Archives for category: Failure

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

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

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

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

She writes:

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

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

“Nothing,” she said.

Nothing.

I felt a thud in my soul.

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, yes. I had forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new teacher had resigned as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve seen something else.

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

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

Timothy Snyder on “Superpower Suicide”

By dianeravitch

June 3, 2026 //

Timothy Snyder is an expert on European history. He taught for many years at Yale University and held a prestigious chair in European history. In 2025, he accepted a chair at the University of Toronto. His Substack blog is titled “Thinking About…” This important essay appeared in May 9. Nothing Snyder says here has changed.

He wrote:

The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.

On April 20th I was asked to speak in New York about ethics and power. My thinking, which I expressed in a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, on this little video, and in the media, was that our utterly unethical war was also utterly self-destructive. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide. The term was since come into more general use, and readers have been asking me to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

It is hard to see this clearly. Even as we oppose individual Trump adventures, we hope that in some way they are based on some understanding of the national interest. They are not. To get the perspective we need to see the nature of this anti-strategic self-slaughter, it will help to consider thirteen traditional bases of state power.

1. Statehood. A superpower must, at a minimum, be a modern state. This means that it must be an arrangement that includes, via law and other institutions, a larger body of citizens within a common endeavor. There is no sign that the Trump administration regards the United States of America as a state. It treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise.

2. National interest. Another minimal requirement of superpower would be a sense of why that power must be used. The Trump administration exhibits no interest in the good of the people. Theorists of international relations have differed as to how leaders understand national interests; we are intellectually unprepared, however, for a situation in which the leader simply does not care about either the state or the nation.

3. Succession. Again, for a state to maintain itself as a superpower, it must maintain itself over time. The basic requirement of such continuity is a succession principle, a means by which authority is transferred from some people to other people while institutions continue to function. In the United States, democracy enables succession. Historically, there are means of succession, for example by dynasty (or dynastic adoption, as in second-century Rome) or by the decision of a politburo, as in China or the USSR (in the US this would be a capitalist politburo, the sort of oligarchical coven that got us JD Vance). Getting from democracy to such different arrangements would end the American republic. Trump aspires to stay in power indefinitely, and says so. By putting the vote in question, he puts America in question, and thus American power.

4. Elites. For states to thrive and to accumulate and maintain power, the right people have to be in charge. There is no perfect means to achieve this, and there is the inevitable tension, as the Roman Stoics and others have noted, between the skills needed to rise to the top and those suited to serving some general interest. And those who rise to a position of authority will try to pass it on to their children; the Roman Catholic Church went to the extreme of insisting on priestly celibacy to block this tendency. Historically, powerful states seek ways to enable qualified people to serve in positions of authority, regardless of birth. Ancient China had an examination system. Napoleon established the principle of merit in both civilian and military life. The United States had a civil service that was the envy of the world as well as a military that was its most meritocratic institution. The Trump administration has chosen to disable the civil service and to purge the military command of people of quality. This process has been carried out by people who are themselves wildly unqualified to hold any sort of office, let along cabinet positions. To see where we are, we must understand that people such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, about whom one might raise other objections, had no business accepting their nominations, since they lack any qualifications. The fact that such people could be considered, let alone appointed, is a marker of superpower suicide.

5. Education. In a deeper sense, a superpower must have a mechanism to refresh its society, and thus its politics and administration, by preparing its population to understand the challenges of the world. This administration has done the contrary. University students are forbidden to gather and to speak their minds; university administrations are threatened with retaliation if they allow their faculty to teach freely; libraries around the country, including in military academies, are purged of useful books; public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved; an unregulated internet is allowed and indeed encouraged to transform the public sphere into a realm of emotions and recriminations.

6. Science. The rise of great powers often involves an alliance between politics and science. The ancient Mesopotamians were astronomers whose systems of describing the heavens still mark our ways of thought; so were the Mayans. The Romans managed to operationalize Greek science to build, defend, and cure. The Renaissance was, by no coincidence, also the age of exploration. Modern imperial powers built state institutions to fund science and attract scientists; the United States from the 1940s was the outstanding example of this trend, and science (often as practiced by immigrants) was the most important basis of American superpower. Current American policy is to fund science on the basis of primitive ideological taboos, and to discourage young scientists from immigrating to the United States. Senior scientists are also leaving; a colleague in a central position in US science just told me that he is leaving the country in part because the overall environment is better in other places. It is also US policy to cast doubt on basic scientific observations, such as that of human-caused climate change.

7. Energy. Human groups that pioneer new forms of energy technology rise; those that do not fall. This might be the most profound truth of our history; a magnificent forthcoming bookdemonstrates the significance of energy transitions at the most profound level, that of the history of life on earth itself. Humans who mastered fire could consume more energy themselves. Humans who domesticated dogs could use their energy to hunt mammoths. Humans who domesticated plants could turn solar energy to their own purposes. Humans who understood weather and climate could turn wind energy to the purpose of exploration and conquest, as did the Vikings. The United States was established on the cusp of a transition to hydrocarbon energy: coal, oil, natural gas. These forms of energy are now becoming obsolete, not only in ecological but also in economic terms. And yet this administration has chosen to cancel America’s energy transition and subsidize technologies that have no future. This is superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form. And nothing could benefit America’s chief rival, China, more than this choice.

8. Technology. It requires little effort to associate technology with the rise of great powers. Military achievement is associated intimately with innovation; from the spur to the machine gun, the causal relationship is not really contestable. While the United States spends gigantic amounts of money on weaponry, the Trump administration has chosen to focus on weapons from the past rather than of the future. Trump’s idea is battleships named after himself based on what he remembers of a movie. The plans for “Trump-class” battleships are a mixture of the fictional and the vulnerable, which does reflect the man. The notion is to invest untold amounts of money into a kind of weapon has been understood to be obsolete since 1943, and which if somehow built would be highly vulnerable to weapons other countries now have. This strategic atavism draws the United States away from national security in its most basic sense. The shape of modern warfare is revealed by the high-tech war between Russia and Ukraine, especially in Ukraine’s successful self-defense. The Trump administration chose to ignore the lessons of that war and to demean and defund America’s Ukrainian ally, to the detriment of American interests and American warfighting.

9. Diplomacy. This art, celebrated by great powers, has been trashed by the United States. It cannot be practiced without understanding other countries, as the most focused American diplomats have stressed (for example, Henry Kissinger, who can hardly be excused of softheartedness). It has rested, in the American and other cases, on the deliberate construction of a diplomatic corps where people train in languages and trade in knowledge. Under the Trump administration, the foreign service has been trashed. The principle of diplomacy, such as it is, is that other countries will do what we want because we are big and bad. This has not worked. The bizarre notion that the president can himself “make deals” is the sign of a religious cult; like most cults, its activity is the generation of ever more creative excuses for the lack of performance. There is no evidence that Trump knows how to negotiate, and abundant evidence that he does not: for example, defeat in trade wars with China; personal vulnerability to the preferences of Russian leaders, and the disaster of Iranian nuclear enrichment, of which Trump himself is the chief sponsor. In practice, critical negotiations, with Iran and elsewhere, have been put in the hands of two people, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with close personal relationships with the president and obvious economic stakes in the relevant conflicts. The diplomacy of the Huns was far more sophisticated than this. It is hard to overstate how primitive the current American approach is, and how much joy it brings to America’s enemies.

