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Science Research in New England Gets a Reprieve from DEI Ban, for Now

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2025 //
6

The Boston Globe reported on the resumption of science projects halted by the Trump administration because their subjects were Black, Hispanic, gay, or transgender. Trump is determined to wiped out federal recognition of these categories of people and to stop science research of all kinds.

PROVIDENCE — Four months after her large-scale research study seeking to contain the spread of HIV was canceled by the Trump administration, Dr. Amy Nunn received a letter: the grant has been reinstated.

The study, which is enrolling Black and Hispanic gay men, is set to resume after a June court order in favor of the American Public Health Association and other groups that sued the National Institutes of Health for abruptly canceling hundreds of scientific research grants. 

The NIH said in a form letter to researchers in February and March that their studies “no longer effectuate agency priorities” because they included, among other complaints, reference to gender identity or diversity, equity and inclusion.

The order from US District Judge William Young in Massachusetts was narrow, reinstating nearly 900 grants awarded to the plaintiffs, not all of the thousands of grants canceled by NIH so far this year. Young called DEI an “undefined enemy‚” and said the Trump administration’s “blacklisting” of certain topics “has absolutely nothing to do with the promotion of science or research.”

The Trump administration is appealing the ruling, and the NIH continues to say they will block diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, prompting ongoing fear from scientists that their studies could still be on the chopping block even as they restart.

“We feel like we’re tippy-toeing around,” said Nunn, who leads the Rhode Island Public Health Institute. “The backbone of the field is steadfast pursuit of the truth. People are trying to find workarounds where they don’t have to compromise the integrity of their science.”

Nunn said she renewed her membership to the American Public Health Association in order to ensure she’d be included in the lawsuit.

Despite DEI concerns, she plans to continue enrolling gay Black and Hispanic men in her study, which will include 300 patients in Rhode Island, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. 

Black and Hispanic men who have sex with other men contract HIV at dramatically higher rates than gay white men, a statistic Nunn aims to change.

The study was just getting underway, with 20 patients enrolled, when the work was shut down by the NIH in March. While Nunn’s clinic in Providence did not do any layoffs, the clinic in Mississippi — Express Personal Health — shut down, and the D.C. clinic laid off staff.

The four-month funding flip-flop could delay the results of the study by two years, Nunn said, depending on how quickly the researchers can rehire and train new staff. The researchers will also need to find a new clinic in Mississippi.

The patients — 100 each in Rhode Island, Mississippi, and D.C. — will then be followed for a year as they take Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP, to prevent them from contracting HIV. 

The protocol that’s being studied is the use of a patient navigator for “aggressive case management.” That person will help the patient navigate costs, insurance, transportation to the clinic, dealing with homophobia and other barriers to staying on PrEP, which can be taken as a pill or a shot.

The study’s delay means “the science is aging on the vine,” Nunn said, as new HIV prevention drugs are rolled out. “The very thing that we’re studying might very well be obsolete by the time we’re able to reenroll all of this.”

The hundreds of reinstated grants include titles that reference race and gender, such as a study of cervical cancer screening rates in Latina women, alcohol use among transgender youth, aggressive breast cancer rates in Black and Latina women, and multiple HIV/AIDs studies involving LGBTQ patients.

“Many of these grants got swept up almost incidentally by the particular language that they used,” said Peter Lurie, the president of the Center of Science in the Public Interest, which joined the lawsuit. “There was an arbitrary quality to the whole thing.”

Lurie said blocking scientists from studying racial disparities in public health outcomes will hurt all Americans, not just the people in the affected groups.

“A very high question for American public health is why these racial disparities continue to exist,” Lurie said. “We all lose in terms of questions not asked, answers not generated, and opportunities for saving lives not implemented.”

The Trump administration is not backing down from its stance on DEI, even as it restores the funding. The reinstatement letters from the NIH sent to scientists this month include a condition that they must comply with Trump’s executive order on “biological truth,” which rescinded federal recognition of transgender identity, along with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin.

Kenneth Parreno, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he was told by Trump administration lawyers that new letters would be sent out without those terms.

But Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said Wednesday the administration “stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people.”

“HHS is committed to ensuring that taxpayer dollars support programs rooted in evidence-based practices and gold standard science — not driven by divisive DEI mandates or gender ideology,” Nixon said in any email to the Globe.

The Trump administration’s appeal is pending before the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. A motion for a stay of Young’s decision was denied, and the Trump administration is appealing that ruling to the US Supreme Court.

The ongoing push to remove DEI from science has created fear in the scientific community, which relies on federal funding to conduct its research and make payroll.

“Scientific morale has taken a big hit,” Nunn said. “People are apprehensive.”

