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Who Ever Imagined that the U.S. and Russia Would Become Business Partners?

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2026 //
2

Expanding on the story that Heather Cox Richardson told in the previous post, the following story in The New York Times explained the deal-making arranged by Jard Kushner and Howard Witkoff, two amateurs chosen by Trump to negotiate a peace plan to end the war that Russia started when it invaded Ukraine in 2023.

Now we know why Kushner and Witkoff emerged from their meetings with Putin wreathed in smiles. They got no concessions from Putin about ending the war. Their “peace plan” is to demand that Zelensky give Putin everything has done. Their peace plan is to demand that Zelensky surrender whatever Putin wants.

What they did get was Putin’s commitment to a massive project between the US and Rymussis to drill for liquified natural gas in Alaska.

The New York Times reported:

At first blush, the proposed venture looks like it would further the Trump administration’s goal of global “energy dominance.”

An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it and export it to allies abroad.

The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.

But it turns out that the company was not an all-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations.

Joel Riddle, who was chief executive of the company, Polar LNG, until he resigned in September, said he had been misled about the sources of the start-up funding, which ostensibly came from a company in the United Arab Emirates.

Instead, Mr. Riddle said he learned, the true source of at least some of Polar LNG’s money was Novatek, a Russian energy giant under partial U.S. sanctions.

“It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Mr. Riddle said in a brief interview.

These previously unreported tensions were also detailed in legal memos that Mr. Riddle attached to his resignation letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The memos, prepared by Baker Botts, an international law firm, said the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement unit had raised concerns that Polar LNG had ties to Novatek that might present “potential Russia-related sanctions concerns.”

Polar LNG on Friday issued a statement announcing a new acting chief executive, Tim Talkington, and described Mr. Riddle as a “disgruntled former employee.”

The project, if it happens, is a long way off. In addition to the sanctions issues that would have to be negotiated, the technology envisioned is highly complex and must overcome some of the most brutal weather conditions in the United States. It also is competing with another Alaska gas plan that already has the support of the Trump administration. But that the Polar LNG deal is being discussed at all shows how business deals of almost any stripe are on the table during the talks with the Kremlin.

The sequence of events illustrates the unorthodox, opaque mixture of deal-making and high-stakes diplomacy that has defined Mr. Trump’s attempts to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

There is no indication that Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner were aware of Polar LNG or its ties to Novatek, even as the broad outlines of the deal came up in their talks with Mr. Putin beginning last year. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks, said that the deal had only been broadly mentioned and that no granular discussions had occurred.

The project, should it ever come to fruition, would doubly help Novatek, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, first by using Novatek’s technology and second because the company would own an equity stake.

The Alaska gas discussions have taken place alongside talks to sell off part of another Russian energy giant, Lukoil, to the U.S. government and other investors, including some with business ties to Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, causing consternation among some Washington lawmakers and outraging some of Ukraine’s supporters. The pair have also discussed the possibility of U.S. involvement in future Russian gas exports to Europe. (The administration has said that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff were guided only by U.S. interests.)

Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who served as an assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration, said the idea of bringing Novatek into the high north of Alaska is a terrible one. “It is terrible on environmental grounds, it is a terrible idea on economic and geopolitical grounds, and most importantly this feeds the belief that Putin can get an out-of-jail-free card.”

The efforts to bring Novatek equipment to Alaska have also included a businessman, Gentry Beach, with ties to the Trump family. A college friend of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, Mr. Beach served as a finance vice chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Mr. Beach said in February that he had held negotiations with Novatekabout bringing its natural gas technology to Alaska.

Mr. Beach could not be reached for comment. It was not clear if he remained involved in the project, or whether he was aware of Novatek’s potential ownership stake in Polar LNG.

A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said the two men were no longer close, adding that Mr. Trump was not involved in the Polar LNG project. Novatek’s statement said that Mr. Beach had no role in its discussions to take a stake in Polar LNG. The U.S. official said Mr. Beach was not involved in the administration’s discussions related to Novatek.

Mr. Riddle is one of at least three Polar LNG executives who recently resigned. As they departed, Trump officials were notified about their concerns related to the secret Russian financing. Mr. Riddle said the executives had urged administration officials to investigate the matter. The Energy Department, where the warning was sent, did not respond when asked about the matter.

“I felt like I did the right thing to notify authorities at the appropriate time,” Mr. Riddle said.

The Polar LNG plan called for the company to tap into the giant load of natural gas available in the northern reaches of Alaska, a byproduct of extensive oil extraction underway in the region.

Polar LNG’s proposal calls for it to buy a giant, 640,000-ton concrete-and-steel device from Novatek called a gravity-based structure that would be placed on the seabed just above the northern coast of Alaska, in an area known as Milne Point.

Map locates Milne Point, Alaska.

On top of that platform, equipment will be installed that would refrigerate gas supplied by an area oil producer, transforming it into a liquid that can then be loaded onto ships that travel through icy waters and deliver it to customers in Asia.

Novatek uses a similar approach to export natural gas from the Russian Arctic in a project called Arctic LNG 2. Mr. Putin said publicly last year that “we are discussing with our American partners” the possibility of using Novatek technology to produce liquefied natural gas in Alaska.

Korean-made ships with a special ice-breaking design that Polar LNG plans to use were initially built for Novatek, but delivery was stopped by the manufacturer after the United States imposed sanctions on the Arctic LNG 2 project.

From the start, Novatek was slated to supply the gas liquefaction station. But financing for the project was not supposed to come from Russia, according to executives involved in the effort.

Emphasizing the point, Polar LNG features images of the American flag and a bald eagle on its website, boasting that “Polar LNG helps ensure the United States leads,” adding that the project is “America’s Arctic Advantage.”

The company hired lobbyists in Washingtonand in Alaska to help push the project, according to federal and state records. In Washington alone, the company is spending $380,000 a quarter on lobbying, hiring a former Trump-era Interior Department acting assistant secretary, Adam Suess.

Novatek is already under U.S. sanctions that would require the Treasury Department to issue a license for its equipment to be used in Alaska. Recently passed sanctions legislation named after deceased Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, makes things even harder: The bill specifically targets Novatek, as well as its Arctic LNG 2 project, because of the company’s ties to Mr. Putin.

However, Mr. Trump temporarily waived the law’s Russia sanctions last week, presenting the move as necessary to keep peace talks going.

During a meeting held at the Four Seasons Hotel in late August in Abu Dhabi between executives of Polar LNG and its parent company, Tech Wave Industrial Projects Management, top executives from Novatek were present. That was when Mr. Riddle began to appreciate that Novatek was directly involved in approving funding to keep the effort going, text messages reviewed by The Times indicate.

Tech Wave is an Abu Dhabi-based company that specializes in managing oil, gas and construction projects. Its chief operating officer is Bjorn Gundersen, who a decade ago was listed in oil industry trade publications as a senior executive at Novatek supervising LNG projects.

A second Tech Wave executive, Ahmed Farghaly, also worked for Novatek until recently. According to his LinkedIn profile, he left around the time the United States firstimposed sanctions on one of Novatek’s LNG projects.

