Archives for category: Extremism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Stephen Dyer: Ramaswamy Wants to Cripple Public Higher Education in Ohio

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2026 //
4

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor of Ohio.

Stephen Dyer, former legislator, current budget watchdog, warns that Ramaswamy wants to close some of Ohio’s institutions of higher education and make the cost of college even higher for the families of Ohio.

Vivek’s proposal to close public colleges follows years of Republican disinvestment in higher education and public education. Rising costs cause enrollments to decline. Declining enrollments are then an excuse to close colleges.

Why does Ohio want a less-educated public?

Please open the link to his excellent article to read the footnotes.

Dyer writes:

They’re hoping you don’t notice.

Notice that for 30 years, Ohio Republicans have slowly starved higher education funding, which has made the $1 million promise of a college education less attainable for middle-class families.

They’re hoping you fall for the anti-college mythology — they waste money, are giving kids diplomas for basket weaving, are full of hippies. Whatever. They don’t care. Just buy it, already!

They want you to blame anyone but them, even though it’s all their fault.

A personal note. I’m a tuition-paying parent for a public university student.

It’s now more expensive to send my son to Ohio State as an in-state resident than it was for my parents to send me to Tufts University in the 1990s.

Yeah. That’s crazy.

But that cost hike wasn’t because Ohio State is so inefficient or concerned with basket weaving majors that I’m paying through the nose for my son’s education¹. 

Nope.

Ohio Republicans made this happen. They’ve steadily made the unattainably expensive college degree a reality since they started dominating the statehouse and Governor’s mansion in 1994. In fact, it seems the two things they’ve consistently done from a public policy perspective is de-fund both public K-12 education and higher education.

The numbers don’t lie.

So, for example, in 1979, 11.6% of the state budget went to pay for the State Share of Instruction (SSI) — the direct funding portion of the state’s higher education budget that essentially subsidizes in-state tuition (it does more than that, but trying to keep it simple). That was the highest proportion on record.

Next year, it will be 4.7% — the lowest on record. 

If the state committed as much of the state budget to SSI next year as it did in 1979, the state would be providing $3.2 billion more just to SSI. 

How much is that, you ask?

In the 2024-2025 school year, the total tuition collected by all 2-year and 4-year public higher education institutions by all students, in-state and out-of-state, was $3.6 billion. 

That’s right. 

If Ohio had maintained the same commitment to its college students that it did in 1979, we could have tuition free — or essentially free — 2- and 4-year public universities for every Ohio resident … and then some. 

But we don’t even have to go back to 1979. If you went back to the last time the percentage of SSI funding went up under Gov. Ted Strickland in the 2009-2010 school year, you’d have another $1.6 billion. Or if you went back to the first year Republicans had complete governmental control — 1994-1995, you’d have $1.8 billion.

Wanna bet whether Ohio’s public 4-year institutions would be facing an “enrollment crisis” if tuition were reduced this much, Vivek?

Yet for some reason, Ramaswamy seems to want to make closing University of Akron and Kent State University — and the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs — a tentpole of his gubernatorial bid. 

As a former stat legislator who used to represent parts of Summit and Portage counties — where those two universities reside — I’m gonna say that’s certainly a strategy.

A fucking stupid one. 

But it’s a strategy.

This is not rocket science. As state commitment drops, the burden placed on college students and their families increases. The correlation is strong, as my buddy Claude pointed out here²:

Notice there’s a little blip in the percentage during the FY10 and FY11 years. Just as a reminder, those were the only two years of a politically divided legislature and Democratic Governor.

As an aside, you’ll recognize a similar blip on the state share of public K-12 education funding during this same period — the only year on record that more state than local property tax funding paid for Ohio’s public schools. 

By the way, did I mention this all good stuff happened in a budget I helped negotiate during the height of the Great Recession? Please excuse my shameless public policy prowess plug (and alliteration).

Every other year on that chart, Ohio Republicans controlled every lever of power. And the pattern is clear:

  1. Defund the state funding stream that makes college affordable for working families
  2. Make that option far less affordable for those same families
  3. Then when fewer students attend the universities that rely on first-generation students (Kent State and University of Akron come to mind, don’t they Vivek?), blame the universities
  4. Count on everyone both not noticing the steady drain of resources while they get hooked by the “out-of-touch” higher education narrative 
  5. Call on the schools to stop focusing on educating our students and instead become corporations’ training arms
  6. Or, in the case of the Ohio GOP’s billionaire gubernatorial candidate, shut them down

This is all Republicans’ fault. They didn’t have to do this. There wasn’t some crisis that forced them to divest from SSI since they took power. 

