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John Thompson: Public Schools Are a Public Good, Not a Commodity!

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2026 //
5

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reports on a discussion between historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire about the future of public schools. There is no denying the well-funded effort, supported by the Trump administration, to send public money to nonpublic schools. And yet more than 85% of American children still enroll in public schools.

He writes:

I just watched the annual Education Justice Lecture, “The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School.” Education Law Centers’ Executive Director Robert Kim moderated the discussion featuring Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, “The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School.”Jack Schneider explained that we’ve entered a new era where technology-focused, data-driven accountability has created a new value system. It seeks to promote the private good, not public education. To rebuild our public school culture, we must remember our previous value system, which was about the public good for everyone. The decline of community contacts has led to alienation. Consequently, education advocates are “on our heels,” defending the status quo, despite its increased segregation.

Bob Kim urged us to remember public education’s ties to civil rights. And Jennifer Berkshire, who documents the privatizers’ attacks on public education, but who leans towards optimism, replied that the thing she’s most pessimistic about is enforcement of civil rights. Now, inequality is widely seen as the natural reality

Schneider added that without public education, “you don’t have rights, you have options.” And, we need pluralism.

Getting back to her hopefulness, Berkshire described patterns of responses to President Trump’s policies. For instance, many people support Trump’s immigration policies, in general. But, when they see them enforced at schools, they oppose the cruelties they see with their own eyes.

Schneider cited polling and focus groups that compare and contrast the nationalization of politics, as opposed to school politics. Polls show patterns, where many parents are negative about schools nationally, but give high grades for their own school. After all, parents show up for musical, art, and other events that bring neighborhoods together.

Similarly, most say first we must get back to basics but as focus groups talk with each other, they start expanding praise for diverse subject matters; then, they move on to praising inclusivity.

Both Schneider and Berkshire explained how Democrats should learn from their mistakes in promoting schools. They didn’t want to get bogged down describing the bipartisan No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top that inflicted so much harm on public schools. But, they explained, too many are forgetting the backlash against RttT, as well as NCLB.

So, Berkshire started with “our trap,” our assertions that the only path to a better life is through college. And Schneider focused on bringing our opponents back together with neighborhood schools where everyone needs to listen with each other.

But, he warned that rightwingers aren’t the only people who are predicting that we are at the end of the public education era. For instance, there are members of the Obama corporate reform crew who are still trying to get their “band” back together.

We must get back to the culture that saw schooling as a public good, not a Free Market path to economic success, mostly for the elites. We must draw on the power of communication. It is crucial for life in a democracy which is built on communities that band together.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Ethics, Supporting public schools

Popular Lies About Test Scores Corrupt Debates About the Progress of Our Students and Their Schools

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2026 //
4

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

https://share.google/NXK2OD6xIFegOuWoe

By David Reinking and Peter Smagorinsky

Every day we read about people asking, “At what grade level does my child read?” “Is it true that 54% of adults in the U.S. read below a sixth-grade level?” “Have reading scores dropped an entire grade level since the pandemic?”

The assumption behind these questions is test scores are precise indicators of reading ability, like scientific laboratory measurements. But like blood pressure levels — in which there is agreement about what’s being measured — they are variable and open to interpretation. 

Despite the subjectivity and lack of agreement in defining reading, grade level and ability, grade-level reading ability is often mistakenly viewed as determined by a precise, stable test score, one that does not take into account factors such as students’ health and hunger in their testing performance. Not everyone agrees on what is salient at a particular grade level, leading to subjectivity in weighting phonics knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension, the ability to synthesize a theme and recognize an author’s point of view in a given passage, or some combination of such things. 

Standardized tests are typically the basis for establishing grade level. But test scores themselves don’t indicate grade level, which is a creation of an interpreter. That’s why different tests don’t always produce the same grade level. A student who tests at fourth grade in one state may test at the third or fifth grade when moving to another state using a different test. In short, different tests or standards can produce different grade levels.

David Reinking is a retired professor at Clemson and the University of Georgia. He is an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Journal of Literacy Research. (Courtesy)

David Reinking is a retired professor at Clemson and the University of Georgia. He is an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Journal of Literacy Research. (Courtesy)

The National Assessment of Educational Progress calls itself “the nation’s report card” even to the point of using the phrase on its website and then having it repeated as if it is an established fact. It is often invoked in commentaries on grade levels. But it wasn’t designed for that purpose. NAEP itself states that “NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments). NAEP achievement levels are to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted and used with caution.”

But that hasn’t stopped many policy makers and journalists from trying to connect a NAEP test score to a grade level. Giving in to political pressure and rejecting recommendations from authorities in developing tests, in 1990 NAEP officials did introduce four tiers of reading achievement: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. These levels were established solely using subjective judgment about what’s expected of children tested at a specific grade level.

Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at UGA, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English. (Courtesy)

Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at UGA, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English. (Courtesy)

Then, they set equally subjective cut scores to establish boundaries between these four levels. States often use a parallel model for their own tests. In Virginia, student performance is measured on a 0–600 scale, with proficiency set at 400-499 and advanced at 500 or above. It’s hard to imagine that a meaningful difference exists between a student scoring 499 (proficient) and 500 (advanced).

