Only yesterday, I posted a notice about the planned lecture by Dr. Azar Nafisi at Wellesley College on April 15.
Overnight, we agreed that the lecture would be postponed because of a non-tenure track faculty strike on campus. I fervently hoped the strike would be finished before the lecture, but the two sides are currently not close to a settlement.
Non-tenure track faculty voted to unionize as the Wellesley Organized Academic Workers, or WOAW with the United Auto Workers. The strike began March 27.
Dr. Nafisi will not cross a picket line, and neither will I.
Last weekend, the Network for Public Education hosted its conference in Columbus, Ohio. Since our first conference in 2013 in Austin, everyone has said “this is the best ever,” and they said it again on April 7.
The attendees included the newly re-elected State Superintendent of Schools in Minnesota, Jill Underly. The Democratic leader of the Texas House Education Committee, Gina Hinojosa. Numerous teachers of the year from many states. Parent leaders from across the nation.
The Phyllis Bush Award for grassroots organizing was won by the Wisconsin Public Education Network, a parent-led group, who have stood firm for their public schools.
The David Award for the individual or group who courageously stands up to powerful forces on behalf of public schools and their students was won by Pastor Charles Johnson of Pastors for Texas Children, whose organization has fought against Governor Greg Abbott and the billionaires who want to impose vouchers, despite their failure everywhere else and the harm they will wreak on rural schools.
The last speaker was Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota and former Democratic candidate for Vice President in 2024. He was warm, funny, and inspiring.
Nearly 400 educators attended the conference from all across the nation, and everyone stayed to hear Governor Walz, who was wonderful. In time, I will post videos of the main presentations, including his. April 7 was his birthday, and it was too late to get a birthday cake. But two veteran educators left the hotel to find a bakery and returned with a cake.
I introduced Randi Weingarten and reminded the audience that Mike Pompeo had called her “the most dangerous person in the world,” which she should wear as a badge of honor.
Randi gave a rip-roaring speech that brought the audience to its feet. She presented Governor Walz with his birthday cake and everything sang “Happy birthday.”
He was fabulous. He was supposed to slip away at the end of his speech, through a private back door but someone caught up with him and asked for a selfie. Of course, he obliged. Within minutes, it appeared that at least 250 or more people were standing in line for a selfie. He did not leave. He signed autographs and posed for selfies with everyone who wanted one.
He is humble, self-effacing, has a crackling dry wit, and is most definitely a people person.
In the opening session on Friday night, I engaged in a Q & A with Josh Cowen about his recent book: The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Again, the room was overflowing. Josh was excellent at explaining the terrible results of vouchers and how they turned into a subsidy for wealthy families. Why do politicians continue to promote them. The billionaire money is irresistible.
The panels were fabulous. I participated in one about the close link between public schools and democracy. The room was packed, and we had people lining the walls. A panel led by Derek Black, law professor at the university of South Carolina, and Yohuru Williams, dean of the University of Saint Thomas in St. Paul, talked about the history of Black education, inspired by Derek’s new book Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.
Public schools are in the crosshairs of the Trump Administration. The fact that they have failed matters not at all to religious zealots and libertarians. The fact that they bust state budgets doesn’t matter. The fact that they are a subsidy for rich families doesn’t matter. Those rich families will vote for the politicians who gave them a gift.
The urgency of standing up for public schools, defending their teachers, protecting their students, and fighting censorship of books and curriculum has never been more important than now.
The Network for Public Education is committed to stand up for kids, teachers, public schools, and communities. .
Michael R. Bloomberg is a billionaire who made his fortune in technology. He produced a computer with a double screen that is called “the Bloomberg,” with each screen focused on different topics. I don’t know enough about technology to explain why this machine was a big success but it was. Bloomberg is now the most generous of the billionaire set, with the likely exception of McKenzie Scott, who has dedicated her time to giving away the fortune she got when she divorced Jeff Bezos.
Bloomberg was mayor of New York City for 12 years. When he was first elected, I was very enthusiastic about his prospects for reforming the city’s sclerotic school system but became disenchanted when I saw him adopt the “move fast and break things” mode of the tech industry and disrupt the system.
