Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, explains why this NPE conference will be stellar.
She writes:
A community governs its public schools. Neighbors elect a board, set a budget, and decide what their children learn. That is exactly what privatization threatens, and it is what NPE’s national conference is built to defend. Over two days, September 26–27, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe near Houston, more than 40 sessions take on the fight from every angle. Here’s a taste of what’s on the schedule.
Vouchers and charters. In “Beating Vouchers in Court,” Derek Black, Jessica Levin, Fred Jones Jr., and Sharon Krengel will walk through recent wins in Montana, Utah, and Ohio, where voucher programs were declared unconstitutional. They will also review the live challenges in Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida, and Missouri. In “A View from the Trenches,” two Florida school board members and an Arizona teacher offer a candid account of what universal ESA vouchers have already done to how public education is funded and governed. And a session on the federal tax-credit voucher scheme, set to launch in January 2027, lays out what advocates in opt-in and opt-out states can do right now.
In “Taxation Without Representation — Using a Conservative Argument to Combat Charter Schools,” Gregory Walace, Alison Chaplar, Betsy Flanagan, Daniel Marcano Jr., and Jennifer Simões will show how that framing sparked a grassroots movement, moved public opinion, and helped drive proposed legislation. “What’s Next for Charter Schools? A Review of Charter Strategies Across State Lines,” Patti Everitt, Gregory Walace, Carol Burris, and Dave DeMatthews lead an interactive look at how charters keep expanding in key states with few guardrails and little public engagement, which national initiatives fund that growth, and the research and messaging advocates can share across state lines to push back.
Takeovers are where democracy gets stolen outright. Houston high schoolers will describe how they organized against the HISD takeover. Parents from Houston (CVPE) and Fort Worth (FORT) share how they are fighting to win their voice back. An Indianapolis panel will dissect the sharpest trick of all — an elected board left in place, but stripped of control over buildings, transportation, and property taxes. “The Struggle to Govern Ourselves” will confront the research showing takeovers overwhelmingly target majority-Black districts, while organizers from New Orleans share hard-won lessons from years on the front lines. And in “The People’s Board,” presenters will take on Student Outcomes Focused Governance, the corporate model quietly sidelining elected members in board after board.
Follow the money. Maurice Cunningham, Mercedes Schneider, Mike DeGuire and David Armiak teach their best techniques for tracing dark-money networks back to the billionaires and foundations bankrolling privatization in two sessions. Other sessions map the private firms profiteering off vouchers and spotlight Wisconsin’s campaign to get voucher and charter costs printed right on taxpayers’ bills.
The money grabs keep getting more creative. Texas advocates expose SB 1882 “partnership” charters as a fast-track privatization grift. Another panel takes on corporate tax breaks — energy-hungry data centers now the worst offenders — draining billions from schools. And with 17 states cutting or capping property taxes in 2024–25, national and state experts lay out how to defend the local revenue public schools depend on.
Faith, nationalism, and the classroom. Sessions on building school–congregation partnerships and mobilizing faith leaders in hostile states sit alongside a hard look at Christian Nationalism and its playbook for defunding and reshaping public education.
The newest battlegrounds. Randi Weingarten joins experts to debate AI’s role in classrooms — cognition, privacy, mental health, and the environment. A separate panel takes on ed-tech overreach and the lawsuits challenging how it commercializes student data. And student organizers from SEAT share how they’ve carried the fight to school boards, the legislature, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
The skill builder sessions are the reason you will leave with more than notes. Charles Siler, a former Goldwater Institute lobbyist who helped build the privatization playbook before turning on it, joins Manny Garcia to teach what messaging actually moves people. Rachel Coyle and Susan Spicka show how to win over hostile legislators. Others cover new-media strategy, gathering community input at scale, and getting real press traction beyond the press release.
The keynotes anchor it all: Diane Ravitch and Texas AFT’s Zeph Capo open Saturday; Southern Education Foundation CEO Raymond Pierce speaks at lunch; investigative journalist Katherine Stewart headlines Sunday brunch; and Howard University’s Dean Emerita Leslie Fenwick closes us out.
You’ll meet the students, parents, teachers, clergy, researchers, and organizers who are actually winning in courtrooms, at statehouses, and on ballots. Privatizers have the money. We have the people, the passion and the plan. Register now here, book your room here in the hotel block, and join us in Conroe, Texas, right outside Houston.
I can’t promise that hotel rooms are still open but Carol will help you if you made a terrible mistake and forgot to sign up.
Come to hear Yohuru Williams dissect and eviscerate the Trump administration’s absurd attack on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Such policies are meant to broaden opportunity. They take us closer to our professed goals of liberty and justice for all.
Yohuru Williams is a leading scholar and public intellectual who has often appeared on public television to expound on African American history. He is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and Founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Join me on October 6 at Wellesley College.
