Archives for category: For-Profit

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.

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‘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

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.

Kelly Edgar taught music in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) for 25 years. She recently wrote this article in The Nevada Independent about the dangers of charter schools.

She wrote:

Charter schools have been touted as the solution to our “failing public schools.” To be fair, the original intention was good. Those who founded the charter school movement envisioned it as a way to collaborate with public schools by finding creative solutions for students who weren’t thriving in traditional educational settings. 

But that’s not what’s happening today. Since retiring from the Clark County School District in 2024, I’ve developed my own theory: Between the dismantling of the Department of Education and free market ideologues wanting in on public school tax dollars, it’s now clear that the goal of privatizing education has been decades in the making. And charter schools are the stepping stones to get the job done.

Most people assume that charter schools are public schools because they’re free to attend and publicly funded. However, unlike traditional public schools, many are managed by private, for-profit companies — such as Academica in Nevada — and they filter enrollment via applications and lotteries.

Moreover, they do not have publicly elected school boards. In other words, we have no say on how our tax dollars are spent in charter schools because oversight is lax. Yet a charter school principal, a charter school founder and members of Moms For Liberty (which has direct ties to the school privatization movement) can sit on our school board.

Public education certainly has its challenges. I devoted decades to working inside the system and spent my final years sounding the alarm about overcrowded classrooms, insufficient resources, district leaders with ulterior motives and a lack of teacher autonomy. 

What I didn’t realize was that we were being sabotaged by the very people selling taxpayers the solutions

According to a July 2026 report by the Network for Public Education, there’s a direct correlation between academic achievement and per-pupil funding. States that support public schools outperform those that do not. So why is Nevada’s education system still ranked 48th in the nation despite “historic education funding” being passed in 2023?

Because you can’t pour water into a leaky bucket and expect it to hold. The funding was a start, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that Nevada also aggressively redirects public funds toward “private alternatives” such as charter schools. As the Network for Public Education puts it, “Privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand.”

The groundwork for all this was laid when the President Ronald Reagan’s administration, ahead of his 1984 re-election campaign, convinced Americans that we were A Nation at Risk, public schools were to blame and only Reagan could save us. This report simmered with “apocalyptic rhetoric” and the media seized on it like a dog with a bone because nothing grabs attention better than lines such as “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.” 

What A Nation at Risk and major news outlets failed to mention, however, was a statistical sleight of hand called Simpson’s paradox. Students weren’t actually doing worse; more students, not just the privileged few, were taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In fact, President George Bush’s own commissioned study concluded that on nearly every measure, scores held steady or improved. But those findings were suppressed, and politicians on both sides of the aisle doubled down on the same flawed premise that public schools were failing America.

Rather than addressing systemic poverty, which we know affects educational outcomes, politicians and corporate philanthropists wasted billions of dollars micromanaging teachers and student learning with policies and programssuch as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Common Core.

And when public schools didn’t crumble under those “reforms” as anticipated, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a conservative network, manufactured a new crisis: convincing the American people that teachers are indoctrinating their children with radical, anti-American ideologies.

The impact of this conspiracy on teacher morale has been brutal. We went from being treated as professionals to villains overnight, pouring ourselves into our work just to be disparaged by the media and pundits who would never survive a day in our shoes.

But sadly, breaking us was the point so they could justify defunding public education, sell parents on charter schools and other private alternatives under the guise of “school choice,” and “save” Americans from the crisis they created.

In 2017, the council provided the Trump administration with a blueprint to return education to “free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice.” This “Education Reform Report” became the foundation of Chapter 11 of Project 2025. 

And while we haven’t seen every part of their mandate unfold in Nevada, there are red flags. Clark County schools are seeing their lowest enrollment numbers in decades, with many parents opting for alternatives, citing “lax classroom discipline” and “poorly performing public schools.” One would assume lower enrollment could have been an opportunity for the district to address parents’ concerns by decreasing class sizes and offering more individualized attention. But instead, the district was forced to declare a reduction in force that affects 60 licensed professionals because when students leave, the funding follows the child

And where are those tax dollars going? To Academica-managed schools, and more ideologically driven ones such as Founders Classical Academy, run by Hillsdale College, whose leadership has ties to the CNP network that wrote the privatization blueprint. 