In fact, according to the most recent Grapevine report, while student share of higher education cost has gone up since 1980, it’s been by 18 percentage points nationally. 

In Ohio, that increase has jumped 24 points. 

The average Ohio student has to come up with 57 percent of their higher education cost. The national average is 39 percent — still way too high for a country that has to rely on innovation to dominate the world economy. 

But Ohio is 46 percent worse than that. 

In only 10 states do families have to pay a higher share of the higher education freight than Ohioans.

Since 1980, Ohio has cut its appropriations for higher ed overall by 14.8 percent. The national average over that period was a 13 percent increase.

Look. I know Vivek wants to shutter two of the state’s main economic and intellectual engines because they struggle with enrollment. But that struggle isn’t because of what he says — inefficiency, lack of excellence (whatever that is), etc.

I think that spending 30 years dropping the share of the state budget going to subsidize tuition below 5 percent for the first time ever might explain why fewer kids go to college in Ohio than they used to and why enrollment at first-generation universities — whose students typically come from working-class backgrounds — has struggled to grow. 

Yeah. 

That sure as hell seems more likely than whatever the fuck Vivek is imagining under his Jimmy Neutron hair. 

Categories Budget Cuts, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Higher Education, Ohio

Paul Waldman: Has Any Other President Done As Much to Damage the Economy?

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2026 //
6

Paul Waldman was one of my favorite reporters at The Washington Post. He left and started his blog, “The Cross Section.” In this post, he says that most of Trump’s economic setbacks are the result of his own disastrous policies, not forces beyond his control.

I do think Walkman is unfair to Hoover. Unlike Trump, Hoover had a distinguished career and tried to make the right decisions for the right reason.

Waldman writes:

As spring arrives and the cherry blossoms bloom around Washington, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are officially in the toilet:

There are many reasons why he keeps falling lower and lower, but the single most important is likely that Trump has utterly failed on what the foolish and gullible believed was his great strength: the economy. While he does a lot of distasteful but symbolic things like demolishing the East Wing and plastering his name on everything in sight, all of Trump’s most consequential screwups and authoritarian abuses have an economic component. And they all make things worse.

In fact, you’d have to go back to Herbert Hoover to find a president whose decisions were so directly and willfully disastrous for the economy. That’s not because this is the worst economy since the Great Depression; it isn’t, not yet anyway. But in all the downturns and crises we’ve had over the last century, the causes were largely outside of the president’s control.

Those presidents might have made some different decisions or found a way to improve things more quickly, but one wouldn’t say that George W. Bush created the economic crisis of 2008, or that the inflation that crossed the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter happened only because of the decisions they made. Most of the judgments we make of them in retrospect were about how they responded once the crisis arrived. They may have been blamed when things turned bad, but one could argue in every case that it wasn’t really their fault. The latest example is from 2022, when inflation spiked all over the world and here at home Joe Biden got the blame.

But what’s happening now is different. Consider the major policy initiatives of Trump’s second term:

  • Tariffs: Trump believes fervently in the power of tariffs to produce boundless prosperity, and so he has imposed an ever-shifting program of tariffs on foreign materials and products. The nearly universal conclusion of economists is that this policy has been a failure; not only hasn’t it created the manufacturing boom Trump promised, it has increased prices for American consumers and led our trading partners to begin constructing a new global trade system to circumvent the U.S.
  • Immigration: Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration — both deporting immigrants already here and making it all but impossible for new immigrants to come — has been an economic disaster. As a Brookings Institution report notes, “Reduced migration will dampen growth in the labor force, consumer spending, and gross domestic product” in years to come. Multiple economic sectors from construction to agriculture are facing labor shortages, and job growth has slowed to a crawl. And because the crackdown is motivated by naked animus toward all immigrants but especially non-white ones, it extends to a large and growing number of policy areas. For instance, the Small Business Administration just announced that it will cut off loans to green card holders, despite the fact that immigrants start more businesses and create more jobs than native-born Americans. One could hardly imagine a dumber economic own-goal, done for no reason other than the fact that the Trump administration hates immigrants.
  • Energy: Trump has waged an outright war on renewable energy, one of the most dynamic and fast-growing sectors of the world’s economy. As a result, we’ve ceded the green manufacturing sector to China, which now makes most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries. While the Chinese electric car industry is leaping ahead, ours is pulling back, a direct consequence of Trump’s decision to kill EV subsidies. In its lust to prop up the fossil fuel industry, the administration is literally forcing utilities against their will to keep coal plants open so customers can pay more for electricity and get dirtier air in the bargain. And speaking of fossil fuels…
  • The Iran War: We don’t know how long this war will go on, but the economic effects are already being felt. Gas has now crossed $4 a gallon (which will cause a broad increase in prices for all kinds of goods), farmers are facing a spike in the cost of fertilizer, and as Paul Krugman points out, the real effects of the constriction in oil supplies haven’t even been felt yet, which is why some energy analysts are predicting that this could be a worse crisis than the oil shock of the 1970s. The Pentagon wants an additional $200 billion to fund the war, and congressional Republicans are considering health care cuts to pay for it. There are now serious worries that the war could produce a global recession.