10. Alliances. Great powers have allies. To be sure, they might change these alliances rapidly for reasons of interest, as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire famously did. The whole history of the Roman Empire, for that matter, was one of active diplomacy with neighboring barbarians (as the Romans saw matters); archaeology bears witness to the arrangements that were made. The history of modern European empires was also one considered alliances, as the architects of American superpower understood. Under the Trump administration, useful allies are mocked and marginalized for no reason other than personal whimsy and a sense of grievance. Because there is no sense of state or national interest, there can be no understanding that alliances are of service. Trump feels annoyed because he is losing a war and removes US troops from Germany; those troops are there to enable the United States to win wars. I personally cannot think of any other example in which the leaders of a great power behaved in this way, presumably because these kinds of choices are inconsistent with the maintenance of power. The United States now seems to be treating as “allies” middle eastern countries that have nothing to offer except their own interests in the use of American armed forces in their own region, permanent engagement in the disastrous politics of oil, and financial opportunities for people personally close to Trump.

11. The international system. Postwar America did something far more impressive than build a system of alliances; it essentially created a set of laws, rules, and norms that allowed American power to maintain itself and to expand. The European Union and NATO, so abused by the Trump people today, were indirect and direct results of American policies intelligently designed to maximize American trade and security interests. But the achievement was far broader than that, and indeed historically unprecedented: the construction of laws and conventions that kept one country in the center of the world. Today, the Trump people make themselves at the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference and similar gatherings and complaining that the rules are against them — the exact opposite was the case, because America made the rules. In deliberately destroying its own international system, this American government is improving the position of its rivals China and Russia, who have been calling for exactly this to happen, but who lacked the ability to make it happen.

12. The idea of victory. A superpower wins in confrontations, at least some of the time. This administration loses again and again, and is seen to lose by others. Trump announced that his main weapon of influence would be tariffs, but then lost his trade war with China, leaving Beijing more powerful and more emboldened. The Russo-Ukrainian war is a curious case. It would serve the interests of the United States in prosperity and stability for Ukraine to win; but under Trump the United States has switched its policy to one of support for Ukraine to support for Russia. So it has lost in that way. But since the United States has made that pivot, Ukraine has performed ever better in the war, and Russia has performed worse. And so the United States, amazingly, has managed to be the loser in the same war a double sense: by failing to see its own interests, and then by failing to fail. The Iranian war is an obvious strategic defeat in every traditional sense; insofar as there were any American objectives, they were not achieved. Trump’s policies have left Iran with more enriched uranium in the hands of a more radical regime which holds new sources of economic power in the world. In the current situation, in which military options have been self-humiliatingly exhausted, the useful instruments would be those that involved communicating with the Iranian people or influencing Iranian society. Those institutions existed until very recently; they were willfully demolished, to great fanfare, in early 2026.

The United States is now governed by people who celebrate defeat in symbolic terms characteristic of states in disastrous decline. Consider Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the rescue of a US pilot as the resurrection of Jesus. The screaming blasphemy of this might distract us from its strategic helplessness. Christological images of this sort are used as propaganda to transform defeat in the real world into victory in some imaginary one. The US lost the war in Iran. Among other things it was not able to sustain an air campaign. The downing of a US fighter meant than an individual mission failed. It is happy news, of course, that the pilot survived. But the notion that this was a “literal miracle,” as Hegseth claimed, brings the United States, sadly, into the tradition of losers who use Jesus to claim to be winners. An historical example of this was Polish Romanticism, with its idea that the collapse of a republic (chiefly due to wealth inequality) made of Poland the “Christ of Nations.” Donald Trump’s own self-deification has to be seen in similar terms: a president who could assert power in this world would not have to claim that his real authority comes from another one. His fantasies of the total destruction of Iranian civilization are part of an apocalyptic panorama that is inconsistent with decent politics.

13. Finances. Though not the most interesting historical subject, budget disaster stands behind many of the most notable collapses of state power, ancient and modern. Under Trump our national debt now approaches $40 trillion. National debt is higher than GDP of the country for the first time since the end of the Second World War. That is a notable point of comparison: it is normal to run big deficits when facing the challenge of the scale of a world war. We are running huge deficits for an entirely different reason: because we decline to tax wealthy individuals and corporations. That is not an approach that is consistent with fighting and winning wars, nor with maintaining the social services that allow a modern society to function. More profoundly: it reflects an approach to politics — government as customer service to the very wealthy — that leads us from power to ethics.

The war can lead us to a diagnosis of superpower suicide. Wars cannot be won by people who have no idea what they are doing, because they have no frame of reference (such as the nation or the state) beyond their own feelings. They cannot be fought well when the wrong people are making the daily decisions and the wrong weapons are being deployed. They cannot be reasonably brought to an end when there is no practice of diplomacy and no notion of the value of alliances and no concern about corruption.

But even a strict focus on power will lead us back to justice. But just as the war is only a symptom of superpower suicide, so superpower suicide is only a symptom of a still deeper condition, the one that must be addressed.

Even if all we cared about were American power, we would have to ask ourselves how to undo the distortions of democracy and the drastic inequalities of that enabled world-historical levels of strategic buffoonery. After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable.

The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

*****

PS. If you would like to help Ukrainians defend themselves from Russia’s criminal war of aggression, please consider contributing to the Sky Defense campaign. For worse but also for better, as the Ukrainians have shown us, this is a time when civil society campaigns can contribute to general security.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, International, Lies, Science, Stupid, Technology, Trump, Tyranny

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Is Stuck in a Quagmire, Lashes out at Critics, and Praises Himself

By dianeravitch

June 2, 2026 //

Heather Cox Richardson sums up the quagmire in which Trump is stuck, unable to bully Iran, and, according to him, “bored” by the stalemate in negotiations. His response, as she shows, is to unleash a flurry of unhinged tweets about his grandeur, his historical significance, and his self-regard. One can only imagine the reaction of the media and the public if any other president posted similar images and words. At minimum, there would be widespread concern about his deepening megalomania.

She wrote:

As we enter the summer months, we’re hitting the ground running. There is so much news today, I’m going to have to let some of it splash over into tomorrow to do it justice. For today, Iran and its role in the president’s deteriorating mental condition are going to take center stage.

Over the weekend, there were what I’m going to have to call the usual reports of an imminent agreement between the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, with the usual outcome.

Last week the U.S. and Iran appeared to be making headway on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to continue the ceasefire and to establish a framework for further talks about Iran’s nuclear program. But President Donald J. Trump is caught between a rock and a hard place in these negotiations.

His base demands that he look strong and accomplish what, after the initial strikes failed, he claimed to have started the war for: to make sure Iran doesn’t have the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He also needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before he began the strikes—and get oil flowing again from that region of the Middle East. Prices in the U.S. are rising, and the looming threat of oil reserves running out adds even more pressure to consumer prices.

And Congress returns to work tomorrow, raising the possibility that lawmakers will pass a war powers resolution requiring Trump to withdraw American forces from the region. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent House members home a day early before the Memorial Day holiday out of concern such a measure would pass.

But Iran is in no hurry to throw Trump a lifeline. Their negotiators now maintain they have a right to control the Strait of Hormuz. They are demanding reparations for the damage inflicted in the country during the war, and they say they won’t negotiate over the nuclear program until there is a ceasefire.

But these conditions are all problematic for Trump’s negotiators. Permitting Iran to control the strait is not just about oil; it’s about the principle of freedom of the seas set out after World War II. Global trade depends on that concept. The exchange of money is also a problem for Trump. He has spent much of his political life attacking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the U.S., and the European Union negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration, claiming that former president Obama “gave” Iran $1.7 billion. In fact, the JCPOA simply permitted the release of Iranian assets frozen overseas by sanctions, but much of Trump’s base believes that Obama showed weakness by buying an agreement.