Although I was critical of his disruptive changes, I always liked the man, with whom I had several delightful conversations.
Thus it was a great surprise and delight to encounter the following article, in which he warns about the overuse of technology in the classroom:
Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions of taxpayer dollars equipping classrooms with laptops and other devices in hopes of preparing kids for a digital future. The result? Students have fallen further behind on the skills they most need to succeed in careers: the three R’s plus a fourth — relationships.
Today, about 90% of schools provide laptops or tablets to their students. Yet as students spend more time than ever on screens, social skills are deteriorating and test scores are near historic lows.
Just 28% of eighth graders are proficient in math and 30% in reading. For 12th graders, the numbers are similarly dismal (24% in math and 37% in reading, according to the most recently available scores). And US students have also fallen further behind their peers in other countries.
The push for laptops in classrooms came from technologists, think tanks and government officials, who imagined that the devices would allow for curricula to be tailored around student needs, empowering them to learn at their own pace and raising achievement levels. It hasn’t worked.
The push also came from another source: computer manufacturers. However well-intentioned they may be, they have a financial interest in promoting laptops in classrooms and have profited handsomely from it.
When Google released its inexpensive, utilitarian Chromebook in 2011, the company quickly capitalized on schools’ new emphasis on computer use. Why should children learn the quadratic equation, a Google executive asked, when they can just Google the answer? Today, the same executive might ask: Why should children learn to write an essay — or even a sentence — when they can ask a chatbot to do it for them?
The answer to both questions is that mastering the three R’s is the first step toward the true goal of education: critical thinking and problem-solving.
As someone who built a company by developing a computer at the dawn of the digital age, I never believed that computers in the classroom were the cure to what ails schools. Some of the most powerful educational interactions occur when a caring, well-trained teacher can look into a student’s eyes and help them see and understand new ideas. Machines often don’t have that power.
Think back on your own education. Most of us can remember teachers who challenged and inspired us. Now imagine that you had spent less time listening to those teachers and more time staring at a screen. Would you be better or worse off today?
While moderate use of computer devices can have academic benefits, especially when they are used at home, intensive use is often correlated with diminishing performance.
For example: A post-pandemic survey found that more than a quarter of students spend five hours of class time daily on screens, often practicing skills on games that rarely lead to mastery. At the same time, some traditionally interactive classes — art, music, foreign languages — have moved increasingly online.
Studies have found that time-tested methods of learning — such as reading and writing on a page— are superior to screen-based approaches. One reason is simply a matter of time management. As a review of two decades of academic research concluded, children using laptops are easily distracted — and distracting to their peers. As kids might say: Well, duh.
One study found it can take students up to 20 minutes to refocus after engaging in a nonacademic activity. Put another way: Playing one video game three times a day costs an hour of learning.
Some of the online diversions that students find involve disturbing and inappropriate content that slips through schools’ filters, warping developing minds. Making matters worse: Downtime in classrooms — which might have been spent reading, drawing, imagining or playing with classmates, thereby building crucial social skills — is now frittered away on screens.
By reorienting so much class time around screens, schools have unwittingly been promoting an increasingly isolated childhood experience, which has been correlated with rising anxiety and depression — and can come with tragic and even deadly consequences.
As some school districts finally awake to the benefits of banning smartphones during school hours, they should also reconsider their policies around in-class computers, which can be as problematic as phones. For instance: Storing laptops in locked classroom carts would enable more limited, purposeful use. Schools should also provide parents more transparency about the amount of time their children are spending on devices.
The soaring promise of technology in the classroom has failed to deliver results while imposing great costs on children and taxpayers. Superintendents, principals and teachers ought to lead the way in adopting what has become a radical idea: having students spend more classroom time picking up books and pens than powering up laptops and tablets.
Thomas Mills writes a blog called PoliticsNC. In this post, he explains how a Democrat won the Governor’s race in North Carolina, which is now a red state. North Carolina used to be considered the most progressive state in the south, electing Democrats to state level offices and the General Assembly with regularity.