The event will not be livestresmed but will be available later online.
Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor who writes a terrific blog called Civil Discourse. In this post, she summarizes the major political events of the past week.
After a hearing Tuesday morning, Judge Christopher Cooper blocked the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees from returning Trump’s name to the building. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing.” That includes proposals to add “renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump” on the main building or renaming the campus the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
The administration has acted in bad faith on this one, stretching the court’s patience thin. In today’s order, the Judge noted that “the drama at the Kennedy Center continues.” The administration flirted with defying a court order when it delayed the removal of Trump’s name after the first court order. It then draped the front of the building in an apparent childish move akin to Trump announcing that if his name couldn’t be there, no one else’s would be visible. But there was absolutely no justification for Trump’s more recent efforts to get the Board to return his name to the front of the Center after the Judge had already entered an injunction. Had the administration moved forward, it would have been flagrant defiance of a court order.
It matters when a court tells this particular litigant that it meant what it said and that compliance isn’t optional. “To obtain relief enforcing a prior order, a plaintiff must demonstrate that ‘a defendant has not complied with a judgment entered against it,’” Judge Cooper wrote. Then he ordered the relief the plaintiff requested—enforcing the injunction that the President refuses to comply with and sending a message that he had no intention of letting Trump get away with the semantic gymnastics when he’d attempted to put his name back up with President Kennedy’s.
What comes next:
Of course there will be an appeal. But the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. Trump cannot put his name back on President Kennedy’s memorial. The distraction value of this case is over.
This decision, like so many others, was a no-brainer legally. The case has so little merit that one wouldn’t even expect a neutral Supreme Court to touch it on certiorari; they’d just let the Court of Appeals decision stand. Unless the Supreme Court wants to wake up one morning to discover they have been rebranded as the “Donald J. Trump-Improved Supreme Court” they would do well to follow Judge Cooper’s lead.
But there’s still a cautionary tale: the destruction of the East Wing. We know how Trump operates. The lawyers may need to go back to court to seek an injunction to prevent him from tearing the Kennedy Center down. Today he told the press, “For me to go and fix it and subsidize it, I think the Trump administration should have recognition. If we don’t do that, it’s going to close and get ripped down.” It doesn’t get much more clear than that.
Tuesday, after the Court’s decision, Trump posted on Truth Social, making it sound like the Kennedy Center is falling apart. It is an older building, and it always needs some work. Just because Trump happens to be in the White House when repairs are done doesn’t mean his name belongs on it. Adam Klasfeld nailed it when he wrote: “Congress appropriated $250M+ in taxpayer money last year for Trump’s wish-list renovations for the Kennedy Center, inserting no language about holding the whole thing hostage if it’s not a shrine to Trump.”
But you get the tenor of how irrational Trump is about this whole affair in a lengthy Tuesday Truth Social post:
Shockingly, a Judge appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, Christopher Cooper, ruled that The Kennedy Center, which was going to close in early July for largescale renovations and construction due to years of neglect, decay, and poor maintenance, and which was to be transformed by the Trump Administration into the Finest Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World, is not allowed to close for these renovations, which would not be possible to properly do without such a closure. Additionally, Judge Cooper ruled that the 36 Member Board of Trustees, which unanimously voted to add the name “TRUMP” onto the former Kennedy Center, making it The Trump Kennedy Center, did not have the right to do such an addition, and the name, “TRUMP,” must be removed.
…
Judge Cooper and the Radical Left would rather see it DIE than have President Trump transform it into something that everyone could be proud of, much as I have done, in many cases, throughout my life, and recently, with all of the construction, renovations, and ‘fix ups’ that we have completed.” He concludes in vintage Trump fashion: “There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I but, that’s OK, I will continue to do, what is considered to be, a great job for the wonderful people of our Country.
You may not have had a constitutional crisis over the naming of the Kennedy Center on your bingo card for this year, but here we are. Any of the actions Trump seems to be contemplating here would run afoul of the court’s order.
Also Worth Noting Today:
Oral argument took place yesterday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in a case involving whether Lindsey Halligan, a Trump attorney with no experience as a prosecutor, was properly put in place as his US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. (Halligan was appointed after the incumbent in that position was forced out in the debacle over the first—and now dismissed—indictment of Jim Comey.) The lower court’s ruling that Halligan was appointed illegally also led to the dismissal of federal charges against New York AG Letitia James. At least two of the judges on the panel seemed inclined to believe that the administration had broken the rules and the lower court’s decision should stand.
In other news, Laura Weiss at Punchbowl reported on Kash Patel’s Tuesday outing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, noting that it became “incredibly tense – not just between Patel and Dems.” Senators Grassley and Booker tussled after Patel insulted Vermont Senator Peter Welch, calling him “a complete and total fraud” during questioning. Patel accused Democrats of “attacking him for campaign ads.” But it got worse for Patel, who all but begged Grassley to end the hearing during questioning from Senator Adam Schiff. That line of questioning recalled Schiff’s time as a federal prosecutor—he knows how to handle a difficult witness. Schiff grilled Patel about firing every agent who worked on the Mar-a-Lago investigation (reminder: agents don’t get a choice which matters they work on; they’re assigned).