Indeed, major research institutions have faced mass funding cuts from the federal government since Trump took office. Brown University, the largest research institution in Rhode Island, had more than $500 million frozen until it reached an agreement with Trump on Wednesday.

In exchange for the research dollars to be released, Brown agreed not to engage in racial discrimination in admissions or university programming, and will provide access to admissions data to the federal government so it can assess compliance. The university also agreed not to perform any gender-affirming surgeries and to adopt Trump’s definitions of a male and female in the “biological truth” executive order.

While some have avoided speaking out, fearing further funding cuts, Nunn said she felt a “moral and ethical duty” to do so.

Categories Censorship, Equity, Ethics, Funding, Gender, Race, Research, Science

Arizona: School Choice Harms Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2025 //
6

Laura Meckler of the Washington Post visited Arizona to learn about the effects of an expansive program of charter schools and vouchers. Arizona voted overwhelmingly against vouchers in a state referendum in 2018. Vouchers lost by 65-35%. The rightwing legislature and Governor Douglas Ducey, encouraged by billionaire Charles Koch, ignored the views of the electorate and enacted a large voucher program.

Now the state underwrites the tuition of kids who were already in private schools, many of whom come from affluent families. Voucher schools admit the students they want and exclude those they don’t want.

Arizona’s charter sector includes for-profit charters and charters run by entrepreneurs and grifters. It has experienced numerous scandals.

There’s no accountability for voucher schools and minimal accountability for homeschoolers whose parents spend money on sports equipment, ninja warrior training, toys, LEGO sets, and a wide variety of nonacademic stuff.

Eli Hager of ProPublica wrote that the cost of vouchers had blown a huge hole in the state’s budget, making it necessary to reduce spending on highway projects, water infrastructure, and other critical needs.

Vouchers and charters have not produced academic gains. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Arizona is among the lowest-ranking states.

But the biggest consequence of voucher expansion has been the closing of neighborhood public schools. .

Meckler writes:

PHOENIX — The party at John R. Davis Elementary School was in full swing, but at the snow cone station, the school’s librarian was in tears.

In the cafeteria, alumni marveled at old photographs on display and shook their heads. On a wall of the library, visitors posted sticky notes to describe their feelings: “Angry,” read a purple square. “Anxious,” said a pink one. “Annoyed.” “Heart broken.” “Bummed.” And more than any other word: “Sad.”

Ten days later, John R. Davis Elementary School would close — not just for the summer, but for good.

Now, as the new school year begins, the Roosevelt Elementary School District opens with just 13 schools. That’s almost a third fewer than it had last spring, a response to enrollment declines as the state offers unprecedented taxpayer funding for alternatives to public school.

The party gave the community a few hours to celebrate the school’s 43 years — to say goodbye.

“It’s a grieving process for me,” Antionette Nuanez, the librarian, told a pair of Davis graduates who dropped by the party. Everyone at the party, it seemed, was feeling the loss — loss of tradition, of community, of simply having a school in walking distance. Nuanez, in particular, was overcome with the emotion of it all: “It’s like a death,” she said.

Perhaps more than any other state, Arizona has embraced market competition as a central tenet of its K-12 education system, offering parents an extraordinary opportunity to choose and shape their children’s education using tax dollars, and developing a national reputation as the Wild West of schooling.

The state has supported a robust charter school system, tax money for home schooling and expansive private school vouchers, which are available to all families regardless of income. Nearly 89,000 students receive Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, a form of vouchers, state data show; a second voucher program awarded nearly 62,000 tax-supported private school scholarships in 2024, though some students received more than one. More than 232,000 students attend charter schools.

Together, these programs help explain why just 75 percent of Arizona children attended public schools in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s one of the lowest rates in the country.

Supporters of school choice say families are turning to alternatives because public schools are not serving their children well. It’s only right, they argue, that tax dollars follow children to whatever educational setting their families choose.

Critics complain that vouchers eat up state funding, benefit families who can afford private school on their own, disrupt communities and send tax dollars to schools that face little accountability. Unlike public schools, private schools don’t have to administer state tests. They can pick and choose their students, while public schools must educate everyone.

The modern school choice movement began in 1990 with a small voucher program in Milwaukee and has grown into a central plank of the Republican education agenda, with programs now operating in more than half the states. In 2022, Arizona created the first universal program — open to all, not just low-income families. Since then, about a dozen conservative states have adopted universal or near-universal programs. And in July, President Donald Trump signed into law the first federal voucher program, which will require states to opt in, at an estimated cost of $26 billion over the next decade.