But in 2010, the Tea Party Republicans swept the state legislature. They gerrymandered the state so adeptly that Democrats had no chance to win control of the legislature again.
While the legislature has a Republican supermajority, the governorship has been captured by a Democrat in the last three elections: by Dr. Roy Cooper in 2016 and 2020, and by Josh Stein in 2024.
Governor Josh Stein
Political observers have long wondered about North Carolina’s split ticket voting. The state routinely elects Democrats to top statewide jobs like governor and attorney general while voting for Republicans for president and US Senate in the same election cycle. Josh Stein has won three elections, two for attorney general and one for governor, while Trump carried the state. His State of the State address offers insight into how Democrats win here. National Democrats should take notice.
Stein delivered his address to the legislature on Wednesday night. At its core, the speech was people-oriented. He put the struggles of the state in human terms instead of political ones. He downplayed political divisions and his swipes at Republicans were muted.
He led off with the recovery from Hurricane Helene, recognizing several families and business owners who are recovering from the disaster. He praised their resilience and the commitment of both individuals and community organizations like Baptists on Mission. He declared, “[T]he people who have been aiding folks out west don’t care a whit about the politics of the people they are helping.”
Stein never mentioned FEMA. His only reference to the federal response to the disaster was his declaration that he’s working with the Trump administration and Congress to get more money into the state. He kept the focus on the people who were most affected by the storm. His only political shot was urging the GOP led legislature to pass a bill giving $500 million more to disaster recovery.
He moved from disaster recovery to job development. He leaned heavily into apprentice programs and community colleges. The focus was inherently working class. Stein said, “Folks should not have to get a bachelor’s degree to get a good-paying job and provide for their family.” He never mentioned the university system.
Stein next shifted to child care and education. He highlighted the shortage and expense of child care in the state, calling for a task force to find “innovative solutions.” He called for family friendly tax cuts instead of reducing the corporate income tax. He called for raising teacher pay and pointed out that North Carolina is 48th in the nation in per pupil spending. He proposed a $4 billion bond to build more schools and fix existing ones.
He challenged the Republicans on their voucher program. While he didn’t focus on the vouchers themselves, he called out the tax breaks offered to wealthy families who receive voucher money and the unregulated schools that tax dollars support. He framed the debate in terms favorable to Democrats, looking for wins on accountability and shifting resources to working families instead of wealthy ones.
Stein also built on one of his priorities as attorney general, combatting fentanyl. He highlighted the death of a young man and asked the legislature to fund a Fentanyl Control Unit. He’s getting on the right side of an issue that concerns much of rural North Carolina and setting up a challenge for Republicans if they rebuke his request.
Stein stayed away from divisive cultural issues. He was inclusive in the broadest sense of the word. He focused on shared priorities that cross ethnic, racial, and gender lines.
Stein’s overall tone was bipartisan or nonpartisan. He laid out priorities that are widely shared—Helene recovery efforts, creating jobs and developing our workforce, increasing access to child care, improving public education, combatting fentanyl deaths—while acknowledging we might differ in how to achieve these goals. He offered hope instead of pointing fingers.
When Stein did pick fights, they were subtle and put Democrats on the side of working people —child care tax breaks for working families instead of the corporate tax cuts, raising teacher pay instead of subsidizing tuition of wealthy families. He brought a populist tone to his education and tax arguments. He made direct appeals to the working class voters that Democrats need to attract.
Democrats across the country should take notice. Stein turned down the heat instead of inviting divisions. He gave very little red meat to the base, but stayed true to core Democratic values, like supporting public education and helping working families. While he set up subtle contrasts with Republicans in the legislature, he also celebrated bipartisan victories like Medicaid expansion.
Stein gave a unifying speech, one that was hard for Republicans to attack. He laid down the foundation for working across party lines. He focused on solutions instead of problems. He set priorities that were largely noncontroversial. He made clear that he would be governor of the whole state, not just the leader of a party. He offered a sharp contrast to the divisive politics of Washington. That’s how Democrats win in a state like North Carolina.