Much confusion is also centered in interpreting whether “basic” is acceptably normal or if it is reasonable to expect all students to be “proficient.” Many commentators, some of whom have a vested interest in arguing that there is a reading crisis, argue the latter. Some have promoted the false idea that “proficient” is grade-level reading, which it absolutely is not. Then, they wrongly argue that two-thirds of American students are reading below grade level by counting “basic” scores as below grade level.

Another way to illustrate the problem is to simply rename NAEP’s subjective categories as “below average,” “average,” “above average” and “far above average.” Then, approximately 60% of students are reading at or above an average score, and only 40% (instead of the usually expected 50%) of students are below average. Presto, much of the reading crisis disappears. As further evidence against a crisis, there has been relatively little variation in NAEP reading scores since 1992, even if an upward trend began retreating around 2015 with many plausible but unconfirmed explanations.

A number of educators have debunked the conclusions of NAEP misinterpreters. Yet, the dogged belief persists that everything can be reduced to subjective interpretations of test scores divided into hierarchical categories that can be falsely, if conveniently, converted to grade levels. 

We are concerned whenever we encounter all-too-common misinformation about grade-level reading ability. When misinformation becomes disinformation offered by those who use grade-level reading ability to advance political, polemical or ideological agendas, we become concerned about how faith in test scores lends them to manipulation and deception to help create the crisis that critics have historically claimed is engulfing schools, only to be saved by their favorite solutions. 

David Reinking is a retired professor at Clemson and the University of Georgia, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Journal of Literacy Research. Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at UGA, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, Fraud, Lies, Literacy, NAEP, Standardized Testing

The Lunatic Fringe of the Texas GOP Won!

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2026 //
1

Michelle H. Davis of “Lone Star Left” closes out her coverage of the Texas Republican convention. Her incisive reporting demonstrates the lunacy and cruelty that now dominate Texas Republicans. Well, at least they didn’t adopt a resolution to give the death penalty to any woman who dared to have an abortion. That’s something.

She writes:

The Republican Party of Texas is a party of hate and a party of cruelty. They were built in smoky back offices and pulpits in the early 1970s on the Moral Majority and the New Right. Then, they conquered Texas through the shady legal maneuverings of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. The men at the top built an empire of corruption and theft. Theft of our water, theft of our clean air, theft of our labor. 

Texas Republicans have long had everything they’ve wanted. For decades, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have gotten poorer. But it’s not enough. They have to keep people voting for them somehow. Dumb down education. Appeal to the most extreme elements. That’s all they have left. 

In 1964, the John Birch Society found its moment at the Republican National Convention. Barry Goldwater didn’t fully embrace them. But he didn’t reject them either. When Nelson Rockefeller stood at that podium and named the John Birch Society alongside the Ku Klux Klan as examples of extremism that the party should refuse, the crowd booed him off the stage. Goldwater then declared, “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”

Goldwater was a total shit.

The Birchers never went away. And over the next sixty years, what was once considered the lunatic fringe became the Republican mainstream. The “deep state.” The “new world order.” Conspiracies about globalists, infiltrators, and enemies within. It’s the same playbook.

Which brings us to the 2026 Republican Party of Texas Convention.

The “Abolish Abortion” plank failed the final vote in the platform. That’s the one that would have handed the death penalty to any woman who received abortion care. Any woman. A minor. A rape survivor. Doesn’t matter. But don’t mistake that for a victory, because the men who stood on that convention floor and pushed for it are still on the ballot. Including: 

  • Rep. Bret Money (R-HD02). You can donate to his Democratic opponent, Fatima Muse, HERE. 
  • Rep. David Lowe (R-HD91). You can donate to his Democratic opponent, Yisak Worku, HERE. 

But what did pass on the platform? 

Banning IVF. Banning Sharia Law. 

In 2026, the Birchers write the Republican Party platform. 

Why IVF? Well, because they say this is a person:

But, actually, that ⬆️ is a mouse embryo I found on Google. But if women who are struggling with fertility are not allowed to have IVF in Texas anymore. 1- It will eventually spread to other states, and 2- what kind of repercussions will come from this? 

America already has a history of this. 

  • The Indian Adoption Project, beginning in the early 1950s, adopted Native children out primarily to non-Indian families to reduce reservation populations. By the time Congress finally acted, approximately one-third of all American Indian children had been removed from their homes. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 was the legislative response, and the right has been trying to gut it ever since.
  • Between 1998 and 2008, nearly 30,000 Guatemalan-born children were adopted by US parents. The US Embassy in Guatemala knew as far back as 1995 that birth mothers’ lives were threatened if they tried to reclaim their children. Guatemala shut it down in 2008.

The Evangelical Christian adoption movement has a documented history of manufacturing an “orphan crisis” to justify removing children from living parents in developing countries. Even Erika Kirk had an orphanage in Romania, which she was later accused of sex trafficking children out of. 

Banning Sharia Law? 

First of all, they already tried this in the 2015 Legislative session during the last time Muslim panic swept the state of Texas. During that time, Beth Van Duyne, the then-mayor of Irving, was directly responsible for the statewide outrage and upset. This was simialar to the Muslim panic after 9/11. Maybe, not that bad. But the Republicans go back and forth between which marginalized group they hate most each year. This year, it happens to be Muslims. 

