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The 74: More Religious Charter Schools Apply for Public $$

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
4

You knew that when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a request from Oklahoma to approve a religious charter school, there would be more requests in the pipeline. Oklahoma was rejected by a 4-4 vote only because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, because of her friendship with one of the lawyers for the online Catholic school.

Recently, as I reported, Oklahoma returned with a proposal for an online Jewish charter school, a Ben Gamla charter. The entire state of Oklahoma has a population of only 9,000 Jews. They are not requesting a Jewish school, but an entrepreneur connected to a Florida for-profit charter chain is.

Religious charter schools are a big problem for the national charter lobby. They say that charter schools are “public” schools. The advocates for religious charter schools say they are not public schools. They are specifically religious schools.

The 74 reported the latest proposal:

When the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked this year in a case over whether charter schools can be religious, experts said it wouldn’t take long for the question to re-emerge in another lawsuit.

They were right.

In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is on the school’s side. He issued an opinion last month that the state’s ban on religious charter schools likely violates the First Amendment. 

“Tennessee’s public charter schools are not government entities for constitutional purposes and may assert free exercise rights,” he wrote to Rep. Michele Carringer, the Knoxville Republican who requested the opinion. 

The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school. Peter Deutsch, the former Democratic congressman who founded the Ben Gamla charter schools, began working on the idea long before the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School even went to court. The 4-4 tie in May means that an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the school from receiving state funds still stands. 

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation runs a network of Hebrew language charter schools in Florida. Now it wants to open a virtual religious charter school in Oklahoma. (Ben Gamla)

“The prior decision shows that there’s an open question here that needs to be resolved,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm representing the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation. “We hope the court will get it right this time. We hope the federal courts get it right without having to go to the Supreme Court.”

Idaho also confronted the issue earlier this year. The state’s first charter, Brabeion Academy, initially promoted the school as Christian. But it was approved in August as a nonreligious school and will open as such next fall. Related‘A Day to Exhale’: Supreme Court Deadlocks on Religious Charter Schools — For Now

Deutsch, Skrmetti and other supporters of faith-based charter schools base their argument on three earlier Supreme Court rulings allowing public funds to support sectarian schools. They say that excluding religious organizations from operating faith-based charter schools is discrimination and violates the Constitution. But leaders of the charter sector and public school advocates argue that classifying charter schools as private would threaten funding and civil rights protections for 3.7 million students nationwide…

To Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, the debate is settled, for now. In November, he said his office would “oppose any attempts to undermine the rule of law.” 

Americans United, which advocates for maintaining church-state separation, has also issued a warning over the new school. The organization represented parents and advocates in a separate case over the school. 

“Religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO, said in a press release….

The demand for a Jewish charter school would be much higher in Florida, which has an estimated Jewish population of nearly 762,000, compared with about 9,000 in Oklahoma. 

Please open the link to continue reading the article.

Categories Charter Schools, Ethics, For-Profit, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Virtual Charter Schools

Heather Cox Richardson on Pearl Harbor and Its Message for Today

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2025 //
12

Yesterday, December 7, was the 84th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said it was a day that will live in infamy. After the passage of so much time, Heather Cox Richardson sees that Pearl Harbor shines a light on our current political morass.

She writes:

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.

Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America, and on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were Black American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Indigenous Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

President Donald J. Trump and his cronies have abandoned the principles of democracy and openly embraced the hierarchical society the U.S. fought against in World War II. They have fired women, Black Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans from positions in the government and the military and erased them from official histories. They have seized, incarcerated and deported immigrants— or rendered them to third countries to be tortured— and have sent federal agents and federal troops into Democratic-led cities to terrorize the people living there.

They have traded the rule of law for the rule of Trump, weaponizing the Department of Justice against those they perceive as enemies, pardoning loyalists convicted of crimes, and now, executing those they declare are members of drug cartels without evidence, charges, or trials. They have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations.

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

We hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the radical right will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, History

NPE Releases a New Report on Charter Schools and Their Lack of Accountability

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2025 //
5

I was present in the very beginnings of the charter school movement. I advocated on their behalf. I and many others said that charter schools would be better than public schools because they would be more successful (because they would be free of bureaucracy), they would be more accountable (because their charter would be revoked if they weren’t successful), they would “save” the neediest students, and they would save money (because they wouldn’t have all that administrative bloat).

That was the mid-1980s. Now, more than 35 years later, we know that none of those promises were kept. The charter lobby has fought to avoid accountability; charters pay their administrators more than public schools; charters demand the same funding as public schools; the most successful charters avoid the neediest students; and–aside from charters that choose their students with care–charters are not more successful than public schools, and many are far worse. Charters open and close like day lilies.

This week, the National Center of Charter School Accountability, a project of NPE, published Charter School Reckoning: Part II Disillusionment, written by Carol Burris. This is the second part in a three-part comprehensive report on charter schools entitled Charter School Reckoning: Decline, Dissolution, and Cost.

Its central argument is that a once-promising idea—charter schools as laboratories of innovation—has been steadily weakened by state laws that prioritize rapid expansion and less regulation over school quality and necessary oversight. Those policy and legislative shifts have produced predictable results: fraud, mismanagement, profiteering, abrupt closures, and significant charter churn. The report connects the above instances with the weaknesses in state charter laws and regulations that enable both bad practices and criminal activity. 

As part of the investigation, the NPE team scanned news reports and government investigative audits published between September 2023 and September 2025 and identified $858,000,000 in tax dollars lost due to theft, fraud, and/or gross mismanagement.