He’s a business guy, he knows the economy and stuff

To call this a record of economic incompetence would be too kind. In every case, Trump chose to do what he did for the most stupid, petty, and malicious reasons, despite the fact that the economic effects his decisions would produce were obvious and predicted by anyone with half a brain. It’s especially notable given that in his first term, Trump operated with a kind of benign neglect on many economic fronts, the consequence of which was that before he utterly screwed up his response to the covid pandemic, things were going pretty well. Yes, he restricted immigration and imposed some tariffs, but it was on a much smaller scale. For the first three years of his term, job growth was reasonable, inflation was low, and the economy largely rolled along.

Which probably reinforced the widespread and completely false notion that because Trump was a business guy who knows business stuff, he would be skilled at managing the economy. Even if Trump had been a traditional business leader and not a scam artist with a checkered record of successes and spectacular failures (including multiple bankruptcies), that wouldn’t have meant he knew anything about macroeconomic policy; as I’ve been shouting for far too many years, government and business are not remotely alike, and the skills and knowledge one needs to succeed in one do not transfer to the other.

Yet despite the crushing weight of all available evidence, one still heard voters in 2024 say that because Trump knows business, he could come into office, business away all that inflation (which was largely gone by the time of the election anyway), and bring us to a new age of prosperity. The fact that people thought that is a tribute to the propagandistic power of repetition: Say a thing often enough, no matter how ridiculous it is, and at least some people will believe it. (The same is true of the idea that Trump is a great deal-maker, when in fact he is the world’s worst negotiator.)

To their credit, Americans are now giving Trump dreadful ratings on the economy; in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll (which was taken a week ago, before the national average for gas topped $4 a gallon), his economic approval was only 29%, worse than Joe Biden’s at the height of the 2022 inflation:

It would be nice if this were the result of the American public’s discerning judgment, but it almost certainly isn’t. That’s not to say that a majority of them favor fascism, because they don’t. But to drive your approval as low as Trump’s has gotten, you have to really muck up the economy. And on that score, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Economy, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

A Song About Trump’s Education Policies: “We Believe in Local Control”

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2026 //
4

A good way to start off April Fool’s Day is by listening to this song by a group of young people in Colorado. The lyrics were written by Kevin Welner and are posted at the website of the National Education Policy Center.

The Trump regime says clearly “We believe in local control.” Except when they don’t.

Trump has issued executive orders about what may or may not be taught. Trump’s executive order #14253, signed on March 27, 2025, was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” What it meant in practice was to censor any teaching or displays that showed the shameful aspects of American history, and to focus instead on “patriotic history.”

Trump has launched a campaign to oust diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as gender studies, African-American studies, and studies of other groups.

Trump has tried to seize control of institutions of higher education institutions by falsely accusing them of anti-Semitism. He has sought to control the admission of students, the curriculum, and the hiring of faculty.

Trump has taken institutions of higher education hostage by withholding or cancelling billions of dollars for research into medicine and science unless they turned control over to the federal government.

But, as the song says, “We believe in local control!”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Higher Education, Lies, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Good News! One Judge Stops Construction on Trump’s Hideous Ballroom; Another Overturns Trump Order to Stop Funding PBS-NPR!

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2026 //
0

This afternoon, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., stopped work on Trump’s ballroom, saying it needs Congressional approval.

Federal Judge Richard Leon ruled against the ballroom, saying Trump’s lawyers made “brazen” claims. Among them, that completing the ballroom was a matter of national security. If completed, the ballroom will be more than double the size of the White House.

The New York Times wrote:

A federal judge ordered a halt to construction of President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom, ruling that Trump lacks authority to fund the estimated $400 million project through private donations.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon disagreed with the Trump administration’s argument that the president has broad authority to make changes to the White House, including on the scale of a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” Leon wrote in a 35-page ruling issued Tuesday afternoon. He said that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have.”