And then there is the nuclear issue.

So what has tended to happen in negotiations is that the teams come up with a framework, details leak to the media, and Trump’s base hears that Trump has weakened on some of his maximalist demands. They complain, Trump then posts something false about the talks or incendiary about Iran, and the negotiations fall apart.

And the cost of the war, in both lives and treasure, and the pressure on U.S. consumers and the economy continue to mount.

Last Friday, Trump and his advisors spent two hours discussing the latest round of negotiations in the Situation Room. According to Erika Solomon and Farnaz Fassihi of the New York Times, that agreement included the release of about $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets and a postwar “investment fund” to rebuild Iran, with one diplomat telling the journalists the number on the table was $300 billion. Talks about Iran’s nuclear program would be deferred.

On Friday morning, Trump posted, once again, that the strait would be opened and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. But then he emerged from the Situation Room without the “final determination” on the agreement he had promised. On Saturday, Mohsen Rezaie, one of the advisors to Iran’s supreme leader, posted: “As predicted, the President of the United States is betraying diplomacy for the third time.”

Over the weekend, Trump’s social media account posted repeated attacks on Democrats and on the judges who have been deciding against him in legal cases. He posted long defenses of his alterations to monuments in Washington, D.C., and AI images of capital landmarks covered in trash and graffiti juxtaposed with ones gleaming and fresh, with captions that blame Democrats for the former and praise Trump for the latter.

His posts seemed designed primarily to reassure himself. By Saturday, so many of the musical acts his team had lined up to play at his Freedom 250 “Great American State Fair” from late June through the beginning of July had bailed that Trump posted that he was “thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists,” and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!” He continued: “Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called “Artists” that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN. So, by copy of this TRUTH, I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, D.C., same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited—It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

It was an odd echo of his December 19, 2020, tweet calling his base to Washington, D.C., in which he wrote: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Odder still was what followed: image after image of Trump as a great leader. There were images of Trump alongside first president George Washington, one of them showing the two presidents riding horses together in colonial garb beside a racecar with TRUMP across the hood, the White House in the background, and the Space Shuttle overhead. In an AI image, Trump is dunking a basketball over an exhausted New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat; in another image, he and Patriots football player Tom Brady stand talking, backlit, under a caption that reads “GOAT.”

There were pictures of Trump kissing the American flag; Mount Rushmore with Trump’s sculpture in line with those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln (who looks somewhat alarmed); Trump apparently as a superhero admiral with armor on his chest that bears an American eagle; Trump standing near King Charles; Trump with China’s president Xi Jinping.

A series of AI images in the style of the 1950s Dick and Jane readers show a town parade festooned with flags and patriotic bunting, little girls laughing together at an old-fashioned town fair, and little boys in a suburb playing ball. All of the images read: “AMERICA IS BACK!” And in them, all of the people are white.

He posted an image of a white family from that era standing beside a Cadillac Coupe DeVille parked on a suburban street, with the caption: “BILLIONS WERE SPENT TO CONVINCE YOU THIS IS EVIL.”

Then Trump’s account posted a series of images contrasting his vision of Biden’s America versus his own. In his images, Biden’s world was one of theft, illegal squatting, violence, and illegal immigration. The images of Trump’s “solutions” to these problems showed people imprisoned, arrested, and deported.

At 1:02 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us. But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end—It always does! President DJT”

A minute later, his account posted: “Has anyone ever seen a happy Dumocrat???”

Then, later this morning, Iranian officials said they were suspending negotiations with the U.S. until Israel, which entered the war alongside the U.S., stops its strikes on Lebanon, strikes they say violate the ceasefire agreement. They warned they would close the Strait of Hormuz entirely—a few ships have been making the transit—and move against the Bab al-Mandab strait at the outlet of the Red Sea, as well. On CNBC, Trump told Eamon Javers that he doesn’t care if peace negotiations with Iran end. “I couldn’t care less,” he said. Negotiations were starting “to get very boring.”

But oil prices jumped sharply with the announcement of the suspension and the threat to the Bab al-Mandab, and at 1:43 in the afternoon, Trump posted: “Talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” At 5:47, he posted on social media that he had spoken with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and indirectly with Hezbollah, and that they both agreed to stop striking each other.

The Pentagon has been trying to control information coming out about its actions for months now, but that effort is now ramping up. This afternoon, Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has designated its press office as a classified space—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF—and even those journalists who have not had their press badges rescinded will require an appointment to talk to the press secretary.

—

Notes:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-obama-iran-cash/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/29/trump-no-update-iran-deal-00943503

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/01/world/live-news/iran-trump-lebanon-war-news?post-id=cmpv0qep900003b6sh3u6kp9i

Click to access Fact-check-iran-deal-1.pdf

Tehran pauses peace talks with U.S. over Israeli attacks in Lebanon, Iranian sources say

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/trump-iran-war-negotiations-oil-israel-interview.html

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook-pm/2026/06/01/trump-i-dont-care-if-iran-talks-are-over-00944460

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/oil-prices-trump-iran-talks-collapse-rcna347869

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/06/01/pentagon-bans-journalists-press-office-designating-it-classified-space/

ir_rezaee/status/2060634659646484743

scottbudman/status/1604915748693909504

HamidRezaAz/status/2061439791132996026

Trump’s Truth:

Categories Character, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Health, Trump

New York Court Reverses DOGE Cancellation of $100 Million for NEH Grants

By dianeravitch

May 22, 2026 //

Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern Districy of New York issued a ruling restoring $100 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that were canceled by Elon Musk’s DOGE team. The judge said the cancellations violated the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, and furthermore that DOGE lacked the statutory authority to act. Judge McMahon ordered the reinstatement of every grant to writers, scholars, and researchers. The DOGE censors did not actually review the grants but used ChatGPT to identify words that the Trump administration had banned, especially those associated with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the decision was the judge’s ruling that DOGE had no authority to cancel these grants. In fact, DOGE had no authority to fire thousands of civil servants or to terminate entire agencies, like USAID.

She wrote:

On the central ultra vires question, Judge McMahon was unequivocal: “It is not that DOGE misconstrued a statutory provision conferring authority on it; it is that Congress conferred no authority on DOGE at all with respect to the awarding, continuation, or termination of NEH grants.”

The Authors Guild, one of the plaintiffs, reported on the decision;

May 7, 2026—A New York federal court in a 143-page decision today held for the Authors Guild plaintiffs on every count in its case on behalf of individual writers and scholars against DOGE and the NEH for DOGE’s April 2025 mass cancellation at the National Endowment for the Humanities. It ordered the reinstatement of every grant terminated, delivering a complete victory to the Authors Guild and more than 1,400 writers, scholars, and researchers whose awards were abruptly eliminated.

Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs on all three of their claims, finding the terminations violated the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment and were carried out by DOGE without any statutory authority to act.

The court issued a permanent injunction enjoining the administration from giving effect to the mass terminations and requiring the government to rescind every termination notice and restore all affected grants and certified the Authors Guild’s lawsuit as a class action covering all approximately 1,400 affected grantees.

“Today’s ruling makes clear that no administration—regardless of its priorities—is free to defy the statutory purposes of federal agencies and that or to cancel grants based on viewpoint discrimination,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild. “Not only did DOGE have no authority to cancel the grants, it used an AI chatbot to invent pretextual reasons to do it anyway. Writers and scholars had structured their lives around these awards—taking leaves of absence, giving up other income, making commitments—because the government had entered into a legally binding obligation. That obligation must be honored. We are gratified that justice was done, grateful to our amazing legal team at Fairmark Partners, and we will be watching closely to make sure every one of these grants is restored.”