The report contrasts the original aspirations of the charter movement with today’s reality, shaped in large part by the intense lobbying of powerful corporate charter chains and trade organizations. It also examines areas that have received far too little attention, including the role of authorizers and the structure and accountability of charter-school governing boards.

It concludes with ten recommendations that, taken together, would bring democratic governance to the schools, open schools based on need and community input, and restore the founding vision of charter schools as nimble, community-driven, teacher-led laboratories grounded in equity and public purpose.

This new report can be found here.

Part I of Charter Reckoning: Decline can be found here.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Innovation

Trump Celebrates Himself: Me! Me!

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2025 //
2

When Trump allowed his buddy Elon Musk to run a so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency, Musk sent his mentees into every department with a license to terrorize civil servants and destroy their work. Agencies were literally ransacked, employees with deep experience were peremptorily fired by young men in their late teens and early 20s. Foreign aid programs were shuttered, and their employees given orders to return home.

The only certain result of the DOGE incursion was that the kids vacuumed up the personal data of every person, purpose unknown.

One casualty of DOGE in those early days was the Institute of Peace. The Institute was established by Congress and signed into law by President Reagan in 1984. Its goal was to train peacemakers and be the equivalent of military academies. It had a bipartisan board. It trained thousands of professionals in conflict resolution.

In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order to begin dissolving the IP. He fired most of its Board of Directors. The brazen DOGE pests forced their way into the building and took it over. The IP went to court to fight for survival.

The issue is still in court but Trump realized he had a use for the attractive building that previously housed the IP. He invited representatives of Rwanda and the Congo to come to Washington to accept a peace agreement for their decades-long war. This was intended to add luster to Trump’s ongoing campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize. President Obama got one, and that really bothers Trump, who is obsessively jealous of both Obama and Biden.

Days before the big meeting, workmen attached Trump’s name to two sides of the building. It is now officially the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. The words “Institute of Peace” are chiselled into the stone. The Trump name was attached in large silver letters. When he’s gone, they can easily be removed.

Foreign leaders now understand well that the key to Trump’s heart is his ego. So they compete to give him a gold crown, a solid bar of gold, and whatever extravagant symbols of royalty they can dream up.

FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, awarded its first gold “peace prize” to Trump to compensate for his loss of the Nobel peace prize. Trump said, “This is truly one of the great honors of my life.” The event was held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where Trump fired the entire board, packed the board with his lackeys, and named himself president of the board. He has been thinking of naming the concert hall of the Kennedy Center for Melania. Don’t be surprised if sometime in the next four years, the facility is renamed the Trump Center for the Performing Arts.

And why shouldn’t the Washington Monument be retitled the Trump Monument?

Nothing is too small to be overlooked. Until now, visitors to national parks got free entry on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, both of which are national holidays. However, the Trump administration has removed those two days. The only free day will be the birthday of Donald J. Trump. Will it soon be declared a national holiday?

Republicans have discussed placing his name and face on a coin–nickel, dime, or quarter–but they better act quickly before the 2026 midterm elections.

Governor Gavin Newsom was quick to respond:

Shortly after Trump won the first FIFA Peace Prize (FIFA is the world soccer federation), retail giant Kohl’s bestowed its first Kohl’s Peace Prize on Governor Gavin Newsom! Governor Newsom said he was honored.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Gary Rubinstein Reviews “An Education” with Gusto!

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2025 //
2

Gary Rubinstein is a teacher of mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in NYC and a prominent critic of corporate reform. He started his career as one of the first corps members of Teach for America. After many years inside the reform world, he saw its flaws and became an apostate. Like me. With his superb mathematical skills, he has debunked charter school “miracles,” TFA data, the Tennessee Achievement School District, which did a lot of boasting but failed.

His review is a delight to read.

He writes:

Fifty years after the publication of her first book, ‘The Great School Wars’, author and historian Diane Ravitch has released her long awaited memoirs.  In ‘An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else’ Ravitch takes us through her life from her childhood in Houston through the ups and downs of a long and productive life driven by truth and integrity.

What makes this book a ‘must read’ is that it has the three elements that a great autobiography should.  First, her life story is interesting on an objective level.  Anyone picking up the book and reading over the book jacket will know that Ravtich is someone who achieved fame and notoriety through the unlikely passion of the history of Education in America.  But in this book we learn about the sorrow she had to endure between her great triumphs.  So her story, even if it weren’t so well written, would make a very good book.  A second component of a great autobiography is the author’s ability to reflect on 80 plus years of life and find the pivotal moments that changed the course of her life.  But for an autobiography to be ‘great’ it must be infused and brought to life with excellent precise writing.  As ‘An Education’ has all three aspects, this is a book you are going to want to read and then keep to re-read over the years when you are in need of inspiration.

If you have read any of Ravitch’s education books, you know that she is a master of absorbing decades of events and processing them and creating an insightful, and incredibly efficient, thesis which she develops over the course of a book.  As she explains in this book, she learned her craft while writing as a journalist for The Wellesley News and then for The New Leader magazine.  In all her books she exhibits this efficient technique that would make Strunk and White beam.  But, by design, Ravtich’s books on Education are stripped of emotional language.  Those books educate you through a series of well chosen facts that lead you to understand the implications and big moments without having to spell out every detail.  The big question, which this new book answers with an emphatic ‘Yes’ is whether or not her kind of writing can be used to evoke the joy and the sorrow she experienced through her full 87 years of living.

When I started reading this book, I would bookmark interesting passages that show her talent for memoir.  Eventually I realized that I was bookmarking almost every page.  So after the first 50 of so pages, I had to slow down on the bookmarking.  Here are some of my favorite moments (I will try not to give away too much).