Schiff to Patel: “I will remind you, director, because you probably need reminding, that while this Congress is not going to investigate the wrongful termination of potentially hundreds of agents, the next Congress will. And you have an obligation as FBI director to ensure that none of the [documents] are destroyed.” Patel, who reportedly tried to pack up his things and leave, appealed to Grassley for help: “I would appreciate it if you concluded this hearing.”
Although Patel’s exchange with Louisiana Senator John Kennedy over bestiality and FBI hiring garnered the most media attention, the more important exchange was the one with Welch, who accused Patel of being “more than willing” to use the FBI to advance Trump’s personal grievances over election losses, saying, “My concern is that this means what you are willing to do for the president in this year’s midterm elections that the president is already saying are going to be rigged if he loses.” He asked Patel about sending agents to the polls and whether he would promise to “not in any way interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November.” Patel responded, “I have pledged unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies.” That’s not exactly a no.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump seems to have found more crazy. Frantic for a new distraction, he is accusing the Biden administration of mishandling the investigation into one of the assassination attempts on him in Pennsylvania. You’ve just got to read this one to believe it.
This is what we can expect between now and the midterms, and likely beyond, especially if Trump is perceived as the cause of Democratic gains. It’s Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with sh*t.” Remember that they want you to feel overloaded and incapable of coping. Take some time for yourself, and then remember we have work to do. There will be another “No Kings” event on October 17 to help us get out the vote, and we will be okay because we have each other.
I’m grateful you’re here with me at Civil Discourse. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! If you’re not, today is a great day to become one and support a community that believes well-informed citizens can save a democracy.
The family of Tierra Walker, 37, is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton because of her death. Walker died in December 2024 after she was denied an abortion that would have saved her life.
Paxton is running for the U.S. Senate against Democrat James Talarico.
The family’s lawsuit contends that the state’s near-total ban on abortion is unconstitutional.
Walker was 20 weeks pregnant. She had been diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. Her high blood pressure threatened her life.
Walker repeatedly suffered seizures and blood clots. She and her family asked for a life-saving abortion but were rejected by multiple doctors, who refused to treat her because of Texas’s harsh ban on abortions. Doctors who perform abortions will not only lose their license, they may be fined $100,000 and sentenced to life in prison.
The family is also suing the executive director of the Texas Medical Board, the University of Texas health system and individual doctors.
ProPublica reviewed Tierra Walker’s files in 2025, and at best, she was the victim of state-sanctioned malpractice. Under Texas law, the life of the fetus is protected; the life of the mother is not.
ProPublica condensed more than 6,500 pages of Walker’s medical records into a summary of her care with the guidance of two high-risk pregnancy specialists. More than a dozen OB-GYNs reviewed the case for ProPublica and said that since Walker had persistently high blood pressure, it would have been standard medical practice to advise her of the serious risks of her pregnancy early on, to revisit the conversation as new complications emerged and to offer termination at any point if she wanted it. Some described her condition as a “ticking time bomb.” Had Walker ended her pregnancy, every expert believed, she would not have died.
Many said that her case illustrated why they think all patients need the freedom to choose how much risk they are willing to take during pregnancy. Walker expressed that she didn’t want to take that risk, her family says. She had a vibrant life, a husband and son whom she loved.
Under Texas’ abortion law, though, that didn’t matter….
Dr. Elizabeth Langen, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Michigan who reviewed Walker’s case, said a physician comfortable with high-risk pregnancies should have counseled her on the dangers of continuing and offered her an abortion. “The safest thing for her was to terminate this pregnancy, that’s for sure.”
During Walker’s many hospital and prenatal visits, 21 OB-GYNs were among the more than 90 physicians involved in her care. None of them counseled her on the option — or the health benefits — of a termination, according to medical records.
ProPublica points out that legislators in several states who have tried to introduce medical exemptions to their anti-abortion laws have been stopped by activists who claim that any exemption is unacceptable. They say that women will seek abortions under false pretenses and that doctors will prescribe abortion for women with nothing more than a headache.
They should talk to Tierra Walker’s family or at least read the ProPublica article.
It is time for the Trump-appointed members of the Board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to be fired by Congress or to resign.
They have failed in their most fundamental duty, the duty to protect the function and reputation of the institution they serve.
Being a board member is not a perk. It’s a responsibility.
Above all, board members are responsible to safeguard the institution.
Before Trump, the Center had a bipartisan board and a nonpartisan reputation. It was dedicated to celebrating the best of American art and culture.