Background

In early April 2025, DOGE officials terminated more than 1,400 NEH grants awarded to scholars, writers, research institutions, and other humanities organizations totaling over $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds—the largest mass cancellation of previously awarded grants in the agency’s nearly 60-year history—with no individualized review, no notice, and no opportunity to appeal.

Discovery revealed that a DOGE official had used ChatGPT to generate “DEI rationales” for termination, submitting thousands of grant descriptions to the AI tool with a single standardized prompt, without defining the term or understanding how the tool interpreted it. They didn’t take any steps to ensure that the system wouldn’t discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or other protected categories. DOGE also searched for grants containing keywords like “gay,” “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), “indigenous,” “tribal,” “melting pot,” “equality,” and similar terms. It did not search for analogous terms like “white,” “heterosexual,” or “Caucasian.”

The results were, in the court’s account, irrational: Studies of ancient Jewish texts, the persecution of Uyghurs in China, the plastics industry, and American women in Paris in the early 1900s were all flagged as DEI. The NEH’s own acting chair told DOGE many of the rationales “mischaracterized” the grants but was overruled. His own email to DOGE acknowledged: “Either way, as you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects.”

Two Consolidated Cases

The result of this landmark ruling was actually two separate lawsuits that were quickly consolidated into one. On May 1, 2025, the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Historical Association filed the initial suit, ACLS v. McDonald, challenging DOGE’s mass terminations. Eleven days later, the Authors Guild filed its own suit, The Authors Guild v. NEH, in the Southern District of New York — structured as a class action on behalf of all approximately 1,400 affected grantees. On May 14, Judge Colleen McMahon consolidated the two cases, noting they were “substantially identical,” and the litigation proceeded jointly from there.

Because the Authors Guild’s suit was structured as a class action, Judge McMahon’s order applies not just to named plaintiffs but to all 1,400-plus writers, scholars, and researchers whose awards were canceled, making yesterday’s ruling a victory for everyone DOGE targeted.

Ruling

On the ChatGPT-driven process, she wrote that it “would hardly be surprising if ChatGPT inferred, from DOGE’s repeated requests, that Fox and Cavanaugh were looking for reasons why grants could be characterized as DEI—and therefore terminable—and supplied ‘rationales’ simply in order to satisfy the user’s perceived demand. The utter lack of reasoning behind so many of its ‘rationales’ certainly suggests as much.”

“We are extremely pleased with Judge McMahon’s ruling reinstating the more than $100 million in NEH grants that were cancelled by DOGE last April.,” said Jamie Crooks, Managing Partner of Fairmark Partners, LLP “While we are still evaluating her detailed, 143-page opinion, the bottom line is clear: Judge McMahon agreed with the Authors Guild and the other plaintiffs that these ‘DEI’-based cancellations violated the First Amendment and Equal Protection, and that DOGE did not have the authority to order these grants terminated.  The Court’s order that the grants be reinstated will allow our clients and the hundreds of other scholars and institutions in the class to continue performing their important scholarly work, and it’s also a vindication for the rule of law and basic principles of constitutional law.”

NEH award recipient Bill Goldstein said, “I am—and all of the plaintiffs will be— forever grateful for your brilliant, tireless, and effective work on our behalf. And on behalf of the First Amendment and what remains and must endure of the rule of law. The stakes are that high, and you made our rights and that right clear. Congratulations on your victory, and thank you for ours.”

Given that the administration has ignored other judicial orders, including the preliminary injunction in this case, we cannot say whether NEH will in fact reinstate the grants and pay out the money owed under those grants. The court emphasized that its decision addresses only “the legality of the Government’s decision to terminate” the grants and that it is requiring the government to “rescind the termination notices,” but clarified that it does not “require[] the immediate payment of grant funds” or “adjudicate[] any contractual entitlement to money.” The reason for that it that claims seeking payment of money owed by the federal government must be brought in a separate court—the Court of Federal Claims. Here, Judge McMahon noted that securing payment of the grant funds “might well require a separate suit in the Court of Federal Claims”—though she did not outline a specific process. For now, we are reviewing the decision with our attorneys to determine next steps, including any possible action in the Court of Federal Claims. As always, our goal is to ensure that grantees receive the payments they are owed as promptly as possible.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Justice

Jan Resseger: Reviving NCLB WILL NOT Improve Schools

By dianeravitch

May 22, 2026 //

Jan Resseger, social justice warrior, strongly dissents from those who want to bring back the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

She writes:

Defining schools by their achievement test scores is reductive. Of course we want our children to learn to read, to enjoy and understand literature, to master math, and to study history and the sciences, but a fixation on comparing school districts’ test scores blinds us to the human relations that constitute a classroom, to the social formation of children that happens at school, and to myriad other ways of thinking about what students are accomplishing at school. The temptation then is to define schoolteachers as producers of test scores and forget about all the other ways they help our children learn and grow.

Because test scores provide a simple, universal measure, we grab onto it and give it more weight than all the other factors we can’t so easily measure. Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado and director of the National Education Policy Center identifies family income, a factor entirely outside of school, as the most significant variable affecting a school district’s aggregate test scores: “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America. School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economical inequality.”

Last week, the NY Times’ Claire Cain Miller, Frencesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh reported on a major new demographic study documenting a widespread decline over the past decade in U.S. students’ standardized test scores: “Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago… A report on the new data describes a decade-long ‘learning recession.’… Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues. Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990—then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students. Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than pre-pandemic… Test scores in low-income districts fell furthest, but affluent districts—the types of places families move to for the schools—also lost ground.”

The reporters do acknowledge a number of factors that may correlate with dropping scores, but they seem to lean toward blaming a lot of the problem on the end of No Child Left Behind. They are mistaken when they declare that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA), NCLB’s replacement, ended test-based school accountability. In fact that 2015 law just made the states, not the federal government, agree to impose sanctions on the schools that had been unable significantly to raise test scores. The reporters quote Brian A. Jacob, a professor at the University of Michigan, who believes NCLB’s fading influence has been one cause of test score decline: “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement… There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”

A prominent retired professor of education, Diane Ravitch pushed back immediately on what she understood as the bias of the recent NY Times article: “I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of No Child Left Behind-Race to the Top pressures. Sure, they increased the pressure on students, teachers, and principals, but their negative effects undermined the quality of education. Picking the right bubble on a standardized test became the goal of education. Campbell’s Law says that when a measure becomes the goal, it loses its value as a measure. Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that ‘the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’ “

Ravitch names a number of experts who have evaluated the damage wrought by the No Child Left Behind Act’s strategy: to punish schools and teachers who, supposedly, weren’t working hard enough to make all students reach test-score proficiency by 2014. The most prominent is Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on standardized testing, who, in 2017, published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. Koretz not only explains Campbell’s Law, but he shows how the pressure of test-based accountability corrupted what happened public schools across the country when the federal government threatened mandatory closure, or mandatory privatization or charterization of so-called “failing schools.”