When you Google “What is Sharia Law,” you get a lot of different answers, so hear it directly from Rep. Salman Bhojani (D-HD92): 

From the Republicans’ perspective, it really boils down to ignorance and bigotry. Just like the “Show Me Your Papers” bill. Just like the DEI bans. Same rhyme, different verse. 

All the Texas transplants, pretending to be Texans. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, we love our transplants. They add to the vibrant culture that makes our state so unique. But nothing chaps my hide more than a bunch of dudes that moved here in their 40s rambling on about how THEY represent Texas values more than ME. Like, sirs, I have a grandfather and a great-uncle in the square the day JFK got shot, and they were both born in Dallas.

And all of these Republicans, the wealthy ones, who came here to get into politics or nepo-baby their way into their daddy’s corporation that came to Texas for the low taxes, they think the Texas spirit is all about taking as much as you can for yourself, while screwing everyone else at the bottom, and hurting anyone different from you. 

Senate Majority Leader Tan Parker, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stood at that podium and invoked the Alamo. He talked about faith, family, liberty, and the God-given right of free people to govern themselves. He said Texas is proof that freedom works. 

Parker has been rated as one of the most dangerous anti-choice legislators in Texas. He’s endorsed by both Texas Right to Life and Texas Alliance for Life. His legislative priorities in 2025 centered on capital markets packages and making Texas a hub for financial services, because when women are dying from abortion ban complications, and Texas has a maternal mortality rate that rivals that of developing nations, but Parker’s focus is on helping rich people move their money here faster. 

The man flew in from Pennsylvania, wrapped himself in the Texas flag, invoked the memory of the men who died at the Alamo, and has spent nearly two decades making life harder for the working Texans he claims to represent.

Same thing with Dannie Goober yesterday. 

The rest of the planks we covered mostly passed. 

The full platform will be posted on the Republican Party of Texas website in the coming weeks. Read it. Share it. Make sure every voter in your life knows exactly what these people are planning.

Because we already know what’s coming in the 90th Legislative Session. They’ve written it down for us. Frozen embryos have more rights than the mothers who made them. Muslims are the designated enemy of the cycle. A Texas that looks less like the state we love and more like the fever dream of a John Birch Society pamphlet from 1962.

They are telling us exactly who they are.

The question is whether we’re going to let them keep doing it.

We can stop them by flipping the Texas House. Democrats need a net gain of just 14 seats to break Republican control, and the candidates to do it are on the ballot right now. 

The line in the sand is at the ballot box.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, History, Ignorance, Republicans, Texas

Scott Dworkin: Don Jr. Cashes in on His Connections

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2026 //
1

Scott Dworkin writes a blog to promote voting, especially voting for Democrats.

He posted this recently, the ongoing saga of the Trump Kids Getting Rich:

TRUMP TARIFFED THEM. THEY PAID HIS SON.

Donald Trump Jr. (L) and Anant Ambani (R)

Last summer, the regime went to war with one of the richest families on earth. Trump hit India with 50% tariffs built to punish the Ambanis—the billionaire family whose company had made a fortune off cheap Russian oil.

Then Donald Trump Jr. flew to India in November 2025, toured the family’s private zoo, and danced with their heir that night. Four months later, according to a ProPublica investigation, the Ambanis poured at least $100 million into an obscure Texas oil startup that Trump Jr. had secretly acquired a stake in.

Soon after, the Ambanis received what they’d been lobbying for: tariffs slashed on Indian imports, a license to buy Venezuelan oil, and a sanctions waiver to buy Russian oil. Trump personally celebrated the deal on Truth Social.

Forbes estimated that Trump Jr.’s net worth rocketed from roughly $50 million to $300 million since his dad returned to office—based only on publicly disclosed investments.

When Democrats take back Congress, every one of these deals gets investigated.

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Trump Gives Contract for Coal-Fired Plant to MAGA Ally with Zero Experience

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2026 //
4

During the 2024 campaign, Trump met with leaders of the oil and gas industry and asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He promised to be their champion.

I don’t know whether the industry delivered for Trump, but he has certainly delivered for them. He has opposed alternative sources of energy, treats climate change as a hoax, and canceled federal contracts for wind and solar projects that were well underway. He loves fossil fuels and plans to revive the coal industry. Trump is a champion of “clean coal,” whatever that is.

While Europe, China, and Japan forge ahead with the expansion of alternative sources of energy, the U.S. is investing in the energy sources of the past.

Redeeming his promise to the coal industry, Trump recently launched planning for a coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The contract for the design and feasibility was awarded to a Trump crony with no experience in the field.

A man the Trump administration picked to be a key player at the fore of a U.S. coal renaissance is likely more familiar to QAnon circles than energy ones.

TerraSpark’s project carries big promises. The proposed 1.6 gigawatt facility — touted by the Trump administration last week — would be the first new coal-fired power plant built in the U.S since 2013. It vows to infuse up to 1,000 jobs into West Virginia, a state rich in coal-mining history that’s seen its industry wither over the past two decades.

But few if any Trump administration energy allies have heard of TerraSpark or Alex Phillips, who is running the company with two other people also lacking coal backgrounds. Even the Republican lawmaker whose district would host the massive coal plant and carbon capture project learned of it just two months before the Energy Department this month agreed to give it $18.5 million of taxpayer dollars to pay for a feasibility and design study.