Leon also wrote that Trump must identify a law that allowed him to demolish the White House’s East Wing annex last year without congressional approval.

Judge Leon was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002.

In a 35-page opinion, Judge Leon wrote that Mr. Trump likely did not have the authority to act on his own, without consulting Congress, to replace entire sections of the White House — changes that could endure for generations.

He also reiterated concerns he had raised for months in court: that from the start, the administration has provided shifting and questionable accounts of who was in charge of the project and under what authority private donations could be accepted to fund it.

“Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!” he wrote. “But here is the good news. It is not too late for Congress to authorize the continued construction of the ballroom project.”

Judge Leon wrote that if the White House sought congressional approval, the legislature would “retain its authority over the nation’s property and its oversight over the government’s spending.”

“The National Trust’s interests in a constitutional and lawful process will be vindicated,” he added. “And the American people will benefit from the branches of Government exercising their constitutionally prescribed roles.”

“Not a bad outcome, that!” he concluded.

The decision suggested that Judge Leon was satisfied that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit chartered by Congress to guard America’s historic buildings which had sued over the project, had put together a workable challenge following several misfires.

In another federal court, the Trump administration’s executive order canceling the funding for NPR and PBS were ruled unconstitutional by federal judge Randolph Moss, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014.

The New York Times reported:

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that President Trump’s executive order barring the federal funding of NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment.

Randolph Moss, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in his ruling that Mr. Trump’s order, signed last May, was unlawful because it instructed federal agencies to refrain from funding NPR and PBS because the president believed their news coverage had a liberal viewpoint.

“The message is clear: NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the President disapproves of their ‘left-wing’ coverage of the news,” Judge Moss wrote. But the First Amendment, he said, “does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type.”

The ruling will likely have minimal effect on the federal funding of public media. Two months after the executive order, Congress voted to claw back roughly $500 million in annual funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that distributes federal money to NPR and PBS. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has since shut down, and public radio and TV stations across the country have sought alternate forms of revenue…

In his opinion, Judge Moss wrote that the executive order and other public statements from the White House criticizing NPR reporting, including about Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “targets a disfavored viewpoint.”

“It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the president does not like and seeks to squelch,” Judge Moss wrote

If I read this correctly, the money is gone. It probably was shifted to the military, where it is a drop in the bucket.

The Trump FCC has no objection to media consolidation under rightwing auspices. But it does not like media where critical thinking and debate are encouraged.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Vermont: Malign Rightwingers Target Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2026 //
3

Ken Fredette is a Vermonter who is dedicated to improving the state’s public schools. He is a former President of the Vermont School Boards Association and is currently active in Friends of Vermont Public Education.

A decade ago, when I visited Vermont, I was very impressed by the State Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcomb. She had a vision for public schools that was centered on the well-being of children, not punishments for teachers and schools. She ran for Governor and unfortunately lost. She is currently serving in the Legislature.

The current Governor is Republican Phil Scott. Ken Fredette wrote me that Scott left the Secretary of Education job open for a year (after Holcomb’s replacement Dan French resigned). Then, Ken wrote:

In 2024, following Phil Scott delaying appointing a replacement for SecEd Dan French for a year, he then appointed Zoie Saunders, from Florida, who worked for a for-profit charter school organization, and whose only experience with public schools was closing them. I was in the Vermont Senate chamber when the vote was 19-9 against approving the appointment – that advise and consent thing – and Scott reappointed her to “fill the vacancy” created by that vote before I was out of the building. You can’t make this stuff up.

So, clearly, Vermont has a Governor and Secretary of Education who have no commitment to Vermont’s public schools, attended by 90% of the state’s children.

You can help save Vermont public schools! Log in here. Stay informed.

Ken wrote this article, which was published by Weekender Rutland Herald and also the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.

If anyone had any doubts that there is a concerted effort to undermine public education here in Vermont and throughout the country, those doubts should have evaporated on March 20, when an assistant U.S. secretary of education — on a tour to visit a school in all 50 states — opted to visit a small (less than 60 students) parochial school in Newport for a good example of schools in Vermont.

The plan to shift support from our constitutionally-mandated public education system to private schools — sometimes religious, sometimes for-profit charter schools in other states — has been orchestrated somewhat quietly for decades by groups employing tactics from a national playbook.

But the campaign is no longer quiet, bolstered by edicts from the White House, such as the federal voucher program; The Heritage Foundation (which carved out the dark caverns of Project 2025); questionable opinions from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the separation of church and state, enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and articulated by Thomas Jefferson; and countless other conservative groups.