Tech Wave, in a statement, confirmed that Mr. Gundersen had worked for Novatek before 2022, the year the war with Ukraine started. It also said Novatek “has no ownership interest” in the company. The statement did not address questions from The Times as to whether Novatek money helped finance the Polar LNG efforts.

Denis Solovyov, Novatek’s deputy chairman, and Leonid Mikhelson, the company’s chief executive, discussed their company’s providing as much as $15 million to Tech Wave to bankroll Polar LNG, the messages say. Asked about the messages and the Abu Dhabi meeting, Novatek said it could not comment on private correspondence, but that the company and Polar LNG had agreed to “provide each other with open communication.”

“All the necessary decisions were made at the meeting in Abu Dhabi,” Mr. Solovyov wrote in one message to Mr. Riddle sent in early September. “The first 5 million were supposed to arrive by today.”

It was several weeks after this exchange that Mr. Riddle resigned. Two other top Polar LNG executives, Dan Chandra, the company’s chief financial officer, and Jim Smith, a former Exxon Mobil executive who served as Polar LNG’s executive vice president, also have left in recent weeks.

Polar LNG, in a statement Friday, said that “Riddle was recently terminated from the company for cause,” adding: “The company is investigating claims concerning Riddle that may result in litigation.”

But Mr. Riddle resigned six days before the company issued him a letter saying it would terminate his employment immediately, in part because he had raised concerns that some of the company’s actions could be “subject to sanctions,” documents obtained by The Times show.

Questions about the potential ties to Novatek had by late this summer already reached Trump administration officials, according to a memo prepared by an outside law firm for Polar LNG, Baker Botts.

“Concerns regarding a perceived connection to Novatek will likely affect licensing or other regulatory approvals,” Baker Botts wrote in a memo to company executives that was shared with The Times.

In addition, the letter said that federal officials had already made clear in communications with the company that they were concerned that an investor in Polar LNG “has ties to Novatek and may be acting on Novatek’s behalf with respect to the project.”

Paul Luther, a Baker Botts lawyer who worked on the matter, declined on Friday to discuss it further.

Polar LNG would need a series of approvals from the federal government before the deal could move ahead, including a sign-off from the Treasury Department authorizing it to acquire the Novatek seabed platform, given that parts of the company are under sanctions. It would also require a permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build a gas export facility.

Questions have already emerged about whether the Novatek device will function at the planned Milne Point location because of shallow waters there and the “potential disruption to traditional whaling and local opposition, particularly from the local native Alaskan population,” a lawyer for Polar LNG wrote in an internal company memo.

Certain Trump administration officials had already expressed skepticism about the Polar LNG plan, according to internal company documents seen by The Times and interviews with some of the people involved.

Part of the concern is that the Polar LNG project would be pitted against an even more ambitious plan to build a $50 billion, 800-mile natural gas pipeline to move natural gas from the northern slope to the southern coast of Alaska, where it could be more easily shipped out from existing ports there. That plan would also potentially supply Asian markets.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations enthusiastically embraced the gas pipeline project, which Japan and Korea may help finance to increase their reliable supply of natural gas.

“The pipeline makes far more sense,” said Matthew McManus, who until April 2025 served as a deputy director at the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources and is now at the National Center for Energy Analytics. “The Polar LNG project would face years of permitting and concerns about ties to Russia.”

Mr. Talkington, Polar LNG’s acting chief executive, said his company sought to seize “a generational opportunity to advance U.S. energy dominance, unlock profound benefits for the state of Alaska, and strengthen American Arctic navigation.”

The fact that discussions are even going on about using Russian equipment — and potentially a Russian-financed company — to move American natural gas to international markets is a further insult to Ukraine, and should not be a part of talks over a possible end to the war, said Ilya Zaslavskiy, a gas industry consultant who previously worked in Moscow and New York who now does research on Russian sanctions and energy issues out of Washington.

“Any approach by Novatek to transfer technology should be seen as a Kremlin attempt to co-opt U.S. policymakers in order to undermine U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and our allies,” Mr. Zaslavskiy said.

Categories Accountability, Alaska, Elections, Ethics, For-Profit, International, Trump

Trump Makes BIG Deals with Putin, Who Is Now Our Closest Ally

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2026 //
5

Heather Cox Richardson reports on the deals that Trump is making with Putin. The U.S. is going into business with Russia! Where is Lindsey Graham when we need him?

Trump can’t understand why Zelensky is unwilling to sell out Ukraine, as he is selling out the U.S.

Profits galore! Someone will make billions! But not you!

Richardson writes:

Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.

An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.

Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”

U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.

Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.

Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.

It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.

On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.

A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.

In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.

The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.

The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, International, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: More Trump Family Corruption

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2026 //
11

It will be years before we have a full account of the Trump family’s profiteering, but we already know that President Trump’s personal wealth increased by more than $2 billion in 2025. His sons, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and other cronies have also made big financial gains while investing in sweetheart deals.

Heather Cox Richardson recounts some of the latest financial shenanigans. One of the shadiest deals entangles the interests of Trump and Putin.

She writes:

A new report from Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton of the New York Times Saturday revealed that the administration’s talk about doing business deals with Putin while he continues to strike Ukraine was not hypothetical. As they have allegedly been negotiating for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff—neither of whom are diplomats—have been talking with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about a multibillion-dollar deal to buy the assets of Russian oil giant Lukoil at the rock-bottom prices to which they have sunk because of U.S. sanctions.

Because such a sale would immediately remove those assets from U.S. sanctions, they would instantly become far more valuable. Those looking to benefit financially from the purchase would include a major Trump donor, as well as Middle Eastern investors tied to the Trump family and the Witkoffs. The U.S. government would take a stake in the company as well, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Congress authorized in 2018 to invest in development projects in lower- and middle-income countries.

While Lukoil is technically a private company, observers believe Putin has control over it. And while the deal would have to be approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems unlikely that Trump loyalist Bessent would stop it.

According to Troianovski and Lipton, Putin suggested the deal on September 5. It was likely not coincidental that the offer came after Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died on July 11. Graham, who was close to Trump, was firmly behind Ukraine as it tried to fight off Putin’s invasion. Until Trump, Democrats and Republicans both felt strongly that American national security depended on stopping Putin’s aggression, and they stood behind Ukraine.

Trump’s ties to Russia are extensive and well known, but this apparent attempt to buy Trump’s support for Russia even as the war drags into another winter and Ukraine’s drones are destroying Russia’s oil sector seems especially blatant. It puts a spotlight on the fact that, under Trump, U.S. national security is for sale. A Democratic-led Senate would undoubtedly object to what the Republicans have permitted.

Indeed, under Trump there does not appear to be a line between foreign affairs and Trump family business deals. On October 1, Allegra Goodwin, Katie Polglase, and Majlie de Puy Kamp of CNN reported that while in discussions about ending the war in Gaza, Kushner has major financial interests in the Israeli military.

Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has invested in Phoenix Financial, a firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that, in turn, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in at least nine companies that provide equipment for the Israeli military. The CNN journalists report that the stock values of all the nine companies grew last year and that many of the companies attributed the growth to the war in Gaza. Kushner’s firm sold a quarter of its stock in Phoenix in July for more than $340 million, more than five times the value of its initial purchase.