Since today is April Fools Day, I had to dig to find something humorous. It wouldn’t be about education, because there’s nothing funny about a billionaire wrestling entrepreneur leading the charge to close the U.S. Department of Education. It wouldn’t be about politics, because there’s nothing funny about a befuddled, doddering old man pretending to be Mussolini.
The article was written by Jay Horowitz, the media director for the New York Mets.
He wrote:
I have been honored to be part of the Mets organization for 46 years now. Over that time, I have been associated with some pretty great events. One thing I am extremely proud of is to have played a small role in perhaps the greatest sports hoax in the history of baseball, or for that matter in the history of all sports.
The hoax, prank or joke, whatever you want to call it came to life 40 years ago in the April 1, 1985 Sports Illustrated cover story. The story was titled “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch” written by the renowned sportswriter, George Plimpton. According to the article, Sidd was a rookie pitcher training with us in St. Petersburg after being discovered in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. He also wore one shoe, a heavy hiker’s boot, when pitching.
Sidd was raised in an English orphanage, learned yoga in Tibet, and by the way could throw a fastball 168 mph. As an aside, he also played the French horn.
It was like a bombshell when the story hit. For a period of three or four days, the entire baseball world brought our subplot. It had to be true because it was in SI and it had to be true because the great George Plimpton wrote it. George was also the co-founder of the Paris Review and he would never lie.
In fact the entire story was completely made up by George. It was right there in front of everybody but no one picked it up right away. The subhead of the article read:
“He’s a pitcher, part yogi, and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga and his future in baseball.”
The first letters of these words spell out “Happy April Fools Day — a(h) fib.”
Joe Berton, who posed as Sidd Finch in a 1985 Sports Illustrated hoax, reenacts his famous shot outside Oak Park High School in Illinois on Friday, March 25, 2011. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
Let me take you back to how this all started. It was late February 1985 and I had just settled in to my spring training office in St Petersburg. I got a call from our general manager, the late Frank Cashen, who asked me to come see him.
I walked over to meet him and was joined by Jean Coen, Frank’s administrative assistant. Frank asked me if I had a sense of humor and I laughed yes. Frank told me he had just gotten a call from his friend Mark Mulvoy, who was the managing editor of SI. Mark had asked Plimpton to come up with an April 1 story and when he couldn’t find something to his liking he made up one of his own, our buddy Sidd.
Frank wanted to know if I could help sell it. I said by all means. Working with human interest stories was in my bones. For eight years at Fairleigh Dickinson University as the SID, I sold story ideas on a one-armed soccer player, a priest who played hockey, a 43-year-old freshman football player and a 5-4 second baseman who was hit by a pitch 128 times in his career.
This was right up my alley
We didn’t let too many Mets people know what the plan was. Of course, Davey Johnson was in the loop and Mel Stottlemyre was my go-to guy. In mid March, I met Lane Stewart, the photographer for SI at our Huggins Stengel Fieldhouse. We sent up photo ops for the story. We gave Sidd a locker, his number was 21, between Darryl Strawberry and George Foster. Sidd went down to the beach to play his French horn.
I spoke to Straw the other day and he remembered Sidd with a smile. “I remember thinking how could a guy who looked like that throw that hard.”
Kevin Mitchell, a rookie back then recalled interacting with Sidd and found him to be a fun guy with a great sense of humor.
Dwight Gooden, who was the rookie of the year in 1984, thought the hoax was real at first.
”I knew a little, but not too much,” said Gooden, “and it wasn’t until the third day I found out it was a prank.”
Jay Horwitz
Lane took photos of Sidd with all the guys I went to some of our younger players — Dave Cohcrane, Ronn Reynolds, John Christensen and Lenny Dykstra — and asked for their help. I told them we had this young phenom coming in that we needed their help.
I didn’t spill all the beans, I just told them we had this youngster who you wouldn’t believe.
We erected a huge closed tarp on the field where Sidd was to throw BP. All the kids bought in and were great in the photos.