Since Ravitch can write a full tale in the span of five or six lines, there are so many interesting stories in this book.  As a writer she reminds me of one of those painters, I don’t know so much about painting to know what this is called – maybe impressionistic? – who, rather than producing a full photographic quality image, instead just does the minimal with the paint and brush to convey the emotion and ideas.  This is something that is very difficult to do yet she makes it look easy.

A few pages later, Ravitch relays an amusing story about how as a teen she found a pearl in an oyster and ended up in the newspaper for it and also got food poisoning from eating the oyster:  “The next day, after the newspaper appeared with a  photograph of me in short shorts, identified by name, strange men began calling the house, asking for me and saying impudent things.  That went on for days, along with the vomiting.  My mother was not amused.”  This is so efficient, not a word wasted and it does convey the absurdity and the humor with a minimal delivery reminiscent of maybe Bob Newhart.

Here’s one I liked:  “The only Sunday school teacher I remember was a strapping guy who discussed Bible stories and the Jewish religion with us.  He told us that when he was our age he had run away with the circus.”  Ah, see how great this is?  In the first sentence she sets up the scene.  And then in just a few words tells us the perfect thing to understand this guy.  No more is needed and no more is said.

Throughout the book, Ravitch takes stories and moments that could easily fill several pages and finds a way to convey them in a few words.  For the reader, this has the effect of injecting all the humor and sometimes the sorrow of these moments directly into our brains without it having to be processed and translated in our minds.

Though these two examples are fun and convey the innocence of childhood, Ravitch is similarly terse in her telling of some of the deepest tragic moments of her life.  When these happen in the book, the descriptions are so efficiently written that, like sometimes when bad things happen in life unexpectedly, we find ourselves pausing and wondering if that really just happened.  The matter of fact telling of memorable moments of life, both big and small, happy and tragic, has a powerful effect on the reader.

The book really gets rolling when Ravitch enters college in 1956 at Wellesley.  In one sense she is a fish out of water and then she eventually completely at home with the lifelong friends she made there.  This was a really fun chapter to read as Ravitch has the first of her many brushes with fame, like her friend Maddy – eventually Madeleine Albright.  Just as always, Ravitch perfectly sets up the matter of fact description of her friend’s background and then, in an instant it is revealed who she became known as. The Madeleine Albright story was less than one page long.

One of my favorite parts was the description about a satirical musical Ravitch and her friends wrote for the Wellesley Junior Show.  It was hilarious.  I kind of want to see the full script but her description of it, as all her descriptions, gave us just enough that we feel like we saw the whole show but forgot some of the missing details.

After college, Ravitch starts domestic life but isn’t quite content.  She then goes on a lifelong quest for love and for purpose.  As she goes through different eras in her life, she meets a new cast of colorful characters, some famous, some not, but always relevant to her story.

In this book we learn how she went from being the wife of an influential New York City figure to the influential Dr. Ravitch the Education guru of this country.  As she rises in the ranks, she finds herself in the company of so many famous people — even several presidents, yet she conveys in her telling of these encounters that, to her, it wasn’t such a big deal.  They are all just people.  Anyone who has gotten the chance to meet her in person and see her interact with so many people who are not famous will see that she treats non famous people like they are special and is always asking them questions rather than talking about herself.

One of the funniest anecdotes in the book is when she inadvertently got Isaac Asimov angry with her over small talk related to word processors.  Again, this is only a few lines, but another interesting adventure in Ravitch’s full life that put her often in the room with all kinds of famous people.

While married to her husband, Diane unexpectedly meets her soulmate who happens to be a woman. In the chapter about the genesis and growth of her relationship, they have now been together for almost 40 years, she is able to convey what it means to finally experience the joy of true love.

In the last chapters of the book we learn about the Washington years in the Department of Education and how that came about and what she tried to accomplish there.  We also learn about what it took to renounce much of her work and to follow the evidence into a more evolved system of beliefs about what can improve education in this country.  She lost a lot of friends and titles in the process but she kept her personal integrity and commitment to the truth.

Throughout the book, the theme is that Ravitch is never just one thing or the other.  Is she a education conservative or an education liberal?  Is she straight or gay?  Is she a southerner or a north easterner?  Is she an introvert or an extrovert?  Is she a socialite or a homebody?  And throughout her life she is sometimes one and sometimes the other.  She is someone who defies categorization.  And though in the subtitle she says she ‘changed her mind about schools and almost everything else’ she never changed her core belief that you don’t just stay in the same place just because you are comfortable there.

And like with her, this book is a lot of different things.  On one level it is an amusing and interesting read about someone whose choices led her on an unlikely adventure ending with her being, in some circles, a huge celebrity.  But it is also an inspirational tale of how having values and staying true to them can help you overcome some of the unfortunate obstacles you have to deal with in life.  And though I doubt it was intended to accomplish something else, I think that for many readers they will want to write down their own memoirs after reading this.  Ravitch makes it look so easy to analyze your life, find the key moments in it and write some succinct prose – though of course it isn’t so easy but still a worthwhile task.

After finishing this book, I had an experience that only a few people were also able to have.  In the acknowledgements in the ‘friends’ section, among sixteen other names, there was my own.  I got a chill seeing this, never expecting it.  But this made me think something else, also a lesson, though maybe unintended from this great book.  This book reminds us of the importance of relationships.  Everyone you know has a story to tell.  Some people’s lives may not have the highs and lows of Diane Ravitch’s but for each person, their joys and sorrows are meaningful to them.  And even if they don’t have the capability to write the way Ravitch can, if they could, you might find yourselves in the acknowledgement page for that friend or family member.  So enjoy the relationships you have while you can and remember that you are an important person in many people’s lives.