The Clark County School District is not alone. Data indicate that by 2031, public school enrollment is projected to decline nationwide. 

This begs the question: If by 2031, more students are enrolled in charter schools, then aren’t charter schools just glorified public schools without the safeguard of public oversight? 

That absence of oversight is key when profit is the goal. It’s in the best interests of management companies to keep costs down. This inevitably leads to shrinking school budgets and compromising standards through raising class sizes, lowering pay and hiring less experienced teachers. And our students? Commodities. 

Which brings us back to square one. But this time, instead of pulling our children out of one free school to attend another free school, parents will be forced to either pay for private education or send their children to a potentially substandard charter school. As we face rising inflation and artificial intelligence replacing jobs, private school tuition is out of reach for most families.

The paradoxes of “school choice” can’t be ignored. Public schools educate every child who walks through the door, including those who need more trauma-informed care, more expensive interventions or who face severe learning challenges. These are often the same students that the “choice schools” didn’t have room for. Comparing the educational outcomes of a school that accepts every child to one that does not is, frankly, illogical, especially since the system is rigged against us: per-pupil funding follows the child while proposed federal budget cuts gut the very resources our students need most: Title I and Title II funding, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections and ample resources for arts education and mental health services. 

Healthcare in this country is run for profit, yet we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income nation. We don’t blame doctors or hospitals. We point to the economic disparities built into a broken system. Let’s not repeat the same mistake with our children’s education.

Kelly Edgar taught in the Clark County School District for 25 years, specializing in music education.

When it comes to supporting its public schools, Florida ranks dead last in the nation. Not only was it dead last of all states, it was at the very bottom in 2024 and 2025.

Florida betrays its state constitution, which contains a clear mandate to create and protect strong public schools.

Article IX, Section 1(a) states:

“The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education…”

Under the misleadership of Republican politicians like Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis, Florida has diverted billions of dollars to privately governed charter schools and unaccountable vouchers for private and religious schools and home schooling. Bush and DeSantis have ignored and abandoned Florida’s state constitution.

And among all the states, Florida’s school rank dead last.

Based on the NPE report Public Schooling in America 2026, Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for public Education, wrote:

This is the third consecutive year that Florida’s statehouse has earned last place when it comes to supporting public schools. Florida’s lawmakers don’t merely encourage privatization through charters, vouchers, and homeschools; they actively engineer conditions that undermine public schools and worsen the environment for teaching and learning.

The damage from Florida’s universal voucher program is staggering. Close to four billion dollars in state education funding now flows annually to voucher programs — nearly one in four state education dollars diverted away from public schools, including to families whose children never set foot in a public school. And the funding mechanism puts the burden directly on school districts, which must absorb the loss.

Meanwhile, Florida continuously revises its school rating standards to ensure more public schools are labeled as failing, while simultaneously incentivizing and subsidizing charter expansion. Its Schools of Hope program even allows charters to colonize unused space inside public school buildings. Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz teamed up with a Florida billionaire to help draft the enabling legislation, then used it to muscle her chain into the Miami charter market with generous public funding in tow.

Fifty percent of Florida’s charter sector is run by for-profit operators — one of the highest shares in the nation. Only Michigan has more. Florida is home to Academica, the largest for-profit charter chain in the country, and to Charter Schools USA. Both profit from the real estate they build and lease back to their own branded schools.

Charter schools claim to be equally open to all students. That is not the case in Florida, which lost points for the numerous enrollment privileges its laws permit. Florida is one of a small number of states that allow company-based charter schools. The Villages, the largest retirement community in the country, has its own charter school, and it functions less like a school of choice than a company store. The school was created by the community’s developer, and at least one parent must be employed by The Villages or a company that services it. If that parent quits or is fired, the child must leave immediately. For a low-wage service worker who might want to change jobs, the school becomes a trap — a reason to stay put rather than pursue something better.

Florida sinks to the bottom not only because of its weak charter and voucher laws and the financial incentives it offers to expand privatization, but because it actively undermines its public schools through policy and funding decisions at every turn. Florida lost every possible point on school funding — whether measured by cost-of-living-adjusted teacher salaries, equitable funding distribution, or funding based on capacity to pay. It has low teacher satisfaction, high student-to-teacher and student-to-counselor ratios, weak anti-bullying laws, and it still permits corporal punishment.

