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Trump Gives Contract for Coal-Fired Plant to MAGA Ally with Zero Experience

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2026 //
3

During the 2024 campaign, Trump met with leaders of the oil and gas industry and asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He promised to be their champion.

I don’t know whether the industry delivered for Trump, but he has certainly delivered for them. He has opposed alternative sources of energy, treats climate change as a hoax, and canceled federal contracts for wind and solar projects that were well underway. He loves fossil fuels and plans to revive the coal industry. Trump is a champion of “clean coal,” whatever that is.

While Europe, China, and Japan forge ahead with the expansion of alternative sources of energy, the U.S. is investing in the energy sources of the past.

Redeeming his promise to the coal industry, Trump recently launched planning for a coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The contract for the design and feasibility was awarded to a Trump crony with no experience in the field.

A man the Trump administration picked to be a key player at the fore of a U.S. coal renaissance is likely more familiar to QAnon circles than energy ones.

TerraSpark’s project carries big promises. The proposed 1.6 gigawatt facility — touted by the Trump administration last week — would be the first new coal-fired power plant built in the U.S since 2013. It vows to infuse up to 1,000 jobs into West Virginia, a state rich in coal-mining history that’s seen its industry wither over the past two decades.

But few if any Trump administration energy allies have heard of TerraSpark or Alex Phillips, who is running the company with two other people also lacking coal backgrounds. Even the Republican lawmaker whose district would host the massive coal plant and carbon capture project learned of it just two months before the Energy Department this month agreed to give it $18.5 million of taxpayer dollars to pay for a feasibility and design study.

While Phillips has no energy industry experience, he has hovered around Washington politics during the Trump era. The owner of a rural Virginia internet business served on telecommunications advisory boards. He was past president of a wireless internet company trade association that also had a political action committee. And he operated his own PAC, the Great American Patriot Project, that backed candidates who “adhere to the United States Constitution and America First principles.”

He made more of a name for himself within the MAGA movement through his American Priority Conference, known as AMPfest. It drew QAnon promoters and personalities like Roger Stone — President Donald Trump is a longtime friend and former client — former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and other MAGA influencers with a history of touting conspiracy theories, particularly the lie that widespread voter fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.

AMPfest and Phillips’ American Priority organization have since closed shop, with the last AMPfest held in October 2021 at Trump National Doral in Miami. Before then, however, he became integral enough to MAGA world to secure a speaking spot alongside far-right provocateurs like Alex Jones, Scott Pressler and Jack Posobiec at a rally on the eve of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” event.

While Phillips did not end up speaking at that event — according to Mother Jones, which did not report why — he embraced election denier theories from the scene. He also encouraged then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election, saying he “needs to step up.”

“I think that there’s been overwhelming evidence provided in so many different formats, ways, that any congressman or senator that doesn’t think that there was some kind of irregularity that needs to be looked at in these seven states is just not paying attention or is corrupt,” he told Citizen Media News outside of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Phillips referred questions to a public relations firm, which made another TerraSpark partner, Bill Tolpegin, available for comment. Tolpegin said in a statement that Phillips had no contact with the White House or Energy Department about the grant. Tolpegin said that the company “had no special, unique or otherwise different levels of access, communication with or attention from administration officials.”

But Phillips’ latest career act is nonetheless illustrative of Washington politics during Trump’s White House sequel, where allies have often won contracts or jobs.

“This is not normal,” Mike McKenna, an energy lobbyist who worked in the first Trump White House, said of DOE approving federal grants for a company with no track record in the industry.

McKenna said he is aware of two companies “with decades of experience in generating electricity” that have struggled to navigate DOE processes.

“These companies are no doubt going to ask if companies and people with no experience can do this, why can’t we?” he said. “I don’t want to be that guy, but this is obviously political. And the more political it is, the less likely it is to happen,” he said of building new coal plants.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement that Trump’s coal grants are part of his commitments to buoy the nation’s coal industry, such as directives to run coal plants beyond scheduled retirement dates that DOE has credited for preventing electricity blackouts.

“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” she wrote in response to questions about Phillips and TerraSpark.

Rogers referred POLITICO to DOE for questions about the grant process. DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said the department selected TerraSpark through a “competitive merit review process” that included evaluation of “technical merit, programmatic relevance, and the applicant’s ability to successfully execute the proposed work.” He did not address questions about Phillips.

“The economics of the project will speak for itself, and are highly competitive,” Tolpegin said.

Coal and carbon capture

What TerraSpark envisions is complex and expensive. A power plant the size it foresees would likely cost more than $1 billion — and that’s before accounting for technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions as proposed.