While Phillips has no energy industry experience, he has hovered around Washington politics during the Trump era. The owner of a rural Virginia internet business served on telecommunications advisory boards. He was past president of a wireless internet company trade association that also had a political action committee. And he operated his own PAC, the Great American Patriot Project, that backed candidates who “adhere to the United States Constitution and America First principles.”

He made more of a name for himself within the MAGA movement through his American Priority Conference, known as AMPfest. It drew QAnon promoters and personalities like Roger Stone — President Donald Trump is a longtime friend and former client — former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and other MAGA influencers with a history of touting conspiracy theories, particularly the lie that widespread voter fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.

AMPfest and Phillips’ American Priority organization have since closed shop, with the last AMPfest held in October 2021 at Trump National Doral in Miami. Before then, however, he became integral enough to MAGA world to secure a speaking spot alongside far-right provocateurs like Alex Jones, Scott Pressler and Jack Posobiec at a rally on the eve of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” event.

While Phillips did not end up speaking at that event — according to Mother Jones, which did not report why — he embraced election denier theories from the scene. He also encouraged then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election, saying he “needs to step up.”

“I think that there’s been overwhelming evidence provided in so many different formats, ways, that any congressman or senator that doesn’t think that there was some kind of irregularity that needs to be looked at in these seven states is just not paying attention or is corrupt,” he told Citizen Media News outside of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Phillips referred questions to a public relations firm, which made another TerraSpark partner, Bill Tolpegin, available for comment. Tolpegin said in a statement that Phillips had no contact with the White House or Energy Department about the grant. Tolpegin said that the company “had no special, unique or otherwise different levels of access, communication with or attention from administration officials.”

But Phillips’ latest career act is nonetheless illustrative of Washington politics during Trump’s White House sequel, where allies have often won contracts or jobs.

“This is not normal,” Mike McKenna, an energy lobbyist who worked in the first Trump White House, said of DOE approving federal grants for a company with no track record in the industry.

McKenna said he is aware of two companies “with decades of experience in generating electricity” that have struggled to navigate DOE processes.

“These companies are no doubt going to ask if companies and people with no experience can do this, why can’t we?” he said. “I don’t want to be that guy, but this is obviously political. And the more political it is, the less likely it is to happen,” he said of building new coal plants.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement that Trump’s coal grants are part of his commitments to buoy the nation’s coal industry, such as directives to run coal plants beyond scheduled retirement dates that DOE has credited for preventing electricity blackouts.

“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” she wrote in response to questions about Phillips and TerraSpark.

Rogers referred POLITICO to DOE for questions about the grant process. DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said the department selected TerraSpark through a “competitive merit review process” that included evaluation of “technical merit, programmatic relevance, and the applicant’s ability to successfully execute the proposed work.” He did not address questions about Phillips.

“The economics of the project will speak for itself, and are highly competitive,” Tolpegin said.

Coal and carbon capture

What TerraSpark envisions is complex and expensive. A power plant the size it foresees would likely cost more than $1 billion — and that’s before accounting for technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions as proposed.

In addition to Phillips and Tolpegin, who calls himself a “serial entrepreneur,” the company has a third partner, Cory Cipra, a Kansas City-based technology consultant whom Tolpegin said has “a deep background working with utilities.” The company applied for the DOE grant in December and said it will not receive the funding until it comes up with the remaining $21.5 million needed to fund its study.

In an interview with POLITICO, Tolpegin said he founded the company with Phillips to bring online more energy generation “in a way that’s as clean as possible” that could eventually be “carbon negative.”

He called the company’s lack of experience in coal a “good thing.” Prior carbon capture attempts have been limited by “conventional” carbon capture technologies, he said.

“We’re not building your grandparents’ coal plant,” Tolpegin said. “We’re going to be building something new that I hope can flip the script on coal.”

The project was not on DOE’s radar a year ago, said Steve Winberg, who ran DOE’s fossil energy office in Trump’s first term and was undersecretary of infrastructure at DOE until May 2025. He said he knew some of the people involved in TerraSpark — he would not say who — but not Phillips.

The pool of potential grant winners was much larger earlier this winter. DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, which handles power generation and coal research, briefed the agency front office in early March on at least seven viable selections for the federal money, according to three people familiar with the process, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations.

DOE ultimately picked two proposals for new coal plants, including a project in Alaska — which was awarded an $89 million grant — and the TerraSpark plan to build in West Virginia. Another two projects for existing plants also received awards. 

“Some of these companies are probably three connected guys who threw an application together,” said one DOE official granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with reporters. They said the TerraSpark proposal deserves scrutiny. “And the DOE review that occurred would likely not surface that and/or was specifically disinterested in figuring that out.”

TerraSpark does not have much of an online presence, registering its website in July 2025, according to a domain registry. Its website did not name any company officials until a press release for the DOE grant appeared late June 4.…

Kevin Hagerty, a commissioner of Grant County, where the project is slated to be located, said there had been rumors of a project but that he didn’t learn of specifics until DOE announced the grant. Nonetheless, he said people in the Trump-backing county were excited about the support for the state’s shrinking coal industry.