Of 102 possible points, Florida disgracefully earned only 14. You can read our full NPE 2026 report card here.

Scott Dworkin runs a Democratic activist’s blog, raising money for candidates and exposing Trump scandals and grifts. I subscribe and encourage you to do the same.

He writes:

A NEW TRUMP BUSINESS: THE PENTAGON

A paper trail of federal money keeps showing up right behind the Trump name. Don Jr. joined drone maker Unusual Machines’ advisory board in November 2024—and within a year, one of the company’s largest orders ever was placed by the US Army.

Last August, Don Jr.’s firm, 1789 Capital, bought into a startup called Vulcan Elements; three months later it landed a $620 million loan, the biggest in the Pentagon’s lending office history. ProPublica found the loan was initiated by senior White House official Peter Navarro—a friend of Don Jr.’s—and pushed through in a matter of weeks, sending Vulcan’s value skyrocketing from $200 million toward $2 billion.

The sons swear their names have nothing to do with it, but the record says otherwise: roughly $3.7 billion in federal money went to at least ten companies tied to the brothers since the regime took power. That’s your April taxes, meant to defend the country, rerouted to whoever hired the right last name.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is now demanding the Pentagon’s inspector general investigate: “his sons are cashing in on defense contracts funded by hardworking taxpayers.”

They built this in the dark to work in secret, betting nobody would ever turn on the lights. The investigation just started, the receipts are already public, and every dollar gets traced. This fight is only beginning.

DOGE IS DEAD. THE DAMAGE ISN’T.

DOGE’s mandate expired July 4, the end date written into Trump’s own executive order. Elon Musk swore he’d cut $2 trillion. DOGE’s website claims $215 billion—a number they haven’t updated since January and that budget experts don’t buy. Even taking their figure at face value, that’s a dime in cuts for every dollar promised.

Molly Hardy was the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2024 employee of the year. DOGE laid her off anyway. Then in March, the agency came crawling back, emailing to ask if she’d return. She turned them down—not bitter, just clear-eyed: “It didn’t feel good. It just felt really sad.”

She’s not alone, and that’s the part they didn’t see coming. All over the government, the wreckage is being reversed: HHS fired 10,000 workers and is now scrambling to hire 12,000. Agencies that bragged about the chainsaw are begging people to come back. Asked if shrinking the workforce was even still the goal, OPM chief Scott Kupor admitted: “I’m not hearing that.”

And when Congress asked what DOGE actually accomplished, budget director Russell Vought had nothing to show: “We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report.”

The people who took a chainsaw to our government don’t get to slink off without a full accounting. We’ll see to that.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, was the author of the recent report Public Schooling in America: Our 2026 Report Card on the States. The subtitle: THE BEST AND THE WORST STATEHOUSES FOR SUPPORTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS.

She wrote recently to explain why Ohio received a low grade:

Ohio lost more points on privatization in the NPE Report Card than any other state — more than Florida, more than Arizona. Its charter and voucher policies are among the most expansive and least accountable in the nation. The only reason Ohio does not rank at the very bottom is that it continues to fund its public schools at a relatively adequate level. That margin is shrinking.

The charter sector tells a particularly troubling story. Half of all charter schools in Ohio are operated by for-profit companies — an unusually high share even by national standards. Yet nearly half of all charter schools that have ever opened with enrollment in the state have since closed, a closure rate of 49 percent. These are not isolated failures. They reflect a system designed with too few guardrails and too little accountability.

A significant portion of these for-profit schools are credit recovery operations and online schools — low-cost, maximum-profit models held to lower academic standards than traditional public schools. Nearly one in three charter students in Ohio — 30 percent — attends a virtual school or an institution where instruction is delivered primarily online.

What explains so much low-quality supply? Ohio’s authorizing structure is a central culprit. The state permits multiple authorizers, including nonprofits that collect millions in authorizing fees and have a financial incentive to approve and retain schools regardless of performance.

Ohio also has more voucher programs than any other state in the country — eight in total — further diverting public dollars away from the students and communities that depend on public schools.