Koretz reminds us that in places where test scores did rise under No Child Left Behind, it may not have reflected students’ academic growth. Test score gains were in many places artificially produced through test prep, the narrowing of the school curriculum, and even cheating: “Cheating—by teachers and administrators, not by students—is one of the simplest ways to inflate scores, and if you aren’t caught, it’s the most dependable.” (The Testing Charade, p. 73) His book covers the tragic Atlanta cheating scandal, and other examples when teachers read the tests in advance and prepared students to answer specific questions. Koretz describes various kinds of test prep coaching and drilling that were widespread in the NCLB era. And, “(Teachers) reported that they reduced—sometimes very substantially—the amount of time devoted to teaching science, which was not tested, in order to make additional time for prepping kids in math and reading.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 95-96)

Last week’s NY Times report on the possible causes of an overall drop in test scores over the recent decade also names two other possible causes. First, a decade ago, as schools began to provide laptops or electronic tablets to their students for online learning, students’ widespread dependence on their smartphones also became epidemic: “Something happened globally around the same time: the proliferation of devices, at home and in school. Nearly half of American teenagers now say they are online ‘almost constantly,’ compared with just under a quarter who said that a decade ago, according to Pew Research Center.” Due to the proliferation of devices, our classrooms operate differently, and our children are doing less reading of books for study and enjoyment.

Second, the reporters, explain, there was massive and well documented learning loss during the COVID pandemic: “Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly. The new data shows that scores inched upwards in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground…. The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students.”

I have never heard anyone who has been able to trace the extent of long term damage during COVID, when students’ schools were closed and many children were left while their parents were at work to learn remotely on computers. Chronic absence has been a greater problem since COVID, and something schools have struggled to overcome. No one has been able to assess how long COVID will keep affecting children who were preschoolers and young elementary students back in 2019.

Finally there is one other big factor that could also be related to falling test scores over time: states have been perpetually reducing funding for public schools. According to the most recent research from the Albert Shanker Institute: “There are 42 states (including the District of Columbia) that devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 schools than they did before the 2007-2009 recession. This seems to be a permanent disinvestment in public education.” “(U)nequal opportunity is (also) universal in the U.S. In all states, higher-poverty districts are funded less adequately than lower-poverty districts… We find that 37 percent of white students attend districts with negative adequacy gaps, compared with 75 percent of African American students and 62 percent of Hispanic students. In other words, African American students are about twice as likely as their white peers to attend school in a district with below-adequate funding, while Hispanic students are almost 70 percent more likely to do so, and Native American… students are 50 percent more likely. Similarly, African American students are over 3 times more likely than white students to attend chronically underfunded districts….” These economic factors are likely to have affected students’ learning over time.

Our society will not be able to address our economic, social, and educational injustices through No Child Left Behind-style, test-based public school accountability.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Was Kash Patel’s Snorkeling Trip at Pearl Harbor Sacrilegious?

By dianeravitch

May 18, 2026 //

There’s not much these days that can shock the sensibilities of ordinary human beings, but this story might be one of those exceptions.

FBI Director Kash Patel went swimming on a “VIP Snorkel” trip near the remains of the USS Arizona, in which nearly 1,000 American sailors and Marines have been entombed since December 7, 1941. Some people may say it’s no big deal but others are shocked by his lack of discretion and decency.

The New York Times reported:

Last summer, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, capped a whirlwind South Pacific trip with a snorkel trip in Hawaii.

There, Navy SEALs used two boats to transport and escort Mr. Patel and nine other people on what a Defense Department email called a “V.I.P. Snorkel” next to one of the military’s most sacred sites, the underwater tomb of the U.S.S. Arizona that holds the remains of more than 900 Navy sailors and Marines who died at Pearl Harbor.

Mr. Patel swam in the vicinity of the tomb for 30 minutes, according to the Navy.

Out of respect for the dead entombed in the wreck of the Arizona, rules bar visitors even from wearing swimwear at the memorial. With some exceptions over the years for dignitaries, the only people allowed in the water around the tomb are military and National Park Service divers interring the remains of the last Arizona survivors in the wreck, or conducting annual maintenance surveys, according to a former Navy officer and a former National Park Service official familiar with restrictions at the site.

Officials from the Navy and the Defense Department said V.I.P. “tours” near the Arizona were common, but they declined to say how often they take people snorkeling. A Navy spokeswoman declined to identify the nine people who joined Mr. Patel on the trip. The F.B.I. said that Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the head of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, invited Mr. Patel to Pearl Harbor.

The New York Times obtained details of the Pearl Harbor trip through a Freedom of Information Act request and information from a former F.B.I. official. Mr. Patel’s participation in the snorkeling trip was reported earlier by The Associated Press.

The idea of a high-ranking government official receiving an escort from the SEALs for a recreational swim near the tomb is “horrifying,” said William M. McBride, a Navy veteran and professor emeritus of history at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

“This is a war grave with the same legal status as Arlington National Cemetery,” Mr. McBride said in an interview. “Snorkeling around Arizona is as disrespectful as playing kickball on top of the graves at Arlington.”

The Pearl Harbor trip was at the end of an itinerary in which Mr. Patel visited F.B.I. facilities in Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand. Disclosure of the snorkeling tour, and new details about other trips he has taken, comes as Mr. Patel is already under scrutiny for blending leisure travel with official business or instructing F.B.I. employees to make accommodations for him and his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins.

Categories Accountability, Character, Ethics, Failure, History

Why Chief Justice John Roberts Should Be Removed

By dianeravitch

May 15, 2026 //

Christopher Armitage, author of “The Existentialist Republic” blog on Substack is filing a complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts for failing to disclose his family income and failing to acknowledge his very significant conflicts of interest. He wants us to do the same. We knew that Justices Thomas and Alito failed to disclose gifts and income. Add Justice Roberts to the list.

Armitage wrote:

Over sixteen years of federal financial disclosure forms, Chief Justice John Roberts mischaracterized more than twenty million dollars in household income from law firms appearing before the Supreme Court. He concealed his wife’s equity stake in her employer for three consecutive years. He failed to recuse from more than five hundred cases argued at the Supreme Court by law firms that had paid his household millions in commissions. He architected the Court’s first ethics code and designed it to be unenforceable. This is a course of conduct stretching across two decades, connected by a single through-line: the belief that the rules that apply to every other federal judge do not apply to him.

The governing standard is 28 U.S.C. § 455, which applies to every federal judge including Supreme Court justices. Three of its subsections matter here, and a judge only needs one of them to trigger the recusal obligation. Roberts triggers all three.

Subsection (a) says a judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” This is the appearance standard, and it does not require actual bias. It requires only that a reasonable person knowing the facts would question the judge’s impartiality.

That’s the lowest bar, and it’s the easiest to satisfy. The next two are more specific and even more difficult to evade.

Subsection (b)(4) says a judge shall disqualify himself where “he or his spouse, or a minor child residing in his household, has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome.” The language is broad on purpose. Congress wanted the net to catch exactly the kind of arrangement at issue here.

Subsection (b)(5)(iii) adds that a judge shall disqualify where a spouse “is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” That subsection covers situations where the financial interest runs through the spouse rather than through the judge directly.

Bennett Gershman, a legal ethics professor at Pace Law School, reviewed the Roberts household arrangement in 2022 at the request of a whistleblower. His analysis applies all three. A law firm that paid the judge’s household hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission has an ongoing commercial relationship with the spouse, and that spouse has an interest, whether measured as past compensation, ongoing business relationship, or future commissions, that could be substantially affected by the judge’s rulings in cases the firm argues. Even under the narrowest reading of “financial interest,” a reasonable person knowing that a law firm had paid Jane Roberts hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions would question John Roberts’s impartiality in a case the firm argued before him.