If he were a government employee, Kushner would have to disclose his finances, but he is a “volunteer” negotiator. One of Kushner’s lawyers told the reporters that Kushner has “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” about investments, but, as the journalists note, Kushner told Forbes that he meets with the leaders of the financial group every few weeks and maintains “a very active dialogue” with them.

Kushner’s lawyer confirmed that was true a year ago when Kushner said it, but that since he has been “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts,” he has scaled back that contact significantly.

It’s not just Kushner. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal on October 2 warned that “Don Jr.’s Star Turn Is Coming,” noting that the “Trump family businesses will be in the spotlight on Capitol Hill for the next two years.” “Does the Trump family know what is about to hit them?” the board asked. It noted that even Republicans are upset at the news that an oligarch close to Putin had paid for Don Jr.’s wedding celebration. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) has called for the Senate to subpoena Don Jr. to find out how that financial underwriting came to happen. While they’re at it, Curtis wants to learn more about the family’s cryptocurrency and prediction market ventures.

The corruption of the administration is matched by its incompetence, and neither will come out well in congressional investigations.

In September, hackers broke into the FBI jobs portal and stole information about nearly every FBI employee as well as more than 8,000 state and local law enforcement officers who had worked with the FBI agents. On Saturday, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported just how devastating that breach was. The hacked data included “names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, FBI email addresses and employee ID numbers, in addition to personal identifying information for emergency contacts, including Social Security numbers and personal email addresses.”

According to FBI officials and outside experts, Dilanian and Leonnig report, the breach is a counterintelligence disaster—one of the worst in U.S. history. The information not only exposes the people involved, but also enables adversaries to figure out U.S. priorities and who is working on what.

One cybersecurity expert at the FBI said the cause of the breach was “definitely incompetence.” The information should never have been linked to the internet, the expert said. “It belonged on our internal system and some dumbass moved it all” to a system connected to the internet. The expert told Dilanian and Leonnig that in chats the FBI obtained, the hackers wrote they couldn’t believe that the hack of such important information was so easy.

Speaking at a high school gymnasium in Ohio Saturday night, Trump told an audience: “Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their *ss.”

Which is more appealing; Trump’s profiteering or his vulgarity?

Categories For-Profit

Network for Public Education Urges States Not to Opt in to Federal Voucher Program!

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2026 //
6

The Network for Public Education is dedicated to the preservation and improvement of public schools. Public schools are a foundation stone of our democracy. Nearly 90% of American students are enrolled in public schools.

We urge concerned citizens to write to their Governor and tell them NOT to participate in the federal voucher program!

Every community needs high-quality public schools but diverting public money to private alternatives weakens public schools.

Public money should be spent in public schools.

The Trump administration does not like public schools. It encourages public funding for religious schools, vouchers, charter schools, for-profit schools, and home schools. Research and experience teach that these alternatives choose their students and they discriminate. And they get worse academic results than public schools.

Voucher schools are free to reject students with disabilities. Unlike public schools, students in special education have no rights.

Do not fall for the machinations of the Trump regime against public schools. Their intentions are not good. They loathe public schools, the schools that educated 90% of all Americans and created the greatest nation in the world.

From NPE executive director Carol Burris:

October 2, 2026

The Network for Public Education Urges Governors Not to Opt-in to the Federal Voucher Program

On October 1, the U.S. Treasury Department released regulations for the federal tax creditvoucher program that was slipped into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and pushed through reconciliation.

The rules confirm that this program will advantage sending public dollars to private and religious schools, including schools that freely discriminate. Governors must decide whether to opt-in by January 1.

We make our recommendation that states not opt-in based on the following:

Opting in allows federal tax dollars to fund discrimination against children.

When a state opts in, federal tax dollars can flow to private and religious schools and other providers that discriminate against students based on disability, academic challenges, LGBTQ status, or religion. States are expressly forbidden from adding protections of their own.

Opting in pushes cash-strapped public schools toward “pay to play.”

The regulations allow scholarships for public school students to cover services such as tutoring or extra special education services. However, nothing in the regulations stops public schools from turning programs they now fund into paid services that would require families to scramble to cover with scholarships.

A struggling district could convert elementary band, middle school art, or high school SAT prep into programs paid for with these vouchers. Here is the catch: to do that, the district must first charge parents. Some students will get a voucher. Others will not. Children whose parents cannot pay will be shut out.

This moves us one step closer to libertarian Milton Friedman’s vision, in which parents pay to educate their children and public education disappears. Make no mistake. This has been the far right’s goal for decades.

Opting in now creates a blind commitment to a program designed by those who actively undermine public schools.

At this point, the regulations are not final nor has Treasury released its Guidance regarding what expenses will be eligible under the program. That Guidance is expected “by the end of the year,”according to Kevin Salinger at Treasury. Without the Department’s Guidance for what qualifies as an eligible expense, a governor may opt-in, only to find out that virtually any spending that makes its way to public schools or districts has been disallowed. And then they’re stuck, because it’s clear that once in, states cannot back out until the following year.

Opting in fuels the growth of schools without rules.

As privatization has expanded, NPE has documented the fraud, abuse, and chaos that charter and voucher programs have produced. Dangling more tax dollars with few restrictions will draw more bad actors into education, opening low-cost, experimental schools that mislead parents and shortchange children.

States cannot block money from flowing to schools with poor fiscal or academic records. They cannot require public reporting on how funds are used or which students are served. They cannot add safeguards against waste and fraud.

Opting in adds to an unsustainable federal deficit.

Treasury projects that by 2030 the program could cost $26 billion a year in lost federal revenue.

That is more than Title I or IDEA, the largest federal programs supporting public schools.

Opting in will drain donations from charities American families depend on.

Large, respected charities like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and smaller ones that fund suicide prevention centers and domestic violence shelters, will now compete with a program that offers a dollar-for-dollar tax credit instead of a deduction. In an affordability crisis, donors will be drawn to giving that returns their entire contribution.

We encourage friends of public education to act today. Write your governor with a simple message: Do not opt our state into the federal voucher program. Then urge your members of Congress to repeal it. Join the millions of Americans who treasure public education and recognize this voucher program for what it is—a stealth attempt to destroy our beloved public schools.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, For-Profit, Funding, Home Schooling, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Research, Resistance, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Support for public schools, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Peter Greene: New Regulations for Federal Voucher Program Tie the Hands of Local Officials

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
5

Starting on January 1, 2027, the federal government will sponsor its own voucher program. In this post, Peter Greene explains how the new program will work. You can be sure that every dollar spent on charter schools and vouchers will be taken away from public schools.

Peter Greene writes:

Since Congress passed President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill with its federal school voucher, questions have abounded about the exact form that the tax credit program would take. Today the Treasury Department released proposed rules for the voucher program, and some of those questions are being answered

One of the persistent questions has been how much flexibility will states have in how the program is administered. The answer that came today is “Not very much.”

The basic structure of the tax credit voucher program works like this: a taxpayer redirects $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) and receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The SGO uses that money (minus an up-to-10% administrative fee) to grant scholarships to students, who may then use the money for educational expenses. 