If Ohio continues on its current trajectory, the consequences are predictable: further erosion of public school funding, further decline in the rankings, and fewer educational options as the neighborhood public school choice disappears. 

We have read all about the scandals of Graham Platner. We know about the women he dated, the women he texted, and his tattoo. The media has written about all of them in detail.

What we don’t know is about the financial scandals of his opponent, Senator Susan Collins. Her husband is a lobbyist, and she has lovingly taken care of his business.

David Dayen, editor of The American Prospect, wrote about the media’s double standard here.

The Founding Fathers had a finely honed sense of the corroding power of corruption. They wrote prohibitions on self-enrichment and the pull of bribery directly into the Constitution on three separate occasions, banning foreign and domestic gifts, changes to presidential compensation during one’s period in office, and appointments for members of Congress that could be remunerative. They believed that someone treated well by a foreign potentate or stateside special interest would be naturally inclined to benefit them, if even unconsciously, and that a wall needed to be constructed to guard against this.

That the Supreme Court has directly or indirectly nullified these one by one is a tragedy. But the court of public opinion, at least as mediated by gatekeepers of information, has also separated what counts as corruption from what counts as a political scandal. Donald Trump personally earning $1.4 billion from a family cryptocurrency business that benefits from his administration’s lenient crypto policies (much of those crypto purchases coming directly from a foreign government) is less well known to the public than whatever wild thing he said on his personal social media site the night before.

By the same token, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a household name, and Darializa Avila Chevalier will soon be, because of what they say, or once said. Thomas Daffron is not a household name.

Daffron is Susan Collins’s husband. He was also a registered lobbyist and eventually became chief operating officer of a K Street consulting firm named Jefferson Consulting, prior to and after marrying Collins. This firm received $76 million in government contracts for acquisition and improvement consulting during Daffron’s tenure from 2006 to 2016. Much of it came after he became COO, and especially after Collins wrote a contracting reform bill in 2007, parts of which boosted Jefferson Consulting.

Some of the connections appeared rather clear. To use one example, the Collins bill required a strategic plan for acquisition at the Federal Acquisition Institute, and Jefferson billed the Federal Acquisition Institute for its strategic plan. This pattern repeated; the bill put in rules mandating precisely the services Jefferson Consulting provided.

This is not a new revelation. It was released on the eve of Collins’s last re-election campaign six years ago. Collins’s response was that Daffron, the man she has been married to since 2012 and has known since the 1970s, never officially lobbied her. Collins won re-election and that was that, until her Democratic opponent for Senate this year, Graham Platner, brought it up as part of an anti-corruption agenda he released a week ago. He proposed the “Collins Rule”: Any senator whose spouse or the firm where they work receives government contracts should have to recuse themselves from voting or oversight work on that contract.

Collins was apoplectic. She tweeted that the claim was “outrageous and false,” and that she was defamed as a criminal. (Platner replied that he didn’t say it was criminal, but that it should be.) She sent her campaign manager to stand outside Platner’s press event and rebut the charges. The campaign manager said that money is delivered to contractors through the executive branch and not the Senate, eliding the fact that the bill Collins wrote benefited the firm her good friend and future spouse worked at.

For six years, this has been a nonstory, because we don’t have a political culture that imprints this kind of financial machination and leveraging of political power as a scandal. It’s either too complicated or just politics, and people move on.

Scandals are reserved for old internet comments and personal failings. Of these, Platner has plenty. When I talked to him last week, I mentioned that he’s become like a figure in Homer’s epics who is always preceded with an epithet: the “scandal-plagued” Graham Platner.

He’s talked about these scandals countless times, and I don’t need to rehash them here. But you can believe both that personal character is important in assessing elected officials and make room within that definition of character to cover how their actions in office affect their personal bank accounts.

“We’ve been working within a political system that for so long now, this form of self-dealing and self-enrichment has become intrinsic to the system itself,” Platner told me. “A lot of people who cover this stuff have created this framework in which that kind of thing is not even worthy of discussion … We write off actual scandal, legalized corruption, because we’ve been so immunized to it.”