One doesn’t become a board member to destroy the reputation of an institution.
One doesn’t become a board member to destroy the finances of an institution.
The Kennedy Center was built as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. He had a singular interest in the arts. He frequently invited artists and poets to speak and perform in the White House.
The board of the Kennedy Center appointed by Trump has been slavishly devoted to turning the memorial into a center honoring both Trump and Kennedy.
They violated their oath and their fiduciary duty from the beginning.
Their rank politicization of the Center drove artists and performers away. It drove away the Washington National Opera. It drove the National Symphony Orchestra to financial ruin.
It drove away the audiences who loved the Center and never thought of it as a partisan performance space. Ticket sales plummeted.
The board fought in the courts to keep Trump’s name on memorial, where it did not belong.
The Trump board repeatedly lost in court; a federal judge concluded that Congress named the Center and only Congress could change its name.
So the board has now decided to close the Center, and Trump has said he will block funding for the Center’s renovation unless his name is put on the facade. He wants to share the Kennedy memorial.
It is not his to share, anymore than the Lincoln Memorial or the Jefferson Memorial.
The board has joined Trump in desecrating the Kennedy Center.
The members of the board appointed by Trump are responsible for this mess.
The culture war battles we fight over our public schools are fundamentally disagreements about American values: what does it mean to be an American, and in whose image do we build our public schools?
“When Americans start fighting over their schools, you can be fairly sure of one thing: it probably isn’t really about school.”
— Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider,
The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual
From working as Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration to laying the foundation of the modern conservative education reform movement, Diane Ravitch—a one-time champion of No Child Left Behind—spent most of her life as a Republican with conservative values. The story of her life, as told in her 2025 memoir, is the story of the American Century. As today’s culture war on “wokeness” and “leftist indoctrination” targets diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools, Ravitch’s memoir makes a powerful case study for teaching these core American values.
Born in Houston in 1938, Diane recounts celebrating VJ Day with her family as a young child, surrounded by returning sailors and the pop of firecrackers. She learned to write with a quill pen and attended a segregated high school when the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. The descendant of Polish Jews who came to America in the 1850s, Diane experienced a level of antisemitism and misogyny in her personal and professional life that by today’s standards would be galling (and illegal). She learned as an adult that the entire Jewish community where her grandfather was born was murdered in the Holocaust.
Ravitch’s interest in education didn’t begin until she began attending community meetings as the only white person in the room with parents in Harlem, New York who had felt shut out of the school district’s planning process. As a member of the Silent Generation, she made explicit demands of American wealth and greatness:
“Why shouldn’t all people in our rich society—regardless of their wealth or class or race or personal attributes—have a decent life, meaning health care, decent housing, good schools, food security, and physical safety?…I think these are preconditions for a good society.”
If Diane’s values were informed by a life lived in the greatness of the American Century, what made America great was the steady—and always imperfect—realization of those values in action. The New Deal aligned our immense national resources toward popular economic recovery from the depths of the Great Depression, even as jobs and housing programs discriminated against Black Americans. The GI Bill helped create a thriving post-war middle class by providing housing to millions of veterans and their families and sending millions more to college, even as Black veterans were segregated out of the nation’s suburbs and universities.
As we underwent a decades-long civil rights revolution at home, the postwar world we rebuilt in our image was of an idealized United States that overcame a violent and prejudicial past to renew itself as a more diverse, pluralistic, multicultural, democratic, and egalitarian nation.
E Pluribus Unum. Out of Many, One.
Uneven and flawed as it was, American prosperity did grow in proportion to our inclusivity: by expanding citizenship and voting rights, integrating and publicly supporting schools and universities, asserting our obligations to the elderly and those in poverty, and protecting the rights of marginalized groups. The American Dream became a shorthand for people who came here to start their lives over, even from countries victimized by U.S. foreign policy, knowing their best days were ahead of them. And as Americans watched the Times Square ball drop on the eve of Y2K, they were standing in the most powerful, prosperous, innovative, and culturally dominant nation in the history of the world.
Now, at age 87, Ravitch reflects on how conservative politics abandoned these core values and caused her to leave the Republican Party in the early 2000s, as they became increasingly dominated by self-serving corporations, wealthy donors, and religious interests. “To use current parlance, I went from being a staunch conservative to being ‘woke,’” she writes, adding, “I wear the label with pride. To me, it means that I awakened to the inequity and injustice that deprives millions of people of a good life, the life that everyone wants and deserves.”
In other words, by taking seriously the charge of our founding documents to become “a more perfect union”, taking up “the unfinished work” of the American experiment, and bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice over the course of the 20th century, Diane Ravitch—like America itself—became woke.
Our fights about schools are really battles over American values and what it means to be an American, and the War on Woke has always been a war on American values.