April 1 was a Sunday and the story started to surface a few days before. We held a mock press conference with Reynolds, a catcher. We burnt a hole in his glove and said this was from Sidd’s 104-mph curve. Christensen and Cochrane said they never saw somebody throw as hard. Dykstra was in awe.
The one who sold it the best was Mel. He had such credibility because of his great Yankee career. There is no doubt in my mind people believed it because Mel was involved.
The writers would ask how would Sidd fit into the rotation. Mel said we will just have to wait and see. We have to find a place for him because he is such a talent.
Plimpton kept it going, too. He made himself unavailable to the media which added to the mystique.
When the story hit the newsstand, my phone rang off the hook. I had a nasty conversation with a sports editor of a New York paper and he asked how could I have given the story to SI when his paper was there every day. I remained calm and asked how would he feel if he got the scoop and I gave it to SI. He was not amused.
My beat guys were not too happy with me either. They felt I had played favorites.
Two baseball owners called the editor of SI wanting to know if the story was true. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also called Sports Illustrated and wanted to know the truth. The sports editor of Life Magazine was really upset, too!
One of our coaches who moved on to another team called me in disbelief and said no one from his new club had ever heard of Sidd. I just laughed again.
I have to give a shout out to Bobby Schaeffer, who was the manger of our Triple-A team at Tidewater. He made a scouting report on Sidd and called him a great prospect.
Slowly but surely the truth began to seep out. On April 7 at Al Lang Stadium we held a press conference that Sidd had moved on from baseball and was moving on to golf. Sidd, who was really Joe Berton, a junior high school teacher from Chicago, came back for the occasion. Joe was recruited by Lane and they were close friends.
Joe was a big Cubs fan at the time and he has remained tight with Lane. He never thought this would be as big as it turned out. He asked me to give him his name plate so so he could remember his time as a Met.
I have kept in touch with Lane, too. He said the people at SI never expected it to be this big that we would be still be talking about Sidd 40 years later. He said the magazine was never trying to fool anybody, just have fun.
The New York Mets’ bobblehead of Sidd Finch. (New York Mets)
Its been 40 years and Ron Darling still remembers with fondness the spring he spent with Sidd (I mean Joe in St. Petersburg).
“That was my first introduction to a New York media experience,” said Ron. “It was wonderful. I loved when Joe walked around talking to the guys. I am a big reader and I was thrilled to be a part of something that George Plimpton was associated with in some capacity. I didn’t know everything that was going on but I knew the premise was a hoax.
“When I got back to NYC that year all my friends wanted to talk about Sidd. It was an experience I never will forget.”
Jay Horwitz started his Mets PR career 45 years ago on April Fools’ Day, 1980. One of his major accomplishments is helping spread the Sidd Finch story, perhaps the No. 1 hoax in sports history.
Germany’s DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials,” the news site reported Wednesday. The top officials include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Some are “linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s data was “particularly easy for DER SPIEGEL reporters to discover,” including his cell phone number and email address.”
The reporters “turned to a commercial provider of contact information that is primarily used by companies for sales, marketing and recruitment,” and then they “sent the provider a link to Hegseth’s LinkedIn profile and received a Gmail address and a mobile phone number in return, in addition to other information.”
“A search of leaked user data revealed that the email address and, in some cases, even the password associated with it, could be found in over 20 publicly accessible leaks. Using publicly available information, it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.”
Private contact details of the most important security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the internet. DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials…
As such, the reporting has revealed an additional grave, previously unknown security breach at the highest levels in Washington. Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices. It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth discussed a military strike.
This event demonstrates the utter incompetence and stupidity of Trump’s choices for his Cabinet. Clearly, he chose people based on their personal loyalty to him, their TV presence, and whether they “looked the part” in his eyes. What did not matter at all was their knowledge and experience.
Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a book about Lincoln’s Cabinet called Team of Rivals.
John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma. He keeps watch over the Red state politics of Oklahoma and follows the national education scene closely, He writes here about author Robert Pondiscio. I was at one time good friends with Pondiscio. We were on the same wave-length. But things changed. Curiously, as I moved from right to left in my views, he moved in the other direction.