So pick up a copy today and take a ride through the ups and downs of a well lived life.  Though she has made a career of writing about education and teaching, through this book she educates and teaches us that if you keep an open mind and are committed to learning and following the facts, you might end up in a comfortable home a long way from where you started.

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Hoax, Ravitch, Diane

Tom Ultican Reviews My New Book, with Some Personal Reflections

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2025 //
3

Tom Ultican had a successful career in the private sector when he made a decision that changed his life: He became a teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California. After he retired, he became blogging about education. He became one of the most perceptive investigators of the powerful people and dark money behind the organized attacks on public schools.

I am delighted to present his review of my just-published memoir, titled AN EDUCATION: HOW I CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT SCHOOLS AND ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE (Columbia University Press).

I am posting a portion of his review here. I encourage you to open the link and finish his fine commentary.

He wrote:

An Education; How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else, is highly recommended especially for the thousands of us who consider her a friend. Diane is a very generous person with both her time and resources. I first met Diane through her blog in 2014, then in person at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago. It was in this time period that she started posting some of my articles on her blog while simultaneously informing me about who was working to destroy public education. At the time, I did not realize what a privilege this was. Her latest book is an intimate memoir that introduces us to Diane Rose Silverstein of Houston, Texas born July 1, 1938. It tells the story of a Jewish Texan from of large struggling family becoming politically influential and a national treasure.

On a page following the dedication page, she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and devines.”

I knew that Diane had made a big change and reversed herself on test based accountability and other school reform agendas driven by conservatives and neoliberals. However, the courage this change took and the depth of her reversal were profoundly illuminated by reading this book.

Although growing up in a Roosevelt supporting family and being a registered Democrat, she became deeply conservative. Diane served on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham foundation, contributed to the Manhattan Institute and was a member of the Koret Task Force with the likes of Eric Hanushek and E. D. Hirsch Jr. Her best friends personally and politically all supported the ideas she abandoned. By reversing herself, she walked away from professional security and long held personal friendships. It was courageously principled but must have been a personally daunting move.

Me and Diane

The best part of “An Education” for me was Diane’s recounting growing up in Houston and going to a segregated public school. Her experience was just so relatable. She liked all the music my oldest sister liked. Cheating was rampant in her school just like mine and like her; I let my classmates copy my work. My rural Idaho school was kind of segregated but that was because only white people and a few Mexican families lived in the community. The Mexican kids were very popular in our school. I never met a Black person until I was a senior in high school and had only seen a few through a car window when vacationing in Kansas City. It was wonderful to find some commonalities.

I had studied engineering, worked in Silicon Valley and pretty much ignored education. But I did hear from Diane and her friends about what a failure public education had become. By 1999, I became tired of hearing about people becoming rich off their stock options, working on the next greatest hard drive or dealing with the atrocious San Jose traffic. I decided to return to San Diego and do something to help public education by enlisting in a master of education program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

The UCSD program was oriented toward constructivist education which I really liked. I read books by Alfie Kohn and papers by Lisa Delpit and was ready to revolutionize public education. Then I got to my first job at Bell Jr. High School and discovered that the teachers there were well informed pros with lots of experience. By comparison, I was not nearly as competent as most of them.

It was then that I started to see that I had been bamboozled about how bad public schools were and started looking for like minded people. Two books, David Berliner’s and Eugene Glass’s “50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools” and Diane Ravitch’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” were like water for the thirsty. Soon after that, I found Diane’s blog and joined the Network for Public Education (NPE) along with many other public school advocates.

I saw Diane at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. It was an absolutely inspiring event with a keynote by the amazing Yong Zhao. Although we started communicating a little by email, I did not meet Diane personally until NPE 2016 in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was there that the Reverend William Barber gave a truly inspiring speech.

Tom Ultican and Diane Ravitch in Raleigh (by Ultican)

Please open the link and keep reading this excellent review!

Categories Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, History, Network for Public Education, Personal, Ravitch, Diane, Supporting public schools

New Hampshire: Parents Complain that Voucher Program is a Scam

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2025 //
2

Parents in New Hampshire are outraged by the state’s new voucher law. It is siphoning money from public schools, which are attended by 90% of the state’s students, and 95% of those with disabilities. When the state legislature debated vouchers, parents overwhelmingly opposed them. But the legislature ignored the public and parent opposition and approved a modest voucher plan. The original plan was based on the claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing schools,”

That plan has since expanded dramatically; no longer modest, it now supplies vouchers to any student, regardless of family income. Currently, 80% of the vouchers are claimed by kids who never attended public schools. Now that the legislature has lifted income limits for those who seek vouchers, the program has become a subsidy for families that can afford to pay the tuition.

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH has the story:

CONCORD — Public education advocates said the state’s universal voucher program is putting students, taxpayers and education professionals at risk as more and more taxpayer money is diverted to the unaccountable program.

At a press conference celebrating American Education Week, Megan Tuttle, president NEA — NH, said the program takes money away from public schools as the state now funds two school systems, one public and the other private.

“As we celebrate American Education Week, let’s recommit to strengthening, not destabilizing public schools,” Tuttle said. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Our students deserve fully funded public schools, not policies that erode them. And our state’s future depends on getting this right.”

She noted private schools do not have to follow the same guidelines as public schools who have to accept all children no matter how expensive their education or their educational needs.

Nor are private schools bound by federal civil rights provisions, she said, such as the Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

“The only choice in a voucher system,” Tuttle said, “is that private and religious schools get to pick their students, not the other way around.”