While the state must require SGOs to meet the state’s requirements for charitable organizations, the state may not put restrictions on how the SGO operates “such as by limiting the type of school that scholarship recipients may attend or the types of qualified elementary or secondary education expenses for which scholarship funds may be used.” 

This restriction on restrictions dovetails with the voucher movement’s push to render legal the use of redirected taxpayer dollars to fund religious schools without setting limits on how those schools can discriminate.

The rules appear to solidify the idea that an SGO cannot be removed by the state for reasons other than failure to comply with the law’s SGO requirements. These requirements simply require an SGHO to serve at least ten eligible students and spend the appropriate amount of money on the vouchers. Nothing in the law requires SGOs to monitor or assess the educational quality of the vendors who receive the money.

The rules issued do indicate that an SGO can choose to limit its scholarships “to specific subject matter” or to students whose household income is less than 80% of the area median gross income, but it appears that those limits would be placed at the SGO’s discretion and not the state’s.

The federal voucher program caps eligibility at 300% of area median gross income, a generous cap that would make the vast majority of American families eligible for the voucher. 

The rules published today show that if a state wanted to, for instance, add restrictions that directed vouchers only to low-income students or students in particular communities, they could not do so. Nor could they impose any restrictions that would keep the voucher dollars from going to religious schools. 

In short, any governors who expected to use these redirected taxpayer dollars in ways that aligned with their own policy goals may need to reconsider. If they opt in, their hands are tied.

There are other details to be dug out and discussed, but one rule guarantees that these discussions may go on forever. While some “stakeholders” recommended restricting state’s ability to opt out after opting in, the rules indicate that a governor will opt in for just one year at a time.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

The Five Biggest Charter School Grifts

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
4

Bruce Baker taught for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He now teaches education policy at the University of Miami. He will have many opportunities to observe and document edu-grifting in Florida.

In this post, he identities the five biggest charter scandals and explains how they worked. Much of what you will read was called “legal graft” by past pundits. In other words, the charter operators collect millions in public funds while providing a dubious education, and they get away scot-free.

In other words, take the money and run. No consequences.

He writes:

Five cases, four mechanisms, one ranking: this post lines up the biggest fraud prosecutions, the biggest company-store combination, and the biggest sweeps contract in the charter sector’s history against the single largest real-estate deal any operator has ever built, and asks which one moved the most money. The answer isn’t the one with an indictment attached.

In The Grift Model I group the ways charter operators route public money into private hands into four repeating types: enrollment inflation (getting paid for students who aren’t really being educated — phantom seats, unverifiable attendance, ghost enrollees); related-party transactions (a school’s own board or executives sitting on both sides of a contract); the company store (a captive vendor a school is required to buy from — curriculum, credentials, back-office services — that happens to be owned by the people running the school); and real estate (buying, or arranging for a related party to buy, the very buildings public dollars already financed, then leasing them back at a markup).

What I hadn’t done before is put the five biggest documented cases — regardless of category — on the same page and rank them by dollar figure. A caveat before I do: these numbers come from different kinds of documents (a criminal restitution order isn’t the same instrument as a municipal bond prospectus), cover different time spans, and in a couple of cases reflect an auditor’s or a prosecutor’s counting choice as much as anyone’s. I’m ranking them anyway, because the comparison itself is the point — and because the single largest number on this list isn’t attached to anyone’s indictment.

Here they are, five to one.

5. White Hat Management, Ohio: about $100 million over a decade

White Hat’s “sweeps” contracts with ten Hope Academy and Life Skills Center campuses in Cleveland and Akron routed roughly 95 percent of each school’s state funding to the management company, which then handled teacher salaries, facilities, and operations with minimal board oversight — company-store logic applied to an entire school’s back office rather than one vendor line. Over a decade that added up to something like $100 million. When several of the nonprofit boards tried to switch management companies, White Hat argued the computers, furniture, and classroom equipment it had bought with that money belonged to White Hat, not the schools — meaning the boards would have to buy back the property their own public funding had already paid for once.

In 2015, a divided Ohio Supreme Court sided with White Hat, 4–3, upholding the buy-back scheme as an enforceable contract term. Justice Paul Pfeifer’s dissent put it about as plainly as a judicial opinion gets: “the contracts require that after the public pays to buy those materials for a public use, the public must then pay the companies if it wants to retain ownership of the materials.” Justice William O’Neill called it, in a dissent The Progressive covered in full, “a fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit.” Neither dissent changed the outcome. Nobody broke a law here — a state’s highest court looked at the arithmetic and, on the merits, said it was fine. (Court News Ohio’s case summary has the full procedural history.)

4. ECOT, Ohio: $117 million ordered repaid

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was, at its peak, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Ohio funds schools on a formula built around enrollment and documented hours of learning activity — a formula that works fine when “attendance” means a body in a classroom, and considerably less well when it means a login timestamp nobody is verifying. A state audit covering fiscal years 2016 through 2018 found ECOT couldn’t substantiate the participation hours behind a large share of the funding it had claimed. The Ohio Auditor of State’s officeultimately found the school owed $106.6 million to the Ohio Department of Education, plus additional findings against ECOT-affiliated management entities, for a combined total just over $117 million. ECOT shut down in January 2018 rather than pay it back; Ideastream’s coverage of the final audit and the Dayton Daily News both note the state has spent the years since trying to collect. A related judgment against affiliated entities separately reached $161.6 million. It remains the largest attendance-fraud clawback in the sector’s history: virtual schools, virtual kids, real dollars.

3. Chester Community Charter School / CSMI, Pennsylvania: roughly $122 million combined

This is the case I use to show what happens when the company store, related-party real estate, and plain self-dealing all show up in a single school under a single owner. Chester Community Charter, Pennsylvania’s largest brick-and-mortar charter, is managed by CSMI, a company controlled by Vahan Gureghian. A 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer public-records fightestablished that CSMI had been paid roughly $60.6 million in management fees since 1999. In 2010, Gureghian sold the school’s buildings — which he owned personally — to a newly created nonprofit, for the specific and sole purpose of leasing them back to the school, for $50.7 million, financed through municipal bonds and requiring roughly $4 million a year in lease payments; Pennsylvania’s Auditor General found the school had also improperly claimed $1.27 million in state lease reimbursements on buildings the program’s own rules made ineligible, because the “related parties” on both sides of the lease were, functionally, the same person before and after the sale. Then, in 2016, a federal Office of Inspector General audit found that the school’s CEO — Gureghian himself — had written checks to himself totaling $11 million without board approval. Add the pieces up and you get a single owner, across roughly fifteen years, sitting on every side of upward of $122 million in transactions with the school he ran. No criminal charges resulted from any of it.