The never-ending attacks have presented in blatant falsehoods: Remember the absurd claim that Critical Race Theory — a college level course — was being taught in our public schools? Lacking even a shred of evidence, it seems the fallback position of those promoting this was the more times the lie was told, and the louder the bombasts got, the more people would buy into it.

At the height of that hoax, a sitting member of the Vermont Legislature came to a local school board meeting with a list of words and phrases I recognized as having been generated by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (one of the above-mentioned conservative groups). I watched with my eyes growing wider as they rattled off the list, ending by demanding the board immediately issue a directive to all teachers that nothing on it would ever be spoken in a classroom.

When the air let out of the CRT balloon, it merely meant it was time to turn to the next page in the national playbook. That presented as empowering parents. Seriously, what possible argument could be given against parents having a say in their children’s education?

Choice has been a highly charged topic around the country for many years. Here in Vermont, this has reached a point where it is pitting the administration against our Legislature. My faith is placed with our representatives and senators to thoughtfully deliberate such important policy matters, and not afford so much decision-making authority to the governor’s office.

Also on March 20, a commentary from the director of policy and communications at the Vermont Agency of Education sang praises of Mississippi raising their fourth-graders’ reading proficiency dramatically, and relatively quickly; our governor had also pointed to this remarkable achievement during his recent State of the State address.

I’m very glad for the kids of Mississippi, but to imply Vermont students are falling off some sort of educational cliff by cherry-picking numbers and using vague phrases like “… trending downward for a decade” (starting about when our current governor took office) is chicanery. So is skipping over a major piece of the story: Mississippi third-graders who weren’t likely to excel in the fourth-grade assessments were forced to repeat third grade.

Vermont is unique in many ways, including — and perhaps especially — our education system. When 30% of school budgets failed at Town Meeting 2024, Vermonters weren’t saying to tear down our school system — they were saying that property taxes were burying them.

There are some pretty basic steps that could be taken to relieve those tax burdens on longtime working Vermonters. Asking those affluent enough to have a second home here to pay a fairer share is an obvious one, and that’s been a very successful program in a couple of other states already. Following that, let’s update the Common Level of Appraisal system such that if I buy a place in Vermont for $475,000 that was listed at $247,000, I just agreed the new value is $475,000, and my new neighbors’ property tax rates won’t float up to subsidize mine.

There are other steps we could take, but going back to a foundation formula is not among them. When you hear talk from the administration about a plan that is “evidenced based,” please bear in mind that the highly paid outside consultants providing the evidence repeatedly conceded that it didn’t really apply to Vermont, because we are different from any of the places they’d studied.

We need to look at data germane to who and where we are in order to make informed decisions on how to best proceed, because we need to get this right.

Ken Fredette lives in Wallingford.

Categories Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vermont

A Must-Watch Interview: Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2026 //
2

This is a very important interview, a thoughtful discussion between two remarkable people.

Two historians talk about Trump tyranny, the rule of oligarchs, and the power of the fossil fuel industry.

Snyder reminds us of the importance of the November elections. It’s our chance to put limits on the oligarchs and authoritarians.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Trump

Peter Greene: What You Need to Know About Plyler v. Doe and Why It Matters

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2026 //
2

You probably never heard of a U.S. Supreme Court decision called Plyler v. Doe (1977). But you should learn about it, because immigrant-haters are doing their best to overturn it right now.

In this post, Peter Greene explains what Plyler v. Doe said and why it’s now in the red-hot center of American politics right now.

Greene writes:

You’re going to see the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe coming up a bunch these days, and if you are not up on your SCOTUS cases, let me provide you with the basic info about what the case was, why its decision matters, and why some folks are looking to get it overturned. This is about immigrants and education and, as is often the case these, a whole lot more.

Why did the case happen in the first place?

Texas. In 1975, they passed a law prohibiting “the use of state funds for the education of children who had not been legally admitted to the U.S.” In 1977, Tyler Independent School District adopted a policy requiring students who were not “legally admitted” to pay tuition (”legally admitted” included having documents saying they were legally present or in the process of getting such documents).

A group of students who couldn’t produce such documents sued the district. The district court ruled the policy (and therefor the state law on which it rested) was unconstitutional. The federal appeals court agreed, and the district pursued appeals all the way to the Supremes, who handed down a decision in June of 1982.

What did SCOTUS say?

SCOTUS was 5-4 against the policy.

The majority opinion, written by Justice William J. Brenan. found that the law was aimed squarely at children and discriminated against them for a characteristic that they could not control. The ruling also asserted that there is a state and national interest in educating these children, regardless of immigration status, because denying them an education would lead to “the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime.”