The state voucher program, Education Freedom Account, was initially sold as providing opportunities to low-income parents to find the best educational environment for their students if they do not do well in the public school environment.

Initially the program was limited to students whose parents earned 300 percent of the federal poverty level or less, but earlier this year the program was opened to any parent whose child is eligible to attend public school in the state regardless of earnings.

The change doubled the number of students in the program from 5,204 last school year to 10,510 this school year and the cost increased from $28 million to $52 million this year to date.

While the program was sold as an alternative to public education, more than 80 percent of the students to date were in religious or private schools, or homeschooled when they joined the EFA program as is the case in other states with universal vouchers.

Public schools in New Hampshire educate 90 percent of the state’s students and 95 percent of those with disabilities.

Rep. Hope Damon, D-Croydon, who is the deputy ranking member of the House Education Funding Committee, said her party is fighting every day to ensure every child regardless of income or zip code has access to a high quality education, while the governor and Republican lawmakers have doubled down on their reckless school voucher scheme.

“A few years ago, we were promised that vouchers, these so-called EFAs, would serve families in need,” Damon said,  “but it’s clear that was just a ploy for Republican lawmakers in Concord to open up the floodgates and push through an over-budget, universal school voucher program.” 

Now some of the wealthiest families receive taxpayer-funded handouts that pay for private schools, she said, while just 19 percent of the students in the EFA program are from low-income families.

“Our most vulnerable families are being left behind,” Damon said. “Our public schools are already punching above their weight, scoring very well nationally despite extremely limited resources from the state. Vouchers just make their job harder.”

She said the program strains taxpayer dollars and increases property taxes, while it is already $12.3 million over budget at a time when the Republican controlled legislature voted to significantly cut funding for University of New Hampshire.

“This universal voucher scheme is expensive. It flies in the face of fiscal responsibility,” she said. “There’s very little accountability and oversight on how vouchers are used.”

New Hampshire’s future depends on its students having a high quality public education, she said.

Republicans have long argued parents should decide how best to educate their children and are in the best position to determine whether their child is receiving an adequate education.

Longtime school choice advocate, former Rep. Glenn Cordelli, R-Tuftonboro, argued repeatedly that if parents do not like the education their child receives in one EFA educational setting, they are free to move their child to a new one.

“Education freedom is not theory. It is accountability that begins at the kitchen table, where a mother or father can say this is not working and choose what does,” Cordelli said after he received an award earlier this year from the Children’s Fund of NH, the organization that administers the program for the state. 

During the press conference David Trumble of Weare, a business owner, educator and former State Senate candidate, said the state has to invest more in its students just as a business has to invest to grow. 

Republicans focus their efforts on diverting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund private school education, he said, expanding the voucher program to cover wealthy families who can use these funds to pay for tuition or skiing lessons.

“The Republican voucher scheme is dangerous because public schools continue to go underfunded and students lose out on the resources they need to ensure long-term success,” Trumble said. “The state is long overdue in living up to its constitutional mandate to fund the public schools.”
He noted the current situation in Claremont where the school district faces a $5 million deficit building up over the past three school years due to fiscal mismanagement at the Supervisory Administrative Unit level.

He said the city would probably not be in this situation if the state had been meeting its constitutional obligation to fund public education.

Earlier this week, the Senate Education Committee approved a revolving loan program for the city to meet its cash flow needs this school year and into the future by allowing early borrowing from the state adequacy grants it will receive in the future.

That plan included a provision allowing the parents of students to apply for EFA grants mid year to remove their children from the school district, due to the uncertainty.

The plan also requires the city to place a school budget cap warrant article on its next annual school district meeting, both pet projects of GOP lawmakers.

“Claremont’s the canary in the coal mine,” Damon said. “It is not the only district that is in significant financial distress, but attaching even more unlimited vouchers to that bill is a further way to defund public schools. It’s a very, I think, inappropriate attachment.”

When asked what lawmakers could do to bring more transparency, accountability and fiscal constraints to the program, Damon said “the Free State-influenced Republican Party does not want vouchers to be diminished at all, but we’re not going to stop trying.”

Tuttle suggested voters make a change in the composition of the legislature. 

“We know the majority of voters in New Hampshire, they believe public funds belong in public schools,” Tuttle said. “And looking ahead to 2026, we need to be electing leaders in the state of New Hampshire who are going to . . . put in some new policies.” 

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

Happy Thanksgiving! Thoughts for 2025, Now

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2025 //
25

Let us be thankful for the good things in our lives. Our families and friends. Health. Food. The blessings of freedom and democracy, which we must defend every day.

Let us think about those who do not enjoy the blessings of family, friends, good health, shelter, and food.

Do what you can to support those less fortunate than yourself. Lend a helping hand at a local community center or church or synagogue or mosque. Support groups that are helping immigrant families who are living in terror, fearful of being kidnapped by ICE.

Remember that it is not normal to have armed military patrolling the streets of our cities. It is not normal to see masked men pepper spraying fellow citizens in the streets. It is not normal to see armed men chasing people on farms, where they are picking the fruits and vegetables on our Thanksgiving table, tackling them, and whisking them away to unknown detention centers.

We don’t have a crisis of too many immigrants. We have a crisis of a do-nothing Congress that has been unable to pass legislation creating a process for honest, hard-working immigrants to have a legal path to citizenship.

We have a crisis of bigotry, of white nationalists who think they can restore a world of white supremacy that has disappeared. Nope, won’t happen. Twenty percent of our population is Hispanic. About 57-58% is Caucasian. Among children 17 and younger, about 49-50% is Caucasian.

Like it or not, our society is diverse. Banning the word “diversity” doesn’t change reality.