2. The A3 charter network, California: $400 million generated, about $80 million allegedly diverted

Between 2015 and 2019, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock used a network of 19 online charter schools, partnerships with struggling private schools, and summer athletic programs to enroll thousands of students who, per prosecutors, never took a class. The scheme generated roughly $400 million in California public education funding; investigators alleged about $80 million of it was funneled into companies the two men controlled. Voice of San Diego’s account calls it, by the state’s own description, one of the largest charter-school fraud cases in the country’s history — and yet neither man served a day in prison. McManus, an Australian citizen, was sentenced to four years but served it under house arrest with an ankle monitor in Australia; Schrock’s ankle-monitor time was credited against his sentence. Nine other defendants pleaded to reduced or misdemeanor charges. Both men paid roughly $19 million each in fines and restitution, and the California State Controller’s office says the state has recovered more than $240 million overall — real money back, on a fraud whose architects never spent a night in a cell.

1. National Heritage Academies, Michigan and six other states: $853.6 million

In 2021, National Heritage Academies — the country’s third-largest for-profit charter operator, with more than 90 schools — arranged to sell 69 of its campuses across seven states to Campus Partners 1, a nonprofit newly created for the transaction, with no operating history and, at the time reporters looked, no registration on file with Michigan’s attorney general. NHA’s owner, J.C. Huizenga, controls both the seller’s side (through Charter Development Co., which retained the facility-maintenance and ground-lease contracts) and, through his general counsel installed as the new nonprofit’s president, effectively the buyer’s side as well. The purchase was financed through $853.6 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, issued by an industrial development authority in La Paz County, Arizona — a jurisdiction with no obvious relationship to any of the seven states where the schools actually sit. The schools then signed 30-year leases back to the very entities that had just “sold” them. Network for Public Education’s account and NCSPE’s coverage at Teachers College, Columbia University both flag the same detail: nothing about this required hiding anything, and no one has been indicted. Local commissions in Michigan raised transparency objections and briefly slowed a few approvals, but the deal closed.

It is, by a wide margin, the largest single dollar figure on this list — more than double the other four cases combined — and it’s the cleanest illustration in the sector of this project’s core argument: the extraction that scales isn’t the kind that needs a prosecutor. It’s the kind a bond market is happy to underwrite.

Open the link to see his comparisons of these five top educators-grifts.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Cheating, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, Hoax, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Freddy DeBoer: No, American Schools Are Not Failing

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2026 //
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Freddy DeBoer challenges the oft-repeated claim that American schools are failing. We have heard the same lament since 1983, when the Reagan administration published a pamphlet titled “A Nation at Risk.” That publication, the work of the National Commission on Educational Excellence, proclaimed that America’s schools, once the envy of the world, were caught in “a rising tide of mediocrity.” The report gathered every possible negative statistic about public schools and turned them into a jeremiad.

Governors formed task forces and agreed that what the nation needed most was lots more testing, which eventually turned schools into a cash cow for the testing industry. Worse, it made test scores the goal of education, not a measure.

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, passed in January 2002, made the pursuit of higher test scores a federal mandate, accompanied by harsh and punitive measures for schools that were unable to produce the ever higher test scores.

NCLB was followed by Obama’s equally punitive Race to the Top in 2010. Not only were schools targeted for not raising test scores, but individual teachers were singled out and punished. Schools were closed, teachers were fired, charter schools became a new panacea–which failed as panaceas tend to do.

The Bush brothers–President George W. and Florida Governor Jeb–claimed that accountability was the ultimate key to success.

But in the absence of dramatic test score gains, Jeb and other Republicans decided that vouchers were the ultimate panacea: no accountability, just choose any school you want, be it religious, private, online, or homeschooling. Quality no longer mattered. Accountability no longer mattered (except for the majority of students who continued to enroll in public schools and continued to take the standardized tests). Just choice.

Go back to the beginning: that infamous report called “A Nation at Risk.” One of the staff members who wrote the report was a young man named James Harvey. In 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the release of that influential report, James Harvey wrote an article declaring that the conclusions of the report were vastly overstated. He wrote an article in The Washington Post about “how we cooked the books.”

Freddy DeBoer probably didn’t read James Harvey’s brilliant and disturbing article. But he writes from the same perspective. Our public schools have been the target of a huge smear job. The smear was a fake. It was used to promote charter schools and vouchers. Many of our public schools are excellent. Some are in desperate need of desperate measures, like reduced class sizes, wraparound services for students and families. They are not worse than they used to be. Ninety percent of our population attended public schools. Their graduates created the most powerful nation in the world. Can we do better? Of course, especially for children with the greatest needs. Are public schools failing? No.

This is what DeBoer thinks:

The belief that American public schools are an international embarrassment, sites of endless failure, is one of the few things our polarized political system seems to agree on. After all, the transition from George W. Bush’s presidential education policy to that of Barack Obama was one of remarkable continuity, based on a shared premise: Our schools were in a broad state of emergency. Today, politicians of both parties still tell that story, as do op-ed pages and nonprofit organizations and bipartisan cable panels. The notion has hardened into an axiom, a claim so familiar that the people making it no longer feel obligated to back it up with evidence. But we don’t have to buy this narrative, and we shouldn’t — because the evidence tells us that the narrative just isn’t true.

The best way to consider a country’s educational performance is in relation to the performance of international peers, and the most authoritative international benchmark is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, which tests 15-year-olds across 81 education systems. In the most recent results, from 2022, American students tested better in reading than 68 of the 80 other systems and well above the international average. In science, they bested 56 of 80. Math is our weakest subject, but even there we outscore 43 systems and tie with a dozen more, meaning that on our worst day we still do better than more than half the developed world. Our top performers look particularly good on the PISA; for example, 14 percent of American teenagers scored at the highest level in reading, double the OECD average. 

Some critics note that our education system is expensive and say that we should demand better results for our money. But this demand implies that there’s a straightforward relationship between per-pupil spending and test scores; decades of evidence demonstrate that there is not. And the results show that we produce many sterling students for our money.GLOBE STAFF; ROB Z/ADOBE

Indeed, the students at the top of our system aren’t merely fine; they’re the best on earth. American teams have placed in the top three at the International Mathematical Olympiad every year for a decade and won or tied for first in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2024. In 2025, all five members of the US physics team won gold at the International Physics Olympiad, making the United States the only country to sweep gold that year. Our chemistry, biology, informatics, linguistics, and other teams collect medals year after year. These are overwhelmingly public-school kids from ordinary suburban and urban districts, outcompeting the best academic talent the world can produce. You rarely read about them because their success doesn’t fit the declinist story.

But scores are dropping, aren’t they? Yes, and that’s exactly why international context matters. The 2022 PISA results showed an unprecedented worldwide collapse, with average scores across the OECD falling roughly 10 points in reading and 15 in math. When students in Germany, Norway, and New Zealand decline in lockstep with students in Arizona and Connecticut, the cause is plainly not American teachers, unions, or curricula. (My own guess is that the smartphone is to blame, but I can’t prove it.) Even as our raw scores fell, our international rank rose in all three subjects because our peers’ scores fell further. Again, when was the last time you heard that in our media?

None of this is to deny that some American schools are in crisis. But those failures aren’t spread evenly across our system; they’re concentrated in a small number of places suffering from poverty, structural racism, and institutional decline. The United States has the highest child-poverty rate in the OECD (roughly a quarter of our children live in poverty, versus less than 10 percent in top-scoring nations like Finland and Denmark) and our socioeconomic and demographic stratification is pronounced. As such, our aggregate scores on assessments like PISA are weighed down disproportionately by disadvantaged students. 