This may seem solely like a media critique, and yes: It’s partially that. Headlines like “Platner Tests Democrats’ Tolerance for Scandal” are rarely matched by ones like “Collins Tests Republicans’ Tolerance for Self-Dealing.” But that takes everyone but the media off the hook.

Platner and Collins are locked in a virtually tied race, according to recent polling. Other statewide Maine races show the Democrat comfortably in front. Part of Collins’s still being in the game is due to her experience and durability, but part of it is the way in which this definition of political scandal is massaged and shaped.

In her career, Susan Collins hasn’t faced a drumbeat of questions about her consistent violations of the congressional stock trading disclosure laws that she co-authored. She hasn’t had to answer many queries about a net worth that has more than doubled since 2012, after her marriage to Daffron. She doesn’t respond to reporters about her family stock holdings in Amazon and UnitedHealth and Visa, and the votes she makes affecting those businesses.

She isn’t forced to explain why she switched her vote to allow a tax break for private equity managers to stand, and how now private equity managers are supporting her re-election with millions of dollars. She hasn’t said much about the 100 billionaires who are funding a super PAC on her behalf (run by a lobbyist whom Daffron recently consulted for) that has spent $9 million in attack ads just through the end of last month. There’s been little about how one of the billionaires is a private equity mogul who destroyed paper mills in Maine and put residents out of work.

We all know chapter and verse about Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his texts to women other than his wife early in his marriage, and allegations of misconduct from former girlfriends (that one he vociferously denies). These are the kinds of revelations that are grist for gossip. We don’t have a mentality that puts financial scandal and personal scandal on the same plane. Old tweets are easy to cover, but they’re also easy to understand and to render judgments in ways not applied to things that take more consideration.

The people who decide what does and doesn’t matter in politics also don’t speak the language of no-bid contractspay-to-play deals, and family benefits from contractswith the same zeal reserved for putting an old tweet on a screen. Maybe that’s because corruption hits both ways and can blow back on one’s own party, and maybe that’s because personal peccadilloes are a shortcut and time-saver.

Either way, this dearth of consideration has saddled us with this myopic definition of scandal that contributes to a disaffection with politics. If graft is seen as normal, the ability for reform and even progress feels remote.

Please open the link to finish reading this examination of the media’s double standards.

Truman didnt say anything about the President’s children!

Mary Trump wrote about how Eric and Donald Jr. are cashing in on their father’s Presidency.

Are there no laws against conflict of interest? Nepotism?

And to think that Republicans were outraged by Hunter Biden! Whatever he did (a seat on the Burisma board; name-dropping his father in business meetings?) is chump change compared to the money-grubbing Trump boys.

Where is the outrage?

Mary Trump writes:

Donald has always insisted that his children run their businesses independently. We have been told repeatedly that there is a bright line separating the presidency from the Trump family’s financial interests. We have also been told to ignore the remarkable coincidence that, every time Donald returns to power, his family somehow discovers lucrative new industries that depend almost entirely on decisions made by the federal government.

Those coincidences are becoming increasingly difficult to believe.

Since Donald returned to the White House, his two oldest and arguably most useless sons have dramatically expanded their investments into industries that rely almost entirely on Pentagon spending and federal policy. These are not businesses they spent years building. They are not industries in which either Don Jr. or Eric has any meaningful experience. They simply happen to be some of the fastest growing sectors benefiting from the Trump regime’s priorities.

Coincidentally, of course.

Don Jr.’s venture capital firm acquired a stake in Vulcan Elements shortly before the company received a $620 million Pentagon loan. According to reporting by ProPublica, that loan was accelerated after intervention from the White House.

Eric, meanwhile, serves as Chief Strategy Advisor for a robotics company despite possessing no discernible qualifications for such a role. That same company later received a $24 million Pentagon contract.

Neither Don Jr. nor Eric serves in government.

Neither is required to comply with federal ethics rules.

Neither files public financial disclosures.

Yet both continue to profit from industries whose fortunes increasingly depend on decisions being made by the administration run by their father.

Late in 2025, the Pentagon established the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, appropriately abbreviated DAWG, to rapidly expand the military’s use of drones, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Initially funded at roughly $226 million for fiscal year 2026, the Pentagon is now requesting an astonishing $54.6 billion for fiscal year 2027.