The majority argument also rested heavily on the Fourteenth Amendment, which should ring a bell because that is also the amendment that establishes birthright citizenship, which Donald Trump would very much like to get rid of. The arguments in Plyler rested on the Equal Protection Clause. Justice Lewis Powell (a Nixon appointee) argued in his concurring opinion that the children were being kept from schools because their parents broke the law. “A legislative classification that threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents cannot be reconciled with one of the fundamental purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Even the dissent, written by Chief Justice Warren Berger, actually agreed with the majority that it would be a bad idea to “tolerate creation of a segment of society made up of illiterate persons.” But they asserted that this was an issue to be settled by lawmakers and not the court.

One notable argument raised by Texas officials was that the phrase “within the jurisdiction” in the Equal Protection Clause did not cover illegal aliens. Both the majority opinion and the dissent disagreed, arguing that illegal aliens are, in fact, persons, and they are here.

Why do we care?

Many pieces of this case have re-emerged in recent years, in part because conservatives have a bone to pick with the Fourteenth Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause was, for instance, instrumental in Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that established same-gender marriage as Constitutional.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been itching to revive that 1975 anti-child law since SCOTUS struck down Roe, arguing that the Dobbs decision draft opinion from Justice Samuel Alito (the one that was leaked) was based on the idea that abortion rights are not specifically protected by the Constitution and neither does it mention education rights for undocumented immigrants.

And if SCOTUS can be convinced to take another look at that “within the jurisdiction” language, so that the court no longer recognizes being a person and being here as enough, we could be looking the wholesale creation of all sorts of second-class tiers in America, people who are not protected by the Equal Protection Clause.

The Trump administration has been pushing back against Plyler for a while, But in just the last week, hateful homunculus Steven Miller has pushed Texas to kick those undocumented immigrant kids out of school. Earlier this month the House held a whole hearing on “the adverse effects of Plyler v. Doe.“ The underlying argument is part bullshit, part chilling prediction of where these guys are headed, the argument being basically “Why spend money on anyone who is not One Of Us,” an argument that is sociopathic baloney, but also alarming in how easily it can extended to anybody We Don’t Like. Witness also this tweet from the official White House twitter account:

Get that? Not the worst of the worst. Not illegal or undocumented immigration. The promise made and kept is to chase all immigrants away. And if scaring them away from schools with ICE, or chasing them out of schools entirely– well, if that gets a few more of those immigrants out of the country, then the administration thinks that’s just fine.

The GOP in Tennessee has obligingly advanced a bill that would allow schools to deny, or charge tuition for, education to any children without legal immigration status. They did amend the bill so that children thrown out of school for immigrant status will not be in trouble under the state truancy laws. What big hearts! The bill exists to allow legal challenges to carry it all the way to the Supremes so they can, if so inclined, undo Plyler.

Just imagine if SCOTUS also undoes the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizen language. America gets a large, uneducated generation of young humans who can either be deported or put to work as good old fashioned hard laborers (thank all the states that have rolled back child labor laws).

There’s an extra layer of irony here. As we learn from Adam Laats in his book Mr. Lancaster’s System, one of the forces behind the invention of the U.S. public school system was a concern about the number of illiterate and unschooled youths who were out on the street causing trouble and worrying their elders.

So pay attention to what happens to Plyler next under the regime. It could spell trouble not just for undocumented immigrants, but for all of us. If leaders agree that only Certain People are entitled to an education, we’d better pay attention to who qualifies as Certain People, and who does not.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Immigration, Texas

Stephen Miller: Too Cruel for School?

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2026 //
4

Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large of The American Prospect, has advised Texas Republicans to deny access to public schooling to undocumented children. The Supreme Court decided the issue more than four decades ago; maybe today’s conservative Court might overturn that ruling.

Meyerson writes:

The Don’s consigliere tells Texas Republicans to end undocumented children’s access to public schools.

Last week, Stephen Miller—Don Trump’s wartime consigliere—met with Texas’s Republican legislators and asked them why they hadn’t passed a bill that banned undocumented children from public schools.

At first glance, the answer to that question might be that in 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that states were legally required to pay for the elementary school education of children regardless of their immigration status. But, as Tom Oliverson, the chairman of the Texas House Republican Caucus, told The New York Times yesterday, “There’s a lot of people that believe that that ruling has some pretty faulty logic associated with it.”

