Diana Lambert of Edsource reported that Jonathan Raymond, the former Superintendent of the Sacramento School District, agreed to take over the leadership of a “troubled” charter school called Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools. The school enrolls adults, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants.
Wow, was it ever troubled!
Good for Raymond for taking on the challenge of fixing the school! The first thing he did was to dismiss the entire board.
The school owes the state $180 million dollars for money it should not have received or misspent. Most of the teachers were unqualified or were hired because they were friends or family of board members.
And on and on, demonstrating the need for the Legislature to establish oversight and accountability for charter schools, which the California Charter Schools Association has opposed for years.
Lambert wrote:
Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools opened in Sacramento in 2014 with high ideals — to help adult students, many formerly incarcerated or new immigrants, to earn a diploma, improve English language skills, or learn a trade.
Now, the school is one reason state legislators are considering increased charter school oversight.
Twin Rivers and other organizations did not provide adequate oversight.
Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools received more than $180 million in K-12 funds it was not eligible to collect and must now repay.
Graduation rates were so low they brought down the state’s graduation rate by half a percentage point.
Charter school leaders wasted taxpayer dollars on gifts and trips.
School leaders hired friends and family for jobs they weren’t qualified to hold.
Most teachers did not have the appropriate credentials to teach K-12 classes.
It wasn’t until the California State Auditor’s Office released a report in June, commissioned by state legislators, that the level of impropriety at the school became apparent.
The 80-page state audit found that the adult school received $180 million of K-12 funding for which it was not eligible, assigned teachers to classes they were not credentialed to teach, and avoided standardized testing by eliminating the 11th grade.
The audit also found that school leaders spent $1.96 million on a three-day trip for staff to San Diego for professional development, $80,000 on a leadership conference in Maui, $33,000 a month to lease a semi-professional ballpark, and more than $145,000 on gifts for students.
“The Highlands audit has underscored for us the need for greater accountability on the part of charter authorizers of all sizes, to conduct more thorough oversight that is not solely reliant upon a charter school’s annual audit or a charter school’s assertions,” said Cassie Mancini, legislative advocate for the California School Employees Association at a state Senate hearing on Assembly Bill 84, a charter oversight bill, in July.
Legislators, charter school advocates and charter school authorizers have been working to revise two competing charter school bills with the goal of merging them into one.
Adult charter gets K-12 funds
Many of the problems the audit found at Highlands Community Charter seem to stem from how the school leaders interpreted the rules around a unique federal program that allows adult charter schools, working in partnership with a Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act agency, to receive K-12 funding, which is significantly higher than adult education funding…
Highlands Community Charter had a graduation rate of 2.8% and its California Innovative Career Academy, or CICA, had a rate of 16.9%. Highlands opened CICA, an independent study school, in 2019…
A large number of underqualified teachers and large class sizes, averaging 51 students per teacher, may have contributed to the poor academic performance of the school’s students, according to the audit. The state has no limit on class sizes in charter high schools.
At the time of the audit, only 53 of the school’s 250 teachers had a K-12 credential, said Bill McGuire, who served as executive director of the school during the year of the audit. He blamed the lack of appropriately credentialed teachers on inaccurate information from credentialing officials.
The charter school owes $180 million to the state. It’s asking for some sort of write-off since the money is gone. The authorizer, Twin Rivers, collected $12.9 million in fees but didn’t seem to oversee much.
A scam? An error? A rip-off? Call it what you will. California and every other state needs to establish meaningful oversight and accountability for charter schools. A huge amount of money was spent since the school(s) opened in 2014, and very few people were educated.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an article for The New York Times calling for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign. Since Sanders was chairman of the Senate Committee overseeing HHS, he argues with facts, not just indignation.
He writes:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.
Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.
This week, Mr. Kennedy pushed out the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than one month on the job because she refused to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies. Four leading officials at C.D.C. resigned the same week. One of those officials said Mr. Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” apparently to fit Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. This is not Making America Healthy Again.
Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.
It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view. Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the country’s largest professional association of pediatricians, representing over 67,000 doctors who treat our children every day, calls immunizations “one of the greatest public health achievements,” which prevents tens of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease.
The American Medical Association, the largest professional association of physicians and medical students, representing over 270,000 doctors along with 79 leading medical societies, recently said that vaccines for flu, R.S.V. and Covid-19 are “the best tools to protect the public against these illnesses and their potentially serious complications.”
The World Health Organization, an agency with some of the most prominent medical experts around the globe, recently noted that over the past 50 years, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives and reduced the infant deaths by 40 percent.
Against the overwhelming body of evidence within medicine and science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? He has claimed that autism is caused by vaccines, despite more than a dozen rigorous scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of children that have found no connection between vaccines and autism.
He has called the Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest” ever made despite findings cited by the W.H.O. that Covid shots saved over 14 million lives throughout the world in 2021 alone.
He has ridiculously questioned whether the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio itself did even though scientists have found that the vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented around 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.
He has absurdly claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
Who supports Secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading “experts” that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.
Many of his supporters are from Children’s Health Defense — the anti-vaccine group he founded and profited from — and a small circle of loyalists that have spread misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories on vaccines for years.
The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.
What will this mean for the health and well-being of the American people?
Short term, it will be harder for Americans to get lifesaving vaccines. Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs — if they can manage to get a vaccine at all.
Covid is just the beginning. Mr. Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, the list of recommended vaccines that children receive to protect them from diseases like measles, chickenpox and polio. The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm.