Some state programs have now grown so large that spillover effects on public schools are coming into view. In Ohio, the legislature agreed toincrease voucher spending to $1.3 billion by 2027, up from just over $1 billion in 2025, while traditional public schools, which serve far more children, were given a smaller increase — and less than what public education advocates say had been promised under a multiyear agreement to ramp up school spending. In Florida, which has a $4 billion voucher program, public schools districts are seeing enrollment declines, meaning less money from the state and, in many cases, budget cuts.

The ramifications for public education have been particularly clear in Arizona, offering an early picture of K-12 education under the Republican vision of maximum school choice, or what proponents call education freedom. Here, public schools are starting to close.

The challenge: more competition for the same number of students. For the past 15 years, the state’s school-age population has remained steady, though the overall population has grown, said Rick Brammer, principal manager of Applied Economics, a consulting firm that has analyzed enrollment trends, demographic data and the effects of school choice programs in dozens of Arizona school districts.

“You’re taking the same size pie and cutting it into more pieces,” Brammer said. “As we’ve created and funded alternatives, we’ve just emptied out school after school from the districts. In a tight nutshell, that’s the whole story.”

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Home Schooling, Privatization, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Senate Appropriations Committee Rejects Trump Plan to Slash Education Funding

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2025 //
4

Good news!

Jan Resseger reports some surprisingly good news: the Senate Appropriations Committee passed an education budget that restored Trump’s cuts to education and disregarded his plan to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.

Jan sees their action as evidence that public protest works and that the public does not want to abandon federal funding of schools. Jan also cautions that education may yet be imperiled by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Vought was overall writer and editor of “Project 2025” and McMahon is a dedicated ideologue.

Nonetheless, it’s heartening to know that some Republicans were willing to stand up to Trump and Reject one of his worst ideas.

She begins:

On July 31st, K-12 Dive’s Kara Arundel reported some very good news: “The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved a bipartisan spending bill for fiscal year 2026 (FY 26) that would prevent the executive branch from removing Title I and special education programs to agencies outside the U.S. Department of Education. The legislation also rejects several other funding reforms proposed by the Trump administration… In total, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommends funding the Education Department in FY 26 at $79 billion…. That’s $12.3 billion more than President Donald Trump’s proposal of $66.7 billion.  In the current fiscal year, the Education Department is funded at $78.7 billion.”

Open the link to read the details.

Categories Funding, Resistance, U.S. Department of Education

NPE: Charter Schools in Decline: A National Report

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2025 //
9

The National Center for Charter School Accountability, which is a project of the Network for Public Education, released the first of a three-part series of a national report on the decline of the charter school sector.

Written by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris, the report will be released in three sections. The first one, Decline, documents the startling halt in charter school growth. Once heralded as the salvation of American education, charter schools are no longer growing. Despite the lack of demand for new charters, the Trump administration recently increased the annual appropriation to the federal Charter Schools Program from $440 million every year to $500 million a year.

The report will be released in three parts: Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs. This is the first part.

Burris begins:

In 1992, City Academy — the nation’s first charter school — opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. Created and led by experienced teachers, it was designed as an alternative school for students struggling in traditional settings. With just 53 students, City Academy embodied the original vision for charter schools: small, teacher-run schools within public districts that tested innovative strategies to reach hard-to-teach kids.

When successful, those strategies would inform and strengthen public education as a whole.

That was the idea supported by American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker in 1988.

But by the early 1990s, Shanker had become disillusioned. As his wife Edith later explained, “Al became increasingly critical of charter schools as they moved further from their original intent.

He warned that without well-crafted legislation and public oversight, business interests would hijack the charter school concept, ‘whose real aim is to smash public schools.’”

His warning proved prophetic. In the decades since, real estate investors, for-profit management companies, and corporate charter chains have taken over what began as teacher-led experiments. Today, more than fifty charter trade associations—some state-based, others national—lobby aggressively to block charter school oversight and resist any legislative reform. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reported over $26.5 million in income in 2023, with more than $28 million in assets. The California Charter Schools Association reported nearly $13 million in revenue that same year. These organizations are not only advocates but powerful lobbyists, intent on protecting all existing charters and promoting unlimited growth.

During the Obama years, federal initiatives like Race to the Top fueled charter expansion with strong bipartisan support. But that coalition has since un-raveled. While Republican enthusiasm for any alternative to public education— charters, vouchers, homeschools — has surged, Democratic support has eroded, particularly as concerns grow over transparency, equity, and privatization.

Today, the charter sector stands at a reckoning point. Growth has slowed.

For-profit models are expanding. The push to create religious charter schools has fractured the movement from within. Meanwhile, charters are now competing not just with public schools and each other, but with a growing network of voucher-funded private schools and publicly subsidized homeschools.