The project is in early stages. While TerraSpark said the project will be located in Mount Storm, it has not yet selected a location, and does not own land in the county.

The partners are also still exploring what specific end users, such as a data center, will be attached to the project.

On June 4, the day DOE announced its grant, TerraSpark’s website said the coal plant would be accompanied by a 1-gigawatt AI data center. By the next day, the website instead said the plan would be paired with a “multi-industry campus.”

Tolpegin said some details on the website were updated to correct “stale” information and that the “first phase” of the project would be building the coal plant in the next few years, with tenants to be determined later. The company has also said it eventually plans to connect the plant to the grid.

Uphill battle for new coal

Energy companies and utilities have been reluctant to build new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. for myriad reasons. Environmental regulations raised the cost of burning coal. A gusher of natural gas made that fuel more economically competitive. Plummeting solar and wind costs pushed more capital-intensive coal facilities out of the mix.

Yet tech companies have proven willing to explore costly energy projects like geothermal and nuclear to feed energy-hungry data centers. Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to revive “clean, beautiful coal.” Some coal backers are quietly optimistic that those trends will benefit them.

“You think about the speed to which you need to get a data center going, people assume it’s going to be natural gas, but then you’ve got that turbine problem — long lead time on those,” Winberg said. “A lot of people assume it’s going to be nuclear, but you’ve got a long, long lead time on the nuclear. So coal is starting to fit into the mix again.”

But analysts in the energy sector have been skeptical of the TerraSpark project’s viability.

Seth Feaster, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank that supports a shift to cleaner resources, said that while many large energy infrastructure projects are built by experienced energy utilities, DOE in its June grant announcement turned to companies that don’t appear to have deep pockets or relevant experience.

“Who’s financing them, who’s going to invest in them?” he said. The government grants will “help a little bit, but you’ve got to convince the markets of the credibility of your project.”

“I find that pretty thin at the moment here,” he said.

Ryan Sweezey, director of North American power and renewables at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said that if the developers plan to have a data center or other industrial customers that directly tie in to the plant, coal boilers likely won’t be able to ramp up and down quickly enough without batteries.

Sweezey said the executives’ lack of experience in energy or coal plant development was a “major red flag.”

Hooking up AI data centers directly to power sources — an increasingly popular model for the electricity-devouring sector — is “very complicated” and requires “serious expertise,” said Sweezey.

Adding a carbon capture and storage system to the mix further complicates that picture, and would catapult the overall cost, which could be over $10 billion, he predicted. Tolpegin said the entire cost of the energy campus and coal plant could be “in the billions.”

TerraSpark has partnered with Mantel, a carbon capture startup founded by MIT alumni in 2022, and Sargent & Lundy, an energy engineering firm. The Chicago-based firm has built more than 100 projects related to carbon capture in the last five years, according to its website, and completed work on the Petra Nova project in Texas, the only U.S. power plant currently operating carbon capture at commercial scale.

In a statement, a Mantel spokesperson said TerraSpark is one of many customers and that it is “committed to delivering efficient, scalable carbon capture solutions wherever they can have the greatest impact.”

The energy technology service provider Babcock & Wilcox is also part of the project, along with carbon capture consultants Advanced Resources International.

In a statement, Babcock’s communications director, Sharyn Brooks, said the company has decades of experience with boiler technologies, which positions the company “to support advanced coal generation projects with proven, high-efficiency technologies.”

“Our role is focused on providing engineering and technical support,” Brooks said.

Representatives of Sargent & Lundy and Advanced Resources International did not respond to requests for comment.

Terraspark’s ambitious plans also call for building a new campus for West Virginia University to focus on extracting rare earth minerals from coal waste, and could eventually acquire coal ash from other locations to process for rare earths.

That would be a massive undertaking for any developer, said Rudra Kapila, a director of carbon management and hydrogen at think tank Third Way, who evaluated carbon capture grant proposals for DOE during the Biden administration.

“I mean, who is this Johnny?” she said.

Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.

Categories Corruption, Environment, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

John Oliver on the Failure of the Rightwing Takeover of New College in Florida

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2026 //
11

John Oliver took a piercing look at Ron DeSantis’s takeover of New College in Sarasota.

When DeSantis first became governor of Florida, a legislator told him about this little bed of radicalism, and DeSantis admitted that he had never heard of it. But then he realized that attacking it and remodeling it would help build his resume for his bid for the Presidency.

New College was, like Hampshire College, a progressive institution where there were no grades and students could design their own courses. It attracted free-thinking students and professors, and this was intolerable to people like DeSantis. The fact that it was funded by the state made it vulnerable to political interference.

DeSantis decided that New College’s inclusion of gender studies and its welcoming of LGBT students was, in fact, a pretext for indoctrinating students into a Communist, socialist, anti-American way of thinking.

New College was woke, and the governor had to take control. He ousted the president and the board of trustees and replaced them with rightwing allies and political buddies. The new president of New College had no experience in higher education but had been Republican Speaker of the House in Florida.

One new board member, Chris Rufo, was an anti-woke crusader who wanted to turn New College into a model for how to take control of progressive colleges and turn them into rightwing colleges.