We must, all of us, practice kindness. Gratitude. Generosity of spirit.

This Thanksgiving is a good time to start.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Freedom, Immigration, Justice, Love, Puerto Rico, Racism

The Trump-Putin “Peace Plan” Spells Surrender for Ukraine

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2025 //
13

Make no mistake. Trump is Putin’s ally. Putting Trump in charge of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine is akin to putting the fox in charge of guarding the henhouse. On more than one occasion, Trump has sent his emissaries to devise a “peace plan” without asking Ukraine or the representatives of Europe to participate in the discussions.

Trump campaigned by claiming that he could end the war in a single day. All that was required would be a phone call to his good friend Putin.

That hasn’t happened, but Trump continues to threaten to cut off all aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky capitulates to Putin’s demands. These demands would give Putin everything he wants.

Max Boot spelled out the situation in The Washington Post:

Russia’s barbaric assault on Ukraine continues: A single Russian drone and missile strike on an apartment block in western Ukraine last week killed at least 31 civilians. Meanwhile, Russia is ramping up its campaign of sabotage in Europe: Polish authorities blamed the Kremlin for a Nov. 15 explosion on a rail line used to transport supplies to Ukraine. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said recently, Europe “is not at war” but it is also “no longer at peace” with Russia.

The growing threat from Vladimir Putin’s despotic, expansionist regime calls for Churchillian resolution, unity and strength on the part of the transatlantic alliance. Instead, Neville Chamberlain-style irresolution and confusion reigns on both sides of the Atlantic. The situation is far more concerning in the United States than in Europe, with the Trump administration having seemingly endorsed, at least for now, a “peace plan” that would give Russia a victory at the negotiating table that it hasn’t earned on the battlefield.

The Europeans have stepped up, providing weapons and funding to Ukraine as U.S. support has dried up. The European Union has a plan to do even more by sending Kyiv some $200 billionin frozen Russian assets as a “loan” that would likely never be repaid. Obviously, given the current corruption scandal in Kyiv, safeguards on the disbursement of the money would be needed. But this is a vital — indeed, irreplaceable — source of funding that can keep Ukraine afloat for years. Yet tiny Belgium, where most of the funds are frozen, is wringing its hands and holding up the plan. There is no Plan B: Europe has to send the Russian funds or else Ukraine will run out of money. So why dither and delay?

As for the peace plan floated by the White House last week: The 28-point plan amounts to a holiday wish list from the Kremlin. It would require Ukraine to cede the entire Donbas region — even the parts that Russian troops have been unable to conquer — and to cut the size of its armed forces by roughly a third. Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO, and NATO would not be allowed to dispatch peacekeeping troops to Ukraine. Ukraine would hold elections within 100 days and “all Nazi ideology” would be “prohibited”; this is Kremlin code for toppling the Zelensky government. Russia isn’t being asked to limit the size of its armed forces or to hold elections; all the demands are on Ukraine.

What does Ukraine get in return? A separate draft agreement specifies that in the event of renewed Russian aggression, the United States could respond with “armed force, intelligence and logistical assistance, economic and diplomatic actions.” But the U.S. wouldn’t be compelled to do anything. Ukraine would be left to rely on a worthless Russian pledge of “nonaggression” — something it already promised in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

This isn’t a peace plan. It’s a blueprint for Ukraine’s capitulation. If implemented, it would turn this pro-Western, democratic nation, which has been courageously resisting Russian aggression since 2014, into a Kremlin colony….

In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman was scathing in his view of the Trump-Putin “peace plan.”

He predicted that Trump would not get the Nobel Peace Prize, which he covets, but would certainly win the ““Neville Chamberlain Peace Prize” — awarded by history to the leader of the country that most flagrantly sells out its allies and its values to an aggressive dictator.”

He wrote:

This prize richly deserves to be shared by Trump’s many “secretaries of state” — Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio and Dan Driscoll — who together negotiated the surrender of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s demands without consulting Ukraine or our European allies in advance — and then told Ukraine it had to accept the plan by Thanksgiving…

If Ukraine is, indeed, forced to surrender to the specific terms of this “deal” by then, Thanksgiving will no longer be an American holiday. It will become a Russian holiday. It will become a day of thanks that victory in Putin’s savage and misbegotten war against Ukraine’s people, which has been an utter failure — morally, militarily, diplomatically and economically — was delivered to Russia not by the superiority of its arms or the virtue of its claims, but by an American administration…

He was the British prime minister who advocated the policy of appeasement, which aimed to avoid war with Adolf Hitler’s Germany by giving in to his demands. This was concretized in the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain, along with others in Europe, allowed Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain boasted it would secure “peace for our time.” A year later, Poland was invaded, starting World War II and leading to Chamberlain’s resignation — and his everlasting shame.

To all the gentlemen who delivered this turkey to Moscow, I can offer only one piece of advice: Be under no illusions. Neither Fox News nor the White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt will be writing the history of this deal. If you force it upon Ukraine as it is, every one of your names will live in infamy alongside that of Chamberlain, who is remembered today for only one thing:

This Trump plan, if implemented, will do the modern equivalent. By rewarding Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine based on his obsession with making it part of Mother Russia, the U.S. will be putting the whole European Union under Putin’s thumb. Trump’s message to our allies will be clear: Don’t provoke Putin, because as long as I am commander in chief, the United States will pay no price and we will bear no burden in the defense of your freedom.

Which is why, if this plan is forced on Ukraine as is, we will need to add a new verb to the diplomatic lexicon: “Trumped” — to be sold out by an American president, for reasons none of his citizens understand (but surely there are reasons). And history will never forget the men who did it — Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, Dan Driscoll — for their shame will be everlasting.