In Detroit, which sits at the bottom of every large urban US district tested, two-thirds of students were chronically absent in a recent year, speaking to a lack of stability and resources at the family level. What teachers could succeed in those conditions? Cleveland, Baltimore, districts in the impoverished rural areas of West Virginia — they all tell a similar story. The American schools that struggle the worst share no common curriculum, union contract, or pedagogy. What they share is extreme poverty, segregation, and decades of disinvestment — in local labor markets, transportation, and health care.

Imagine swapping the students of Detroit with those of wealthy Bloomfield Hills next door, where the schools have excellent performance metrics. Does anyone believe the students from Detroit would suddenly excel? 

Simply shoveling money at urban schools is not the answer. In fact, poorer, higher-minority schools in the United States receive significantly more per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools. As it stands, the teachers in the Detroit public school system are asked to achieve similar results to the ones in the Bloomfield system, despite the vast disparities in living and learning environments of the students they teach. 

I’m known to be very skeptical about the influence of schools and teachers on test scores, which tend to reflect the socioeconomic conditions of groups and the variation in talent levels between individuals. But you don’t have to share my views in that regard to acknowledge that our worst-performing schools face conditions that no amount of teaching quality can overcome. And consider a fact that’s almost never reported: America’s most disadvantaged students, those in the bottom international decile in socioeconomic status, rank sixth out of 64 comparable nations in math. In other words, even in the midst of all that poverty and dysfunction, our poorest kids outperform almost all of the world’s other poorest kids. The problem is not that our schools fail poor children at an unusual rate. It is that some of our communities are deprived to a scandalous degree.

In sum, our median student does just fine, our best students are the envy of the world, but our worst-performing students drag down our averages in a way that makes our overall performance look much worse than it is — and those extreme negative outliers are almost universally found in communities with intense socioeconomic challenges.

This resolves a puzzle that has baffled pollsters for 40 years. American parents consistently rate the nation’s schools quite poorly while giving their own children’s schools high marks. Average grades for the American school system writ large typically fall in the C or D range, but more than three-quarters of parents typically give their own kids’ schools an A or B. Often this is regarded as a kind of cognitive bias, of irrationality on the part of those parents; surely, they must be viewing their own schools with rose-colored glasses, or so the conventional wisdom has long held. In fact, that attitude makes perfect sense when you reflect on the quantitative reality I’ve described: Most American K-12 schools and students really are doing quite well, which is reflected in the high marks parents give to their own local schools, but like all of us, parents have heard the relentless doomsaying about the country’s schools. Parents judge their own schools from direct experience and the national system from what they see on television. That is, on the question they actually know something about, about which they have the best evidence, they’re quite positive, and they have every reason to be.

The myth of universal failure didn’t come out of nowhere, and for the record I don’t think it was born entirely in bad faith. Some of the people who spread it were no doubt animated by a real and decent impulse to improve the lives of American children, saw the awful conditions in our inner cities, and overextrapolated their impression of school failure. Others were likely so motivated to attack public schools for ideological reasons that they didn’t care much about misrepresenting the data. Whatever the motives, over time it became far too common for politicians, pundits, and members of the media to take data that showed a handful of distressed communities dragging down otherwise strong averages and present it as proof that American education was rotten from root to branch. An honest reading pointed toward investing in poor places and pursuing avenues for shared prosperity other than just schooling; the sensationalist reading pointed toward dismantling public schools. Many people chose the sensationalist one and repeated it until it became something “everybody knew.”

The stakes are significant. If the failures of American education really are systemwide, the response has to be wholesale reform — new national mandates and perhaps a federal takeover of local education policy; even more standardized testing; the criminalization of teacher unions; private school vouchers for all. But the reality is that our educational failure is concentrated, and it’s concentrated in predictable places, which means the remedy must be too: Serious investment for the communities where poverty has done its damage, not merely for the schools that sit inside them, along with an effort to build more pathways to middle class stability for those who are not academically motivated.

There is some evidence that such investment, for example in environmental cleanup or direct financial assistance for poorer families, can improve learning outcomes. There too, though, the evidence is contested and the effects unclear. But this investment offers obvious advantages: Even if bringing more money and development into poor communities does not close academic gaps, the direct economic advantages will endure. 

These efforts are both harder and more expensive than yet another round of complaining about teachers and their unions, but they have the advantage of potentially solving real problems. If we have a moral duty to improve our schools, as the school reformers insist, then that begins with a moral duty to tell the truth.

Categories Education Reform, Failure, For-Profit, Lies

Inside the Collapse of a “Montessori Ponzi” Scheme

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2026 //
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In the new world of school choice, parents have to be savvy shoppers. Opening up K-12 education to all comers, regardless of their background or qualifications, is a risky business. And when the “business” of school is run for profit, parents should beware. They and their children are usually pigeons, drawn in to fatten the founders’ bank account.

Claire Suddath of The New York Times dug deep into the story of a chain that expanded too quickly and became “a $440 million fiasco.”

I attach a gift article so you can read the story in full. It is not behind a paywall.

Suddath wrote:

A man with a vision set out to revolutionize preschool. It became a $440 million fiasco.

Ten years ago, a Montessori enthusiast named Ray Girn had a vision. He wanted to bring high-quality, child-led education to as many babies and toddlers as possible, with a chain of for-profit schools that would grow at the pace of a tech start-up. He spoke about doing for preschools “what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved,” and he raised $335 million from investors, including venture capital and private equity firms, to make it happen.

For a while, Mr. Girn’s schools, which operated under the brand Guidepost Montessori, appeared to be successful, with 150 locations that served tens of thousands of children. But they also ran up an astonishing $440 million in losses. The parent company, Higher Ground Education, filed for bankruptcy in June 2025 and shuttered about 60 schools.

In Oregon, parents received an email notification on a Sunday afternoon that their school effectively no longer existed. In Wisconsin, a father went to drop off his 5-month-old son at a Guidepost only to find it had closed. In California, a mother learned that her children’s Guidepost had been sold and that its Montessori curriculum would be replaced with artificial intelligence. Guidepost teachers and parents lit up Facebook and Reddit groups with horror stories — allegations of neglect and mistreatment that made a lot more sense now that everyone knew how mismanaged the company had been.

For-profit education ventures are notorious for disappointing investors and leaving parents fuming. But even in this context, the Guidepost story is striking. “Schools close sometimes, but usually not this many, and not all at once,” said Rebecca Winthrop, who directs the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

What could have caused such a collapse? More than two dozen former teachers, administrators and corporate employees told me that they were deeply concerned by the company’s business model. Seven independently described it as a pyramid scheme. “We were calling it the Montessori Ponzi scheme internally,” said Alex Richardson, a teacher at Guidepost’s first school, in Orange County, Calif.

When Higher Ground opened new Guidepost schools, it often received large advances from landlords to improve their properties. As long as the company kept expanding, it seemed from the outside as if it were thriving. But when it came time to repay the landlords, and growth was no longer an option, the company collapsed. By the end, some Guidepost locations were losing $50,000 a month.