It’s a harrowing story. Set aside some time and watch it. The best part might be the new Dean at comedy night telling a story about exposing himself to a 7-year-old girl. He thought it was funny.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, DeSantis, Education Reform, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Fraud, Higher Education

Watch the Removal of Trump’s Name from the Kennedy Center, Live!

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2026 //
5

MS NOW is live-streaming the removal of Trump’s name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Right now.

Categories Art, Ethics, History, Trump

Federal Judge Rejects Request to Block Removal of Trump Name from Kennedy Center

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2026 //
2

Federal Judge Christopher Cooper turned down a request by the current administration of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to delay his previous order to remove Trump’s name from the building and all other signage.

Soon after his inauguration, Trump replaced the bipartisan board of the Kennedy Center with his allies, who promptly selected Trump as chairman of the board. The only non-Trump Democrat appointee who remained was ex-officio member Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio). The other board members tried to prevent her from participating in votes, but she persisted and filed the lawsuit to take Trump’s name down.

Trump has nearly destroyed the Kennedy Center since he took control. He replaced key administrators with his lackeys. The shake-up alienated audiences and performers. Artists canceled their performances, and ticket sales plummeted.

The board addressed the crisis by deciding to close the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations, possibly total demolition. The federal judge blocked that decision.

The dilemma now is that the Kennedy Center sits mostly empty now, with nothing lined up for the next season, when the board expected that the Center would be closed for renovation.

The Washington Post reported:

A federal judge Friday denied the Kennedy Center’s last-ditch motion to delay removing President Donald Trump’s name from the performing arts venue, as crews erected scaffolding next to the building less than 12 hours before the court-ordered deadline to do so.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the Kennedy Center’s lawyers failed to demonstrate they were likely to win their appeal or that the center would suffer “irreparable harm” if Trump’s name were removed….

In February 2025, Trump purged the center’s board of trustees and replaced them with political allies who then elected him board chair. In December, those loyalists voted to rename the venue, and a day later, crews added Trump’s name to the exterior.

Trump claimed that the board’s vote to do so was a surprise, but he had joked about naming the center after himself for months. Within hours his name was on the website, and the next morning the building’s sign read: “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Justice Department lawyers representing Trump later acknowledged that, given the speed with which the signage was installed, it had been “prepared and/or purchased prior to the Board’s vote the day before.”

Categories Art, Disruption, Ethics, Trump

I Want an Exemption from All IRS Audits, Just Like Trump! You Too!

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2026 //
2

No President in our history has ever sued the federal government that he leads. But Donald Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion because an IRS contractor released his tax returns during his first term in office. The public and the media learned that in some years, he paid no taxes and in one year, his tax payment was a total of $750.

He was insulted and “damaged” by the leak of his tax returns, but every other president since Richard Nixon in 1973 has released his tax returns (Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, released a summary of his returns).

Right before the case went to trial, Trump and Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. Attorney General, reached a deal and withdrew the lawsuit. Even before the trial got started, Federal Judge Kathlyn Williams, who would hear the case, wondered whether there were any real adversaries or was Trump suing himself.

Although other presidents released their tax returns to show they had no conflicts of interest, Trump broke this tradition. During his first term in office, he repeatedly said that he would release his returns when the IRS finished auditing them. A decade later, his taxes were never released. This must be the longest audit in history. By now, the public understands that he will never release his tax returns.

The deal was that Trump would “settle” for the establishment of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to pay to people who claimed to have been wrongly prosecuted by the Justice Department. Trump would chair the board of the fund and have the power to remove other board members. In short, Trump would control a slush fund for his allies, not only the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, but other friends such Mike Lindell (the My Pillow Guy), Roger Stone, John Eastman, Rudy Guiliani, and others who joined Trump in claiming that the 2020 was “rigged.” Even rioters who had struck and injured police officers would be eligible.

In a separate agreement, Blanche signed a document declaring that the IRS would not audit Trump nor members of his family nor his companies. Presently, Trump owes the IRS over $100 million because of a disputed deduction. That debt would go away. What was unclear in this agreement was whether this audit exemption applied not only to the past and present but also the future.

The uproar against this deal was bipartisan. Republican members of Congress spoke out against the slush fund. During the upcoming election, they could not defend federal payouts to insurrectionists, especially those who attacked law officers.

At hearings, Todd Blanche said the slush fund was dead (insurrectionists can still sue the Justice Department and win compensation). Trump has never said so.

But one part of the deal was left intact: the agreement that Trump and family would not be audited by the IRS.

This deal outrages me. Why should the Trump family and their business ventures be shielded from tax audits? Why not me? Why not you? Why not everyone who pays taxes?

“Maybe he doesn’t want the American people … to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes…”

Trump has a long and well-documented history of tax avoidance.

In the first presidential debate of 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Trump–at Hofstra University on September 16, 2026–Clinton said:

Trump immediately replied:

“That makes me smart.”  

He added that if he had paid more taxes, the money would have been “squandered” by the government.

I remember thinking when he said that, “If everyone dodged their taxes or used every loophole, how would the U.S. fund its military or pay for Medicare or function in any way?”

This is not a man who should be exempt from IRS audits, nor should Eric, Don Jr. or the rest of the rapacious family and their corporate entities.