John Thompson writes about him and his ideological journey here:
Since the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Robert Pondiscio agreed to join the Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ Executive Review Committee, I’ve wondered how he could collaborate with Russell Vought and the founders of Project 2025 in order to turn Oklahoma’s teaching standards into rightwing propaganda. (I should note that because of a scheduling problem, he wasn’t able to remain on the committee.)
Years ago, when I first met Pondiscio, he was focused on high quality curricula; the person I knew would have been horrified by Walters’ silently imposed standards, that, for instance:
Would require that high school students “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results’ including”‘ sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.’”
After reading Pondiscio’s “The Last Days of Public School,” I’ve wondered what corporate school reformers would have thought if, in 2010, he had written the same things about the “Risks and Rewards” of school privatization. My reading of it is that Pondiscio now makes mostly the same statements about test-driven school privatization, as he did back then. But he’s switched sides, allying with both the Billionaires Boys Club and MAGAs in order to advance his personal agenda.
Pondiscio has long supported Core Knowledge, but he and E.D. Hirsch sought tests for diagnostic purposes, not reward-and-punish. Pondiscio agreed with Hirsch that high-stakes tests “are fundamentally unfair to disadvantaged children, particularly low-income children of color.”
When being interviewed by Larry Ferlazzo, Pondiscio denounced the corporate reformers, who were non-educators, who believed that improving teacher quality and lifting charter school caps was a simple solution. They believed their “reforms” could overcome the extreme poverty and multiple traumas that his and my students endured. Moreover, he was repelled by stories about “Rubber Rooms” in order to engage in “bashing teachers.”
And, rather than blame public schools for wasting money, he pointed out the huge amounts of money spent for implementing the hunches of corporate reformers seeking disruptive and transformative change.
By 2018, however, Pondiscio seemed fully committed to his new test-driven, competition-driven allies. For instance, he enthusiastically supported New Orleans’ Superintendent John White, who was a true-believer in school privatization, Teach for America, and high-stakes testing. When debating Diane Ravitch about school choice, he “retorted that school choice was not a ‘rightwing agenda,’ it was a ‘moral agenda.’”
Even today, when explaining how public schools (which he confusingly calls the “legacy system”) are doomed, Pondiscio seems to acknowledge that punitive, market-driven policies have failed in the ways we defenders of public schools predicted. He acknowledges that student outcomes were declining before Covid hit. But it contributed to “mounting challenges: historic declines in student achievement, chronic absenteeism, discipline crises, and plummeting teacher morale. Even as schools return to normal, confidence in public education has suffered hammer blows.”
To his credit, Pondiscio also cites the challenges of the “baby bust”—a decline in the birth rate that will reduce the number of school-age children by an estimated two to three million over the next decade.
It is to his discredit, I believe, that he doesn’t mention the damage done by the Trump administrations, and the extreme anti-public school propaganda funded by the “Billionaires Boys Club.”
Pondiscio now writes that “the zip code–driven default mode of educating our children is unlikely to disappear entirely. It will remain a common mode for a significant number of children if only because of habit and inertia. But we have hit and passed peak public education. Its influence and dominance can only wane.”
While remaining on the AEI team and being open to working with the Heritage Foundation effort to dismantle public education, Pondiscio writes, “In practice, this means almost any parent can opt out of public education and redirect funds to offset the cost of private school, pay for tutoring, and purchase textbooks, technology, and almost any conceivable service they deem necessary to meet the educational needs of their child.”
While supporting this outcome, Pondiscio writes:
While public schools have largely failed to be the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” Mann envisioned, they have at least aspired to provide a shared foundation of civic knowledge and literacy. In a world where education is fully customizable, we risk losing the common civic framework that binds a diverse nation together. Schools transmit not just knowledge but shared values, norms, and narratives.