Mr. Girn is still active in the education industry. Last year, he and his wife, Rebecca Girn — the other founder of Higher Ground and its general counsel — welcomed me at a converted ranch-style house outside Austin, Texas, where they’ve already opened another school, called Fulcrum. Their three children are among the students…

Guidepost was not the first school chain that Mr. Girn had run at an unsustainable pace. Back in 2003, when Mr. Girn, a Canadian native, was a psychology and philosophy student at the University of Toronto, a friend suggested he come work at a school in Orange County called LePort Montessori. It was founded by a wealthy bariatric surgeon, Peter LePort, who sat on the board of the Ayn Rand Institute. Mr. Girn had no formal training in education, but he ran a Rand-focused club on campus. That was enough for Mr. LePort, who hired him to help start a new elementary school.

Mr. Girn became devoted to the Montessori method, which encourages children to direct their own lessons, with teachers as guides. “It’s as close to perfect as human education has ever gotten,” he once said at an Ayn Rand Institute conference. Traditional schools stifled children’s innate love of learning, he thought, and day care programs could be especially oppressive. “They’re literally putting the child behind bars, moving them from rocker to high chair to container,” he said. Montessori could free them.

In 2009, Mr. Girn became the chief executive of LePort. He envisioned turning the company into a national chain (“We had the opportunity to become the child care provider for SpaceX,” he said). But he was more focused on growth than Mr. LePort was comfortable with. In 2016, Mr. Girn was fired.

He resolved to try again, this time with a chain of schools that he could control. He and Ms. Girn formed Higher Ground and hired several of LePort’s corporate staff members. Some LePort parents soon followed, including Greg Mauro, a founding partner of Learn Capital, a venture firm known for backing education start-ups. Learn Capital invested about $1 million, and Mr. Girn opened his first two Guidepost schools. Within three years, the company had 27.

Guidepost employees describe these early schools as thoughtfully planned. White-walled classrooms were outfitted with charming, toddler-sized furniture made of pale, unfinished wood. “Everyone cared so deeply,” said Kiana Kometani, who in 2019 became the first head of school at a Guidepost in Folsom, Calif. Teachers spoke about fostering each child’s intellectual curiosity, of giving them agency before they could tie their shoes.

Mr. Girn was a skillful pitchman. He promised parents something rare: the rigorous education of a high-end preschool, but with the hours of a commercial day care. Most Guideposts were in wealthy places — Walnut Creek, Brooklyn Heights — and appealed to the kind of dual-income families who could afford the equivalent of a small sedan in preschool tuition.

“Guidepost catered to the elevated intellectual type,” said Emily Tkaczibson, who paid about $4,000 a month for her two children to attend a Guidepost in Tigard, Ore. “We would have recommended the school to anybody.” Matthew Espie, another parent in Tigard, considered himself “lucky” that his youngest child got off the waiting list after only 10 months.

There were signs, though, that the company was trying to do too much too soon. Mr. Girn expanded abroad, opening schools in Hong Kong and mainland China in 2019. Mr. Richardson, the Orange County teacher, said around that time, three Chinese toddlers came to his school for reasons that were never explained. None of them spoke English, and the Guidepost teachers didn’t speak Mandarin.

“One toddler would stand there and cry and say the same word over and over again,” Mr. Richardson said. “We learned later that she was yelling for her mom, but at the time we didn’t know. We couldn’t understand her enough to help her.”

Please open the link and finish reading this fascinating article. Turning education into a business opportunity is dangerous.

Categories Childhood, Education Industry, For-Profit, School Choice

Jan Resseger: The Trump Administration’s War on Children

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2026 //
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Jan Resseger keeps a steady focus o what matters most in a decent society: the well-being of children. Trump and his minions don’t care. Not about children. Not about the rule of law. Not about democracy. Trump cares about greed and self-enrichment. He seems to care about his children. He cuts them in on the grift. His youngest son Barron is said to be worth $150 million. But he doesn’t care about yours.

The fact that he just issued guidance on childhood vaccinations, which reduces mandated vaccines and puts America’s most vulnerable at risk of serious illness and death, tells you all you need to know about this scientifically ignorant man.

Jan writes:

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s important new book, Regime Change, explores how the second Trump administration functions—the cast of characters, their relationships, and their operational style. A reader is also exposed, however, to the President’s and the administration’s big policy concerns—imposing tariffs, ridding the country of immigrants, ending nuclear weapons in Iran, proclaiming that everything is more affordable, and ending the public’s fixation on Jeffrey Epstein. These issues have also been widely covered broadly in the news.

Here are topics that do not appear at all in Regime Change‘s index: children, public education, CHIP, SNAP, Head Start, or Child Care.  There is not even a mention of Trump’s tuition tax credit private school vouchers launched in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The issue of birthright citizenship is mentioned in the index only as a subhead under immigration, and in the book itself birthright citizenship is covered only in one sentence describing its proposed elimination by an early Trump executive order. In the index, there is only one page citation to the U.S. Department of Education itself, but the reference is to brief coverage of the administration’s attempt to eradicate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at Harvard University.

The lack of regular news coverage—particularly in the local newspapers—about Trump’s damaging public education policy and the administration’s failure to protect children’s well-being and children’s rights does not, however, mean that these issues have been untouched by Trump administration policy. For those of us who do not need CHIP or SNAP, who can afford quality child care and preschool, whose children attend well-funded public schools, whose families have been citizens for generations, however, there is minimal exposure to the Trump administration’s threats to the institutions on which vulnerable families and children depend.

Just this past week the Trump administration took two steps that, if they do come to pass, will seriously impact some of our society’s most vulnerable children—poor children benefiting today from Head Start, and the children of immigrants from whom the President is once again trying to steal the protection of birthright citizenship. First Focus on Children’s President Bruce Lesley has identified what he calls the Trump administration’s “organized abandonment” of the needs and rights of our society’s most vulnerable children.

The Trump administration attempted to destroy Head Start.     At the end of last week, the Trump administration formally proposed new federal administrative guidance to deregulate the quality of Head Start programs that currently serve 700,000 children across the United States.  The destruction of Head Start had been predicted early last week but on Thursday in a notice in the Federal Register, the administration formally proposed radically diminishing 133 pages of rules that have shaped Head Start since it was established in 1965 as a centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.  The Center on Law and Social Policy explains that the proposed new rules are being disguised by the administration with language describing “an effort to ‘streamline,’ ‘enhance,’ and ‘modernize’” the program.  Politico‘s Mackenzie Wilkes reports: “The Heritage Foundation has long called for the elimination of Head Start, but the conservative group published a report last month saying the program should be deregulated in many of the ways the proposed rule suggests while ‘officials work to end the program.’ ”

The Associated Press‘s Moria Balingit outlines the changes the new rules would prescribe: “Head Start… is currently governed by more than 100 pages of regulations… (which) require centers to have low staff-to-student ratios and a research-backed curriculum, among other things, and they ensure centers are providing wraparound services that are critical to children in poverty, including medical and dental screenings and parent coaching. The proposal would toss out nearly all of that rule book. Education Week”s Elizabeth Heubeck adds: “The new proposal would require (that) all classroom instruction be conducted in English, except for immersion programs operated on Native American tribal lands. An estimated 30-35% of children enrolled in the Head Start program are dual language learners.”  The program would also exclude many non-citizen children and children in some immigrant families.