Roberts’s defenders have a single counter, and they cite it often. The Judicial Conference’s 2009 Advisory Opinion No. 107 says recusal is not automatically required merely because a spouse worked as a recruiter for a firm with business before the court. But the same opinion says recusal may be required where the relationship is “substantial and ongoing.” $10.3 million in documented commissions over seven years, with clients including multiple firms that appear before the Court multiple times per term, meets any reasonable definition of substantial and ongoing.

The recusal obligation is not discretionary under § 455. The statute uses the word “shall.” Roberts’s defense would have to argue either that his wife’s commission income doesn’t constitute a financial interest in firms paying the commissions, which is a strained reading, or that the interest isn’t substantially affected by his rulings, which is also strained because firms that win at the Court get more business and firms that lose get less.

The whistleblower is Kendal Price, a former managing director at Major, Lindsey and Africa, the legal recruiting firm where Jane Sullivan Roberts worked from 2007 to 2014. Price filed a federal complaint in December 2022 with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and the Department of Justice. He attached internal company spreadsheets, his own sworn affidavit, Jane Roberts’s 2015 arbitration testimony, and Gershman’s supporting legal memorandum.

An important note. This information was released because of a whistleblower, and some would say that means it is possible there is considerably greater corruption that just hasn’t been brought to the public. Some might say that it’s likely the tip of the corrupt iceberg. Few people would be willing to gather evidence on their employers activities, bring those to Congress, and risk attracting the enmity of the leader of the highest court in the land. Fewer will follow in that person’s footsteps if they see zero consequences follow from the whistleblowers disclosure.

The spreadsheets showed Jane Roberts earned $10,323,842.70 in commissions over those seven years on $13,309,433 in attributed firm revenue. An MLA partner described her in sworn testimony as the highest earning recruiter in the entire company by a wide margin.

The documented placements include former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to WilmerHale, Washington attorney Robert Bennett to Hogan Lovells, former United States Attorney Neil MacBride to Davis Polk, and New York Federal Reserve general counsel Michael Held to WilmerHale. Jane Roberts testified under oath that she placed senior government lawyers at starting partner salaries up to three million dollars. Successful people, she said, have successful friends. Mark Jungers, a former MLA managing partner, told Politico the firm hired her hoping to benefit from her being the Chief Justice’s wife.

The scope of Roberts’s corruption is not measured in individual cases. It is measured across the entire docket of the Supreme Court over two decades. WilmerHale alone, one of Jane Roberts’s documented client firms, had 18 cases at the Supreme Court in the single term of 2016, and Seth Waxman of WilmerHale has argued more than 85 Supreme Court cases across his career. Hogan Lovells, another documented client firm, argued 8 Supreme Court cases in 2024 alone and has represented nearly 10 percent of the Court’s entire docket in recent terms. Across Roberts’s two decades on the Court, the law firms paying his household in commissions have argued more than five hundred cases before him. He recused from none of them on spousal income grounds.
In 2019 she moved to Macrae and opened the firm’s Washington office, and her earnings from 2015 forward have never surfaced in public reporting.

Each year the Chief Justice signs a federal financial disclosure form required of every Article III judge under the Ethics in Government Act, and each year for more than a decade, the form described his wife’s compensation as salary.

The characterization was false. Jane Roberts earns commission, paid per placement, originating with the law firms that hire her candidates, and commission income and salary income are different categories of earnings governed by different tax treatment and different disclosure rules.

Gershman’s memorandum addresses this directly. Characterizing Mrs. Roberts’s commissions as salary, he wrote, is not merely factually incorrect. It is incorrect as a matter of law. Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush and the man who prepared Roberts for his confirmation hearings, put it more bluntly. The Chief Justice “fudged the details,” Painter wrote in 2023, “misleadingly describing his wife’s earnings as salary.” Even that is generous. Painter is a Republican ethics lawyer protecting a Republican institution.

“Fudged” is what you say when you don’t want to say “lied.” Roberts has been knowingly lying on federal forms for more than a decade to profit from his position on the Supreme Court.

In 2023, after Business Insider published the whistleblower documents, Roberts quietly corrected the entry. His 2022 disclosure report, which the Administrative Office released that June, described Jane Roberts’s compensation as base salary and commission. The same report, for the first time, disclosed an equity stake in Macrae valued between $100,001 and $250,000. She had acquired it in 2019, and Roberts had omitted it from three prior annual filings and attributed the omission to inadvertence.

Title 5, Section 13106 of the United States Code requires the Judicial Conference to refer any judge it has reasonable cause to believe willfully filed false disclosures to the Attorney General. Civil penalties reach fifty thousand dollars per violation. Title 18, Section 1001 makes it a federal crime to knowingly and willfully falsify a material fact on a document submitted to the federal government, punishable by up to five years in prison. The statutes carve out no exception for the Chief Justice.

Congress impeached and removed Federal District Judge Thomas Porteous in 2010 on a record that included false disclosure forms. Congress did the work the statute imagines, and no one has ever brought a referral or prosecution against a sitting Supreme Court justice for the same conduct.

After ProPublica broke the Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow story in April 2023, Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin wrote to Roberts inviting him to testify. Roberts declined in a one-page letter on April 25, citing separation of powers concerns. All nine justices signed an attached statement affirming that individual justices, not the Court, decide recusal questions. The self-policing rule remained in place.

In November 2023 the Court issued its first formal Code of Conduct. The document ran fourteen pages, and its preamble conceded that the absence of a written code had produced the misunderstanding that justices considered themselves unrestricted by ethics rules. The code contained no enforcement mechanism. It designated no body to receive complaints, empowered no body to investigate, and gave no body authority to impose sanctions. The Congressional Research Service confirmed the absence of enforcement in a formal report. The Brennan Center for Justice called the code designed to fail. Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics scholar at Washington University, said nothing in the statement suggested the Court even understood what the problem was.

The Dobbs investigation followed the same pattern. After the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked in May 2022, the Court’s marshal interviewed ninety-seven employees. Every employee signed an affidavit under penalty of perjury. The justices did not. The marshal’s January 2023 report said she had spoken with each justice, several on multiple occasions, but under a different standard than the one that applied to the staff.

The report concluded that she could not identify the source by a preponderance of the evidence, and the investigation closed.

Roberts is a primary architect of the ethics crisis that has broken the Court. He is a willing participant in the destruction of one of the three pillars of American checks and balances.

John Roberts is not a Trump lackey or a spineless rube. He is a builder of the world we are now living in. He is selling our future. He was appointed to the Supreme Court because of his belief that Republicans should be above the law and that the Presidency should be all-powerful so long as it’s run by a Republican. He might be an ideologue and a true believer, but not in regards to Christianity or Originalism. He is a true believer in the almighty dollar, and he sold his judicial soul to the highest bidder. May consequences someday visit him.

Five mechanisms exist to hold a federal judge accountable for the conduct documented here. Each of them is available. Each of them is being refused.

The law exists. 5 U.S.C. § 13106 makes willful false disclosure a civil violation with penalties up to $50,000. 18 U.S.C. § 1001 makes knowing false statements to the federal government a felony punishable by five years. 28 U.S.C. § 455 mandates recusal. These are laws Congress wrote. They apply to the Chief Justice.

Impeachment exists. Article II, Section 4 provides for removal of judges for high crimes and misdemeanors. Porteous in 2010. Claiborne in 1986. Hastings in 1989. Congress has the power and has used it on federal judges.

The Judicial Conference has a statutory referral obligation under § 13106. It exists. It just hasn’t been used against a justice.

The DC Bar has disciplinary jurisdiction over its members. It exists. It just carves out judicial capacity by policy.