In addition to Phillips and Tolpegin, who calls himself a “serial entrepreneur,” the company has a third partner, Cory Cipra, a Kansas City-based technology consultant whom Tolpegin said has “a deep background working with utilities.” The company applied for the DOE grant in December and said it will not receive the funding until it comes up with the remaining $21.5 million needed to fund its study.

In an interview with POLITICO, Tolpegin said he founded the company with Phillips to bring online more energy generation “in a way that’s as clean as possible” that could eventually be “carbon negative.”

He called the company’s lack of experience in coal a “good thing.” Prior carbon capture attempts have been limited by “conventional” carbon capture technologies, he said.

“We’re not building your grandparents’ coal plant,” Tolpegin said. “We’re going to be building something new that I hope can flip the script on coal.”

The project was not on DOE’s radar a year ago, said Steve Winberg, who ran DOE’s fossil energy office in Trump’s first term and was undersecretary of infrastructure at DOE until May 2025. He said he knew some of the people involved in TerraSpark — he would not say who — but not Phillips.

The pool of potential grant winners was much larger earlier this winter. DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, which handles power generation and coal research, briefed the agency front office in early March on at least seven viable selections for the federal money, according to three people familiar with the process, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations.

DOE ultimately picked two proposals for new coal plants, including a project in Alaska — which was awarded an $89 million grant — and the TerraSpark plan to build in West Virginia. Another two projects for existing plants also received awards. 

“Some of these companies are probably three connected guys who threw an application together,” said one DOE official granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with reporters. They said the TerraSpark proposal deserves scrutiny. “And the DOE review that occurred would likely not surface that and/or was specifically disinterested in figuring that out.”

TerraSpark does not have much of an online presence, registering its website in July 2025, according to a domain registry. Its website did not name any company officials until a press release for the DOE grant appeared late June 4.…

Kevin Hagerty, a commissioner of Grant County, where the project is slated to be located, said there had been rumors of a project but that he didn’t learn of specifics until DOE announced the grant. Nonetheless, he said people in the Trump-backing county were excited about the support for the state’s shrinking coal industry.

The project is in early stages. While TerraSpark said the project will be located in Mount Storm, it has not yet selected a location, and does not own land in the county.

The partners are also still exploring what specific end users, such as a data center, will be attached to the project.

On June 4, the day DOE announced its grant, TerraSpark’s website said the coal plant would be accompanied by a 1-gigawatt AI data center. By the next day, the website instead said the plan would be paired with a “multi-industry campus.”

Tolpegin said some details on the website were updated to correct “stale” information and that the “first phase” of the project would be building the coal plant in the next few years, with tenants to be determined later. The company has also said it eventually plans to connect the plant to the grid.

Uphill battle for new coal

Energy companies and utilities have been reluctant to build new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. for myriad reasons. Environmental regulations raised the cost of burning coal. A gusher of natural gas made that fuel more economically competitive. Plummeting solar and wind costs pushed more capital-intensive coal facilities out of the mix.

Yet tech companies have proven willing to explore costly energy projects like geothermal and nuclear to feed energy-hungry data centers. Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to revive “clean, beautiful coal.” Some coal backers are quietly optimistic that those trends will benefit them.

“You think about the speed to which you need to get a data center going, people assume it’s going to be natural gas, but then you’ve got that turbine problem — long lead time on those,” Winberg said. “A lot of people assume it’s going to be nuclear, but you’ve got a long, long lead time on the nuclear. So coal is starting to fit into the mix again.”

But analysts in the energy sector have been skeptical of the TerraSpark project’s viability.

Seth Feaster, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank that supports a shift to cleaner resources, said that while many large energy infrastructure projects are built by experienced energy utilities, DOE in its June grant announcement turned to companies that don’t appear to have deep pockets or relevant experience.

“Who’s financing them, who’s going to invest in them?” he said. The government grants will “help a little bit, but you’ve got to convince the markets of the credibility of your project.”

“I find that pretty thin at the moment here,” he said.

Ryan Sweezey, director of North American power and renewables at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said that if the developers plan to have a data center or other industrial customers that directly tie in to the plant, coal boilers likely won’t be able to ramp up and down quickly enough without batteries.

Sweezey said the executives’ lack of experience in energy or coal plant development was a “major red flag.”

Hooking up AI data centers directly to power sources — an increasingly popular model for the electricity-devouring sector — is “very complicated” and requires “serious expertise,” said Sweezey.

Adding a carbon capture and storage system to the mix further complicates that picture, and would catapult the overall cost, which could be over $10 billion, he predicted. Tolpegin said the entire cost of the energy campus and coal plant could be “in the billions.”