While Congress establishes federal departments and the specific offices within the departments, the legislative branch has no power over the executive branch’s right to establish formal administrative rules and guidance.  It is possible that the rules announced in last week’s Federal Register can be challenged in court, and it is also possible, of course, that public outrage might cause the Trump administration to modify the new rules during the 60 day period when the public is invited to submit public comments before the rule becomes final. A future President, of course, could replace the Trump administration’s new rules.

President Trump signed two new executive orders to undermine birthright citizenship.     Last Thursday, The Washington Post‘s Isaac Arnsdorf, Justin Jouvenal, and David Nakamura reported: “President Donald Trump took another stab at restricting automatic citizenship for people born in the United States after the Supreme Court rejected his earlier attempt. In two executive orders signed Thursday, Trump reached for different legal maneuvers to test the limits of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The first order said children would be ineligible if born to ‘alien enemies,’ members of foreign terrorist organizations, or foreign lobbyists. The second order said children of people who fraudulently request tourist visas for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S. would not become citizens… The new orders marked a fresh effort to… deliver on a campaign promise by expanding the categories of people who the administration argues fall outside the constitutional guarantee.”

The reporters quote legal experts who doubt that the first executive order could survive a legal challenge: “An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department. No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic.”

The reporters attribute the second executive order to White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, who has made stopping “birth tourism” a priority. They provide data to demonstrate that what is called “birth tourism” is relatively infrequent. “In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births.”

None of the legal experts the reporters quote believes that either of these executive orders would be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court or would challenge in any way what Chief Justice John Roberts declared in his June 30, 2026 decision in Trump v. Barbara: “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

First Focus on Children’s Bruce Lesley believes that both of  last week’s executive orders are seriously misguided: “The legal question isn’t simply what the government thinks about immigration. It’s whether an innocent child can lose fundamental rights grounded in the Constitution because of something government officials allege about a parent’s conduct and intent… The latest effort to gut a fundamental constitutional operating principle since our nation’s founding has been written clearly in the Constitution since 1868, is being sold to the public with pathetic history and legal arguments the Supreme Court itself rejected 128 years ago and early this year. Every administration has the authority to enforce immigration laws. However, none has the authority to rewrite the Constitution… by redefining which babies they deem are precious and which are pushed into the shadows of our society.”

Although there has obviously been some news coverage of the week’s public policy initiatives impacting our society’s children, the well-being of our children is neither the top policy concern for officials in the Trump administration nor the top story for the reporters who track the administration’s agenda. Because the needs of children are definitely not the primary lens through which the Trump administration views and conceptualizes our society’s important needs, it is especially important to watch for news about children’s welfare, their rights, and the enormous institution of public schools that serves the mass of our children

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Environment, Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Taxpayers Foot the Medical Bills for Low-Wage Employees of Walmart, Amazon

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2026 //
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Judd Legum at Popular Information excels at exposing scandals, many of which are in plain view. In this post, he reveals what many people have long suspected: About 10% of the employees at Walmart and Amazon qualify for public subsidies for Medicaid because they are so poorly paid. Meanwhile, the owners of Walmart and Amazon are multi-billionaires. Why don’t they pay wages that are enough to keep their employees off public subsidies?

Judd writes:

American taxpayers are spending billions every year providing Medicaid benefits to hundreds of thousands of employees of Amazon and Walmart, a new analysis by Popular Information reveals.

Amazon and Walmart are two of the largest and most profitable companies in the country — collectively generating $100 billion in profits in 2025 — but many of their employees still qualify for Medicaid because their take-home pay hovers around (or below) the poverty line.

As taxpayers keep their workers afloat, the wealth of the two companies’ largest shareholders is increasing exponentially. The Walton family, the largest shareholders of Walmart, saw their collective wealth increase from $238 billion in 2021 to $513 billion at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, Amazon founder and current executive chairman Jeff Bezos saw his net worth increase from $187 billion to $255 billion over roughly the same time period.

Popular Information calculated the public subsidy to Amazon and Walmart by cross-referencing several publicly available data sources. Last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report examining the top 25 employers of Medicaid enrollees in six states: Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. This provided state-level Medicaid enrollment for Amazon and Walmart workers in all six states, with the exception of Amazon in Maine.

Popular Information compared these figures to the total number of employees working for Walmart and Amazon in each state, sourced from company disclosures, to establish an average Medicaid enrollment rate for each company. The average Medicaid enrollment rate was then used to establish an estimated Medicaid enrollment for employees of each company in the remaining states.

Finally, the estimated number of employees receiving Medicaid in each state was multiplied by that state’s average annual cost of a non-elderly, non-disabled Medicaid enrollee, as published by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC).

Using this methodology, Popular Information estimates that, nationwide, over 156,000 Walmart employees are enrolled in Medicaid at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $1.04 billion.

This figure significantly understates the true cost of Medicaid for Walmart employees to taxpayers. First, the calculation only includes the direct cost of Medicaid for the employees themselves. But Walmart’s low wages for these employees also makes their families eligible for Medicaid. Taking into account dependents, the cost to taxpayers would roughly double. Further, the most recent data on Medicaid cost per enrollee from MACPAC is from fiscal year 2023. Costs for 2025 and 2026 are likely significantly higher.

In Walmart’s 2026 fiscal year, then-CEO Doug McMillon was paid over $29.2 million in total compensation while the median Walmart worker earned $30,520 — a ratio of 958 to 1. The earnings of an average worker put them well below the cutoff for Medicaid eligibility for a family of three.

For Amazon, the same methodology finds that an estimated 123,000 Amazon employees are enrolled in Medicaid at a cost to taxpayers of $927 million.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was given a massive compensation package of $212 million in 2021, mostly in stock that vests over 10 years. Jassy’s compensation has been smaller since; he was paid another $2.1 million in 2024. Meanwhile, the median Amazon employee earned $40,206 that year. This global number includes the many higher-paid technical employees who work at Amazon. Warehouse workers in the United States, and others in blue collar positions, make much less, making them eligible for Medicaid.

“Amazon is one of the largest job creators in the country, so looking at raw numbers instead of percentages is misleading,” an Amazon spokesman said in response to Popular Information’s request for comment. “Also, eligibility for both SNAP and Medicaid is based on total household income and family size, not individual wages or benefits – so employers that offer part-time options for those who want them, like we do, are likely to have more people who are eligible.”

While Walmart ranked first in terms of “raw numbers” of employees on Medicaid, Amazon had a higher percentage of its workforce on Medicaid (11.7%) than Walmart (9.4%).

Not everyone who works parttime does so by choice. In June 2026, 4.7 million “individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Moreover, according to the GAO, 66.1% of employed individuals on Medicaid work full-time.

Walmart declined to comment on the record. According to the company’s corporate website, starting wages at Walmart have increased by 93% since 2015.

Categories Billionaires, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Health, Medicine
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