The Supreme Court Bar has a complaint mechanism. It exists. It just answers to the Court.
The mechanisms exist. The political will of the people who control them does not. The Judicial Conference won’t refer. The DC Bar declines on intake. The Senate won’t impeach. DOJ won’t prosecute. Each institution points at another institution and says not my jurisdiction, not my moment, not my responsibility.

In the United Kingdom, a party who believes a judge should step aside can file a challenge, and a different judge decides. In Canada, the Judicial Council accepts complaints from any member of the public and can recommend a judge’s removal.

In Germany, the other members of a Federal Constitutional Court panel vote on whether a colleague must recuse, and the judge in question does not vote on their own case. In Australia, a statutory code requires federal judges to disclose spousal income in full rather than by category label. At the European Court of Human Rights, the plenary court has authority to remove a judge who fails to recuse where the law requires it.

What every one of these systems shares, and what the American system lacks, is an external body with the authority to receive a complaint, investigate it, and impose consequences. The self-policing rule is the American anomaly.

This is not recent drift. In December 2000, Roberts flew to Tallahassee at his own expense and met privately with Governor Jeb Bush to advise on the governor’s role in assigning Florida’s electors to George W. Bush. Nobody disclosed the meeting during his 2005 confirmation hearings. A December 2000 email from Bush to Roberts, which surfaced a decade later through the governor’s gubernatorial correspondence, thanked him for his input in this unique and historic situation. The advice concerned scenarios in which the Republican-controlled legislature could assign electors directly, bypassing the popular vote and the ongoing recount.

The Reagan-era paper trail at the National Archives contains memos in which Roberts argued against heightened constitutional scrutiny for sex discrimination, recommended that Reagan distance himself from the Centers for Disease Control’s conclusion that AIDS could not be transmitted by casual contact, described comparable-worth pay equity as staggeringly pernicious, and wrote that an effects test in the Voting Rights Act would amount to a quota system for electoral politics. Twenty-seven years later he wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder gutting the same statute.

For twenty years the ethics conversation around the Supreme Court has run on a curve composed entirely of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Roberts has played the institutional grown-up, the last one who cared about the Court as an institution, the one trying to hold the line. The line he held was the one that protected his own household. Thomas took gifts from Harlan Crow. Alito took flights from Paul Singer. Roberts took law firm money through his wife’s commission checks and mislabeled it on a federal form.

The DC Bar accepts disciplinary complaints from any member of the public against any of its admitted attorneys. John G. Roberts Jr. is admitted to the DC Bar, and I am filing a complaint against him today, after this article goes live. The complaint alleges that Roberts violated DC Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(c) across sixteen annual federal financial disclosure filings from 2007 through 2022, by mischaracterizing at least $10,323,842.70 in documented commission income from law firms appearing before the Court as salary, with unreported commission income across an additional eight annual filings from 2015 through 2022 estimated at a floor of $11.8 million based on the documented seven-year mean, and with the actual figure likely substantially higher given Macrae’s reported revenue growth during that period. The complaint further alleges that Roberts omitted a material equity interest in his wife’s employer from three consecutive annual filings between 2019 and 2021. The complaint cites 5 U.S.C. § 13106 and 18 U.S.C. § 1001 as the underlying statutory predicates.

The men and women running this system built their careers on the assumption that nobody was paying attention. That the forms would go unread. That the recusals would go uncounted. That the statutes would sit on the shelf. That the institutions would cover for each other and no one outside would notice the arrangement.
We noticed.

We see the ten million dollars documented and the eleven million more estimated. The millions more likely unseen. We see the sixteen years of false characterizations. We see the hidden equity stake. We see the stock trades and the missed recusals and the Code of Conduct written to fail and the justices who signed affidavits for no one. We see the Judicial Conference that won’t refer and the Senate that won’t impeach and the Attorney General who won’t prosecute. We see every institution pointing at every other institution and shrugging.

Here is what you can do.

One. Share this article. Every person who reads it is one more person who knows, and the thing they built their careers on is the assumption that nobody knows. Post it. Send it. Forward it. Break the quiet.

Two. Send a letter to the DC Bar Office of Disciplinary Counsel at 515 Fifth Street NW, Building A, Room 117, Washington DC 20001. Write it in your own words. The facts to include are that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. mischaracterized his wife’s commission income as salary on sixteen years of federal financial disclosure forms, omitted a material equity interest for three consecutive years, and did not recuse from more than five hundred cases argued by law firms paying his household in commissions. The relevant statutes are 28 U.S.C. § 455, 5 U.S.C. § 13106, and 18 U.S.C. § 1001, and the rule to cite is DC Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(c). It takes about ten minutes.

All of this movement creates pressure. Pressure creates heat. Enough heat and things will change. Be the heat, be the pressure, and the system will bend. That’s how we take our damn country back.

We need 10 subscribers per article. Yesterday, despite hundreds of thousands of daily readers, we fell short of that number for the first time in nearly a month. If you want this all to continue, for everyone, then we need you!

Don’t let this be the reason you miss rent or skip a meal. For everyone else, you can be one of the ten today and make sure the articles, books, legislation, and training keep coming for everyone.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Failure, Fraud, Justice

Jan Resseger: Rebuffing the Attacks on Teachers and Public Schools

By dianeravitch

May 13, 2026 //

Jan Resseger is a careful researcher in Ohio who tracks education issues with careful attention to facts, details, and context. In this post, she notes that public schools have become the targets of ideologues in state legislatures and even the U.S. Department of Education. All too often, politicians use the public schools as a punching bag, but know nothing of their work or their accomplishments. werethe fsmiliar with the work and the accomplishments of teachers, she believes, state and federal officials would thank teachers instead disparaging them.

In recent local elections, voters in nearly 2/3 of school districts turned down relatively small property tax increases to fund the schools, usually repairs and physical upgrades. Legislators said this proved that voters are not happy with public schools, but Jan believes the election results reflect the squeeze of inflation and affordability caused by Trump’s policies and by the state’s failure to fund public schools adequately as it continues to expand charters and vouchers. Ohio has a Republican supermajority in both houses of its legislature, and they are eagerly funding charters and vouchers despite disappointing results.

As Jan writes, if the critics were familiar with the daily work of teachers, they would be champions of public schools, not critics.

She writes:

Attacks on the nation’s public schools fill the news. After last week’s May primary election in Ohio, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee reportedly blamed public schools for a statewide property tax revolt: “(T)hrowing money at schools stuck in an old way of thinking won’t solve any problems.”

And at the federal level at the end of April, the U.S. Department of Education, by amending federal guidance, stopped defining public school teachers and administrators as professionals by setting formal regulations that will mean graduate students in education cannot borrow as much money to pay for graduate school as others the Trump administration defines as professionals. Education Week’s Evie Blad reports that a new federal regulation finalized by the U.S. Department of Education would “exclude education from a list of ‘professional’ graduate degrees subjected to higher loan limits… The final rule lists the following graduate degrees as ‘professional’: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology, and clinical psychology.” The new rule will make it harder for educators to afford graduate school by setting “new limits on federal student loans” for teachers and school administrators seeking advanced degrees to enhance their content knowledge and meet requirements for licensure.

The Department of Education must publish in the Federal Register new rules that are being proposed, and receive public comments prior to making the new rules final. In the case of redefining graduate programs in education as non-professional, there was considerable pushback from the public. Secretary McMahon’s department ignored the comments. For K-12 Dive, Anna Merod and Ben Unglesbee report: “Commenters told the department that impacted degree programs include master of arts in teaching, master of education, education specialist, master of library sciences, and doctor of education… The department’s final rule said the agency received many public comments calling for including education as a professional degree or to otherwise allow higher borrowing levels for students pursuing advanced education degrees. In their arguments, commenters cited teacher shortages and the importance of graduate programs for licensure advancement… Additionally commenters noted that career changers who want to enter the profession pursue master’s degrees in education for certification, especially in high-need areas.”