TerraSpark has partnered with Mantel, a carbon capture startup founded by MIT alumni in 2022, and Sargent & Lundy, an energy engineering firm. The Chicago-based firm has built more than 100 projects related to carbon capture in the last five years, according to its website, and completed work on the Petra Nova project in Texas, the only U.S. power plant currently operating carbon capture at commercial scale.

In a statement, a Mantel spokesperson said TerraSpark is one of many customers and that it is “committed to delivering efficient, scalable carbon capture solutions wherever they can have the greatest impact.”

The energy technology service provider Babcock & Wilcox is also part of the project, along with carbon capture consultants Advanced Resources International.

In a statement, Babcock’s communications director, Sharyn Brooks, said the company has decades of experience with boiler technologies, which positions the company “to support advanced coal generation projects with proven, high-efficiency technologies.”

“Our role is focused on providing engineering and technical support,” Brooks said.

Representatives of Sargent & Lundy and Advanced Resources International did not respond to requests for comment.

Terraspark’s ambitious plans also call for building a new campus for West Virginia University to focus on extracting rare earth minerals from coal waste, and could eventually acquire coal ash from other locations to process for rare earths.

That would be a massive undertaking for any developer, said Rudra Kapila, a director of carbon management and hydrogen at think tank Third Way, who evaluated carbon capture grant proposals for DOE during the Biden administration.

“I mean, who is this Johnny?” she said.

Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.

Categories Corruption, Environment, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Scott Maxwell: Voucher Schools in Florida Should Be Accountable

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2026 //
9

Scott Maxwell is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. In this column, he argues that voucher schools in Florida should not be allowed to dodge accountability. And, he explains, they are completely unaccountable. The state Constitution requires that the state provide high-quality education, which voucher schools do not. He neglects to notice that the state Constitution states that no public money should go to religious schools. Not a penny, but most vouchers go to religious schools.

What is more, the voters of Florida rejected an effort to strip that language from the state Vonstitution in 2012.

Scott Maxwell wrote:

Teachers and parents have filed a landmark lawsuit challenging the legality of Florida’s billion-dollar school voucher system

The argument at the heart of their suit is that Florida’s constitution requires tax dollars be spent on “high-quality” education. Yet Florida’s voucher system is a black-hole of accountability, sometimes paying for kids to go to “schools” that are total disasters — where teachers lack degrees, inflate grades and use curriculum that is rubbish.

I’m not convinced the teachers and parents will win this lawsuit. In fact, I doubt they will. Similar challenges have been unsuccessful. And Gov. Ron DeSantis has done a pretty thorough job of stacking the courts with political allies, especially at the appellate level.

But I know for a fact the teachers and parents have a point. In fact, It’s inarguable. This newspaper has spent nearly a decade documenting voucher schools that failed children.

Often, the parents themselves were shocked and outraged to learn that schools were failing their kids and that there was little to no accountability.

The Sentinel’s multi-year “Schools Without Rules” investigation into voucher (or “scholarship”) schools found some schools employed teachers that lacked any teaching credentials or college degrees.

Some were such financial disasters, they shut down in the middle of the year, stranding families. (One in Orlando was evicted from a commercial complex where a neighboring tenant was “Drug Tests R Us.”)

Some refused to serve children with disabilities, whether it was autism or reliance on a wheelchair. Even more refused to teach children who are gay or had gay parents. These were schools eager for the public money but unwilling to serve all the public. None of this was discreet. Some had written policies saying that they wouldn’t serve children with Down’s syndrome or who uttered the sentence: “I am gay.”

Some schools taught junk science and bogus history, suggesting that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together and downplaying slavery and segregation.

And at some schools, parents were so appalled at what they found that they reported to the state things like “Cleaning lady substituting for teacher” and “I don’t see any evidence of academics.”

If you think any of that represents “high quality” education, you might also believe the mini tacos at 7-Eleven are five-star dining.

Many private schools that accept vouchers do stellar jobs and fill niche needs that public schools have historically struggled to meet. But too many taxpayer-funded schools are total trainwrecks. And the reason is that Florida has very few standards for voucher schools.

That is, in fact, the crux of the lawsuit, which lists about 20 different things that public schools are required to do by state law, but which all voucher schools are not.

Like providing certain levels of school safety staffing and having threat-management plans in place. Offering vetted curriculum and providing transportation. Hiring qualified teachers. And publicly posting test scores from state assessments that show whether students are actually learning anything. Public schools must do all of that.

The argument from choice-without-standards supporters is that parents should be able to choose any education they want for their kids without exception.