When Todd Blanche testified to Congress in defense of the agreement to protect the Trump family from IRS audits, Democrats expressed outrage:

Senator Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon said:

“It’s the ultimate case of an ultrawealthy individual living under one set of rules while everybody else lives under another,” Wyden said, adding about Trump: “I take it as an admission of his own guilt when it comes to tax cheating.”

Ranking Member Sen. Ron Wyden speaks during a hearing with Internal Revenue Service Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano on April 15, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Rep. Ron Wyden (D), Oregon

Bessent “owes the committee an explanation of what the Treasury knows about the dirty settlement,” noting the Treasury Department’s role as both “defendant and a negotiator” in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.

“This is an abuse of the IRS that goes way beyond anything that I have any familiarity with…

“Trump has set the new high water mark for public corruption… everybody in 🇺🇸 is subject to IRS audit except the Trumps. I take it as an admission of his own guilt when it comes to tax cheating. Trumps have stuffed every dollar they can into their pockets.”

A tweet: Why does a president need immunity from committing TAX FRAUD unless he is and has been committing tax fraud?

I hope that someone is planning to take legal action. This deal is unethical, dishonest, and just plain wrong.

But lawyer Elie Honig wrote that Trump is likely to keep his audit exemption because no one is injured by his deal and no one has standing to sue.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Trump

Mike Miles Is Ruining Some of Houston’s Best Schools

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2026 //
7

Texas State Commissioner Mike Morath took control of the Houston Independent School District in 2023. Morath fired the respected superintendent, replaced the elected board with an appointed board, and named Mike Miles as the new superintendent on June 1, 2023.

Miles had already served in a similar role in Dallas, where his top-down style alienated teachers and drove many of them to quit. Morath, a computer software guy, served on the school board in Dallas. Otherwise, he has no education experience. Gina Hinojosa, who is running for Governor against Greg Abbot, has said the first thing she will do if elected is to fire Morath.

Miles’ tenure in Houston has been controversial. He imposed a lock-step, scripted curriculum. He has fired large numbers of respected principals, and many teachers have quit. But test scores are up!

This column by Lisa Falkenberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning senior columnist for The Houston Chronicle, provides a different perspective on Miles in this article.

She writes:

Stuck in traffic one morning in October, I tried to make small talk with my 13-year-old daughter in the back seat.

“What are you reading these days?” I asked.  

“Nothing,” she said.

Nothing.

I felt a thud in my soul.

This was the same big-eyed girl, the same consummate straight-A student who, just a few years earlier, had to have her nose physically dislodged from a book several times a day so the family could reacquaint ourselves with her face.

In elementary school during the pandemic, she finished “Little Women” in two days. If you had asked her if she loved reading, she might have responded similarly to Scout Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird”: “I never loved to read. One does not love to breathe.”

“You’re not reading anything?” I prodded the middle-schooler. “Not even in English class?”

She paused, giving me a look that said I should know better.

“Mom,” she said. “I don’t even have an English teacher.”

Ah, yes. I had forgotten.

For months, I had written about other schools within Houston ISD, scrutinizing superintendent Mike Miles’ reforms in the state’s takeover, his closure of libraries and sidelining of storybooks, all the while harboring some relief that my own three kids’ campuses had been somewhat insulated from the changes.  

Until this year, that is, when the district’s instability, fluctuating expectations and teacher exodus hurt my kid, too.

Some like to pretend that Miles’ move-fast-and-break-things approach is only affecting students at the poorest-performing schools for whom any change must be better than what they had. That’s not true. The Houston Chronicle has reported that aspects of Miles’ controversial curriculum or instructional model have seeped into virtually all of HISD’s 274 campuses.

That includes some of the highest-performing schools that never needed academic rehabilitation in the first place. These are schools for which families sweat lottery admissions to gain entry, and some even buy houses or rent apartments just to be zoned to them.

My middle child attends one of these, an “A”-rated Vanguard campus for advanced students that we entered through a lottery. When I tell people what’s happening there, some don’t believe me. I can’t blame them. Miles’ effect on HISD’s best schools isn’t what grabs headlines.

Still, here’s a glimpse of what we’ve seen. I’m not naming the school because my goal isn’t to have this column tied permanently to the campus name in Google searches. It’s to open eyes. 

 A week or two before that conversation with my daughter in the car, she told me she feared her English teacher would quit because district observers were prodding him about his lackluster use of whiteboards and response cards — key tools in Miles’ New Education System.

The observers even handed out their own worksheet packets, she said, as the teacher stood by and watched. By October 24, an administrator informed parents that the teacher had submitted his resignation. 

I couldn’t understand why the district was meddling with a good school that supposedly had autonomy. Miles has argued that even some top schools need NES methods because achievement gaps persist. That’s apparently not the case at my daughter’s school, which earned high marks in achievement, progress and closing gaps.

Miles’ methods — top-down management, strictly controlled curriculum, frenetic pace and high-stakes quizzes — appear to have led to some testing gains in schools where students were severely behind. HISD has gone from 56 “F” campuses to zero. That does seem like progress. 

But Miles’ charter-like approach is less effective with advanced students, such as those attending Vanguard or International Baccalaureate programs known for rigorous, often individualized and project-based curriculum that go far beyond worksheet packets.  