This report, released in three parts — Decline, Disillusionment, and Costs —examines the trajectory of the charter school movement. It contrasts the promise of its early days with its complex, often troubling reality today.

As the charter experiment enters its fourth decade, the question is no longer what charter schools were meant to be — but whether they can still be reformed in order to serve the public good….

Burris questions why the federal government–which claims to be cutting costs and cutting unnecessary programs–continues to send $500 million every year to a sector that is not growing and does not need the money. DOGE eliminated most employees of the U.S. Department of Wducation but left the federal Charter Schools Program untouched.

The charter school sector stands at a critical juncture. Once heralded as a bold experiment in innovation and opportunity, it is now characterized by stagnation, retrenchment, and rising school closures. Between 2022 and 2025, growth has nearly halted, and closures — often sudden and disruptive— are accelerating. Federal investment, rather than adapting to the sector’s shifting realities, has ballooned to half a billion dollars annually, funding schools that never open, quickly fail, or operate with minimal oversight and accountability.

As the data show, under-enrollment is the primary driver of failure. There is no crisis of unmet demand. Hundreds of charter schools, according to NCES data, can’t fill even a single classroom. The frequently cited “million-student waitlist” has been thoroughly debunked, yet continues to be invoked to justify ever-increasing taxpayer support.

Meanwhile, mega-charters and online schools like Commonwealth Charter Academy siphon vast sums of public dollars while delivering dismal academic outcomes. Others, like Highlands Community Charter School, have defrauded taxpayers and exploited students under the guise of second chances.

With enrollment stagnating and oversight failing, taxpayers should ask: Why are we continuing to fund with federal dollars an expansion that isn’t happening? It is time for Congress and the Department of Education to reassess the Charter Schools Program. Federal dollars should no longer subsidize a shrinking and troubled sector. Instead, they must be redirected toward accountable, transparent, and student-centered public education.

Part II of this report, Disillusionment, to be published this fall, will further explain the reasons behind the sector’s decline.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Network for Public Education, Privatization

Trump Administration Releases School Funding It Was Withholding

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2025 //
3

Jan Resseger writes here about the decision by the Trump administration to release the billions of dollars to public schools that it had not distributed. Districts were unable to plan their budgets because of the uncertainty. Apparently enough Republicans heard from unhappy constituents and communicated their displeasure to Secretary McMahon. It shows that when parents and educators speak loudly, they are heard. Even in this anti-public school administration.

Jan Resseger wrote about it-

Today’s post is an update.  Yesterday this blog traced what has happened since the Trump administration refused to send $6.8 billion to U.S. public schools, money that had, in March, been approved by Congress in a continuing budget resolution and promised for delivery on July 1, the day that school districts regularly receive federal funding prior to the beginning of a new school year.

This afternoon, July 25, the Trump administration announced that it will release $5 billion of the funds and begin delivering them next week. Last week the administration released $1.4 billion of the funds for 21st Century Community Learning Center after-school programs.

This blog will take a one week break.  Look for a new post on Tuesday, August 5, 2025.

This afternoon Chalkbeat reported: “The Trump administration will release billions in frozen education funds after widespread outcry, including from Republican members of Congress….”

Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman reports: “Roughly $5 billion will flow beginning the week of July 28 to states through four K-12 education grant programs…. The affected grant programs… are… for migrant education… professional development and teacher training… English-learner services… and academic enrichment…. News that the education funding freeze is ending first emerged July 25 at noon in a post on X from Rep. Don Bacon, R.-Neb., one of a small handful of Congressional Republicans who publicly urged the Trump administration to release the money.”

On July 1, the Trump administration also withheld federal funding for adult basic education.  Lieberman reports: “The notice to states didn’t mention the $715 million for adult education the Trump administration has also withheld since July 1. Information about that program typically flows to states separately from information about other education funding streams.”

Certainly the release of the funds is a blessing for school districts whose leaders had been frantically scrambling to figure out how to provide necessary and in some cases legally required services for students when public schools open for the fall semester, which begins in many school districts in the last couple of weeks of August.

Categories Extremism, Funding, Trump

Jan Resseger: Ohio Legislature Robs Public Schools to Fill Pockets of the Rich

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
1

Jan Resseger writes here about the injustice of the budget for public schools passed by the Ohio legislature. Firmly in the control of hard-right Republicans, the legislature eagerly funds vouchers and charter schools while underfunding the public schools. As in every other state, the vast majority of Ohio students attend public schools. The only evaluation of the Ohio voucher program showed that most students who used the vouchers were already attending private schools; those who transferred from public schools fell behind the peers they left behind.