There are two problems with that argument.
One is that no other government-funded voucher program works that way — and for good reason. We don’t let recipients of food vouchers use them on Twinkies and Mountain Dew. This is public money meant to provide nutritional sustenance. So there are guidelines. The same way there is for Medicaid and Medicare. You don’t get to spent public money that’s meant to fulfill a public purpose on anything you like just because you invoke cries of “freedom” or “choice.”

The other problem is that using this money to provide “high quality” education isn’t optional. It’s part of the Florida Constitution — a point the lawsuit addresses when it says: “… choice does not change the Constitution. When public funds are used to educate a child, that child is entitled to the same level of educational opportunities, the same quality standards, and the same basic protections.”

You can certainly make the argument that some public schools have failed some students. Do you know how we know that? Because these schools were required by law to disclose their test scores, standards, hiring practices and curriculum.
In fact, newspapers in Florida were often the ones that exposed problems at public schools.

And most anytime we did, public officials would spring to action and agree reform was needed.
Yet most every time we’ve exposed problems in taxpayer-funded voucher schools, state lawmakers leaders looked the other way.
The most pathetic part of all this is that it’s easily fixable.

Florida could still offer “choice,” but also demand that any schools that receive public money meet basic standards. Hire qualified teachers. Post the results of nationally-normed standardized test scores and graduation rates. And ban discrimination.

“To me, this is just common sense,” said Stephanie Vanos, an Orange County School Board member who also happens to be an Orlando mom and joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff in that capacity. “I’m not saying they need the thousands of pages of rules that apply to us, but we need a common-sense set of rules that should apply to everybody.”

She is, of course, right. Schools that do good jobs shouldn’t be afraid of accountability and transparency. Most aren’t.

In fact, ask yourself these basic questions:
Why shouldn’t parents and students be guaranteed qualified teachers?

Why shouldn’t taxpayers be able to see what kind of test scores are being produced at all the schools they’re funding?

And why shouldn’t taxpayers be assured that the money they’re spending is actually providing “quality” education, as the Constitution requires?
Better yet, ask those who defend the status quo.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Racism, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

How Tech Companies Hooked Kids in School on Social Media

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2026 //
2

The New York Times broke a story about how tech companies have quietly pushed kids to be dependent on social media. The link takes you to a gift article, which you can open and read for free.

The article was written by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, an investigative reporter who covers technology.

The Times opened the article with this overview: Internal documents show how tech giants grabbed children’s attention throughout the day, a strategy that schools say has undermined education.

The article begins:

Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.

Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.

TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.

Again and again, the world’s leading social media companies have targeted students, even as complaints have mounted that they are hurting teenagers’ mental health and academic performance, according to a New York Times review of internal documents that lay bare for the first time these tactics to hook young users.

The documents emerged from lawsuits filed by more than 1,400 school districts against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube amid a rising backlash against social media, with parent movements and best-selling books blaming the platforms for loneliness, bullying, eating disorders and sexual exploitation.

The outcry, long focused on social media’s harm to mental health, has now shifted to its upending of the classroom. Many school districts are banning smartphones, and some are re-evaluating their reliance on devices like Chromebooks, the inexpensive laptops made by YouTube’s parent company, Google.

The companies’ push to keep children glued to their screens has overshadowed concerns from parents, teachers and even their own trust and safety teams about interfering with school, according to the documents and interviews with dozens of parents, teachers and former tech company employees.

TikTok’s leaders decided not to disable notifications during school hours, rejecting a change that its safety teams had pushed for years. A Snapchat strategy document referred to classroom phone use as “under the desk” time. Google managers knew YouTube was recommending videos to students during the school day that had nothing to do with their lessons.

The school districts contend that the apps’ addictive designs made teachers’ jobs more difficult. “It is so constantly tempting to these kids to be on a platform that promises endless, infinite, varied entertainment rather than actually focusing on what they should be at school to do,” said Previn Warren, one of the lead lawyers for the schools.

The companies argue that the Covid pandemic and other factors have harmed adolescents’ mental health, and that parents, schools and cellphone makers bear responsibility for children’s phone habits. They also say that they have made their platforms safer with parental-control features and account restrictions for minors.

All four companies recently settled with Breathitt County Schools, a small district in rural Kentucky that served as a test case for the litigation nationwide. The district, which has about 1,500 students, had sought $3 million in damages and about $60 million that it had planned to put toward a long-term education and mental health plan. The companies agreed to pay Breathitt $27 million: $9 million from Meta, $8 million each from Snap and TikTok and $2 million from Google, according to documents released on Friday and first reported by Bloomberg.

