. Perhaps the place to start posting them is in the Oval Office.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of high school physics and advanced mathematics in California, has been keeping close watch on the billionaire-funded efforts to promote privatization and demean teachers. In this post, he reviews an opinion piece that advocates the resuscitation of failed policies of the past.
As I wrote in my 2013 book Reign of Error, merit pay has been tried again and again, and it has never worked. There and in my last book, Slaying Goliath (pp. 244-245), I cited powerful evidence that paying teachers based on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores was a disaster: The Gates Foundation awarded $575 million to three school districts and four charter chains to evaluate teachers by test scores and peer evaluators, in hopes of getting the best teachers to transfer into the neediest schools. Gates hired top firms Rand and AIR to evaluate the program over six years. They concluded that it wasted resources that might have been better spent on reducing class sizes or raising teachers’ salaries. The program did not raise test scores, did not affect graduation rates or dropout rates, andddid not change the quality of teachers. Yet Hanushek and Macke advocate for the revival of this failed practice.
Ultican writes
It was “déjà vu all over again” when Eric Hanushek and his wife Macke Raymond shared their views in the Washington Post. They cited Michelle Rhee and Mike Miles as exemplary education leaders, merit pay as good education policy and turned to A Nation at Risk for support. Governor Abbott took over Houston’s schools and installed Miles as superintendent but here Hanushek and Raymond were referencing his long ago stint in Dallas.
I am no longer a reader of the Washington Post. When Bezos decided his newspaper would not endorse a candidate for president, I cancelled my subscription. However, a friend felt I needed to see this article and sent me a copy.
Billionaires like Bezos are destroying America and all of its venerable institutions. Hanushek and Raymond are Stanford based billionaire tools.
While working on her PhD in Political Science at the University of Rochester, Macky fell in love with her much older professor, Eric Hanushek, and eventually married him.
Today, Raymond is the director of CREEDO. Her 2015 Hoover Institute Fellow’s profile says in part, “In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and Pearson Learning Systems, Raymond is leading a national study of the effectiveness of public charter schools.” Are the billionaires guarding the hen house?
Rhee and Miles
The Hanushek and Raymond opinion piece states:
“In 2009, under the leadership of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Washington implemented the IMPACT program — a revamped teacher evaluation system that is linked directly to classroom effectiveness and that provides large increases in base salaries for the most effective teachers and dismissal for the least effective. This program has shown that focusing on student learning is rewarded with improved student performance, and that student-focused incentives work.”
This is a totally bunkum statement and is followed by another world of bunkum claim:
“Under the leadership of then-Superintendent Mike Miles, Dallas in 2015 switched to a salary system based on a sophisticated evaluation of teacher effectiveness. It then used this system to provide performance-based bonuses to teachers who would agree to go to the lowest-performing schools in the district. Two things happened: First, the best teachers responded to the incentives and were willing to move to the poorest-performing schools. Second, within two years, these schools jumped up to the district average.”
The linked evidence in the Dallas claim is to an Education Next article written by Hanushek and friends. In it, he claimed, “In the four years after Dallas adopted new performance-based teacher evaluation and compensation systems, student performance on standardized tests improved by 16 percent of a standard deviation in math and 6 percent in reading, while scores for a comparison group of similar Texas schools remained flat.”
Sixteen percent of a standard deviation of growth in math after 4 years sounds weak and 6% of a standard deviation growth in reading does not seem much more than noise in the data.
Hanushek gained notoriety with his 1981 paper, claiming “there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.” This played well with billionaires from the Walton family but had no relationship with reality. The history of crazy pants unsupported statements like this have long caused me to seek verification for whatever he says.
Hanushek and Raymond claim that both Dallas and Washington DC saw comparatively superior testing outcomes than other urban areas in the US. The evidence they provide is a link to the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (tuda). I graphed 4th and 8th grade math tuda data between 2009 and 2024 for the Large City composite, Dallas, DC, Baltimore and San Diego. Nothing substantive popped out in my graphs.
I decided to subtract the 4th grade scores from the 8th grade scores to get a sense of how the students were progressing. The results graphed below stunned me with their clarity. Baltimore, which traditionally has low scores, San Diego, which traditionally scores well and the Large City composite had fairly consistent increases of about 40 points. Dallas and DC both fell below a 30 points increase.
Billionaires Take Over
Michelle Rhee came out of Teach for America (TFA) where she taught for three years in a Baltimore elementary school. She returned to New York, TFA and Wendy Kopp to help found the New Teachers Project which is now known as TNTP. New York Chancellor of Public Schools, Joel Klein, who worked for multi-billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recommended the 37-year-old Rhee to be Washington DC’s new superintendent.
During Rhee’s three year reign of terror, she replaced half of DC’s teachers and a third of its principals. She was consumed with raising test scores and scorned those who did not share her devotion to standardized testing. Her relentless pressure to raise test scores brought some early gains and produced a major cheating scandal.
DC principal, Adell Cothorne, lost her job for insisting upon increased test security when she learned that teachers were violating testing protocols. I had lunch with Adell at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago. She struck me as a proud Black woman with poise, immense courage and profound character.
After Rhee left DC schools, she started StudentsFirst and led a national crusade to abolish teacher tenure and promote school choice. Billionaires and their friends provided her organization with millions of dollars. (Reign of Error, Pages 145-155)
Before 2012, Dallas school board elections were very low key affairs. Two of the three incumbent school board trustees up for reelection ran unopposed in 2011.