That represents an increase of more than 24,000 percent.

It is also larger than the entire proposed budget for the United States Marine Corps.

Think about that for a moment.

The Pentagon is proposing to spend more money on autonomous warfare than on the Marine Corps itself.

And it just so happens that Donald’s two oldest sons have recently become enthusiastic investors in autonomous defense technologies.

This is what MSNBC reported:

This is a major business move and another in a series of examples of the president’s family’s dealings seeming to intersect with his administration. In this case, the Pentagon, as the war with Iran rages on. Just yesterday, drone maker PowerUS announced it will merge with a golf course holding company backed by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., with plans to create a new publicly traded company. That new company calls the Trumps notable investors and says it aims to support American drone industry dominance. The company is expected to compete for lucrative military contracts, trying to fill a void created after the Trump administration banned new foreign made drones on national security grounds. An investment firm joined by Donald Trump Jr. shortly after his father’s reelection has also taken a significant stake in another defense contractor supplying AI powered military technology to the Pentagon. The Trumps maintain their father is not involved in their business dealings, and the White House says President Trump acts only in the best interests of the American people.

The phrase “notable investor” deserves closer examination.

It does not mean Don Jr. or Eric possess unique knowledge about robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, or national defense.

It certainly does not suggest either of them suddenly became experts in autonomous weapons systems. It means they are the sons of the President of the United States. That relationship is their greatest asset. It is the reason companies want them associated with their businesses. It is the reason investors pay attention. And it is almost certainly the reason government contracts suddenly become easier to obtain.

No private citizen should be allowed to leverage proximity to presidential power in this way.

Yet that appears to be exactly what is happening.

Members of Congress are beginning to ask difficult questions.

Following ProPublica’s investigation into Vulcan Elements, Democratic lawmakers demanded explanations after learning that the company’s $620 million Pentagon loan was reportedly handled very differently from virtually every other application under consideration.

According to the report, Don Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, purchased a stake in Vulcan during 2025. Only months later, the Pentagon approved the largest loan ever issued through its Office of Strategic Capital.

Internal documents reportedly revealed that Vulcan’s application moved through the approval process with unusual speed after direct involvement from senior White House adviser Peter Navarro.

One anonymous Pentagon official summarized the situation bluntly.

The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

The Pentagon insists political considerations played no role in the decision. Don Jr. likewise denies participating in securing the loan. Those denials become increasingly difficult to accept when viewed alongside the broader pattern.

One contract might be coincidence.

One investment might be luck.

One White House intervention might be explainable.

But eventually coincidences stop looking like coincidences.

They begin looking like a business model.

The deeper problem is that none of this violates the disclosure rules that govern executive branch officials because Don Jr. and Eric are not executive branch officials.

That loophole allows enormous sums of money to flow toward businesses connected to the First Family while shielding the public from understanding the true extent of their financial interests.

Transparency disappears. Accountability disappears. And public trust disappears right alongside them.

Unfortunately, this pattern does not stop with rare earth minerals or autonomous weapons.

It extends into robotics as well. 

Apparently, Eric Trump has now become an expert on robotics too, a development that would be more amusing if it were not attached to Pentagon spending, military applications, and the rapidly expanding market for autonomous weapons systems.

This is what Eric Trump said in a FOX state TV Interview:

We have to win robotics in the United States of America. You had a great segment two days ago, Maria, about the robot in Beijing that was literally running marathons and beating the fastest marathoners by seven, eight minutes for a full marathon. These are in the very early days. We better be winning this race in the United States of America. We are the greatest economy in the world, and that is exactly what this company is doing. I am telling you, he is doing a phenomenal job. When you go up and interact with these robots and they fist bump you, they high five you, they follow your commands. You bring in the AI economy. It is going to change industry, it is going to change military application, it is going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited and I think it is a very beautiful thing, but we must win this race.

What race, exactly?

The marathon the robot is running?

In what universe does the world become a better place because we have fast-running robots that can fist bump people? Although, to be fair, I would be more than happy to have robots replace Eric and Donnie.