While it’s hard to say how the ongoing litigation might ultimately affect classrooms, it poses a substantial financial risk to the companies, possibly costing billions of dollars, said Alexandra Lahav, a civil litigation professor at Cornell Law School. She noted that the companies were also facing a barrage of claims from families and state attorneys general.

Message to Big Tech: Leave our kids alone!

Categories Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Students, Technology

Rick Wilson: Trump’s Trades Don’t Look Good or Smell Good

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
4

Rick Wilson is a never-Trumper, a former Republican operative who was a founder of The Lincoln Project. He write a popular blog, “Against All Enemies,” where he follows the actions of Trump 47.

He wrote:

Let’s start with a number, because the number is the whole story and the rest is just decoration.

3,700. 

Between January and March of this year, three months, ninety-odd days, one fiscal quarter of a man who is supposed to be running the country, Donald Trump’s required ethics filings disclosed 3,700 stock trades worth somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billiondollars.

Microsoft. Meta. Oracle. Broadcom. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. Nvidia. Apple. An S&P 500 index fund, because even a degenerate gambler likes a hedge. Municipal bonds, for flavor.

That’s not a portfolio. That’s a casino floor. And the President of the United States is standing in the middle of it, counting cards at the table while the pit boss looks the other way, and the cameras, conveniently, are off.

You are supposed to find this normal now. You are supposed to scroll past it. That’s the entire design. 

So let’s not.

.

Here is the part where I am legally and intellectually obligated to be precise, so pay attention. Precision is the enemy of this whole operation, and they are counting on you being too tired for it.

Insider trading is not “rich guy buys stock.”

Insider trading, as a federal crime, has elements: actual, legally defined moving parts a prosecutor has to bolt together. You need material, non-public information. You need a trade made on the basis of it. You need a breach of a duty of trust. And you need the thing lawyers call scienter, which is a fancy Latin way of saying the person knew exactly what they were doing. (Insider trading rabbit holes are shockingly amusing. I’ve been in one for two days.)

The rabbit hole led me to the Supreme Court last night, because of course it did. SCOTUS, over time, blessed two flavors of this in United States v. O’Hagan, the “classical” theory and the “misappropriation” theory, and federal prosecutors get to reach for the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the heavy artillery of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, the criminal securities-fraud statute that carries up to twenty-five years in a federal prison. I don’t understand it all, either, but it strikes me that Trump’s legal team will need to be up on these, quite soon.

Now hold that definition in your hand like a ruler, and lay it next to the reporting.

According to the Washington Post‘s reading of these filings, Trump bought Nvidia on February 10. Days later, Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and the stock jumped roughly 2.5 percent. He sold Microsoft and Amazon in February, then bought millions more in March, shortly before the Pentagon announced it would put its technology into classified computer networks.

Let me say the quiet part at conversational volume: I am not telling you that is a proven crime. I am telling you that if you fed those two paragraphs to a hundred securities lawyers with no name attached, every one of them would say the same two words before their coffee got cold: “Lawyer up.”

The President of the United States sits atop the single largest pile of non-public material intelligence and information on planet Earth. He knows what the Pentagon is buying before the Pentagon’s vendors do. He knows the tariff rate before the market does, because he is the source of the tariff. Markets are always defined by information asymmetry. For him, the asymmetry isn’t a loophole. It’s the strategy. It’s the job.

A normal person who traded a defense contractor’s stock the week before a classified Pentagon contract would be explaining himself to men in windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. Trump gets a $200 fine. Twice. We’ll come back to the two hundred dollars, because the two hundred dollars is the funniest and darkest detail in the entire file.

Here is the thing that turns this from a scandal into a regime: there is functionally no one on the beat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, has been hollowed out with the precision of me working a Thanksgiving turkey. Since the administration took over, the SEC has shed the order of 18% of its workforce, dropping from roughly 5,000 employees to around 4,200, the bulk of them walking out the door clutching $50,000 buyout checks dangled by the same government they were supposed to police.

The Enforcement Division and the Office of the General Counsel, the cops and the lawyers, in other words, took the deepest cuts. DOGE set up shop inside the SEC headquarters, occupying actual rooms; nothing good was ever going to come of that. The Philadelphia and Los Angeles field offices were slated to go dark. Enforcement actions against public companies are down roughly thirty percent. The new chairman publicly mused that it’s “good every once in a while to have a house cleaning.” Uh huh.

You do not need a decoder ring. When the man at the top is running a quarter-billion-dollar trading book off privileged information, and the watchdog has been defunded, depopulated, and told to think of mass attrition as spring cleaning, that is not two unrelated news stories. That is one strategy with two press releases.