At the start of this midterm election year, Moms For Liberty hosted Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidates in a debate that focused largely on education. Candidates spent their time hammering“leftist indoctrination” in teacher education and classroom teaching, with one complaining about “downright evil” ideology pushed on students in reference to a book about a boy wearing a dress to school. Another called for the installation of the Ten Commandments as a way to put the “concept of God” back in schools. Zach Lahn, founder of the unaccredited private Wonder School and current Republican nominee for governor, offered the closest thing to a positive vision with a partisan twist arguing, “Public school is to promote civic virtue, to understand the principles of faith in our country and our culture.”
The trouble comes in whose answer we enshrine in law, turn into policy, and live in the public sphere through our public education system:
What kind of nation are we?
What is the role of public education—that is, the system of tuition-free common schools mandated in our state constitution, accessible to all students, and maintained by taxpayer dollars—in a nation like ours?
What subjects and practices will inform such a system?
Whose values will we train in the adults who teach our children?
Today’s Republican Party demands that we forget the hard-fought lessons of history and remove challenging perspectives, making easier for children to believe in nationalist mythology than the imperfect lived reality of people like Diane Ravitch. A closer look at their changing values and legislative agenda tells us exactly what today’s Republican Party means when they appeal to “civic virtue” and “principles of faith in our country and our culture” in education: in the guise of a war on “woke” diversity, equity, and inclusion, Republican policies are at war with the very materials that made America great.
In Iowa, this has manifested as de-facto book bans and banning so-called “specific defined concepts” from public school curriculum. In response to Iowa’s vague and punitive “age appropriate” school materials law in 2023, schools immediately removed more than 3,000 books. The most removed literary classics included Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners written by Nobel Prize laureates: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Brave New World, and Slaughterhouse-Five among them.
These are perspectives that speak honestly about racial, sexual, and gendered abuse and violence, sometimes all at once, and inform a shared past that tolerated and protected it. They’re also some of the most acclaimed and influential works in American and English literature. It’s no accident that most of them are either written by Black authors, by women, or center the experiences of Black people in America.
Iowa Republicans have also banned so-called “specific defined concepts” from mandatory staff or student training. House File 802, in effect since July 2021, makes it a violation to conduct training that the United States and Iowa “are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist,” that anyone “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” or that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist.” One banned concept forbids including in mandatory training that any student “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.”
Although the law states that it does not “Prohibit the use of curriculum that teaches the topics of sexism, slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination,” and does not “Prohibit discussing specific defined concepts as part of a larger course of academic instruction,” it was widely misunderstood to prohibit classroom teaching about those topics.
The impact of House File 802 has been a documented chilling effect and over-compliance owing to the vagueness of the law as written and interpreted. In one interview-based study, Iowa educators described themselves as surveilled, isolated, and self-censoring. The researchers reported that “the perceived lack of clarity and guidance on this law fueled concerns about their ability to be effective justice-oriented administrators and classroom teachers,” and that teacher candidates are afraid of unintentional violations of the law.
These explicit bans on books and the implicit self-censoring of difficult curriculum leave our kids less prepared for the world outside of school, and outside of Iowa, and create a gap in our children’s public education that is ready to be filled by social media influencers, misinformation, and propaganda.
Public schools are the institution where American values are practiced and lived, not just taught, and where we build shared American identity. All of our fights about books, curriculum, and school choice programs are really arguments over whose answers to these questions we write into law and into the lives of children where the stakes become very real. Through intention or its absence, built by us or built for us, the very real and shared world we inhabit is built bit by bit each day.
The question isn’t whether we teach values in public schools—we always have and we always will. The question is whether we teach the values that actually made this country great: pluralism, inclusion, democratic participation, honest history, and the belief that every child deserves a free and appropriate public education.
“I was a patriot who never questioned my country and its leaders. My complacency was a reflection of my comfort and affluence; radicalism had no appeal to me. If I were to meet that version of myself today, we would have a vigorous argument over everything related to education, race, and politics, although I still abhor violence. Today I want change, demonstrable change that narrows the gap between rich and poor; that provides equal opportunity to all; and that ensures health care and good education as a matter of right, not income. I am still not a radical. I don’t want to overthrow the government. I want it to work on behalf of its ideals to benefit everyone.”
— Diane Ravitch,
An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else
The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts may go bankrupt as soon as tomorrow. The only way to avoid bankruptcy, the board says, is to put Trump’s name back on the building so he will save it.
The board was hand-picked by Trump right after he returned to office.
This is the definition of chutzpah. He destroyed the Kennedy Center by taking personal control of it, naming it for himself, and driving it into the ground, as he has repeatedly done to multiple businesses before he became president. He bankrupted six casinos, as well as Trump Airlines, Trump University, and a long list of Trump–branded items, like Trump wines, Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump magazine, and various other failed ventures.
Make no mistake. No other president has packed the board with his cronies, who named him chair of the board. The board immediately put his name on the Center, making it the Trump-Kennedy Center.