Writing for In These Times, George Joseph explained the political change, “But since the beginning of 2012, hundreds of thousands of Super PAC dollars from Dallas’ richest neighborhoods began flowing into nearly all of the district’s school board elections.”
Once the new 2012 board was seated, it fired Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and replaced him with Mike Miles, a graduate of billionaire Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy.
“Miles’s reforms included a new principal evaluation process which led to large turnover. He also instituted a merit pay system for teachers and hired Charles Glover a 29-year-old administrator of the Dallas TFA branch to be Chief Talent Officer in DISD. After just under three years, he had managed to alienate the black and Hispanic communities as well as many experienced teachers and principals.”
Like Michelle Rhee, he also believed in standardized test based accountability and merit pay.
Concluding Information
Reporting for NPR’s 35 anniversary of A Nation at Risk, Ana Kamenetz discovered, “They started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.”
A decade before Ana’s report, Florida education professor, James Guthrie, noted, “They cooked the books to get what they wanted.”
In 1990, Sandia engineers set out to add weight to A Nation at Risk. They disaggregated the data by race and sex and were surprise to find that every group advanced during the 1963 to 1980 period. The growing numbers of SAT test takers was driven by poor, minority and female students, causing the test averages to drop.
A Nation at Risk was a fraudulent paper and America’s students were actually healthy and doing well, which means public schools were healthy and doing well.
Merit pay is a Taylorist scheme that appeals to many American business leaders, but has a long history of employee dissatisfaction and output quality issues. Researchers at Vanderbilt University studied merit pay for teachers and found no significant gains in testing data and in New York researchers documented negative results.
Unfortunately, billionaires own the media and publish opinion pieces by hired frauds like Hanushek and Raymond.
Since his second inauguration, Trump has fired tens of thousands of federal workers, based on snap recommendations by Elon Musk’s team of whippersnappers. They have gone into government departments and agencies and decided in a day or so which workers to fire and which contracts to terminate. They don’t have enough information or time to make considered judgments, so they treat every federal worker as dispensable. The numbers fired are hard to determine, because federal judges have repeatedly reversed their actions. Some have been approved by the courts. The outcome is still in flux, though we do know that little is left of USAID or the U.S. Departnent of Education.
Government Executive reports that Trump plans a new round of layoffs in his second year. It’s unclear what his end goal is: is he destroying the federal government for some reason? With all the laid-off workers, he hasn’t reduced the budget. It’s grown, due to greater expenses for ICE, border security, and defense.
Some agencies, like FEMA and the National Weather Service, are being stripped to the bone. What will remain of our government at the end of his term?
The Trump administration is looking to slash a net of 107,000 employees at non-defense agencies next fiscal year, which would lead to an overall reduction of more than 7% of those workers.
Agencies laid out their workforce reductions in an expanded version of President Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget released on Friday, which includes both ideas they can implement unilaterally and proposals that will require congressional approval. If agencies follow through on their plans, the cuts will likely be even steeper, as the Defense Department and some other agencies did not include their announced cuts in the new budget documents.
The cuts represent changes projected to take effect next year relative to fiscal 2025 staffing levels. The ongoing cuts that have already occurred were generally not factored into the current workforce counts and the White House noted those figures “may not reflect all of the management and administrative actions underway or planned in federal agencies.”
Agencies are currently operating under a directive from Trump to slash their rolls, though those plans are largely paused under court order and awaiting resolution at the Supreme Court.
Under the budget forecasts, the Education Department will shed the most employees, followed by the Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration, Small Business Administration and NASA. Education has already moved to lay off one-third of its workforce, but those reductions in force are currently paused by a separate court order.
The departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development and Agriculture are also expecting to cut more than 20% of their workforces.
The Trump administration will seek to eliminate more than 107,000 jobs across government, but the net impact is mitigated by targeted hiring at certain agencies and offices. The Transportation Department is the only agency to project an overall staffing increase, driven by hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration and for IT. The Homeland Security Department will seek to significantly staff up at Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the administration ramps up its border crackdown and deportation operations, though DHS will see an overall cut due to planned reductions at the Federal Emergency Management Agency—which is set to shed 13% of its workforce—and the Transportation Security Administration—which will cut around 6%.
Many offices will be cut nearly entirely, such as the research and state forestry offices within USDA’s Forest Service. The department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service would shed nearly 4,000 employees, including two-thirds of employees providing technical assistance on conservation planning and forecasting on snowpack and water supply.
HHS, which has already laid off 10,000 employees, would eliminate 10 offices entirely, though some of the impacted employees are being absorbed into the new Administration for Health America or other reorganized areas. NASA is planning to shutter its Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Engagement office and would cut its Science office in half. DHS would eliminate its Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction office. Cuts at the Treasury Department would be driven by reductions at the Internal Revenue Service— which would zero out its Business Systems Modernization office—though the Bureau of Fiscal Service is also planning to slash one-quarter of its staff.
At the Interior Department, the National Park Service is planning to cut about 27% of its employees, Fish and Wildlife Service would cut 19% and U.S. Geological Survey would cut 32%.
The full scope of the cuts across government will likely expand over time: The Veterans Affairs Department is set to shed more than 80,000 employees and layoffs—assuming a court injunction is lifted—are expected as soon as this month, though they are not a part of the budget. The Defense Department has said it will cut around 60,000 civilian employees, but it has yet to detail those plans in Trump’s budget.
Diane Ravitch's blog 