This is the part that should raise the hair on your neck, regardless of your party. The genius of the grift is not that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s legal-adjacent by demolition. You don’t have to break the law if you can fire the people who enforce it and starve out the ones who remain. The cop didn’t miss the robbery. The cop took the buyout, and the robber signed the check.

Fine. You want to know how this plays as an actual case. Put on the prosecutor’s jacket for a second, because the honest answer is more damning than the cartoon.

It would be hard.

Not because the conduct smells clean. It reeks. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

WSJ: Trump Made Over 3,700 Stock Trades in First Quarter of 2026

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
4

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump made thousands of stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026. In many instances, actions he took as president directly affected the price of the shares he bought or sold.

Previous Presidents put their assets into a blind trust or invested only in bonds.

Before he entered the White House, President Trump was a real-estate developer and speculator. Lately, his fortune has been wagered on some Big Tech stocks.

Money managers for the president made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, including million-dollar purchases of Nvidia, Dell and other Big Tech stocks. Trump’s managers pared his holdings in Microsoft and Amazon with sizable sales in the quarter. 

Canny investors should read Trump’s account on his social media site “Truth Social.” If he praises a company, it’s likely that he just bought the stock and is encouraging others to join him.

Bloomberg reported that experienced traders were stunned by the sheer number of trades on behalf of Trump.

President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.

The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the US Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value. But the volume of trading — more than 40 per day over a three-month period — stands out as much as the potential dollar value.

“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account…

The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House. Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests. Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer. His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy.

At the same time, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helps manage billions in investments for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while simultaneously serving as a “volunteer” envoy for the president on issues affecting the war in Iran and the Middle East in general…

The president’s disclosures spurred questions from some on Wall Street who expressed surprise at the trading volume.

“I’m baffled,” said Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

The billionaire president’s stock trades were no doubt made to protect the best interests of the American people.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Trump Sued IRS for $10 Billion. How Much Will He Pay Himself?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
10

Never in U.S. history has a President so brazenly enriched himself while serving in office. Trump’s family makes business deals with countries that pay enormous profits. Trump sells Trump-branded merchandise at every opportunity. Meme coins, crypto, invitations to dine with him for a hefty price. The money-making opportunities are abundant. Since the start of his second term, his net worth has increased by billions.

But the biggest grift of all is not yet settled. Trump sued the Treasury Department and the IRS for $10 billion for leaking data about his income taxes, an act done by a contractor who was punished with a five-year jail sentence.

The irony is that every president since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released their tax returns, to demonstrate that they have no financial conflicts of interest and would not profit by serving as president. So, Trump is suing the IRS for doing what he should have done voluntarily but refused to do. He ran three times without releasing his tax returns.

By suing the IRS, he is in effect suing himself. Scott Bessent, appointed by Trump and serving at his pleasure, is on the other side of the table. What will he give his boss?

The plot thickens as the Justice Department, also under Trump’s thumb and eager to please him, is trying to reach a settlement in the case of Trump V. the Treasury Department/IRS controlled by Trump.

Trump sued in southern Florida, expecting or hoping to get a judge appointed by him, but must have been stunned when the judge turned out to be Obama appointee. This creates an incentive to settle the case before it goes to the judge.

Of all Trump’s many lawsuits, this may be the most sickening because it is the most corrupt and self-dealing.

Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer reported in The New York Times:

The Justice Department is holding internal discussions about settling President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Servicein the coming days, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, a move that could involve the government directly providing taxpayer funds or another public benefit to the president.

Whether to settle the suit and on what terms remains up in the air. One of the settlement options the Justice Department and White House officials are reviewing is the possibility of the I.R.S. dropping any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or businesses, according to two of the people.

In January, Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns during the president’s first term. The Trumps argued that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

Given that Mr. Trump oversees the I.R.S., the agency that he is suing, the judge in the case has taken a series of novel legal steps to probe whether there is a genuine controversy between the Justice Department and Mr. Trump. For a lawsuit to be valid, the two parties must actually be on opposite sides, otherwise the judge can throw out the case. The judge has ordered Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers — along with the Justice Department, which represents the I.R.S. in federal court — to submit briefs by May 20 explaining whether they are in conflict with one another.

White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline, according to the people.

Mr. Trump has long maintained that the federal government was weaponized against him by political opponents, and he has spent much of his second term seeking retribution against, and sometimes compensation from, those he holds responsible. But depending on its terms, a settlement with the I.R.S. could be among Mr. Trump’s most brazen efforts to bend the government to his personal will — an agenda often carried out through the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump and his family have repeatedly disregarded Washington’s ethical guardrails aimed at preventing government officials from profiting from public office, including by pushing for more than $200 million in a separate administrative case with the Justice Department. But a settlement payment even a fraction of the size of Mr. Trump’s requested $10 billion could be much larger than his other attempts at private gain, potentially doubling his net worth.

The Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred questions to Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the case, a spokesman for whom said, “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

In a previous filing in the case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said they were in discussions with unidentified Justice Department attorneys “designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation.” A government attorney has yet to make an appearance in the case.

A settlement in the coming days would fly in the face of efforts by the federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, an appointee of President Barack Obama in the Southern District of Florida, to try and manage the conflict of interest in the case. Not only has she requested briefings from Mr. Trump’s lawyers and the government by next week, she has appointed a group of six well-respected lawyers not otherwise involved in the case to provide her with their views on whether Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is legitimate.

If a settlement is reached before Judge Williams has a chance to make a decision about whether the underlying lawsuit is valid, it could frustrate her, though legal experts say that her authority beyond that would be limited.

She would not likely be able to prevent Mr. Trump from simply withdrawing the suit and coming to a private agreement with the federal government. Even if the judge were to ultimately find that the settlement was collusive or reached in bad faith, she would likely be hamstrung in any effort to stop money or other benefits from changing hands.

Former government lawyers and experts see a clear defense to Mr. Trump’s suit, and do not see it as one the Justice Department would typically settle on its merits. A group of former I.R.S. and Justice Department officials filed an amicus brief in the case arguing, among other things, that Mr. Trump filed the suit too late and that his request for at least $10 billion was far too large.

Charles Littlejohn, the former I.R.S. contractor sentenced to five years in prison for the leak, provided tax return information about thousands of other wealthy Americans to ProPublica. Some of those people have also sued the I.R.S., and the Justice Department has defended those suits, in part by arguing that the government can’t be held liable for the actions of a contractor.

One of those suits against the I.R.S., from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, was settled in 2024, but the government did not pay Mr. Griffin any damages. Instead, the I.R.S. made a public apology for the leak.

It is unclear or how much money Mr. Trump could receive in a settlement, or if he will be paid at all.

But protection from I.R.S. audits could prove quite valuable. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president and vice president’s annual tax returns. The series of Times articles at the center of Mr. Trump’s suit, published in 2020, showed that he had paid little or no income tax for years. In 2024, the Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.

At the same time, federal law prohibits the president from ordering the start or conclusion of an I.R.S. audit of a specific taxpayer.

Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

John Thompson: Can We Control AI or Will It Control Us?

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2026 //
9

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian, knows that we are at a fork in the road with artificial intelligence: Will it control us or will we control it? The evolution and implementation of AI is driven by corpirations making huge investments and seeking huge profits. The well-being of children is not their uppermost goal.

He writes:

My head has been spinning since I attended the University of Oklahoma’s “Applied A.I. in the Workplace seminar.”

The session began with O.U.’s Dr. Shishir Shah who provided a detailed history of machine learning, starting with the 1940’s. Dr. Shah went into the nuances of the phases of A.I.  It culminated in today’s period of “Human Alignment” with its exploding data bases. He says that we’re entering an era where we don’t ask whether machines “think,” but what will A.I.  learn next.

In conversations with Dr. Shah, I was especially impressed with his insights into public education, and what we would need to do to prepare students for the 21st century. He also said:

As both Dr. Ali and Dr. Jones indicated, we all have to engage in open and transparent discussions about AI and its uses.  This will help improve our understanding of its potential impacts, which then can help shape appropriate guidelines, standards, and policies.  Engagement is important.

Then Dr. Kyle Jones, who leads field engineering for “Databricks,” warned that anything you think you know about A.I. changes in 6 months. Dr. Jones described a number of ways that A.I. provides useful results. But, he added that A.I. is making things easier for robots, and then asked, “What about human beings?”

Dr. Jones also questioned the role of corporate profits in rapidly expanding A.I.   

Then, Dr. Asim Ali, from Auburn University, explained that private investment in A.I. is dominated by the U.S., but we need international solutions, and more regulations. He focused on the recent history of A.I increasing, declining, and returning to growth as it approaches long-term growth. For instance, he used Anthropic’s “Claude” chatbot for an example of what’s possible, as well as its major shortcomings.

Dr. Ali advocates for engaging conversations about A.I. and its uses; if we are “passive about A.I., the future with AI will not be one we like.”  

He also reported on “the low likelihood that we will have [A.I.] Superintelligence anytime soon, but that there’s value in discussing a future with Superintelligence because it challenges us to determine our values when using AI and wrestle with the potential negative outcomes for human society.”