Moreover:
School choice does not guarantee better schools—only different ones. The same market forces that produce elite private schools could also create a “long tail” of low-quality options. Moreover, as more middle-class and engaged families exit public schools, the legacy system risks becoming the school of last resort for the most disadvantaged students—further intensifying educational inequality.
Why would Pondiscio, who makes such acknowledgements, seem to go along with the destruction of public education in order to defeat educators who disagree with him on curriculum and other aspects of instruction?
Reading his AEI posts, I’m struck by the anger he spews about educators who “worship to excess at the altar of student engagement.” I’m struck by his repeatedly blaming “Wokism.” Why does he invest so much in attacking schools as “Ideological Boot Camps?” At a time when Elon Musk and President Trump are trying to destroy the Education Department, why is Pondiscio doubling down on its administrators who he says order schools to “Comply with our enlightened vision or risk a civil rights probe that could cost you your federal funding?”
In other words, why is Pondiscio focusing more on defeating advocates for hands-on learning and civil rights, than defending the poor children of color that he and I taught?
Oliver Darcy, media journalist, reports that Mark Zuckerberg has followed the lead of Elon Musk by abandoning fact-checking.
The No-Fact Zone:Meta announced Thursday it will launch its forthcoming “community notes” feature next week to replace fact-checkers, once again going to Fox News for the rollout as the Mark Zuckerberg-led social giant runs to the right. Joel Kaplan, Meta’snew global affairs officer, blasted the company’s own longstanding fact-checking program, telling Fox’sBrooke Singman it “proved to be really prone to partisan political bias” and was “essentially a censorship tool,” echoing false claims parroted by right-wing media figures and lawmakers. Unlike the fact-checking program, Meta’s community notes will rely on users who are not bound by ethical guidelines to police content for fairness and accuracy, taking a page straight out of Elon Musk’s X. Kaplan told Singman that posts with a community note applied will not be penalized and will continue to thrive on the platform, setting the stage for viral misinformation. While Zuckerberg and Kaplan are portraying the move as a win for free speech—earning praise from Donald Trump—it will surely serve to muddy the waters on some of the world’s biggest social platforms.
In the U.S., most people revere the rule of law and the Constitution. We know that we are protected by the rule of law and are accountable to it. We cling fervently to the belief that justice will be done, even when it is not. We learn from an early age that “no man is above the law” (except, the Supreme Court ruled, the President) and that everyone is equal before the law, even when we see these principles flagrantly violated, with justice favoring those with money and influence. Yet, still we believe.
This past week, the Trump administration lowered the boom on universities and student protestors. To demonstrate its determination to stamp out campus protests, it canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University. This sent a message to every other institution that this administration is prepared to levy a heavy financial penalty on any college that allows campus protests to get out of control.
The Trump team has a list of other campuses that it’s watching, including Harvard University, George Washington University; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California.
The pretext for the crackdown is anti-Semitism, but most Jews don’t want to be the scapegoat for Trump’s marauding on academic freedom. Trump is not protecting them. He’s making them a target.
Cutting off federal funding would have a devastating financial impact on all these universities.
Next, the Trump administration directed ICE to arrest and detain Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University who had led student protests at the university last spring. First, they said they would revoke his student visa. When he said he had a green card, they threatened to cancel it. ICE took him to a prison in Louisiana, and the legal battle over his free speech rights goes on.
The ACLU is representing Khalil. It said in a statement:
Let’s be clear: The First Amendment does not allow the government to retaliate against anyone for their speech. The Trump administration can’t use ICE to punish speech the government doesn’t like, and we must all speak out loudly NOW: Tell ICE: Free Mahmoud Khalil.
We have a Constitutional amendment protecting free speech. That includes not only citizens but people with green cards.
Trump and his team are seizing as much power as they can to see what they can get away with. Can they punish, even destroy, universities with heavy fines? Can they deport anyone who is not a citizen? Can they deport citizens? The law and the Cinstitution do not deter Trump and his flunkies.
These actions may be a prelude to sending in troops to break up anti-Trump protests.
Trump has cowed the Republican Party. We can’t let him intimidate everyone else.
Diane Ravitch's blog 