Well, sure. The Supreme Court clearly had a bias in favor of a generally well-educated public, able to perform the range of jobs and tasks that a functioning nation tends to require. That a bias in favor of a well-educated public has seldom infected Texas Republicans, Fox News, the MAGA movement, or Stephen Miller and his Don goes without saying. Indeed, a well-educated public inherently poses a long-term threat to authoritarians and authoritarian wannabes, inasmuch as such a public may wish to have a say in many public policies.

Miller’s current offensive against immigrant children should come as no surprise. He was the force behind the separation of small immigrant children from their parents during the Don’s first term. As well, one Miller biographer has documented how the teenage Miller once cut off his friendship with a Latino pal because, he told said pal, he’d realized he didn’t want to be friends with a Latino. (I know this goes beyond mere immigrant hatred, but it seems illustrative of Miller’s larger mindset.)

This war on immigrant children is not without precedent. In 1994, California voters enacted Proposition 187, which denied public services—including the right to attend K-12 schools—to undocumented children. Plyler v. Doe was one reason why federal courts almost immediately struck down 187 as unconstitutional, but Miller and many Texas Republicans seem bent on trying it again.

In the weeks before 1994’s Election Day, Los Angeles high school students, both documented and undocumented, foreign-born and U.S.-born, began demonstrating against 187 and in favor of—O, the horror—continuing their education. At first, a few demonstrated on their campuses, and as the movement grew, they began amassing by the thousands across Southern California. Some politically sentient unions, disproportionately Latino-led, began offering those students the chance to work phone banks and walk precincts against 187 in the closing days of the campaign; many jumped at the chance. For some, this was their entry into politics: Two of the march’s organizers became, years later, Speakers of the California Assembly. (I covered all this for the L.A. Weekly.)

One question that 187’s supporters never answered was what the undocumented children and teens would be doing during the hours when schools were in session. Hanging at home, compelling their moms and dads to miss work? Roaming the streets? Expressing the normal reactions of young people whom the state had effectively told to go fuck themselves?


Thanks to Plyler v. Doe, these were questions that nobody had to answer. But Texas Republicans routinely act in ways every bit as sociopathic as Miller. They may be hoping that if they codify Miller’s war on the school-aged, they can at least find some Trump-appointed judge who’ll rule that Plyler was decided in error. Until or unless some higher court overrules that decision, they’d then be able to answer those questions in a distinctly Texas Republican way: They’d be empowered to loose the Rangers, or ICE, the Border Patrol, or any gun-carrying white Texan, on Latino kids on the streets or in stores or at home during school days. Not only would rough beasts be deploying to Bethlehem, but, to Miller’s particular delight, entire children’s ceremonies of innocence would be drowned. Look for those particulars in the next Republican platform.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Trump

The Trump Regime is a “Criminal Enterprise” and Must Be Held Accountable

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2026 //
10

I subscribe to Marc Elias’ blog called “Democracy Docket.” Marc is a veteran prosecutor who is actively pursing lawsuits against the crimes of the Trump administration and winning many of them.

On his blog today is a fascinating conversation with another veteran prosecutor Glenn Kirschner.

Together they discuss how the Trump regime has corrupted the rule of law; how grand juries have usually stood firm in defending it; why Trump and his cronies must be held accountable for their efforts to destroy our democracy; why Merrick Garland was weak but Jack Smith was strong; why the Department of Justice must always be apolitical and hold members of both parties accountable; how Pam Bondi has repeatedly broken the law; and why the Epstein Files will eventually reveal a massive coverup.

All that is to say that I found the discussion to be enlightening and informative. These two—Elias and Kirschner–are truly experts, not just someone fulminating at the latest outage.

Since the content of the blog is for subscribers only, I can’t post it in full. It is definitely worth your while to subscribe.

Here is Marc Elias’ introduction to the dialogue:

For decades, the American justice system has operated on a “presumption of regularity” — the idea that the government acts in good faith. But as we enter the second year of this administration, that presumption has become a dangerous fantasy. Glenn Kirschner spent 30 years as a federal prosecutor, and he knows that when the rule of law is hanging by a thread, there’s no such thing as “business as usual.” 

Glenn joined me to explain why we need a “scorched earth” mission to investigate the criminal enterprise currently occupying the White House. We also dive deep into the Epstein files cover-up and discuss what it takes to hold the Trump administration accountable when we take back the White House in 2029. 

And here is a brief snippet from Kirschner’s remarks:

Glenn: I think accountability doesn’t look like “you’ve got to throw them all in prison, they all need to be in orange jumpsuits.” That’s not accountability. My version of accountability, my definition of accountability, is if we fairly, impartially, aggressively — and I mean scorched earth — investigate in an apolitical fashion every crime that we see with our own eyes. The President and his cabinet, basically this is a criminal enterprise. I prosecuted lengthy RICO cases in federal district court in Washington, D.C. I don’t say that flippantly. This is a criminal enterprise.