That brings me from the various, nuanced history and possible futures they explained to the more complicated paths towards minimizing the harms of A.I.  They offered complex appraisals of multiple paths forward. Perhaps we could refine technocratic skills to program A.I. so it doesn’t turn on humans. Or should we try to launch A.I. so that it then learns how to protect and make a better world for humans?

And, yes, companies want us to use more data, despite the environmental damage that results.   But shouldn’t we ask whether our rampant use of digital tools and social media is meaningful enough to justify the harms done by data centers? 

And, shouldn’t we do a better job of teaching critical thinking?

So, when I drove home from those sessions, my plan was to first reread my notes and to deepen my understanding of their research.  But, the first thing I found in my mailbox was Jill Lepore’s “We, The Robots.”

And Lepore’s opening sentence was a quote from Geoffrey Hinton, a “Nobel Prize-winning godfather of A.I.” “’Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to kill you when you grow up, you should worry.’”

Lepore asks Daniel Roher, the director of the documentary “The A.I. Doc,” which quotes an A.I. insider who says, “I know people who work on A.I. risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school.”

Roher further explains that the government has “abdicated the regulation of artificial Intelligence, just as it failed to pass any meaningful legislation regarding social media.” 

Lepore uses  Anthropic’s “Claude’s,” effort to create an A.I. “Constitution” as a “trying” example of the problems with A.I,  during a time when President Donald Trump is attacking the American Constitution. 

And, she asks whether Anthropic’s efforts are designed to “move toward human participation and democratic governance instead of relying on what appears to be technocratic automatism.” 

Lepore recalled reasons for hope when OpenAI formed a “Superalignment team” and President Joe Biden issued an executive order “calling for Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.  But “In Trumpworld, this was the equivalent of DEI for computers.”

And that brings me back to the O.U. seminar. I don’t know enough to compare and contrast its experts’ detailed findings on A.I. with those of the experts Jill Lepore drew upon. I heard them as being less pessimistic, emphasizing the long histories of challenges that humans have overcome. But, I believe the biggest difference between them is the tone of their analyses. 

For instance, Dr. Jones told me, “There is no single inevitable path that A.I. will follow. As humans we have free will and we get to choose.  So, his “response is to engage with this, rather than ignore it and hope for the best. After all, hope is not a strategy.” 

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, Technology

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

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2026 //
9

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

Secretary of Energy’s Former Company Made Huge Profits, Paid No Taxes

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2026 //
1

Finished paying your taxes? I bet you didn’t do as well as Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Politico reported that the company founded made huge profits and paid no taxes. In fact, his company got a refund! It’s Trump tax policy at work for the 1%.

Politico wrote:

The company founded and formerly run by Energy Secretary Chris Wright paid no federal corporate income taxes last year, according to its regulatory filings, and actually got more than $10 million back from the IRS.

Liberty Energy, the oil field services company Wright founded in 2011 but left last year to join the Trump administration, was among several energy companies included in a report issued Tuesday by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy naming 88 companies that together made more than $105 billion before taxes last year but paid no federal corporate income taxes.

Liberty recorded net income before taxes of $193 million last year but received more than $10 million back in tax benefits, according to its latest annual financial disclosure. The company paid $33 million in federal taxes for the 2024 tax year after making a net income of $403 million before taxes.

Categories Environment, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Florida: A For-Profit Charter Firm Plans to Cash In on Public School Revenues

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2026 //
4

Jason Garcia, investigative reporter, explains how giant for-profit charter chain Academica plans to grab a bigger share of local property taxes. Academica long ago figured out the importance of working with the right lobbyists and contributing generously to the right politicians. Their efforts have paid off in bigger profits.

Garcia writes:

In late February, toward the end of this year’s regular legislative session, Republican leaders in the state Senate introduced a measure to make public school districts across Florida give a bigger share of local property taxes to privately run charter schools.
The idea seemed to catch some senators by surprise when it was presented to the Senate Finance & Tax Committee as part of a larger package of proposed tax cuts and changes. The charter school provision prompted an extended round of sometimes-confused questioning during the hearing; Sen. Ed Hooper, a Republican from Clearwater who is a part of the Senate GOP leadership team, confessed that even he did not fully understand it.
But there was someone who knew about the property tax plan in advance: Academica Corp., the charter school management giant that stands to profit from the change.
Records obtained by Seeking Rents show that the sponsor the Senate tax package shared a draft of the charter school language with a lobbyist for Academica the week before it was filed for the rest of the public to see. An aide to Sen. Bryan Avila (R-Miami Springs) emailed the still-secret tax-sharing scheme to Academica lobbyist Andreina Figueroa with a one-word subject line: “Review.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Florida, For-Profit, Funding
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