Many of us value public education, but increasingly we take these institutions for granted. While schools are essential to our neighborhoods, our communities and our children, most of us have not been inside a school for years due to lockdowns during our society’s epidemic of gun violence. Constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black recently shared some statistics which ought to remind us why public schools are so essential and at the same time so vulnerable to politics: “(A)s the largest government institution in the United States, public education is an obvious potential target of those aiming to undermine faith in government institutions. Public education is twice the size of the entire federal government. More important, it represents the most extensive and persistent relationship that citizens ever have with government. Public schools educate roughly ninety percent of Americans for more than a decade during their formative years.”

The Attack on Public Schools

The late Mike Rose, who devoted his long career at UCLA to preparing future members of the teaching profession, worried about what has, since the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, been a political attack on the nation’s public schools: “Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here. Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination…” (Why School? 2014 edition, pp 203-204)

Rose responded with a three year series of visits across the United States to the classrooms of excellent teachers identified by academics, by their peers, and by school district leaders. In the book which grew out of his school visits, Possible Lives, Rose described teachers at work and reflected on what school teachers do: “Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination. I visited schools for three and a half years, and what struck me early on—and began to define my journey—was how rarely the kind of intellectual and social richness I was finding was reflected in the public sphere… We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries… We are offered, by both entertainment and news media, depictions of schools as mediocre places, where students are vacuous and teachers are not so bright; or as violent and chaotic places, places where order has fled and civility has been lost. It’s hard to imagine anything good in all this.” (Possible Lives, p. 1)

What do teachers do?

Here instead, however, is what those three years showed Rose about school teachers and the complexity of their work: “To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal… As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kind of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.” (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423)

In a comprehensive 2014 summary, Rose defines what teachers do: “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

Reacquainting ourselves with Mike Rose’s thinking is one way for us all to consider the complexity of public schools as institutions and the challenges faced by the professionals who spend six or seven hours every day working with our children. I fear that few of the state legislators and federal officials who deride teachers, who insult teachers by denying their professional status, and who chronically underfund public schools have recently spent much time visiting a public school.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Ohio, Teachers, Teachers and Teaching, Teaching, Tennessee

UNESCO Report on the Dangers of Ed-Tech: “An Ed-Tech Tragedy?”

By dianeravitch

May 5, 2026 //

I posted about this very important international study when it was first released in 2023. It is as relevant now as ever. Can we recognize failure and learn from it? Some European countries have. With some exceptions, we have not.

Ed-Tech is a major industry. Its profits are huge. We have allowed the hype and propaganda of the industry to remake schooling. Part of the marketing is the claim that “our public schools are failing.” The answer: buy more of what impairs learning. Or endorse school choice, charters, vouchers, and home schooling, even though there is zero evidence that these privately run schools are as effective as public schools.

Read the report. Reach your own conclusion. Did we dive into screens and laptops because they increased student motivation and effort? Or because we were swept along by the industry propaganda?

Three years ago, UNESCO released a major blockbuster report warning about the dangers of relying too much on education technology. The author of the report was Mark West. The title of the report is An Ed-Tech Tragedy? Educational Technologies and School Closures in the Time of COVID-19.

An alternate link: https://teachertaskforce.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/2023_UNESCO_An-ed-tech-tragedy_Educational-technologies-and-school-closures-in-the-time-of-COVID19_EN_.pdf

The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.

Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?

You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.

The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:

[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.

The summary says:

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.

Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.

Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.

Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.

In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.

The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…

Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…

Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.

The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.

Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]

Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.

It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…

Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.

Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.

Categories Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, International, Technology

NYC Parents and Activists Block “AI-themed” High School

By dianeravitch

May 5, 2026 //

Parents and activists banded together to persuade the New York City Board of Education (aka the Panel on Educational Policy) to reject a proposal to open an AI-themed high school.

Matthew Haag wrote in The New York Times:

In Brooklyn, an artificial intelligence program helps public school students pronounce words. In Queens, high school students ask Google Gemini how to improve their essays. And in the Bronx, students in a robotics lab consult an A.I. tool before building parts on a 3-D printer.

As teachers and students in New York City and across the United States have increasingly embraced artificial intelligence in the classroom, school leaders in the nation’s largest school system were set to make one of their biggest splashes yet — the opening of an A.I.-focused high school in Manhattan next school year.

But on Monday, the new schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, abruptly halted the creation of the school amid a groundswell of opposition to the rapid adoption of the technology and its potential harms.

In an interview, Mr. Samuels said that he understood the concerns and questions parents have about artificial intelligence in the classroom and its safety and impact on critical thinking. “I want to be able to think about the technology in a very thoughtful way,” Mr. Samuels said.

Despite the decision not to proceed, school leaders in New York City and beyond remain bullish on the future of artificial intelligence in education and its potential benefits. They argue that it could transform teaching and learning, a claim also promoted by companies that sell the tools, and that it would be irresponsible to ignore or restrict the technology.

But New York parents have expressed concern about the artificial intelligence programs used in schools or accessible on students’ computers, as well as the lack of information about the applications and data they collect. Some families recently delivered to Mayor Zohran Mamdani a petition with thousands of signatures calling for a two-year moratorium on generative A.I., such as chatbots.

“The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years,” said Leonie Haimson, an education advocate in New York City and member of the Coalition for an A.I. Moratorium.

Leonie Haimson, a member of the Coalition for an A.I. Moratorium, said that she has witnessed “intense outrage” among New York City parents over A.I. use in schools. Credit…Madison Swart for The New York Times

Under Mr. Samuels’s leadership, the city’s Education Department has started to develop guidelines for how teachers and students should use artificial intelligence. Last month, the school system published its first playbook for A.I., developed in consultation with educators and education technology companies.

The creation of the new high school, known as Next Generation Technology High School and located in the financial district of Manhattan, was expected to be another major step toward the embrace of artificial intelligence in a school system whose decisions, because of its size, often influence other districts. A vote on the creation of the high school by a 22-member education oversight panel was scheduled for Wednesday.

The group’s chairman, Gregory Faulkner, said that he did not believe a single member would have voted in favor of it. Mr. Faulkner said that out of the many emails he received and conversations he had with parents, just a handful of comments were supportive of the school.

“If there’s anything that even has a hint of A.I., there’s strong opposition to it,” Mr. Faulkner said. “People are very nervous about the technology and how it is going to be used.”

Since this is a gift article, feel free to open and finish reading.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Failure, New York City, Parents, Technology

Mike Miles Is Ruining Some of Houston’s Best Schools

Timothy Snyder on “Superpower Suicide”

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Is Stuck in a Quagmire, Lashes out at Critics, and Praises Himself

New York Court Reverses DOGE Cancellation of $100 Million for NEH Grants

Background

Two Consolidated Cases

Ruling

Jan Resseger: Reviving NCLB WILL NOT Improve Schools

Was Kash Patel’s Snorkeling Trip at Pearl Harbor Sacrilegious?

Why Chief Justice John Roberts Should Be Removed

Jan Resseger: Rebuffing the Attacks on Teachers and Public Schools

UNESCO Report on the Dangers of Ed-Tech: “An Ed-Tech Tragedy?”

NYC Parents and Activists Block “AI-themed” High School

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