As a Wall Street Journal editorial on Friday put it: “Mr. Trump may figure he can finally wash his hands of Ukraine if Europe and Ukraine reject his offer. He’s clearly sick of dealing with the war. But appeasing Mr. Putin would haunt the rest of his presidency. If Mr. Trump thinks American voters hate war, wait until he learns how much they hate dishonor. … A bad deal in Ukraine would broadcast to U.S. enemies that they can seize what they want with force or nuclear blackmail or by pressing on until America loses interest.”

Mind you, I am not at all against a negotiated solution. Indeed, from the beginning of this war I have made the point that it will end only with a “dirty deal.” But it cannot be a filthy deal, and the Trump plan is what history will call a filthy deal.

Even before you get to the key details, think of how absurd it is for Trump to strike a deal with Putin and not even include Ukraine and our European allies in the negotiations until they were virtually done. Trump then declared it must be accepted by Thursday, as if Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has a parliament that he needs to win acceptance from, could possibly do so by then, even if he wanted to.

As my Times colleague David Sanger observed in his analysis of the plan’s content: “Many of the 28 points in the proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan offered by the White House read like they had been drafted in the Kremlin. They reflect almost all Mr. Putin’s maximalist demands.”

Ukraine would have to formally give Russia all the territory it has declared for itself in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The United States would recognize that as Russian territory. No NATO forces could be based inside Ukraine to ensure that Russia could never invade again. The Ukrainian military would be capped at 600,000 troops, a 25 percent cut from current levels, and it would be barred from possessing long-range weapons that could reach Russia. Kyiv would receive vague security guarantees from the U.S. against a Russian re-invasion (but who in Ukraine, or Moscow, would trust them coming from Trump?).

Under the Trump plan, $100 billion in frozen Russian assets would be put toward U.S.-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine, and the U.S. would then receive 50 percent of the profits from that investment. (Yes, we are demanding half of the profits generated by a fund to rebuild a ravaged nation.)

Trump, facing blowback from allies, Congress and Ukraine, said Saturday that this was not his “final offer” but added, if Zelensky refuses to accept the terms, “then he can continue to fight his little heart out.” As always with Trump, he is all over the place — and as always, ready to stick it to Zelensky, the guy fighting for his country’s freedom, and never to Putin, the guy trying to take Ukraine’s freedom away.

What would an acceptable dirty deal look like?

It would freeze the forces in place, but never formally cede any seized Ukrainian territory. It would insist that European security forces, backed by U.S. logistics, be stationed along the cease-fire line as a symbolic tripwire against any Russian re-invasion. It would require Russia to pay a significant amount of money to cover all the carnage it has inflicted on Ukraine — and keep Moscow isolated and under sanctions until it does — and include a commitment by the European Union to admit Ukraine as a member as soon as it is ready, without Russian interference.

This last point is vital. It is so the Russian people would have to forever look at their Ukrainian Slavic brothers and sisters in the thriving European Union, while they are stuck in Putin’s kleptocracy. That contrast is Putin’s best punishment for this war and the thing that would cause him the most trouble after it is over.

This would be a dirty deal that history would praise Trump for — getting the best out of a less than perfect hand, by using U.S. leverage on both sides, as he did in Gaza.

But just using U.S. leverage on Ukraine is a filthy deal — folding our imperfect hand to a Russian leader who is playing a terrible one.

There is a term for that in poker: sucker.

James Traub wrote anoter excellent analysis of Trump’s “peace plan.” It would be worth your while to open the link and read in full.

He concludes:

My first reaction on reading the Trump Administration’s 28-point peace plan for Ukraine was shame. That’s a different emotion from the anger I feel when Trump does something deplorable at home, like use the Justice Department to terrorize his enemies. When he abandons people elsewhere I feel ashamed of my country before the world.

This latest exercise in coercive diplomacy does not merely give the Russians what they want and deprive the Ukrainians of what they need. What is extra specially Trumpian, and thus shameful, about the proposal is that its second beneficiary is the United States. Point 10 guarantees the United States “compensation” for the completely unspecified security guarantees alluded to in Point 5. From whom? The plan doesn’t say, but presumably the answer is Ukraine, from which Trump demanded a preposterous $500 billion earlier this year in exchange for ongoing support. So we will profiteer off Ukraine’s subjection….

If the United States walks away, we will have vindicated Putin’s belief that in the end nothing matters except force. We will leave Europe to live in fear of an emboldened Russia. We will have washed our hands of a democratic and patriotic nation.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Trump

Trump Honors Crown Prince Bonesaw

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2025 //
3

We have seen many repulsive sights in the Oval Office since Trump was sworn in last January. The covering of the room in fake gold ornaments is an abomination. Trump’s rude treatment of Zelensky was an outrage.

But the top abomination, at this moment, was his loving embrace of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who should be reviled for his brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

What next? A Presidential Medal of Honor for Putin?

Trump has many personal commercial ties to Saudi Arabia. Cynically speaking, Trump is building alliances by making personal deals with potentates who increase his family wealth. Surely, we cannot forget that MBS arranged to give Son-in-law Jared Kushner $2 billion after Trump left office in 2021. Kushner had no experience in financial investing. His background was real estate. Now, Trump’s real estate buddies Steve Witkoff and Howard Lutnick, are Trump’s envoys to Russia, the Middle East, and other hotspots. They too (and their children) are taking in millions and billions, because they are in “the room where it happens.”