As soon as he politicized the Kennedy Center, its reputation was tarnished. Artists and performers canceled, ticket sales plummeted, the National Opera moved out, the National Symphony went into financial crisis.
A federal judge ordered the board to remove Trump’s name. Congress named it; only Congress could change its name. The board reluctantly removed his name but has not removed the tarps covering the Center’s original name.
And now, the board says the Center will be bankrupt unless Trump’s name is restored!
He destroyed it. Only he can save it.
With the billions of dollars he and his family have friends have profited from crypto and other deals in the past year, maybe they will.
But as long as his name is attached to the Center and his board controls it, it will be shunned by the nation’s leading performers. It can’t buy back its tarnished reputation.
Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.
I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX
There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.
Shocked. Absolutely shocked.
The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis
Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.
For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.
The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.
Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.
The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.
Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.
The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories
Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:
Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.
Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told
Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion
Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated
The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.
That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.
$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh
And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.
Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.
Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.
To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.
The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?
The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure
Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.
The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:
Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data
They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.
None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.
The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:
Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.
The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.
The Bottom Line
The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.
Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.
The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.
Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.
All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.
Or we can say, “Don’t worry, we have the concept of a plan.”
Or we can say, “We’re going to get every penny of it by raising tax rates on corporations and billionaires and by closing tax loopholes that only benefit the rich.” (Which would be the only defensible way to get it.)
Or we can say, “Look. Obviously, we’re no more serious about this than Trump is. He just dangles it out there as a bribe, as he dangled giving everyone “terrific health care at a tiny fraction of the cost.” Or dangled “lower prices on Day One.” Or promised to cherish his first wife “until death did them part.” And his second. And his third.
Once he gets what he wants, what does he care? He breaks his promises on virtually everything, every time. (He did close the border; but is he really deporting just the worst of the worst?)
On the remote chance he’s serious about the $5,000, where would he get it?
Clearly not from taxing billionaires or corporations.
He’d just add it to the National Debt. Because if Republicans have proved anything since Reagan began ballooning it, it’s that they are the “borrow and spend”party.Forty trillion? Fifty trillion? Who cares, so long as they can cut taxes on the wealthy donors who keep them in power.
His other reason for dangling this phony bribe is to deflect attention.
From the Epstein files. From groceries and gas. From the millions about to lose health insurance. From the rural hospitals soon to close. From his staggering corruption. From his disastrous war.
Tobias also noted that the Democrat running for Senate in Kansas was endorsed not only by its Democratic governor but by a former Republican governor.
Kansas’s two-term Democratic governor has endorsed Hamilton — obviously — but get this: Former two-term Republican Governor Bill Graves just endorsed him, too.
For the last six years, Sen. Roger Marshall has turned his back on Kansas. In contrast, Adam Hamilton stands as a bulwark of kindness, humility and service to others. It is for those reasons, and many more, that I believe Kansas should send Adam Hamilton to the U.S. Senate, and I am proud to endorse him. . . .
This is one you should read. Consider subscribing.
There are 56 days to the midterms.
My apologies for the late delivery. “Life” got in the way.
Monday morning, as if Sunday’s scheduled daylong Adderall overdose posting memes that could only come from a raving lunatic – one of which resulted in Iceland summoning the U.S. ambassador on Monday after Sundowning Gramps shared a doctored map of the American flag covering Iceland as well as Greenland, Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean in which Iceland’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdottir, said she demanded answers from Ambassador Billy Long over Trump’s “completely inappropriate” post – wasn’t enough, Doddering Dilbert had his sweet little Natalie post a Lie Anti-Social in which he claimed: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA!” Interestingly, the shitpost revealed he knows he hasn’t won any part of his war with Iran.
As part of his celebration of Labor Day, Delusional Doddering Dilbert went on Lies Anti-Social to attack a months-old report by the Center for American Progress that found his costly National Guard deployments did not curb crime, going so far as to threaten a lawsuit. He wrote, “The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics.” He went on to name George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, NBCUniversal, the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, and even the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates as fellow perpetraors of the CAP’s “lie,” continuing, “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now. I am also strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization.”
After posting 24 other equally-demented posts between 0950-1045 Monday, he concluded with his official Labor Day message: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA!”
Yes – He. Is. Delusional.
Among the delusional droppings on Lies Anti-Social yesterday was one in which Doddering Cilbert unveiled a mockup of proposed Space Force uniforms, which he acknowledged are based on ones worn by fictional fascists, saying that the gray and black look was “inspired by the discipline of the Starship Trooper uniform,” while being “modernized for the guardians of the space domain.” Starship Troopers, the 1997 science fiction film, was intended to undermine what Dutch director Paul Verhoeven interpreted as fascist themes in the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein. Verhoeven told the Guardian in 2018, “I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.” Nazi-inspired iconography is prevalent throughout the film. Even Jonah Goldberg had a reaction: “I liked the movie, which was very different from the book. My concern is whether these guys understand the point Verhoeven intended in Starship Troopers. The thing is I don’t know what would be worse: whether they got it or didn’t.” Menswear writer Derek Guy added: “this is the kind of design costume designers make to tell you who are the bad guys in a space movie.” Another user responded: “If the costume designer on Star Wars had suggested this for the Empire uniforms George Lucas would have told them to dial back the Nazi.”
Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. went into effect at midnight last night, affecting hundreds of goods, including steel and aluminum, appliances and electronics and wood, pulp and paper products. There are no reports of any negotiations. Maladministration II levied 50 percent tariffs on $27.6 billion worth of Canadian goods two weeks ago, raising tensions between the neighboring countries.On Monday, Trump threatened Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier, posting on Lies Anti-Social that it must start building in the U.S. to access the American market, otherwise he demanded that Bombardier be barred from doing business in the United States altogether, claiming the company’s products “aren’t good enough.” He seemed to have forgotten (assuming he ever knew) that the company has a U.S. headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, where it employs more than 1,000 people. In the meantime, the Canadian Energy Minister said he’s ready to cut off all Canadian electical suply to the U.S. if Doddering Dilbert keeps pushing his crazy trade war.
Bastet
Republican Senator Jerry Moran has represented Kansas since 2011. Trump’s threat to eliminate over 1,000 jobs in the “Air Capital of the World” sent Moran and his team scrambling. He posted to his official social media account that he’d already reached out to the White House to make sure the president understands how significant Bombardier is to Kansas’ economy. In his X post, Moran noted the company’s local workforce includes more than a thousand of his constituents whose skills help the country’s aerospace and defense capabilities. He also promised he’d not only keep working to make sure Bombardier stays in Kansas, but that its presence continues to expand. In its own statement, Bombardier praised its American workers not only in Kansas, but in more than 20 states including Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Delusional Dilbert’s dumbassed trade war is threatening American jobs, to the point a loyal Republican senator is begging him to call off his attack.
Back in 1911, Canada and the United States had a free trade deal on the table until House Speaker Champ Clark boasted that he hoped to see the American flag flying over every square foot of British North America. Canadian voters heard that, threw out the government that negotiated the deal, and killed reciprocity for decades, which is the lesson Dilbert apparently never learned about telling your neighbor you plan to swallow them whole.
Sunday, the Alternative fur Deutschland Party (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote, falling three seats short of the majority necessary to form a government by itself. AfD, a party whose regional branch in Saxony-Anhalt is considered a right-wing extremist group by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, finished well ahead of the other parties in the regional election. It would need partners from other parties to form a governing coalition. That would normally be difficult, as Germany’s mainstream parties have refused to work with AfD as part of a so-called “firewall” to prevent the party from gaining power. But AfD may reach out to the far-left BSW party. The two parties are on opposing sides of the political spectrum, but AfD and BSW both share anti-immigration and Russia-friendly sentiments. Ulrich Siegmund, AfD’s candidate in the race for governor, responded to Elon Musk’s X post in which the Afrikaner Nazi wrote “Gut gemacht,” which translates to “good job” in English, posting: “Thank you, @elonmusk, for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time – including here in Germany.”
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who is the son of a Mafia “button man,” and later worked as Trump’s personal lawyer, publicly criticized current Mayor Zohran Mamdani for planning to attend a 9/11 commemoration ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday. In an interview with Newsmax on Sunday, Giuliani – whose decision to locate the city’s emergency responce HQ in the World Trade Center so he could use the bedroom in the facility for his “nooners” – said: “Frankly, whatever he’d like to say, he doesn’t agree that Sept. 11 was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America. Having lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he’s coming.” Mamdani has said nothing like that. Most New Yorkers would appreciate it if Giuliani dropped off the face of the earth.
Back in 2023, Ron DeSantis’ short-lived presidential campaign employed Nate Hochman, who was fired that year after posting a video that included the Sonnenrad, a symbol used by neo- Nazis and white supremacists. Before joining the DeSantis campaign, Hochmann worked at the National Review and the Claremont Institute. He eventually lost a journalism fellowship after publicly praising white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Now, the New York Times is reporting Hochman has been hired as deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning office. According to Hochman’s email signature, he’s also serving as Rubio’s chief speechwriter. The policy planning office is a big deal, as it directly advises the Secretary of State on broad strategic priorities. The State Department both confirmed and defended hiring Hochmann, calling him a trusted staffer who has helped advocate for Maladministration II’s foreign policy agenda. It’s amazing how people with a documented history of racist and extreme rhetoric keep getting hired and/or promoted into influential roles in Maladministration II.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz is reporting In the days leading up to Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 – in which, let us remember, 1,200 people were killed – United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan warned Netanyahu that Hamas’ leader in Gaza was planning the deadly attack. According to Haaretz, Netanyahu failed to inform Israeli security agencies of the impending attack. Netanyahu’s office called the report an “absolute lie” and denied speaking to the UAE. Of course he would – what’s 1,200 of his own dead? It was the perfect excuse to start his long-planned genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli opposition leaders demanded Netanyahu’s removal from office. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a candidate in the upcoming vote, said Netanyahu “bears personal and direct responsibility” for the deaths on Oct. 7 and “cannot continue to serve in his position for even one more minute.”