Two years ago, when I was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I held a hearing with the major government officials responsible for protecting us from a new pandemic, including the head of the C.D.C. Without exception, every one of these agency heads said that, while they could not predict the exact date, there will be a future pandemic and we must be much better prepared for it than we are today.
Unfortunately, Secretary Kennedy’s actions are making a worrisome situation even worse by defunding the research that could help us prepare for the next pandemic. This month, he canceled nearly $500 million in research for the kinds of vaccines that helped us stop the Covid pandemic. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy is cutting funding to states to prepare and respond to future outbreaks of infectious diseases. This is unacceptable.
America’s health care system is already dysfunctional and wildly expensive, and yet the Trump administration will be throwing an estimated 15 million people off their health insurance through a cut of over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. This cut is also expected to result in the closing of or the decline in services at hundreds of nursing homes, hospitals and community health centers. As a result of cuts to the Affordable Care Act, health insurance costs will soar for millions of Americans. That is not Making America Healthy Again.
Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.
The Network for Public Education Action sent out the following alert. Please use the form to send a letter to your members of Congress.
Dear Friend of Public Schools.
They said they wouldn’t cut Title I. They lied.
Majority House leaders just dropped their FY26 education bill, slashing $12.1 billion (15%) in K-12 funding for public education. It guts the very programs that keep our public schools running — while boosting charter start-up/expansion to $500,000,000.
What they’re cutting:
Title I:–27% slashed — funding that provides targeted education services like remedial reading to students with maximum impact in high-poverty schools in cities and rural communities.
English Language Acquisition Grants: Gone.
Title II-A (teacher training & support): Eliminated.
“Despite outsized investment, America’s public schools continue to fail children and families.” That’s what they think of your neighborhood school.
Why this matters
Cuts of this magnitude will crowd classrooms, strip student supports, widen inequities, and push more schools into crisis — especially in rural and high-need communities.
Do these two things now
1) Email your Representative:
Use our action link to send a pre-written message in 15 seconds: Send your email now.
2) Call your Representative:
Find your member’s phone number here. Below is a script you can use right now: “Hello, I’m a constituent from [Representative’s name] district. I’m calling to urge the Representative to oppose the House education funding bill that cuts Title I by 27% and reduces K12 funding by 15%. These cuts will harm students and teachers in our district. Please vote NO and support full funding for public schools — not half-a-billion in funding for charter expansion while our classrooms are being cut. Thank you.”
Now spread the word
Forward this alert to friends, family, and colleagues.
Do not wait. Congress is back today (September 2). Let’s flood their inboxes and phone lines. The House’s education funding bill is a betrayal of America’s children.
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Nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control wrote a joint opinion piece for The New York Times. These are men and women devoted to public health who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. They agree that what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing to the Department of Health and Human Services is outrageous and dangerous.
They write:
We have each had the honor and privilege of serving as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, either in a permanent or an acting capacity, dating back to 1977. Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the C.D.C., the world’s pre-eminent public health agency. We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations — every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump — alongside thousands of dedicated staff members who shared our commitment to saving lives and improving health.
What the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.
Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused onunproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.
We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost.
This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the the danger that school choice and testing posed to public schools. Its title: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. I named a few of the billionaires funding the attacks on public schools, teachers, and unions–Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family–calling them “The Billionaire Boys Club.” Little did I know that they were the tip of the billionaire iceberg.
My hope in 2010 was that public school supporters would block the privatization of their schools. Public schools are as American as apple pie. I wanted the public to wake up, rally around their public schools, and repel the hedge fund managers and billionaires who were funding the privatization movement.
I was too optimistic.
The attacks escalated, fueled by the political power that money buys. The major media bought the corporate reform narrative hook, line, and sinker.
Neoliberal corporate reform brought us high-stakes standardized testing, A-F ratings for schools, charter schools, school closings, and rating teachers by the test scores of their students. And cheating scandals. All to get higher test scores, which never happened.
Now, Jennifer Berkshire asks on her blog The Education Wars whether it’s all over for public schools. Jennifer appreciates the importance of public schools as community builders and civic institutions that serve the common good.
I won’t lie. If you’re a member of Team Public Education, as I am, it has been a tough summer. And if you, like me, have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of school privatization, it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future we’ve been warning about has arrived. Five years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote a book called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: the Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School that culminated in a sort of “Black Mirror” chapter called “education a la carte.” In it, we described how the ultimate vision of school privatization advocates wasn’t simply to shift the nation’s youngsters into private schools, but to ‘unbundle’ education into a vast array of products for consumers to purchase on Amazon-like exchanges. Lest you think we were exaggerating, turn your attention to Florida, where, as Sue Woltanski documents, project unbundle has arrived with a vengence.
Florida, as usual, is slightly ahead of the curve. But the accelerating collapse of public schools in the state, chronicled in this recent New York Times story, pushed along by the now universal school voucher program, will soon be coming to a state near you. The NYT piece, by the way, was just one of many ‘are public schools over?’ stories to drop in recent weeks. The Washington Postversion headed to peer in the window of the GOP vision for education. Spoiler: it entails replacing public schools with “a marketplace of school options.” Then, of course, there was the annual PDK survey of attitudes towards public education, which found both sinking approval of the nation’s schools (with the usual exception for local schools) and rising warmth towards the idea of private school vouchers. As legal scholar Derek Black put it, “The deep well of faith in public education has a disastrous leak.”
To understand what’s happening, I’m going to pause here to spend some time with yet another of the ‘are public schools through?’ stories, Chandler Fritz’s eye-opening new feature for Harper’s, “The Homemade Scholar.” Fritz, a teacher and writer who pens the “Arizona Room” newsletter, took a job at a private religious microschool in order to get a close up view of Arizona’s education marketplace, what he describes as “a new frontier in American education.” I recommend paying attention to this piece because 1) Fritz is a terrific writer and 2) he provides real insights into the appeal of vouchers, or as they’re billed in AZ, education savings accounts—something my own writing rarely reckons with.
Fritz finds a grab bag of reasons that students and parents are drawn to this particular microschool, most of which will be familiar to you: a hunger for ‘customization,’ the desire for religious instruction, the appeal of a small setting, conservative backlash against public education. But there’s another reason we don’t hear as much about—the opposition to the standardized testing that shapes every aspect of what’s left of our public schools. Fritz’s piece is long (the audio version clocks in at nearly an hour), and infuriating in parts, but his observations regarding the attitudes of these ‘education consumers’ towards standardized tests get straight to the point: they hate them.
Bad math
A similar theme pops up in Dana Goldstein’s recent portrayal of the impact of vouchers on schools in Florida’s Orange County. While three quarters of the schools in the district earned an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ on the state’s school accountability report card, parents are eager to free their kids from the burden of taking the state tests, something Florida education watchdog Billy Townsend has been tartly observing for years. Now, I mention opposition to standardized testing here because, even in our deeply divided times, it is a cause that unites parents across virtually any line of division. If you don’t believe me, head down to Texas, where, in addition to re-gerrymandering the state’s electoral maps, legislators have also been pretending to address the popular revolt against the STAAR Test.
But there’s another reason to revisit the antipathy to testing. While you’ve been distracted by the relentless tide of bad and worse news, what’s left of the education reform movement has been busy reemerging, zombie style, seemingly without having learned a single thing about why it flopped in the first place. There are overt signs of the zombie’s return—like Democrats for Education Reform trying to rally the party around a vision of education ‘abundance,’ or Andrew Cuomo, flailing in the NYC mayoral race, now rebranding himself as the education reform candidate with a pledge to shut down failing schools and replace them with new ‘schools of promise.’ Then there’s the pundit-level narrative taking shape in which education reform was working just great until the teachers unions ruined everything and/or Democrats lost their nerve.
This version of events, encapsulated in this recent David Brooks column, goes like this:
School reform was an attempt to disrupt the caste system, to widen opportunity for the less privileged. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama angered core Democratic constituencies like teachers unions in order to expand opportunity down the income scale. But now Democrats have basically given up. Joe Biden didn’t devote much energy to education reform. Kamala Harris ran for president without anything like a robust education reform agenda.
Brooks goes on to cite Michael Petrilli on the ‘Southern surge,’ the rise in test scores in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee (but not Florida) that has education reformers so excited. Kelsey Piper, authoress at the brand new outlet the Argument, is excited too. In her back-and-forth with leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig over the question of whether giving parents cash benefits poor children, Piper comes down squarely on the side of fixing the schools.
I think school reform after school reform has served every conceivable interest group except students (who do not vote) and so have failed to meaningfully increase literacy and numeracy, even though we now have a road map for how to genuinely let every child thrive.
If you guessed that the ‘road map’ referred to here is Mississippi, you would be correct. Mississippi, by the way, is a national leader in child poverty levels, an honor that the state, which just eliminated its income tax, seems determined to hold on to.
Proxy war
Such ‘if only the band would get back together’ takes somehow miss what a flop much of our recent version of education reform turned out to be. Here’s a partial list. The backlash to Common Core on the right didn’t just help to usher in Donald Trump but played a role in transforming the GOP from the party of big business (which was all in on pushing the Common Core standards) to one dominated by aggrieved populists. And the over selling of college tapped into a well of resentment so deep that the entire system of higher education is now threatened. Then there is the relentless push to narrow the purpose of school down to standardized testing and workforce prep, a bipartisan cause that, as I argue in a forthcoming essay in the Baffler, has now been abandoned by the right in favor of education that prizes ‘virtue’ over vocation, even as many Democrats continue to beat the ‘career readiness’ drum.
I’m not the only one to point this out, by the way. Teacher-turned-writer Nora De La Cour makes a compelling case that the appeal of so-called classical charter schools is due in part to the damage done to public education by neoliberal education reform. Students at these rapidly spreading classical schools encounter the ‘great books.’ Their public school peers get “decontextualized excerpts in corporate-produced test prep materials,” writes De La Cour.
Which brings me to the main point of this piece. (Finally!) Part of what’s so frustrating about our current moment is that by leaning into a deeply unpopular vision for public schools—test them, close them, make them compete—a certain brand of Democrat is essentially incentivizing parents to seek out test-free alternatives. Consider too that we’re in the midst of a fierce intraparty debate over what Democrats need to do to win. For the education reform wing of party, the answer to the question is to go hard at teachers unions and double down on school accountability, while also embracing school vouchers.
While this vision is inherently contradictory, it’s also a loser with voters. There may be no single less appealing sales pitch than ‘we’re going to close your school.’ Just ask former Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who was so unpopular in the city’s minority neighborhoods after shuttering 50 schools that he couldn’t run for reelection. As voucher programs expand rapidly, we’re about to enter a new era of school closures. If you don’t believe me, just check out this statement from a CATO Institute spox in response to that WaPo story on Arizona:
It’s tough for some families when their school—public or private—closes. Kids miss their friends, teachers worry about their jobs, parents have to adjust their transportation plans. But stories bemoaning public schools losing enrollment due to school choice policies are missing the point. Should parents who want a different option for their children be forced to stay in their assigned school in order to prop it up? Of course not. Public schools had a virtual monopoly on enrollment for decades, but no school can serve the unique needs of all the children who happen to live near it. As we continue down the path of more educational freedom, some schools will rise to the challenge and others will close. We shouldn’t sacrifice children’s futures in an effort to save schools that aren’t meeting their needs.
Close readers will note the moving goal posts—that we’ve moved from school choice as a means of escaping ‘failing schools’ to escaping any kind of school. But the bottom line is that we’re just supposed to accept that ‘education freedom’ means that lots of schools will be closing. Or take the ‘back to the future’ sales pitch for microschools, in which parents “form pods in church basements, barns, and any space they can find. Teachers are launching microschools in their garages.” This vision of what proponents like to call ‘permissionless education’ is one many parents, indeed entire communities, will find difficult to make sense of. It also seems like a gimme for Democrats who are trying to differentiate themselves from the right’s hostility to public schools.
I want to end on a hopeful note, because I’ve depressed us all enough by now, but also because there are some hopeful signs out there. While the education reform zombie may be reemerging, well funded as ever, a growing number of Democrats are showing us what it sounds like to run as an unabashed advocate for public schools. There’s Graham Platner, the challenger to Susan Collins in Maine, who calls out the endless attacks on public schools and teachers as “the tip of the assault on all things public.” Or how about Nathan Sage in Iowa, who puts the defense of public education at the center of his populist platform:
Public schools are the heart of our Democracy, and Republicans are tearing them down brick by brick, while treating our heroic public school teachers like dirt. They are underfunding our public schools and are diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to private schools and into the pockets of billionaires behind them.
To this list I could add Josh Cowen and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, or Catelin Drey in Iowa, who, if she pulls off a win in today’s special election to fill a state senate seat in a district that Trump carried by 11 points, will end the GOP’s supermajority in that chamber. Drey, by the way, is running as a pro-public-education-candidate and an outspoken opponent of Iowa’s controversial universal school voucher program. Plenty of influential Democrats will insist that that message is a loser. That the way for Democrats to win is to run against public schools—to talk about what failures they are, why we need to get tougher on them, and how maybe we don’t actually need them after all. I think they’re wrong, and that voters agree.
Drey did win in Iowa, decisively, proving that a pro-public education stand is a winning message. Drey won 55% of the vote in a district that Trump carried. Her victory broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.
Their goal is to restore a nation that is dominated by white straight Christian men, with a few white Christian women like Pam Bondi in leadership roles, and to banish any programs that help people improve their lot. That’s what MAGA means: a return to the “good old days” when power was in the hands of people like Trump.
The Trump administration has quietly rescinded long-standing guidance that directed schools to accommodate students who are learning English, alarming advocates who fear that schools will stop offering assistance if the federal government quits enforcing the laws that require it.
The rescission, confirmed by the Education Department on Tuesday, is one of several moves by the administration to scale back support for approximately 5 million schoolchildren not fluent in English, many of them born in the United States. It is also among the first steps in a broader push by the Trump administration to remove multilingual services from federal agencies across the board, an effort the Justice Department has ramped up in recent weeks.
The moves are an acceleration of President Donald Trump’s March 1 order declaring English the country’s “official language,” and they come as the administration is broadly targeting immigrants through its deportation campaign and other policy changes. The Justice Department sent a memorandum to all federal agencies last month directing them to follow Trump’s executive order, including by rescinding guidance related to rules about English-language learners.
Since March, the Education Department has also laid off nearly all workers in its Office of English Language Acquisition and has asked Congress to terminate funding for the federal program that helps pay for educating English-language learners. Last week, education advocates noticed that the guidance document related to English learning had a new label indicating it was rescinded and remains online “for historical purposes only.”
On Tuesday, Education Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said that the guidance for teaching English learners, which was originally set forth in 2015, was rescinded because it “is not in line with Administration policy.” A Justice Department spokesman responded to questions by sending a link to the July memorandum and said he had no comment when asked whether the guidance would be replaced.
For decades, the federal government has held that failing to provide resources for people not proficient in English constitutes discrimination based on national origin under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
In rescinding the guidance, the Trump administration is signaling that it may stop enforcing the law under that long-standing interpretation. The Education and Justice departments have been responsible for enforcing the law….
“The Department of Education and the Department of Justice are walking away from 55 years of legal understanding and enforcement. I don’t think we can understate how important that is,” said Michael Pillera, an attorney who worked at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights for 10 years and now directs the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
Without pressure from the federal government to comply with the law, it is possible that some school districts will drop services, Pillera said, particularly as many districts struggle with financial pressures.
The U.S. Supreme Court voted by 5-4 to approve the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research grants on health, due to their possible connection to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to “radical gender ideology.” Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the Court’s three liberal justices to stop the cuts to research funding.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Supreme Court decided Thursday.
The high court majority lifted a judge’s order blocking $783 million worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Republican President Donald Trump’s priorities. The high court did keep Trump administration guidance on future funding blocked, however.
The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was along those who would have kept the cuts blocked, along with the court’s three liberals.
The order marks the latest Supreme Court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs, including states and public-health advocacy groups, have argued that the cuts will inflict “incalculable losses in public health and human life.”
The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination.”
The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12 billion of NIH research projects that have been cut, but in its emergency appeal, the Trump administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said judges shouldn’t be considering those cases under an earlier Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.
But the plaintiffs, 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups, argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and couldn’t be sent to claims court. Halting studies midway can also ruin the data already collected and ultimately harm the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers, they argued.
U.S. District Judge William Young judge in Massachusetts agreed, finding the abrupt cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing in June. He later added: “Have we no shame.”
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, points out that the once promising charter school industry is now in decline. Fifteen years ago, promoters of charter schools boasted of charter school miracles, of closing achievement gaps and saving poor kids who were “stuck in failing public schools.”
The charter industry lobby won federal funding for charter school expansion. Bill Gates put millions into charters and subsidized a propaganda film to sell the public on the remarkable success of privately run charter schools.
But the miracle dissolved. Some of the “best” charters were selecting their students carefully and/or dropping students who fell behind. Many charters failed. Others folded. Some closed because of low enrollment. Some closed because their owners were corrupt. it’s not a lack of money. The federal government is now pouring $500 million every year into charter growth.
The movement is in decline because the magic is gone.
Thirty years ago, charter schools stood for possibility. At their inception in the 1990s, they were supposed to be nimble, innovative, community-driven alternatives to traditional public schools—labs of experimentation led by teachers and grounded in equity. But in 2025, the movement finds itself at a turning point, not because it succeeded, but because it strayed too far from its original vision.
The first installment of a new report, titled “Charter School Reckoning: Decline, Disillusionment, and Cost,” by the National Center for Charter School Accountability (NCCSA) lays bare a system in decline. Closures are accelerating. Enrollment is stagnating. And beneath the rhetoric of “choice” and “opportunity,” a harsh reality has emerged: a sector in retreat, propped up by unchecked federal funding and powerful lobbying interests.
In the first six months of 2025 alone, fifty charter schools announced their closures. Some disappeared with less than a week’s warning. These schools join more than 160 others that vanished during the previous year. Between school years 2022-23 and 2023-24, the number of charter schools in the United States increased by only eleven. Last September, North Carolina’s Apprentice Academy closed days after opening for the school year. Ohio’s Victory Charter gave families two weeks’ notice. In Minnesota and Texas, charter schools folded before winter break. And last month, just weeks before the new school year was set to begin, yet another charter school in Colorado closed its doors.
And yet, federal investment in the charter school industry hasn’t skipped a beat. The U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), created in 1994 to provide seed money to start charter schools, began with a modest $4.5 million. It now burns through half a billion taxpayer dollars a year. Much of that money is awarded by private contractors who are paid to review applications who provide minimal vetting. Their decisions are based solely on what’s written in grant applications—inviting exaggerated claims and even fiction. One 2022 federal audit found that nearly half the schools promised by Charter Management Organization grant recipients never materialized.
Even more troubling, many of the charter schools that have opened with the help of CSP funding have collapsed. The NCCSA report notes that of the fifty closures so far in 2025, nearly half had received a combined $102 million in federal start-up and expansion grants, according to a search of U.S. Department of Education and state databases.
So why does the funding from the federal government continue to flow? One reason is a myth that refuses to die: the million-student waitlist to get into charter schools. This talking point, originally peddled in 2013 by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, resurfaced in June 2025 by U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon during a Senate hearing. But the figurewas debunked more than a decade ago.
The stark truth is that demand for charter schools is often overestimated. Low enrollment is the number one reason charters shut down. A 2024 study by NCCSA and the Network for Public Education found that nearly half of all charter school closures between 2022 and 2024 were due to insufficient enrollment. Of the fifty closures in the first half of 2025, twenty-seven cited low enrollment as the primary cause.
Consider Florida’s Village of Excellence Academy, which closed with just one day’s notice in January 2025. Its enrollment had fallen from 230 in 2020 to just seventy-eight students. The school is not an anomaly. In 2023-24, 12 percent of all charter schools enrolled fewer than 100 students.
Meanwhile, at the other extreme, mega-charters such as Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA) in Pennsylvania have student populations that are ballooning beyond reason. CCA, a virtual charter school with students across Pennsylvania, now enrolls more than 23,000 students—making it the largest K-12 school in the country. It spent nearly $9 million on advertising in the 2022-23 school year alone and $196 million on real estate since 2020—for a cyber school that delivers its instruction without the need for brick-and-mortar buildings. But student outcomes are dismal: just 11 percent proficiency in English, 4.7 percent proficiency in math, and a graduation rate far below the state average.
Then there’s Highlands Community Charter in California, a school that billed itself as a second chance for adults but instead became a case study in fraud. According to a state audit, Highlands took more than $180 million in funding to which it was not eligible and spent the money inappropriately. The school paid $80,000 for staff to attend a conference at a luxury hotel in Hawaii. Teachers were also employed without proper credentials, often because there was only one teacher for every fifty-one students. Graduation rates were between 2 and 3 percent. Following the audit, the entire board has resigned in disgrace and the state has requested a $180 million reimbursement.
This is not innovation. It’s exploitation of taxpayers and at-risk students.
And yet, federal dollars continue to pour into this shrinking, scandal-prone industry. Policymakers invoke waitlists that don’t exist. Authorizers, who are supposed to oversee charter schools, look the other way, incentivized by per-pupil funding kickbacks. Taxpayers are footing the bill for schools that fail to open, fail to serve, or fail to survive.
The question is no longer what charter schools were once meant to be. It’s whether the sector can be reformed at all. As Congress considers the next education budget, we urge lawmakers to ask: Why are we funding growth that isn’t happening? Why are we subsidizing failure? It’s time to stop chasing the ghost of what charter schools might have been—and start holding the system accountable for what it has become.
During his first term in office, Trump had one major achievement: he responded to the pandemic by authorizing the rapid funding of a vaccine for COVID. His project was called operation Warp Speed. It was the domestic and peaceful equivalent of the Manhattan Project. It was a resounding success. Millions of lives were saved.
Unfortunately, Trump’s Health Secretary is opposed to vaccines. He has spent years encouraging people not to trust vaccines. He recently cancelled $500 million in vaccine research, cancelling research on exactly the kinds of mRNA vaccines that protected people from COVID.
Michael R. Bloomberg is a billionaire who has funded medical research at his Alma mater, John’s Hopkins University, and elsewhere. He is as devoted to promoting public health as RFK Jr. is to undermining it. Mr. Bloomberg was mayor of NYC for 12 years. In this post, he cleverly pits Trump’s ego against one of his worst Cabinet choices.
For leaders in business, failing to learn the lessons of a crisis can be disastrous. For leaders in government, when millions of lives are at risk, such disasters can be catastrophic. Unfortunately, that’s where the US is heading, thanks to the disagreement that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has with his boss, President Donald Trump.
A little history: On Jan. 10, 2020, a Chinese scientist posted the genetic sequence of a “mystery virus” that had sickened dozens and caused at least one death. Forty-two days later, as Covid-19 spread across the globe, researchers near Boston sent the first shipment of an experimental vaccine to US regulators. Three months after that, Trump announced Operation Warp Speed, an $18 billion effort to accelerate the development, approval and distribution of vaccines.
Within a year, billions of vaccine doses had been administered worldwide — saving millions of lives, including those of many Americans. As Trump said: “Operation Warp Speed, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, was one of the most incredible things ever done in this country.” He was absolutely correct — but his health secretary disagrees. The question is: Will Trump allow Kennedy to destroy his legacy?
Kennedy recently canceled $500 million in contracts for the research and development of so-called messenger RNA vaccines. His defense — that mRNA technology is ineffective against respiratory infections — is wrong. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, must know that, so he subsequently offered a different defense: There is insufficient public confidence in it.
Bhattacharya didn’t mention, of course, that Kennedy has fueled that public distrust. Regardless, the correct response to misperceptions about lifesaving medicine is not to throw up one’s hands, cancel funding for it and walk away. It’s to use the power of the bully pulpit to bring people together — community, faith, civic and other leaders — to spread facts and overcome hesitations. That’s leadership.
Not content to peddle misinformation and halt existing projects, Kennedy also effectively terminated additional federal funding for research on mRNA vaccines. The two edicts put countless American lives at risk.
To see the scale of the danger Kennedy is creating, it helps to understand how revolutionary mRNA vaccines are. For many decades, traditional vaccines have injected a small part of a dead or weakened virus into a healthy person. This stimulates the immune system to create antibodies, which protect people from serious infection when they encounter the real thing. In some cases, millions of chicken eggs are used to develop and produce these traditional vaccines, by incubating the viruses. In other cases, cell cultures are grown in bioreactors. Both processes are complex and time-consuming.
New mRNA vaccines are faster to develop. Messenger RNA is a strand of genetic code that gives cells instructions. For decades, scientists worked to design a synthetic form of mRNA, which would then tell the body to fight specific infections. Such a discovery, in theory, would also enable drugmakers to manufacture a vaccine without using a virus, cutting months off development. Yet despite significant advances, an mRNA vaccine had never been produced or tested at scale.
Operation Warp Speed helped overcome the obstacles and produce vaccines in record time. The speed of this breakthrough led to fantastical theories, including that the shots change one’s DNA, insert microchips into the body and cause infertility. It was all nonsense — the ultimate fake news. But it spread nonetheless, amplified by skeptics like Kennedy. Countless studies proved the vaccines safe, and the two scientists behind their development won the Nobel Prize.
The misinformation couldn’t be contained, but Kennedy can be. All that’s needed is a call from the White House directing him to reverse his recent decisions. Otherwise, when the next pandemic strikes, other countries — including China — will be equipped to distribute a shot within weeks, while scientists in the US will be left to fiddle with outdated technology as Americans wait in line.
Senator Bill Cassidy, whose vote was critical for Kennedy’s confirmation, lamented last week that the secretary has “conceded to China an important technology” and is imperiling the administration’s goals. He’s right — yet Cassidy and his colleagues in Congress have stood aside while Kennedy puts American lives at risk.
Without government leadership, the private sector is unlikely to fill the funding gap. Research on treatments for a hypothetical pandemic is financially risky, so public funding is essential to saving lives.
Kennedy’s actions will also have a chilling effect on other potential mRNA developments, including work on Type 1 diabetes, HIV, genetic diseases and myriad other illnesses, especially cancer. That bears repeating: mRNA research could lead to a cure for cancer. How many Americans who have family members suffering from cancer are ready to sacrifice them to Kennedy’s dunderheaded paranoias?
The White House should remember and celebrate its extraordinary first-term success — and build on it by reining in Kennedy. If it does that, the president who sped the development of the Covid vaccine might go down in history as doing the same for a cure for cancer and other diseases.
Free cash!! Free cash!! Open the Church of Satan K-12 Academy and watch the dollars roll in. No one cares how many students are enrolled or even if the list of students is a fake. Governor Abbott trusts you!
Governor Abbott knows that most of the vouchers will be claimed by students who are already enrolled in private schools. He doesn’t care. He knows that kids who leave public schools to attend a private school fall behind. He doesn’t care.
He wants the state to pay the tuition of all children, regardless of whether they attend a snake-charming religious school or the most elite private school in Dallas or Houston.
Governor Abbott wants YOU to step right up and claim your Free cash!!
ProPublica wrote this:
For about eight years, a Houston private school has followed a unique pattern when appointing members to its governing board: It has selected only married couples.
Over 200 miles away, two private schools in Dallas have awarded more than $7 million in combined contracts to their board members.
And at least seven private schools across Texas have issued personal loans, often reaching $100,000 or more, to their school leaders under terms that are often hidden from public view.
Such practices would typically violate laws governing public and charter schools. But private schools operate largely outside those rules because they haven’t historically received direct taxpayer dollars. Now, as the state moves to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on private education, lawmakers have imposed almost none of the accountability measures required of the public school system.
If held to the same standards, 27 private schools identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through tax filings likely would have violated state law. The news organizations found, and three education law experts confirmed, more than 60 business transactions, board appointments and hiring decisions by those schools that would have run afoul of the state rules meant to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest if they were public.
“It’s frankly astonishing to me that anyone would propose the massive sort of spending that we’re talking about in these school voucher programs with, at best, minimal accountability,” said Mark Weber, a public school finance lecturer at New Jersey’s Rutgers University who opposes vouchers. “If I were a taxpayer in Texas, I’d be asking, who’s going to be looking out for me?”
Texas has long stood as a holdout in the national push for voucher programs, even as other conservative states embraced them. Gov. Greg Abbott gave school voucher proponents a major win this year, signing into law one of the largest and costliest programs in the country. In doing so, Abbott’s office has argued that the state has “strict financial requirements,” saying that “Texas taxpayers expect their money to be spent efficiently and effectively on their behalf, both in private and traditional public schools.”
The law, however, imposes no restrictions to prevent the kinds of entanglements that the newsrooms found.
The contrast is sharp. Public or charter school officials who violate these rules could be subject to removal from office, fines or even state jail felony charges.
Private schools face none of those consequences.
Supporters of the voucher program argue that oversight of private schools should come not from the state, but from their boards and the marketplace.
“If you transform the private schools into public schools by applying the same rules and regulations and procedural requirements on them, then you take the private out of the private school,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas. Wolf, who supports vouchers, said that if parents are unhappy with the schools, they will hold them accountable by leaving and taking their tuition dollars with them.
Typically, neither parents nor the state’s taxpayers have access to information that shows precisely how private schools spend money. Only those that are organized as nonprofits are required to file public tax forms that offer limited information. Of the state’s more than 1,000 accredited private schools, many are exempt from submitting such filings because they are religious or for-profit institutions, leaving their business conduct opaque. It is unclear if private schools that participate in Texas’ voucher-like program will have to detail publicly how they use taxpayer dollars.
“The public system is not always perfect, but when it’s not perfect, we see it,” said Joy Baskin, associate executive director for policy and legal services at the Texas Association of School Boards, which represents public districts across the state. “That kind of transparency doesn’t exist in private schools.”
The Chinese Baptist Church in Houston, where Trinity Classical School has a campus (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)
“Just Isn’t Right”
Conflicts of interest in education were on the minds of legislators this spring. At an education committee hearing in March, Texas state Rep. Ryan Guillen, a Republican from Rio Grande City, along the southern border with Mexico, introduced a bill that would bar businesses with close ties to board members from applying for school district contracts. Such deals were previously permitted as long as school leaders publicly disclosed conflicts and abstained from voting.
But Guillen, who did not respond to requests for comment, argued those rules were abused, pointing to recent scandals in two districts that led to state investigationsand, in one case, resulted in federal charges.
He described his bill as a “commonsense” proposal that would ensure “no one in a position of power can exploit the system for financial benefit.” The Legislature passed the bill, which was signed into law by Abbott.
Notably, the measure excluded private schools. In public testimony, no one brought them up, and there was no debate about them even as lawmakers advanced a proposal that would direct state money to them.
The newsrooms found at least six private schools that awarded contracts to companies with ties to their board members.
Cristo Rey Dallas College Prep, a Catholic high school serving primarily low-income students of color, awarded more than $5 million to a construction firm owned by one of its board members for “interior finish” work between 2017 and 2021, tax filings show. The school did not respond to questions about the payments. Raul Estrada, who was on the school board when his firm received the payments, said he recused himself from any votes or decisions related to the contract. He added that the company’s work provided “substantial savings” to the school but did not provide specific figures.
Just 30 miles north, board members at the Shelton School, which specializes in teaching students with learning differences such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments over the last decade. Tax records show one trustee was awarded over $465,000 for landscaping, and another collected more than $1.2 million for “printed education material.” The board members whose firms received the contracts did not respond to requests for comment. Suzanne Stell, the school’s executive director, said the board members who received contracts were not involved in the decisions. Stell also said that the contract for printed material included training for educators.