Eric is listed as Chief Strategy Advisor, which, after listening to him speak, makes perfect sense if the strategy is to say a lot of words without demonstrating any understanding of the subject matter. In April 2026, the Pentagon awarded Foundation Future Industries a $24 million contract to test its Phantom robotic systems for military applications. That contract immediately drew attention from lawmakers concerned about potential conflicts of interest.

This is what Senator Elizabeth Warren said:

Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now? This looks like corruption in plain sight.

Yes. It does.

The Pentagon has defended the contracting process and has not alleged wrongdoing by Eric or the company. Of course it has not. This is Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon. Expecting it to objectively assess whether Donald Trump’s son is benefiting from conflicts of interest is like asking Donald to fact-check his own net worth.

We need a slightly more objective entity to decide whether there is wrongdoing here.

In May 2026, Ranking Member Robert Garcia wrote a letter to the Department of Defense laying out the concerns with unusual clarity.

Eric and Donnie’s purchases, consultancies, and advisory roles create unprecedented intertwining of Donald’s personal financial interests with U.S. policy and national security. Each new venture opens new opportunities to direct DOD funds to the first family’s pockets, and the Trump administration appears to be taking advantage of those opportunities. Such actions raise concerns that DOD is rewarding companies with contracts for recruiting a Trump family member into their ownership group or directly onto their payroll. Such companies have amassed over $725 million in loans, grants, and awards since Donald took office.

No kidding.

The coincidences are mind-boggling.

The Pentagon maintains that its decisions are based on merit, which is a difficult claim to take seriously when Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense. His appointment alone is evidence that merit is not exactly the organizing principle of this administration.

Because neither Eric nor Donnie is subject to federal disclosure requirements, the public has very limited visibility into the scale of their financial exposure. That is precisely how this kind of corruption is allowed to happen. The President’s children can invest in, advise, or promote companies that stand to benefit from federal contracts, while the American people are left guessing how much money they are making and how directly their father’s administration may be helping them make it.

This is the Trump family business model in its purest form. Find an industry dependent on government action. Attach the Trump name to a company operating in that space. Let the machinery of government create the opening. Then insist there is nothing to see when the money begins flowing.

The problem is not merely that Eric and Donnie are unqualified. That has always been the least surprising part of the story. The problem is that their lack of qualifications does not matter. In fact, it may be part of the point. Companies do not need them for their expertise. They need them for their access.

This is the same pattern that has defined Donald’s entire life. He has never understood the difference between public power and private profit because nobody ever forced him to learn it. Fred Trump built the empire. Donald inherited it, hollowed it out, sold off pieces of it, and survived only because other people kept rescuing him. Now his sons are applying the same principle to national security.

The stakes, however, are much higher this time.

We are not talking about failed casinos, licensing deals, branded steaks, or golf course scams. We are talking about drones, rare earth minerals, autonomous warfare, artificial intelligence, robotics, and Pentagon contracts. We are talking about the future of American military policy and billions of dollars in public money being routed through a system in which the president’s family appears to have direct financial interests.

There needs to be an investigation.

Someday, when we finally get through this mess, Eric and Donnie need to be held accountable, stripped of their ill-gotten gains, and, if warranted by the evidence, prosecuted. The American people should not be treated as a revenue stream for the Trump family. The Pentagon should not function as another Trump family ATM. National security should not be turned into a business opportunity for two men whose only qualification is their last name.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave a stunning speech about the normalcy of corruption in the Trump White House. Senator Murphy spoke about “500 Days of Corruption,” in which he detailed numerous deals that enriched the Trump sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Typically, they invested in a company and with days or weeks, that company received a government contract.

Set aside 30 minutes and watch this speech. It is startling, infuriating, outrageous.

Just yesterday (June 29), the media reported that President Trump made $2.2 billion in 2025. $2.2 billion!

The New York Times reported:

President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.

All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.

Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.

Remember how the Republicans in Congress excoriated Hunter Biden because he was paid to serve as a board member for a company called Burisma in Ukraine? How many times did Trump and his allies speak with derision about “the Biden crime family”?

Penny-ante when compared to the shameless profiteering of the Trump family.

The President should have no problem paying his $5 million debt to E. Jean Carroll, which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn or even the $83 million judgment that Carroll won in state court but Trump is litigating to avoid paying.