Maladministration II administration must hand over the names of the people who devised the structure of the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund that was of the bogus settlement of President Trump lawsuit against the IRS, a federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in a case challenging the slush fund.
Brian Jose Morales Garcia was born in Denver, Colorado. Thispast spring he was installing air conditioners in Texas. On April 3, his boss got pulled over near Fredericksburg over the car’s window tint. Brian was in the passenger seat. Troopers called in local police to translate, because he speaks Spanish. Then they called ICE. Brian’s birth certificate was sitting at his house. His family drove it over, but agents wouldn’t even look at it. Agents told him he’d go to prison if he kept insisting he was American. He signed their papers rather than disappear for months. On April 7 – four days after the traffic stop – they deported him to Mexico. Then Brian hired lawyers who got him a hearing on Judge Robert Pitman’s calendar. Days before that, the government agreed he could walk back in if he presented his birth certificate and a photo ID at the border. The same birth certificate the government refused to look at in April. On August 30, he walked back across the border into Texas. Nobody had to look at his citizenship until a federal judge was about to make them explain. His damages case is ongoing.
Republicans suffered yet another blow in their legal war against mail-in voting, this time in Delaware. A Delaware court has once again upheld the state’s 16-year-old permanent absentee voting law, dealing a fresh defeat to Republican state Sen. Gerald Hocker in his years-long crusade against the program. Hocker, who is running for re-election, as well as fellow Senate candidate Steven Washington, argued Delaware’s Permanent-Absentee Statute unconstitutionally lets voters receive absentee ballots indefinitely, without reaffirming their eligibility each election, violating the state constitution’s specific list of qualifying reasons for absentee voting. Vice Chancellor David disagreed, ruling the law does no such thing. The court found the law only allows a narrower slice of voters, those with qualifying illnesses, disabilities, military service, or caregiving duties, to skip reapplying every cycle, while still requiring them to notify the state the moment their situation changes. If a voter’s reason for needing absentee status stops applying, the state must cancel it immediately. “’Permanent’ is therefore a misnomer,” the court wrote, explaining the label doesn’t mean what plaintiffs claimed.
Missouri’s redistricting war has spiraled into chaos, and observers say the state’s own emergency filing to the U.S. Supreme Court hints that county officials could defy the courts to keep the Republican map alive. In a reply brief to the justices, Attorney General Catherine Hanaway argued that the Missouri Supreme Court “derailed an imminent federal congressional election” when it threw out the GOP’s “Missouri First” map for November. Buried in that same filing is a line that political reporter Mark Maxwell warned should worry anyone who cares about orderly elections. Now, her brief concedes, “local election officials in counties are now left to make individual decisions” on whether to follow the order or stick with the map used in the primary while they wait on a federal court. Maxwell warned that the filing signals officials could defy the state Supreme Court and keep the Republican map anyway, “which would be absolute chaos. The state court explicitly forbade this.” People Not Politicians attorney Chuck Hatfield has called the state’s position “open defiance of the court.” Meanwhile, candidates don’t know which district they are running in, and lawsuits are piling up.
The Talarico campaign in Texas just rolled out one of its most eye-catching endorsements yet .
The huge development, which comes as Talarico’s Democratic campaign seeks to be the first to win Texas in over 30 years, was revealed in a brief political ad on Tuesday. The ad said: “This is Ken Paxton, and this is Ken Paxton firing an honest Texas Ranger. David Maxwell spent five decades in law enforcement and was inducted into the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame. The best of the best. Let’s just say he knows a bad guy when he sees one. So when he saw his boss, Ken Paxton, trading favors with a convicted felon, he had to speak up. He reported Ken Paxton to the FBI and Ken Paxton fired him for it. Ranger Maxwell testified in Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial. Ken Paxton was impeached by his own party. But Ranger Maxwell isn’t done speaking up against bad guys.” Ranger Maxwell concludes the commercial:”My name is David Maxwell. Ken Paxton ended my five-decade career because I blew the whistle on his corruption. I am supporting James Talarico for the U.S. Senate … He’s one of the good guys.”
Don’t worry, there will be far more presidential looney toonies to come this week.
Remember, you are not the crazy ones, and we were made for these times. Regardless of what you may feel right now, act as if you believe that and redouble your efforts.
“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.” – Abraham Lincoln