So what we need to do is make sure every crime gets fully investigated through an apolitical investigation whereby we give all of the evidence to the grand jury and we let them serve as the first check on our instincts with respect to who should be prosecuted. Do we have enough evidence to make out, one, probable cause, and two, beyond that, do we prosecutors believe we have a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits, which looks like a conviction at trial? That’s some of the language taken from the U.S. Attorney’s Manual. That is our procedural Bible at the Department of Justice. Once we secure indictments against everybody who has been victimizing the American people and violating our nation’s laws, then we move into the courtroom. We try the case as best we can. We deliver it to the jury and they begin to deliberate.

Accountability is done at that point. That may sound counterintuitive coming from a prosecutor who liked winning convictions. I enjoyed holding perpetrators accountable, vindicating the rights of victims, and protecting the community. But the result is not as important as the process. Justice is a process. And once we deliver it to the second check on our instincts—the trial jury sitting as the conscience of the community, just as grand jurors do—we live with the result, win, lose, or draw: conviction, acquittal, or mistrial because it’s a hung jury where the jurors couldn’t agree unanimously on a verdict. That’s what accountability looks like: putting everybody fairly and apolitically through the criminal justice system and let first the grand jurors decide and then we let the trial jurors decide.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Trump

A New Declaration of Independence by an Angry Citizen: NO KINGS!

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2026 //
6

Donald Trump’s serial depredations and violations of the law and Constitution inspired a retired educator to write a new Declaration of Indepence, tailored to a new age.

He wrote as follows:

Whereas the people of these United States of America have given their lives in defense of our country, let not the federal usurper attempt to crown himself king and return to the time of George III.

Our populace will rise up and demand a return to the rule of law and civil discourse on issues confronting us. Have no kingly proclamations discourage us from following the traditions and norms of our 249 years. We do not live in the time of the divine right of kings. Our government derives from the will of the people and our rights cannot be dissolved by a false monarch. The strength of our democracy always lies with the hopes of our populace.

In all of our country’s existence we have never faced such an evil. We are not accustomed to a fraud who would besmirch our constitution and attempt to rule with his own pronouncements. He has divided us into many differing camps and beliefs with his lies that he will continue to separate us.

His claims that we are being invaded by groups of nefarious cutthroats that are bent on taking over our country are untrue. He will then be able to declare martial law and use all of the levers of government to suppress all protest activities. Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country.

He has not complied with the laws and disregards our judiciary.

He has enriched himself by accepting emoluments from foreign countries, princes and oligarchs.

He has deliberately favored states that voted for him and disavowed those who did not.

He has supported taxes that would enrich the wealthy and deprive the poor.

He has endeavored to make judges bend to his will.

He has plundered our economy and dissolved our relationship with our allies.

He has abducted our people in public places- schools, places of worship, and public buildings.

He has threatened our institutions of higher learning if they did not bend to his will.

He has erected a multitude of new offices in the federal government to dispose of thousands of dedicated public servants.

He has restricted the entry into our country of the brightest young people in the world.

He has aligned himself with our enemies and supports their tyranny.

He has installed a health secretary who is destroying our health system and our capability to do health research.

He has encouraged and pardoned 1500 people who tried to overthrow our government.

His sycophants mock our populace and threaten to jail them if they are not compliant with his wishes.

He is, at this time, transporting armies of masked hoodlums to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty, perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy as the head of a civilized nation.

At every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress of these grievances. We have asked in a most civilized manner. Our petitions have been answered in only the most desultory and vengeful actions. A president whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant is not fit to be the leader of our country.

We have been warning our legislative representatives of the danger of these usurpations. They are fearful of his retributions both political and personal. We have entered the justice system in the highest court of the land to create estoppel. Their decisions do not seem to impede the leader’s desire to remake our democracy into an autocracy. The monied interests have formed a choral group for the president. Their support and their largesse have given him impetus to continue his cruelty. No inhabitants of our land are safe from his reach. Children of any age have felt his sting and have been spirited away.

We, therefore, the people of the United States of America, in Assembly, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world, and the populace, solemnly publish and declare, that these United States of America are and have a right that our allegiance to the current regime will be absolved if the governing bodies of our federal legislature refuse to restrain the president from his policy of revenge and destruction of our country. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Attest.

Signed by Order and in behalf of the American People

Charles Bryson

                                                                             Jeremiah Foyle

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, History, Resistance, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »