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Jamie Raskin Visits an ICE Facility

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2026 //
29

Last night Rep. Jamie Raskin posted a comment on Twitter about his visit to a nearby ICE facility:

I just exercised my right as a Member of Congress to conduct an unannounced oversight visit of the ICE field facility in Baltimore. The staff I met with respected my right to visit, but what I saw was disgraceful. Kristi Noem has a budget of $75 billion she could use to ensure humane conditions, but we saw 60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets. Whether it’s for three days or seven days, nobody would want a member of their family warehoused there. The room set aside for dangerous criminals and violent offenders was empty. We’re demanding immediate answers and action.

What kind of a person treats other human beings this way?

Is cruelty its own reward?

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Funding, Justice, Maryland

Josh Cowen: Why Should the Public Pay Tuition at Religious Schools?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2026 //
4

Over the past few years, vouchers have been endorsed by state legislatures even though the public overwhelmingly opposes them. Nearly a score of state referenda have been held, and in every single state, voters rejected vouchers. Even voters in red states said NO to vouchers.

Voters don’t want to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. But legislators ignore their votes. In Arizona, voters rejected vouchers by 65-35%. But the legislature passed a voucher bill anyway, and the cost to subsidize these nonpublic schools is $1 billion a year.

Today’s evangelists for subsidizing religious schools have chosen to ignore the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, who made clear their opposition to state-funded religion. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about “separation of church and state,” he was referencing a widely held principle.

Josh Cowen recently wrote about this issue on his Substack blog:

Since the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back fifty years of national reproductive freedom in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the Christian Right has turned to another long-held priority: an eventual Court ruling that states must fund religious education.

Over the past few weeks, efforts to create religious charter schools have seen new life. Charter schools are public schools operated outside of the traditional district framework. They can be independently managed by a non-profit or, in some states, for-profit management group, or they can be part of larger networks of charter providers. There are roughy 8,000 charter schools across the country, serving nearly 4 million students.

Blurring Public and Private

In mid-2025, a case called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond deadlocked at the Supreme Court, 4-4. It returned back to Oklahoma, where that state’s highest court had invalidated efforts by a Catholic-run provider to operate a virtual charter school. Had the Court ruled in St. Isidore’s favor, it would have effectively created the nation’s first church-run public school.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, reportedly because her best friend, a law professor named Nicole Garnett, had worked extensively on the legal defense for the Catholic charter school (Side note: while I’m glad Barrett recused herself, notice that the one conservative woman on the Court has held herself to a higher ethical standard than right-wing guys like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito).

The Court’s 4-4 ruling was less a definitive position and more an artifact of the small, insular nature of conservative—and especially Catholic conservative—American legal networks.
Now, efforts to create a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma, and Christian public schools in Colorado and Tennessee are taking new shape.

Technically, these cases operate in a separate stream of legal theory from school voucher jurisprudence. Vouchers are simply taxpayer subsidies for private schools—either through the tax code or directly through state funds. And since 2002’s Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, their application to religious schools has been constitutional. Three voucher-related cases since 2017—Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022, 3 days before Dobbs)—have extended protections to religious schools in state voucher systems.

Basically, once states use public dollars to subsidize private providers of a certain social service (such as education), they can’t limit those providers to non-religious organizations.

But for now, state’s don’t have to provide voucher funding to parents. It’s just that if they do fund vouchers, they must allow vouchers to be spent at religious schools too.

This connects to the question of religious charter schools because although charter schools are legally public entities, the organizations operating them in most cases are private. In theory, the arrangements governing these groups are similar to situations where a school district contracts with a private transportation company for their buses, or a cleaning company for their buildings. Except that with charter schools, the contracted party typically provides instructional materials and even often supplies the teachers.

What right-wing activists want is for the Supreme Court to say that states can’t prevent religious organizations from running public schools as part of a charter agreement
And in that, they are taking one tactical approach in a broader legal and political strategy to simply require states to fund religious instruction.

Establishment and Free Exercise

Spurred partly by new “education savings accounts” spreading in red states (aka vouchers, with additional allowable expenses beyond tuition), a vast network of conservative Christian homeschoolers is pushing for new legal rights. Including mandatory subsidies for their homeschools.

And Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and former U.S. Education Secretary, has made no secret of her desire to see the Supreme Court overturn more than a century of state “Blaine Amendments” prohibiting public dollars spent on religious schools. That would basically force all states to pay for some form of religious instruction.

All of this is possible in large part due to the efforts of Leonard Leo, the Catholic super-fixer of right-wing judicial politics all-but-responsible for the Court’s current conservative majority. Leo has made clear that following Dobbs, state-funded religious education is his next major project in the federal judiciary. And he’s enlisting the Alliance Defending Freedom (the main litigation group in Dobbs) to help lead the way. Beyond garden-variety culture warring, this is partly what the sustained effort to holler about LGBTQ and especially trans-students in public schools is about.

Meanwhile, brand new guidance from what’s left of the U.S. Department of Education is informing public schools across the country that federal dollars will now be tied to expansive interpretations of the right for school personnel to pray during the day in schools. So long as they do not technically compel students to pray at lunch or at the start of the school day, teachers and school leaders may choose to lead their students in prayer.

The end-game here is to de-emphasize the first part of the First Amendment—the Establishment Clause prohibiting government from establishing a single religion—and to emphasize the second part, the Free Exercise Clause.

The argument pushed by DeVos, Leo, ADF and their allies is that by providing taxpayer support only for secular public schools, states are putting undue hardship on families who see religious education as a fundamental part of their free exercise of faith but must pay out-of-pocket for it.

What’s at Stake

It’s possible—even necessary—to object to all this without attacking faith. I’m a Christian man myself, looking forward to the season of reflection of Lent that begins next week.

But church-based public schools are the plan on the Right. And although it’s mostly a battle that will take place in the courts, it’s also a battle that’ll take place in legislatures and in the court of public opinion. And those venues are determined by elections and by political organizing.

When I argue that Democrats have to get serious about improving public schools as part of defending public schools, I’m not just making an argument about campaign strategy (though I’m making that argument too).

What’s at stake here is that the American Right is obsessed with schools, and with carving more and more dollars out to subsidize religious education. And that’s going to be what happens without countering that objective with a bold, sustained vision for educational opportunity for every child.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Stephen Dyer: GOP Sponsors a Bill That Will Screw Trump Voters

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2026 //
0

Stephen Dyer, former legislator and critic of school privatization in Ohio, explains here how a Republican-sponsored bill will hit Republican districts hardest.

He writes on his blog Tenth Period:

It’s no secret that over the last decade, Ohio has gone from a battleground state to a pretty red one, especially when Donald Trump is on the ballot. The major swing that occurred between 2006 when Democrat Ted Strickland won 70+ counties and 2024 has occurred in rural and urban counties, especially around the Mahoning Valley.

Gov. Ted Strickland’s 2006 victory map

President Donald Trump’s 2024 victory map

So what does the Ohio GOP do this year, which is shaping up to be a tough year for them anyway, to hold onto their Trump coalition? 

10th Period is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Try this: Introduce a bill that would, if passed, require folks living in Mahoning County to increase their property taxes by an average of $2,300 per $200,000 home and Trumbull County by $1,886, or close their kids’ schools. 

During a year where everyone is so pissed about property taxes being high that they want to actually get rid of property taxes.

Yeah. Pretty stupid, right?

Why would they do something so stupid, you ask?

So they can maintain an unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy that lets Les Wexner — the guy who was best buddies with Jeffrey Epstein —get a taxpayer funded break on his private school tuition bill.

I can’t make up this shit, man. 

These guys obviously think they’re politically invincible. 

I ran some more analysis of the bill that Callender introduced (who was Ohio Charter Schools’ go to lawyer prior to returning to the House a few years ago), which would block state aid to any school district that’s suing the state over its private school tuition subsidy, which, again, has been found to violate the Ohio Constitution.

Needless to say, the results are not awesome. 

The average Ohio school district would have to go for a levy that runs about 32 mills and would cost a homeowner of a $200,000 home an additional $2,200 a year. And that’s only if they want to keep their kids’ schools open. 

Because scores, if not hundreds, of school districts would cease operating under this bill

As you can see, the impact is worst for urban districts, but rurals are really hammered too.

This data is using the most recent Ohio Department of Education District Profile Report (for income and millage) and the most recent District Payment report for February 2026

I mean, you’re going to have poor, small town¹communities having to contemplate losing an additional 5% or more of their income to pay for Les Wexner’s private school tuition cut? That’s what you’re going with? This year?

Some other tidbits:

  • Trimble Local in Athens County would have to raise their property taxes by a staggering $11,355 per $200,000 home to replace the extorted money. That’s a 162.26-mill levy to raise what amounts to 23% of the average district resident’s income.
  • Steubenville — the home of Dean Martin and a famously Trump-y area — would need to go for a 119-mill levy, costing the $200,000 homeowner another $8,350 per year, which is 16% of the average family’s income there.
  • There are 56 Ohio school districts that would need to go for 50-mill levies or higher to replace the state aid Callender wants to cut. Or those kids — all 137,455 of them — will no longer have schools.
  • There are families in 22 Ohio school districts that would have to give up 10% or more of their average income to make up for Callender’s proposed cuts.
  • The average share of the cost in these districts that’s borne by the state is 47%. So the “you need to tighten your belt” argument ain’t working for these districts.
  • All so Les Wexner can get his private school tuition subsidized. 

I could go on. I posted the spreadsheet here, in case you want to look at more of these just amazing consequences. Not every school district has joined the lawsuit. So these data only apply to those who have. But there are so many of them (@300, or half of all Ohio school districts) that you can extrapolate the results. If every district joined, the effect would be nearly identical to what’s happening in those that have already.

I will say that this bill is clearly unconstitutional. I don’t know how the state will argue that removing funding from 700,000 students is going to provide those same students with a thorough and efficient system of common schools, as the Ohio Constitution mandates. 

So, in short, there is simply no way this bill survives even a modicum of legal scrutiny. So the chances of this happening are next to nothing.

Bu then if it’s clearly unconstitutional, as Callender must know it to be, then why do it? Scare local school districts form joining the lawsuit, or leaving it? Fat chance of that happening. I’ve been hearing districts and, more importantly, parents are more pissed now than they were before.

Like I said earlier, this is quite a play for Callender to make in an already tough political environment 9 months from an election that is expected to be focused on affordability and corruption.

But hey. It’s worked for these guys before and they keep winning in gerrymandered districts. 

So why change now, right?

1. These district types are ones developed by the Ohio Department of Education, not me.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Funding, Hypocrisy, Ohio

Peter Greene: Charter Operators Ask Federal Government for Another Handout

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2026 //
3

Back in the late 1980s, when charter schools were a brand new idea, advocates said that charter schools would be more accountable, cost less, and would get better results.

It was also speculative, since no charter schools existed then. I believed it would turn out that way, as did other proponents of charter schools.

But none of those beliefs/hopes panned out.

We now know that charter lobbyists oppose accountability in state legislatures.

We now know that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, unless they exclude the kids who get low test scores.

We now know that charter schools do not cost less. Many of their leaders are paid more than public school leaders (some are paid $1 million a year). They lobby legislatures to give them the same funding as public schools. In some states, charters have won the power to locate rent-free in public school buildings.

Peter Greene here explains that the charter industry is seeking federal legislation to underwrite the cost of charter school facilities. The federal Charter School Program already provides $500 million a year to start new charter schools or expand existing ones. This grand gift, which the Trump administration increased, ignores the fact that demand for charter schools has declined while charters continue to close because of falling enrollments.

Peter Greene explains the latest grift here:

Among the various bills thrown at Congress is one that finds new ways to throw public money at charter schools.

HB 7086, the “Equitable Access to School Facilities Act,” proposes to send money to charter operators, via the state, to buy and build facilities for schools.

The cost of coming up with a building to put charter schools in might seem like part of the cost of being in the charter school business, but charter operators don’t much care for having to fork over the money. In some states, legislators have solved the problem by just allowing charter schools to just take public property. Florida is rolling out a law that lets charters take public school real estate in whole or in part just by saying, “Hey, we want that.” It’s an extraordinary law, sort of like the opposite of eminent domain, in which the facilities that taxpayers have bought and paid for suddenly belong to a private business.

HB 7086 wants to propose a similar federal solution, delivering grants to any states that come up with clever ways to gift taxpayer dollars to charters that want to build or buy some facilities, or want to come up with fun ways for charters to grab taxpayer-funded buildings.

The bill comes courtesy of Rep. Juan Ciscomani, an Arizona Republican, who just wants to make sure that every school is a great school. In a press release, he explains:

Sadly, access to appropriate and affordable school buildings for charter schools continues to be one of the biggest barriers to growth. Unlike district schools, charter schools aren’t guaranteed access to school buildings or traditional access to facilities funding sources like local property tax dollars.

Yeah, I was going to open a restaurant, but access to food and cooking supplies was a big barrier to growth, so maybe the taxpayers would like to buy that stuff for me?

Or maybe when you decide to go into a business, you do it with a plan that takes into account the cost of being in that business. Certainly the notion that building and financing facilities is easy peasy for public school systems is disconnected from reality. When West Egg Schools want a new building, they have to convince the taxpayers or else that school board will find themselves voted out of office.

If you want to get into the charter school biz, you need a plan about how you’ll manage the cost of getting into the charter school biz. “Well, get the feds to drain taxpayers to fund it for us,” is not such a plan.

Also delighted by the bill is BASIS Educational Ventures, the big honking charter chain that may have the occasional financial issues, but gets a pass on having to display financial transparency.

The bill does display one of the lies of the charter movement– that we can finance multiple school systems with the same money that wasn’t enough to fund one. Not that I expect any choicers to say so out loud. But no school district (or any other business) responds to tough money times by saying, “I know– let’s build more facilities.” The inevitable side effect of choice systems is that taxpayers end up financing redundant facilities and vast amounts of excess capacity, which means taxpayers have to be hit for even more money. Legislators continue to find creative ways to A) ignore the issue and B) legislate more paths by which taxpayer money can be funneled to choice schools.

This bill hasn’t died yet. Tell your Congressperson to drive a stake through its heart.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding

The Kind of Schools That We Need Right Now

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
10

Some years back–actually it was 2019–I read an article that gladdened my heart. It was written in The Atlantic by gazillionaire Nick Hanauer. It was titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America.”

Nick is an interesting guy. He is an entrepreneur in Seattle. He works alongside other successful venture capitalists, and for a time, partnered with Bill Gates to persuade the Washington legislature to endorse charter schools as a remedy to replace “failing” public schools.

But somewhere along the way, he had a change of mind and heart. He realized that the basic problem in the U.S. was income inequality, not “failing schools.”

He began his 2019 article:

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.Great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around.

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million eachto an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

But after decades of organizing and giving, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong. And I hate being wrong.

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

Hanauer recognized that the hollowing out of the middle class was harming our entire society:

In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

Hanauer’s turnaround resonated with me. He was boldly breaking ranks with his peers. I doubt he suffered ostracism, because many of the elites toy with education; it is not a vital interest to them. In my limited experience, watching the uber-rich participate on behalf of charter schools, it appeared that many were going along with the crowd, while some thought that privatization was a miracle cure.

Hanauer understood that children need a good start in life and they need a stable, secure home life to do their best in school. He understood that economic inequality undermined many children’s interest in school, which was less important than survival or a warm winter coat or medical care. He even understood that the decades-long efforts to stamp out unions contributed to economic inequality.

We spoke on the phone. I did a podcast with him. I was impressed by his keen intellect and independence of mind.

With each book I wrote about privatization, I insisted that schools are vital institutions in educating children, but they can’t do it alone. In Reign of Error, I spelled out what I considered a life-course approach to improving the chances of giving children the education they need and deserve.

In the competition between public schools and charter schools, the only measure that outsiders considered was test scores. But I knew that was not right. For many young people, it’s miraculous when they manage to show up for school. They chose to go to school, not to babysit a younger sibling, not to take a part-time job delivering to customers, not to hang out in the local park.

What kind of a school was that? I came to understand that the closest approximation of a school that I imagined was a community school. Community schools provide wraparound services to students and their parents.

Categories Community Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Funding, Health, Innovation, Medicine, Parents, Philanthropy, Students, Teachers

Denis Smith: Public Funding of Private Schools Fragments Our Culture

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2026 //
2

Denis Smith retired after spending years working for the Ohio Departmeny of Education. His last job was overseeing charter schools.

In this post, which appeared in the Ohio Capitol Journal, Smith reviews a proposal by Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican candidate for Governor, that unintentionally reveals the hypocrisy of public funding for private schools. Ramaswamy wants to mandate the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance daily in all public schools, but publicly-funded private schools would be exempt from this mandate.

Smith writes:

It’s hard for me to offer a thank you to Vivek Ramaswamy for anything, but he truly deserves our thanks for a recent statement. 

Thank you, Vivek, in making the case for public education and demonstrating its true value to the nation. 

For someone who reportedly wanted to “detox” from social media only a week ago, your post on X stating that you would make the oral recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory in the state’s schools has provided added layers of meaning for the public to discern that public education is a public good.

Unbeknownst to the Republican governor candidate, his tweet gives public school supporters added ammunition to hurl back at GOP efforts to fund private and religious schools though universal education vouchers that violate the Ohio Constitution.

“We’ll say the pledge of allegiance every day at every public school after I’m elected,” Vivek wrote. 

He went on to say that, “We need more national unity, not less.”

When examined further, his brief post reveals the fatal flaws in Republican efforts to establish a parallel, non-public system of education that violates the Ohio Constitution. 

Let’s look at a few flaws that Ramaswamy’s seemingly innocuous post brings to light.

According to the Ohio Revised Code, “The board of education of each city, local, exempted village, and joint vocational school district shall adopt a policy specifying whether or not oral recitation of the pledge of allegiance to the flag shall be a part of the school’s program …”

There is no requirement in that section of the ORC for private and religious schools to adopt policies that would place the oral recitation of the pledge as a regular part of the school program.  

That sentence is revealing because it shows that non-public schools can receive state funds but not be encumbered by the many laws and regulations that govern public schools.

That’s having it both ways, an art that non-public schools practice so well. We’ll take your money, thanks, but don’t tell us that this or that law or regulation is mandatory in our (private or religious) schools.

Hmmm. I wonder how Ramaswamy and Republicans privately feel about how public funds might go to non-public schools that might care less about instilling patriotism than inculcating their own brand of ideology and history. 

The idea or probability of a publicly funded religious school that teaches its students that the earth is only 6,000 years old readily comes to mind. 

With the current devolution of our society, where Republicans achieve a twofer by eroding public education as a way of destroying public employee unions, that idea is not farfetched.

In addition to a possible future Pledge of Allegiance mandate for public schools, as called for in Ohio House Bill 117, where public and religious schools would be exempt from such requirements, there is another hidden structural flaw in Ramaswamy’s post that belies his words: 

“We need more national unity, not less,” Ramaswamy wrote.

Huh? How does a parallel, unconstitutional yet publicly funded private and religious school system, funded by universal educational vouchers, contribute to national unity?  

Vivek said that we need more national unity. Explain how $1 billion taken from state school aid and given to other, non-public schools that are exempt from so much law and regulation, adds to national unity.

Do these schools pledge allegiance to the state and embrace regulatory compliance in return for such cash? Hardly.

Two years ago on these pages, I offered the views of Dr. Kenneth Conklin, a philosopher who is concerned about “community cohesion and settled social bonds,” along with cultural fragmentation. Here are his considered views:

“If an educational system is altered, its transmission of culture will be distorted,” Conklin wrote. “The easiest way to break apart a society long-term without using violence is to establish separate educational systems for the groups to be broken apart.”(Emphasis mine.)

How do we get more national unity by establishing separate educational systems?

Dr. Conklin added some other thoughts that Ramaswamy and other Republicans such as Ohio Speaker Matt (“We can kind of do what we want”) Huffman and Senate Education Chair Andrew (“Public education in America is socialism”) Brenner might reflect on as our national unity continues to deteriorate. 

“A society’s culture can survive far longer than the lifespan of any of its members, because its educational system passes down the folkways and knowledge of one generation to subsequent generations. A culture changes over time, but has a recognizable continuity of basic values and behavioral patterns that distinguishes it from other cultures. That continuity is provided by the educational system.”

Ramaswamy says that he is concerned about national unity. So am I. Indeed, that continuity is provided by a common school system.

If Ramaswamy is truly concerned about national unity, we should await his announcement about the corrosive effect of vouchers, their damage to community cohesion, settled social bonds, and cultural fragmentation.

Categories Accountability, Funding, Hypocrisy, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Republicans Rachet Up their War on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2026 //
1

Garry Rayno, veteran journalist, reports on the latest Republican plan to defund public schools in New Hampshire. They are moving quickly to enact a plan that will fatten rich districts and impoverish poor districts. They have already passed a voucher plan without income limits; the overwhelming majority of students taking vouchers were already attending private schools. in other words, state welfare for the rich.

Rayno writes in IndepthNH.com:

What’s the hurry?

Last week the Senate was in a hurry to pass two bills that will significantly harm the majority of school districts and students in public schools, while property wealthy districts and well-to-do families will benefit, all in the name of school choice.

The plan is to have the House agree Thursday to the amended version of House Bill 751, which would allow a New Hampshire public school student to enroll in any other public school in the state rather than the school where he or she lives.

The Republican controlled House is expected to concur or agree to the Senate amendment, sending the bill to Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk for her action.

The bill would go into effect immediately instead of next school year as Senate Bill 101 would do, which is nothing more than an attempt to cut short the beating a similar plan has already taken at deliberative sessions in annual school district meetings around the state.

Something this complicated needs more than a few weeks to implement or it will create chaos and uncertainty.

As it stands, the open enrollment plan would make property poor school districts donor communities to property wealthy communities while increasing per student costs for the poorer districts and lowering the per student costs for the wealthier districts.

This really is Robin Hood in reverse.

And this bill is way more financially harmful to poorer communities than a $5,000 grant through the Education Freedom Account program as school districts would owe other districts tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The open enrollment plan would exacerbate the already alarming inequities between the schools in property wealthy communities and those in property poor cities and towns.

To add insult to injury, any shifting of schools for children from poor families will be out of reach because their parents cannot afford transportation or the difference in per student costs they would have to pay if their school district spends less per student than the school their child wants to attend.

The best and well-to-do will be able to go to schools in Bedford, Bow, Amherst, New Ipswich, Rye, Hanover, etc. but the majority of students will be in school districts with declining state aid as it follows the child after the first year and their parents will face ever increasing property tax bills.

This plan is not something that should be fast-tracked, unless you want to destroy public education, which is the goal of the Republican majority in the Legislature.

Under the plan, school districts would have to determine the capacity of the school and the grade levels and update the information each month.

Unlike current law, school districts do not have to vote to approve participating in open enrollment because the state says they shall participate.

The parents of a student living outside the district could apply to attend a different school anywhere in the state if there is a vacancy and the student has not been a disciplinary problem or been expelled from his or her resident school or has a history of chronic absenteeism.

Receiving schools are prohibited from making admission decisions based on “grade or age levels, pupil needs, areas of academic focus, aptitude, academic or athletic achievement.”

Now for the fun part, the home district of the student would pay the receiving district its average per pupil costs, which are determined annually by the Department of Education.

If the sending district’s per-pupil costs are less than the receiving school’s, the parents would have to make up the difference.

It appears if the sending school’s per-pupil costs are more than the receiving school’s, that amount of money would be sent to the receiving school.

Remember the outrage over donor communities, over property taxes raised in one community being sent to another community’s schools, this will make property poor communities donor towns to property wealthy communities who most likely have nicer facilities, better paid teachers and more activities and programs for their students.

It is still exporting property taxes raised in one community to another community’s school district.

The likely scenario is that students whose parents have the economic ability will be enrolled in the better school districts in the state.

That will do two things: It will provide more revenue to a school district that already has a significant tax base, while lowering the money for the student’s home district.

It also will increase the cost per student for that district because there will be a lower number of students, while decreasing the per-pupil costs for the receiving district because there are more pupils.

Analysis by Reaching Higher NH indicates over time, the per-pupil cost of the sending district will be more than the receiving district.

The organization uses the towns of Newport and Sunapee and the scenario of five students leaving Newport each year for Sunapee schools over a five-year period.

The per-pupil cost in Newport is $29,290 and the cost in Sunapee is $31,464.

Newport would have to send Sunapee $146,450 and each family would pay $2,174 to make up the difference, and Sunapee nets $157,320.

The bill allows districts to negotiate to lower the tuition by 80 percent and if that occurs each parent would have to pay $8,032.

During the five-year period, Newport’s per-pupil costs would rise to about $34,000 per pupil and Sunapee would go down to about $29,800.

“Within four years, and after the migration of 20 students, Newport’s cost per-pupil has surpassed Sunapee’s cost per-pupil. The good news for transferring parents is they no longer have to pay out of pocket to cover the difference. The bad news for Newport and its taxpayers is that the bill from Sunapee keeps getting larger, since the cost of open enrollment is tied to the sending district’s cost per pupil,” according to the analysis on the group’s website.

The state school aid, as little as it is, about 22 percent, would follow the child to Sunapee after the first year because the child is now included in the Average Daily Attendance of the Sunapee school district not Newport’s.

What this plan does not do is add one cent to state public education aid, although New Hampshire provides the least amount of state aid of any state in the country including Mississippi or Alabama. 

While New Hampshire pays 22 percent, the national average is 47 percent, which is more than double.

If New Hampshire paid the national average, about $1 billion dollars would come off of local property tax bills.

But even with two recent court cases finding the state has failed to live up to its constitutional obligation to provide its students with an adequate education and to pay for it, lawmakers have yet to do anything to address that, any more than they have in the three decades since the original Claremont lawsuit ruling.

Instead Republican lawmakers have voted to ban books; divisive concepts; diversity, equality and inclusiveness’ made record keeping more onerous and repetitive; will spend $112 million this biennium mostly benefiting kids already in religious and private schools, or homeschooled; sought a statewide school budget cap; failed to provide enough money for special education and building costs, sending the bill to local property taxpayers; cut businesses taxes largely benefiting multinationals and large corporation; eliminated the state’s only progressive tax on interest and dividends; and everything else they could do to destroy public education, as they appear to agree with the chair of the House Education Policy and Administration Committee Kristin Noble, R-Bedford, that public schools are leftist indoctrination centers.

This open enrollment plan is the latest in a long line of distractions from the one thing the legislature legally has to do: Pay for a constitutionally adequate education for the state’s students.

Supporters of the open enrollment plan call it a market approach to education. That would be fine if there were a level playing field, but there is not. 

The education funding system they don’t want to change has sentenced the students and taxpayers of the property poor communities to higher taxes and a less than adequate education creating an economic death spiral.

Yet those who can afford a private or religious school education are given state subsidies at taxpayer expense that include season passes to Gunstock and tuition to religious summer camps.

The Legislature’s first job should be to provide an adequate education to the state’s students and pay for it. That should be the first priority, not an afterthought.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, New Hampshire, Republicans

Peter Greene: Will Mississippi Ditch Its “Miracle” by Endorsing Vouchers?

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2026 //
5

We have all heard the stories of the “Mississippi Miracle,” the dramatic rise in test scores in the midst of underfunding and poverty. Whether or not there has actually been a miracle, some Mississippi legislators are eager to help kids escape those miraculous schools. Specifically, by giving them vouchers for private schools.

The legislature is split, however. The key senator opposes vouchers, which always end up subsidizing kids in private schools. The key members in the House are all in to pay the tuition for affluent families.

Why in the world would legislators want to help students “escape” good schools?

Peter Greene writes:

Mississippi legislators are fiddling with school choice. Some of their fiddling is very limited, and some is just kind of odd, given the context of Mississippi education these days. 

In the senate, SB 2002  is a bill for public school choice, called open enrollment in some states and portability in others. It would give students the chance to pick a public school outside of their own attendance area. Education Committee Chairman Dennie DeBar said that’s as far as he’s willing to go. As J.T. Mitchell reports for Supertalk:

“This is as far as we’re willing to go. I’m not in favor of vouchers,” DeBar said in regard to universal school choice that includes using public funds to help parents pay for private school tuition. “This creates competition amongst our schools to make them better.”

The house, however, is willing to go quite a bit further. They’ve launched HB 2, the Mississippi Education Freedom Act, which would establish Magnolia Student Accounts, an education savings account style voucher.

The bill proposes most of the usual features. A few notable quirks:

* Half of the vouchers are designated for students currently in public school, half for those already in private school.

* Vouchers will be awarded in a first come, first served priority order. Families with under 100% of area median income. Next those between 100% and 200%, then 200% to 300%. Then “all other eligible students.” 

* Each of those eligible groups has a different voucher amount limits. It’s the total funding formula, not to exceed– $4,000 for the under-100% crowd, $2,000 for the next group, and so on. There are also limits on the total that can go to one household.

The voucher dollars can be spent on the usual stuff– tuition, fees, supplies, equipment, uniforms, testing. Plus a whole category for “technological devices” including television, videogame console or accessory, home theater or related audio equipment, and virtual reality products. 

House Speaker Jason White authored HB 2. He explains his support:

White is a longtime advocate for school choice, the idea of giving parents more of a say in where their children are educated without being restricted by their neighborhoods. In a statement, he pointed to Mississippi’s recent gains in education, including a No. 16 overall ranking and nation-leading improvements in reading. He said the Mississippi Education Freedom Act “builds on that success.”

I am not going to get into the Mississippi “miracle” at this point, other than to say that something certainly seems to have happened, but as always with education, it appears to have more to do with hard work, teacher efforts, school resources, and maybe some tweaking of the data, none of which is miraculous.

But whatever “that success” was, I’m not clear on how you build on it by letting parents pull their kids away from it while simultaneously taking resources away from those successful schools. “Our schools are finally improving,” declares White. “So let’s give families more ways to pull their kids out of them.” This does not seem like a recipe for success. 

For the sake of Mississippi students, let’s hope the senate shuts down HB 2. 

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Mississippi, School Choice, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: McMahon and the Death of the U.S. Education Department

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2026 //
4

Jan Resseger reminds us of the purpose of public education by quoting Derek Black’s new book Dangerous Learning, in which he writes that “public schools are the place where children—regardless of status—share a common experience, come to appreciate the public good, and prepare for equal citizenship. The purpose of public education has always been to sustain a republican form of government.” The Trump administration does not want to “sustain a Republican form of government.” It blabbers on about parents’ rights, not the common good. It is determined to destroy the U.S. Department of Education because it protects the rights of students, especially the most vulnerable. Ironically, the claims for “parents’ rights,” has been turned into a battering ram against students’ rights.

Jan writes:

In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law scholar Derek Black explores one of the most basic reasons our public schools, our society’s most extensive and inclusive civic institution, are essential: they are an enormous system whose promise is to serve the needs and protect the rights of nearly 50 million children and adolescents.  Justice cannot be achieved solely through the protection of parents’ rights, by which parents vie to advance their own children’s needs.

Black writes: “As rhetoric, educational freedom sounds good.  As a practical matter, it falls well short of freedom for all. It does not even attempt to ensure that private education works for children. At best, it is agnostic toward the school environments students enter. At worst, it uses public funds to facilitate patterns and values that America has spent the past half century trying to tame…  Public schools to be sure, are far from perfect. They have never fully met the needs of all students and all communities. But those shortcomings are clearly understood as problems to fix. They are seen as bugs, not features, of public education, which has operated for two centuries on the premise that public schools are the place where children—regardless of status—share a common experience, come to appreciate the public good, and prepare for equal citizenship. The purpose of public education has always been to sustain a republican form of government. And public schools are the only place in society premised on bridging the gaps that normally divide us—race, wealth, religion, disability, sex, culture, and more. The founders of the American public education system believed that rather than inhibiting liberty, a common public education is essential to it.” (Dangerous Learning, pp. 182-183)

Widespread educational justice across the nation cannot be achieved solely through the laws of the states. At the federal level, Brown v. Board of Education, and federal laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act have for three quarters of a century been tools by which the federal government could challenge and rectify injustice in public schools.  In 1979, the U.S. Department of Education was founded to pull together many of the programs designed to increase opportunity for children in states whose public schools had failed to protect their educational rights due to their race, ethnicity, or disability—the work of the Office for Civil Rights, and programs supporting English language learners and special education for disabled students, for example.  The Education Department also increased investment in school districts which states had inadequately funded—Title I for school districts serving concentrations of poor children, for example, and grants for Full-Service Community Schools and 21st Century After-School Programs.

The Trump administration has, however, avoided acknowledging the history of educational injustice as the President has consistently promoted the goal of shutting down the U.S. Department of Education and “returning education to the states.”  When she was confirmed as Education Secretary last March, Linda McMahon declared: “President Trump pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice. I intend to make good on that promise.”  McMahon has laid off staff whose positions were created by Congress, threatened to send specific programs to other federal departments, and cancelled a raft of specific, congressionally allocated grant funding —all contrary to federal law. Many of these threats have been temporarily stayed by the courts; others are quietly moving forward.

Last week, McMahon took a new step to weaken the Department’s reach—by agreeing to waive federal rules that prescribe how federal funding can be spent and allowing states to combine at their discretion funding from specific federal grant lines. For the Associated Press, Colin Binkley explained: “The Trump administration is giving Iowa more power to decide how it spends its federal education money, signing off on a proposal that is expected to be the first of many as conservative states seek new latitude from a White House promising to ‘return education to the states.’ Iowa was the first state to apply for an exemption from certain spending rules.”  Binkley describes Education Secretary McMahon’s justification for giving Iowa control of spending federal dollars from four different grant programs: “McMahon told The Associated Press that the new flexibility will free up time and money now devoted to ensuring compliance with federal rules. With fewer strings attached, states can pool their federal dollars toward priorities of their choosing, including literacy or teacher training….”

For K-12 Dive, Kara Arundel lists four separate programs established by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act whose funding streams Iowa has been permitted to combine: Title II, Part A—Supporting Effective Instruction; Title III, Part A—English Language Acquisition; Title IV, Part A—Student Support and Academic Enrichment; and Title IV, Part B—21st Century Community Learning Centers (after-school programs). Arundel describes Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds expressing gratitude for giving her state more freedom: “Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, speaking at the press conference, said the state is ‘confident that we can do even more by reallocating compliance resources. Iowa will begin shifting nearly $8 million and thousands of hours of staff time from bureaucracy to actually putting that expertise and those resources in the classroom.’ “

Several writers, looking at the modesty of last week’s Iowa waiver to consolidate grants are not yet anticipating that the Iowa situation bodes massive deregulation of federal funding.  Education Week’s Mark Lieberman explains: “The waiver approval appears to mark the first time since the 2015 passage of the Every Student Success Act that the federal government has used its authority under that law to allow a state to consolidate funding. But, in contrast with proposals the state put forward roughly a year ago, the new federal approval touches only 5% of Iowa’s overall allocation of federal education funds, the part that’s set aside for the state education agency. The bulk of federal dollars that flow to school districts each year—$900 million worth—will retain their current structure and spending and reporting requirements.”

Binkley reassures the public: “Iowa’s new plan leaves Title I funding untouched.”

Lieberman quotes Anne Hyslop, who now leads All4Ed, and who worked in the Department during the Obama administration: “This announcement could signal an acknowledgment from the department that its legal authority to flatten discrete funding programs and implement unrestricted block grants without congressional approval is limited, said Anne Hyslop… It also foreshadows an uphill battle for other states aiming to convert federal education funding to block grants, including Indiana, which submitted a request for that flexibility, along with relief from certain school accountability requirements in October.”

Chalkbeat’s Erica Meltzer adds States already control most aspects of education. Federal funding makes up about 10% of overall education spending, and those dollars do come with restrictions and reporting requirements that aim to ensure money is spent appropriately… Iowa’s waiver doesn’t allow districts to consolidate most of their federal funding, which would have represented a much larger pot of money.

However, the reporters acknowledge that, in the context of the Trump administration’s goal to return education to the states, the Department may increasingly grant waivers that limit federal oversight.  Will Iowa’s waiver be the first step as the Department of Education reduces guardrails that protect students’ civil rights?

Meltzer reports that the new waiver, “does allow Iowa school districts to take advantage of a 1999 federal provision called  Ed-Flex to roll over more money year over year to make it easier to invest in big-ticket items and longer-term strategies….”  Lieberman adds: “Separate from the waiver approval, McMahon also simultaneously announced she’s approved Iowa to join 10 other states currently participating in the department’s Ed-Flex program, which gives state education agencies the authority to waive certain spending regulations for individual districts… The 10 states currently participating are Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and Wisconsin. Iowa is the first state to gain the distinction since McMahon became secretary.”

Meltzer concludes by cautioning readers: “(T)he Education Department still needs to ensure money is being appropriately spent, which is more challenging after massive layoffs.” She quotes Hyslop worrying: “(T)he U.S. Department of Education right now lacks the capacity to do meaningful oversight of how this program is being implemented or the waiver process in general.”

Specifically, Meltzer warns that one of the federal grants Iowa was allowed to merge supported English language instruction, a step that could well reflect the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants or its anti-DEI initiatives: “Advocates are particularly concerned that Iowa’s new block grant consolidates Title III funds that are required to go to English learners…. The Trump administration laid off most of the staff at the Education Department who support those students, and rescinded a guidance document considered to be the ‘bible’ in that field.” She quotes the Education Trust’s Nicholas Munyan-Penney: “I think of red tape equaling protections for students… We want to make sure that students have access to the protections and resources they need to be successful.”

Will 2026 be the year that the Department of Education expands the use of waivers to undercut the federal oversight of funds that protect equality of educational opportunity across our nation?  We will need to watch carefully as the chaotic education policy in McMahon’s Department of Education continues into its second year.

Categories English Language Learners, Ethics, Funding, Lies, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

Trump Says Civil Rights Laws Discriminate Against Whites

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2026 //
14

In an interview with The New York Times, President Trump explained his hostility towards the civil rights laws meant to end discrimination against racial minorities and women and to expand opportunities for them in the workplace and in education.

He believes that civil rights protections have hurt white men. That is the rationale for his aggressive campaign to purge policies of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) from all institutions receiving federal funding.

Trump is indifferent to the long history of slavery, racism, Jim Crow laws, bigotry, and segregation that harmed minorities, especially African Americans. He is equally indifferent to the long history of sexism and misogny that restricted the careers of women.

Erica Green reports:

President Trump said in an interview that he believed civil rights-era protections resulted in white people being “very badly treated,” his strongest indication that the concept of “reverse discrimination” is driving his aggressive crusade against diversity policies.

Speaking to The New York Times on Wednesday, Mr. Trump echoed grievances amplified by Vice President JD Vance and other top officials who in recent weeks have urged white men to file federal complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

When asked whether protections that began in the 1960s, spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had resulted in discrimination against white men, Mr. Trump said he believed “a lot of people were very badly treated.” 

“White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,” he said, an apparent reference to affirmative action in college admissions. “So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”

He added: “I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people — people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination.”

Trump’s approach is calibrated to appeal to white men who blame their grievances on laws that protect racial minorities and women.

Carrying out Mr. Trump’s agenda is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was formed in 1965 under the Civil Rights Act. The commission’s chair, Andrea Lucas, issued a striking video message last month underlining the agency’s new posture.

“Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex?” Ms. Lucas said in the video posted on X. “You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the E.E.O.C. as soon as possible. Time limits are typically strict for filing a claim.”

“The E.E.O.C. is committed to identifying, attacking, and eliminating ALL forms of race and sex discrimination — including against white male applicants and employees,” she said.

In the video, Ms. Lucas pointed white men to the commission’s F.A.Q. on “D.E.I.-related discrimination,” which notes that D.E.I. “a broad term that is not defined” in the Civil Rights Act.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the nation’s primary litigator of workplace discrimination, and for decades has been a resource for minorities, women and other groups who have historically faced discrimination. But Ms. Lucas has endeavored to make it one of Mr. Trump’s most powerful tools against D.E.I., with a particular focus on remedying perceived harms against white men.

Trump has combatted DEI in universities by threatening to cut off the funding of institutions that implement affirmative action for students and faculty and that have programs to encourage minorities.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, History, Racism, Segregation, Trump
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