Miles’ strict protocols have driven away thousands of teachers at all levels of talent and tenure. In the 2024-25 school year, one in three teachers didn’t return, nearly double the state’s rate. This school year alone, more than 30 of the 73 teachers at my daughter’s school have left, double the annual average of the first two years of the takeover, according to Chronicle reporting and district records I obtained through a public information request. 

Miles argues that high teacher turnover isn’t a problem. He says HISD retains around 90% of exemplary teachers. But most teachers we lost at “A” schools were clearly doing something right. The problem is that Miles defines “exemplary” in part by obedience to his program.

Our loss is someone else’s gain. When my daughter told me in tears that her cherished cheerleading sponsor was leaving to teach science somewhere else, I hugged her and asked if she knew where the teacher was going.

“St. John’s,” she told me. [St. John’s is an elite private school.]

Yes, St. John’s School in River Oaks, one of the most prestigious private high schools in the nation.

In some ways, higher-performing HISD campuses are more vulnerable to the instability caused by high turnover. Unlike Miles’ NES campuses, they don’t have a “teacher’s apprentice” ready to take over if a teacher quits.

When my daughter’s English teacher left, the class was led for weeks by a string of substitutes who mainly assigned worksheet packets — sometimes ones they’d already completed.

“I don’t mind,” my daughter told me at one point. “We’re not learning anything anyway. It’s English. You just pick the longest, best answer.”

When I was her age, growing up in Seguin, Texas, I was holding my breath with Anne Frank in the attic. I was losing the feeling in my toes as a Jack London protagonist struggled to light a fire in sub-freezing temperatures. I don’t remember my eighth-grade English teacher being particularly inspiring, but we read some inspiring literature that stays with me 30 years later.

My daughter’s class was without a teacher for several weeks before the school announced a replacement. The new teacher’s start was delayed by training and illness, emails explained, but finally, she was in the classroom.

After a few days, I asked my daughter if the teacher was actually teaching.

“Yes,” she said. “She reads from the slides.”

Just before Christmas break, I attended a parent meeting that filled the library with worried, frustrated moms and dads complaining of even bigger problems. Several described how their straight-A students were failing algebra because the teacher refused to teach or answer questions about the district slides she was reading. Some parents said they had to hire tutors. It was affecting their kids’ confidence. School administrators assured parents they were bringing over kids from a nearby Vanguard high school to tutor the middle-schoolers in algebra.

My daughter wasn’t affected by that situation. But in English, midyear testing showed she’d dropped 10 points – “low average growth” – putting her back to where she’d been a year earlier.

In late January, yet another note came from administrators: “An Update On Your Child’s English Teacher.”

The new teacher had resigned as well.

The administrator wrote that he was “pleased to share that there will be no gap or delay in the continuity of instruction for your children.” A language arts interventionist had agreed to step in to teach the class. She had been at the school for a while, and our kids were “in good hands.”

“We know that changes and transition can sometimes cause anxiety,” the email noted in closing. “We are here to support your children.”

I didn’t doubt the administrator’s sincerity. I doubted that he had any real power in this top-down regime to fix things.

The new teacher soon assigned a book, an actual book. I started to celebrate. Turns out, my daughter had been assigned the same book the year before. (She tells me she’s read “The Giver” several times, first in elementary school.)

In a parent meeting, I asked the principal why, when whole books are so rarely assigned these days, students were repeating titles. His response was unresponsive.  

“We didn’t read it anyway,” my daughter told me later. “We just read parts of it.”

This middle school, to which I sent both my girls, is still excellent in many ways.

It has some dedicated, truly inspiring teachers who are hanging on. It’s a racially and ethnically diverse campus that offers rigor to smart kids from all kinds of neighborhoods. It molds bright minds into award-winning debaters, dancers and leaders. It still provides some high-quality instruction to kids whose families can’t afford private school or prefer a public school for their child.

For a long time, it was a shining example of what a public school could be.

I thought the point of this takeover was to make more of those. Not fewer.

My daughter’s situation is nowhere near what some special-education students are facing amid district-ordered relocations.

She’ll be OK. She began her own reading regimen this semester and was able to boost her end-of-year English score by several points. I’ve bought a copy of Anne Frank’s diary, which we plan to read this summer before she heads off to high school.

Hopefully, she’ll have another teacher down the road — perhaps a book whisperer like her Harvard Elementary librarian, Ms. Garcia — who can help rekindle her passion for reading.

But let’s not pretend what my daughter got this year in English class was quality.

Let’s not pretend it exemplified the “high-performance culture” that Miles champions, a culture that leaves no time for hallway chatter or holiday parties, no time for the small rituals that make school feel like school, and yet, somehow, tolerates the incessant disruptions of thousands of teacher departures, including from the best schools.

Miles said he could bring up the bottom in HISD without bringing down the top. I wanted to believe him.

I’ve seen something else. 

Lisa Falkenberg is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the Houston Chronicle’s senior columnist. Falkenberg formerly led the Chronicle’s editorial board as vice president and editor of opinion. In May, Falkenberg shared a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for a series on the dangers of stopped trains in Houston. In 2022, she led the editorial board to their first Pulitzer Prize for a series debunking the “Big Lie” of voter fraud and examining Texas’ long history of voter suppression. 

Categories Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Houston, State Takeover, Texas
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