Our investigation also found dozens of instances of nepotism or relatives serving on boards together at private schools, some of which were started and are led by families.
Trinity Classical School in Houston, for example, has long maintained a family-led chain of governance on its school board exclusive to married couples, appointing a new pair each time one cycled off. The board deviated from that pattern only once, when it selected Neil Anderson, the school’s leader, according to tax filings. None of the current board members responded to interview requests, nor did Anderson or the school.
Such arrangements have been prohibited since 2012 in charter schools, which are restricted from appointing more than one family member to serve as a trustee at the same time. Anderson’s appointment would also not be allowed in traditional public schools, where employees are barred from serving on their school’s governing board.
At the elite Greenhill School in the Dallas area, where tuition can exceed $40,000 a year, the previous leader, Scott Griggs, hired his son to coach the boys’ volleyball team and teach middle school math. While allowed in private schools, state nepotism laws prevent public and charter schools from hiring close relatives of superintendents and trustees, with few exceptions. Griggs told the newsrooms that he’d already announced his retirement when he asked the board in 2017 to approve hiring his son, who did not respond to requests for comment.
The following year, the college prep academy provided a personal loan of nearly $100,000 to its current head of school, Lee Hark, for a down payment on a home. The school did not disclose the terms of the agreement in its tax filings, including whether it charged interest or what would happen should Hark default. Hark declined to comment.
Private schools are generally free to use money as they choose, but a 150-year-old provision of the Texas Constitution bars public schools from lending taxpayer dollars. The state does not require private schools to publicly disclose whether taxpayer money would be used for such arrangements under the voucher program.
In a written statement, a Greenhill spokesperson said the school operates with “sound financial principles” that meet or exceed “all standards of accountability for independent schools.” She said the school charged interest on the loan and it has since been paid off, but did not provide records.
Many of the private schools examined by the news organizations, including Greenhill, said that they are still deciding whether to participate in the voluntary voucher program.
The lack of accountability for private schools has sparked concern from public school parents like Sarah Powell, a mother of two near Dallas. She was among thousands who urged lawmakers to reject voucher legislation earlier this year.
“You’re either part of the system or you’re not,” Powell later told the newsrooms. “You can’t have the resources and not any of the regulations. It just isn’t right.”
The Greenhill School, where tuition can surpass $40,000 per student, in Addison, just outside of Dallas (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)
Repeating History
State funds flowing to public and charter schools are monitored by the Texas Education Agency, which requires annual independent audits and assigns ratings that gauge each school’s fiscal health. Districts that repeatedly underperform risk sanctions, including forced closure.
“Looking back on it today, I think it was necessary,” Bob Schulman, a longtime education attorney, said about many of the reforms.
Even as oversight of charter schools has been strengthened, gaps remain. Earlier this year, a ProPublica and Tribune investigation found that a charter network with 1,000 students was paying its superintendent nearly $900,000 annually, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the nation. Yet the school did not disclose the superintendent’s full compensation to the state and later rebuffed calls to lower his salary from lawmakers and the advocacy group representing charters. The school board defended Cavazos’ salary, saying it was merited because of his duties and experience.
The state, however, will not directly regulate private schools under the new voucher program, which will begin next year. Instead, supervision will largely fall to one of 20 private organizations, which schools must pay to obtain and maintain the accreditation required to receive public funds.
A review by the newsrooms of these organizations’ standards found they are generally far less rigorous than the state’s. Most do not require annual financial audits, which some accreditation organizations say can be too costly and time-consuming, and many do not mandate policies to prevent nepotism and conflicts of interest.
If a private school loses accreditation from one group, it can simply apply to another.
That total, however, is likely an undercount even within the sample of schools the newsrooms reviewed. Reporters identified dozens more conflicts listed in tax forms, for example, but the schools provided sparse information about what they were. Because of that, there is no way to determine if the conduct would have violated state laws if it had occurred at a public or charter school. The newsrooms reached out to each school about the missing information, but none answered questions.ġ
Texas lawmakers laid the groundwork for publicly funded schools with limited state oversight when they authorized charter schools in the 1990s as an alternative to traditional public education. At the time, they exempted charter schools from many regulations, betting that greater flexibility would lead to innovation and stronger academic performance.
But over the past three decades, the state has steadily increased restrictions on charter schools in response to concerns about financial mismanagement and academic performance. Charter schools, for example, were initially exempt from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws, but lawmakers gradually changed that after reports exposed leaders enriching themselves and their families. The state implemented another round of stricter rules after newspapers uncovered lavish spending on perks such as Spurs tickets and lucrative land deals.
Schulman, who has represented Texas charter schools for decades, said that some leaders abused the limited state oversight for years, making it more concerning that lawmakers launched a voucher program with even fewer regulations.
“I’m very disturbed,” Schulman said. “But I’m hopeful that it will be a quicker turnaround than it was for the charters.”
How We Reported This Story
For this story, reporters reviewed nonprofit tax filings for 90 of the 200 highest-enrollment private schools listed in the Texas Private Schools Accreditation Commission database. Those filings were not available for the other 110 schools, as for-profit schools or those tied to houses of worship are not typically required to make tax documents public. For the schools that filed these records, reporters reviewed available annual reports dating back to at least 2015.
Reporters identified more than 60 instances involving conflicts of interest, nepotism and financial transactions with related parties at 27 schools. Three education lawyers confirmed our findings.
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