The New York Times wrote recently about how Lutnick’s sons are making lucrative deals , which are helped by the fact that their father is Secretary of Commerce. “But never in modern U.S. history has the office intersected so broadly and deeply with the financial interests of the commerce secretary’s own family, according to interviews with ethics lawyers and historians…”

The New York Times also chronicled the ways that billionaire Steve Witkoff’s sons are cashing in with investments in the Middle East and in cryptocurrency, building on their father’s connection to Trump.

This is not what the Founders intended.

But maybe those of us who worry about abstract ideas like ethics and laws are in the wrong. Maybe the best way to make a deal with the devil is to get in bed with him, speak his language, and buy his friendship. That’s Trump’s way. And nobody does it better.

Sabrina Haake writes:

Trump just threw a lavish state party to welcome a Saudi murderer. He defended the murderer’s crime, blamed the victim, and viciously attacked a reporter for asking the question on everyone’s mind: What about Jamal Khashoggi?

Of all the shameful metaphors for the corruption, ignorance, and rot presently infecting the White House, this one wears the Trump crown.

A brutal regime dismembers its critic

Jamal Khashoggi was a US resident and journalist for the Washington Post during its halcyon years, before it fell to corporate interests that now serve Trump.

Khashoggi was also a frequent critic of the Saudi government. He frequently criticized the royal ruling family, not for their lavish lifestyles, but for their suppression of dissent, their refusal to allow free speech among the Saudi people, and their widespread human rights abuses.

On Oct. 2, 2018, Khashoggi was murdered in Istanbul. He had gone to see about a visa for his Turkish fiancée at the Saudi consulate’s office, where he was attacked, stangled, and dismembered.

A recording made by Turkish intelligence agents in the building captured the whole gruesome ordeal: Khashoggi could be heard struggling against Saudi guards of the royal Crown Prince as his killing was recorded, complete with screams, the sounds of strangulation, then quiet, before a bone saw was heard dismembering his body.

US Intelligence knows bin Salman did it

In 2021, US intelligence reports concluded that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka “the Bone Saw Prince,” had personally ordered the operation.

The US Director of National Intelligence supplied reasons supporting that conclusion, including:

· bin Salman’s total control of decision-making in the Saudi Kingdom;

· The direct involvement of bin Salman’s key adviser in the brutal attack, along with members of his personal security team; and

· bin Salman’s stated support for using violence to silence critics of the Saudi government abroad, including Khashoggi.

US intelligence added that, “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”

Despite these publicly available facts, Trump treated bin Salman to an unusually lavish state reception, complete with military officers in full dress carrying both Saudi and American colors. As the US taxpayer-funded Marine band played, Trump and Mr. Bone Saw were treated to a fly-over of advanced fighter jets, samples of the 48 F-35 jets Trump already sold to Saudi Arabia, despite national security concerns that China would be able to steal the aircraft’s advanced technology.

Trump courts a murderer to line his own pockets

Trump’s personal wealth has increased by over $3 billion since his return to office, largely from ethics-adjacent crypto schemes, foreign real estate deals, meme coins that have no value, and overt pay to play transactions. His lavish courtship of bin Salman fits neatly into the same corrupt pattern, promoting Trump’s illegal,private, for-profit interests.

The Trump Organization now has multiple, large-scale projects pending in Saudi Arabia, including a new Trump Tower and a Trump Plaza development in the works in Jeddah, along with two other projects planned in Riyadh. These deals are publicly known; it’s likely billions more are exchanging hands under the table.

Trump is also in private partnership with the Saudi-owned, “International Luxury Real Estate Developer,” Dar Global. There’s also a separate $2 billion deal where an Abu Dhabi-based, UAE-backed investment firm used a cryptocurrency from the Trump family’s venture, World Liberty Financial, to invest in another crypto exchange, profiting Trump royally.

And no one has forgotten Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner’s, $2 billion private “investment” fee from the Saudis, packaged when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced a $55 billion acquisition. Kushner’s fee is widely regarded as payment for providing political cover and guaranteeing Trump’s regulatory protection. After the PIF’s own advisors initially rejected the deal, bin Salman personally overruled them and pushed it through.

Trump didn’t mention these deals this week when he rolled out the red carpet on taxpayers’ dime, but claimed instead with trademark ambiguity that the Saudis were going to “invest as much as $1 trillion in the US.”

Trump endorses the unthinkable

Journalists around the world, not to mention Khashoggi’s family, had to endure the nightmare of watching Trump fawn all over bin Salman. In every photo from the mainstream media, Trump couldn’t keep his hands off him, as if Trump were absorbing Saudi wealth through his fingers.

Tuesday, when journalist Mary Bruce asked bin Salman about intelligence reports concluding that he ordered the Khashoggi murder, Trump jumped in, answering for him. “He knew nothing about it! You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking something like that.”

Trump then suggested Khashoggi got what he had coming for criticizing the government, saying, “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman (Khashoggi) that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

After sending this chilling message to his critics, Trump then attacked Bruce for asking a “horrible,” insubordinate,” and “just a terrible question,” dressing her down in garbled syntax before cameras of the world with, “You’re all psyched up. Somebody psyched you over at ABC and they’re going to psych it. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter,” and later demanded that ABC lose its broadcast license.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is condemned throughout the civilized world as a brutal 5th Century pariah. Trump just spent a taxpayer fortune to rebrand him “one of the most respected people in the world” to elevate and promote Trump’s own private business ventures.

It is fitting that Trump committed this atrocity in a formerly dignified room recently desecrated with tacky gold medallions. The Oval Office is now a bordello whose pimp is selling America to the highest bidder, and we, his trafficked victims, are letting him do it.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, International, Trump
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