Ohio legislators know that vouchers and charters do not increase educational opportunity. They don’t care. Parents of public school students must inform themselves and act to protect their public schools.

She writes:

In the last week of June, two important events happened almost simultaneously in Ohio: A district court in Columbus found the state’s EdChoice voucher program unconstitutional, and the state legislature passed a budget that at the same time shorts the state’s public schools that serve the mass of our state’s children, significantly cuts the state income tax, and increases funding for private school vouchers over the next two years.

We all desperately hope the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit will save our public schools, but appeals of the case to higher courts will likely take several years, a period when the  new budget’s underfunding of the Fair School Funding Plan, the effect of the income tax cuts and the diversion money to private school vouchers will inevitably continue to diminish the state’s investment in Ohio’s public schools.

In the new budget, the legislature technically phased in a new Fair School Funding Plan—a mathematical formula to ensure that the state will guarantee adequate and equitably distributed state school funding. However, after the House Speaker called the plan unsustainable, the legislature failed fully to fund the new formula’s provisions and thereby ensured the new formula’s ultimate failure before Ohio can even try it out.

The Ohio legislature’s income tax reduction along with lawmakers’ choice to permit continuing growth of publicly funded, universal EdChoice private school tuition vouchers emerges from a philosophy that government’s responsibility is to protect individual parents’ freedom. Solid support for the state’s public schools would instead embody a commitment to what we call the social contract, explained here by economist Joseph Stiglitz:

“A social contract defines the relationship between individuals and societies, much as an actual contract would, outlining the obligations of the parties to the contract and to each other. There is one big difference between the social contract and ordinary contracts. When an actual contract is breached, there are consequences both for the relationship and especially for the breaching party… But when the state violates what it is supposed to do, there is no corresponding mechanism for enforcing the social contract.” The Road to Freedom, p. 86)

Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution definesthe state’s responsibility to provide a strong system of public education as part of the social contract: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”

Here are three ways in which the new state budget undermines Ohio’s public education social contract.

The New Ohio Budget Does Not Commit the State to Equitable and Adequate Public School Funding.

In a new brief, Lawmakers Underfund Ohio Schools by $2.86B in FY26-27; Veto Overrides Risk Another $330M, along with an attached PowerPoint slide presentation, Policy Matters Ohio shows how Ohio’s Fiscal Year 2026-2027 budget undermines the new Fair School Funding Plan just as it is being launched.

The first slide of Policy Matters’ PowerPoint presentation summarizes the impact of the new budget for the state’s public schools: “Ohio lawmakers give a billion-dollar annual tax break to Ohioans earning six figures, underfund (public) schools by $2.86 billion, and leave behind students with the greatest need.”

In Slide 3, Policy Matters compares the amount of public school funding allocated in the new state budget to the amount the new Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP) would have awarded to each school district if the legislature had, as the formula requires it to do, correctly factored in the district’s current costs instead of old cost data from FY 2022. “Under the enacted plan, 74% of Ohio’s school districts will receive less than what the FSFP says they need to meet the costs of an adequate education.”

In a recent Hannah News Service publication, Howard Fleeter, Ohio’s well known school finance expert, explains¹ exactly how the legislature robs school districts of what they had expected under the Fair School Funding Plan: “One of the most important features of the Fair School Funding Plan is its utilization of an inputs-based approach to determining adequacy, which results in a base per-pupil amount which can vary across districts based on the number of students and their distribution across grade levels… In order to not just fully phase in the funding formula but to adequately fund it, the base cost in FY 26 should be based on FY 24 input data and the base cost in FY 27 should be based on FY 25 data.” However, this year the legislature used old, FY 2022 cost data, thereby failing accurately to measure school districts’ costs. In other words, the state should recognize that school district expenses rise year after year due to inflation, and the formula should recognize that school districts have to keep up or risk losing teachers and services.

In Policy Matters’ Slide 5, a bar graph demonstrates that in the new budget, legislators leave farthest behind the school districts serving concentrations of the state’s poorest students. These school districts will fall 107% behind what the FSFP would have brought them in state funding. Their school funding is actually being cut this year.

Part of the loss to school districts serving masses of poor children comes from a recalculation of Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid.  Slide 7 explains that the legislature used “direct certification, a process of identifying low-income students by relying on public benefits data that will lead to fewer low-income students being counted in the system and fewer DPIA dollars going to the places that desperately need them.” Why has the legislature chosen to base DPIA on a data set that will, “cut more than $200 million in DPIA funds over the next biennium, from FY 2025 levels of support”?

Slide 7 adds, as a preface to Slide 8, that the new budget, “appears use that money to offset the ‘performance’ supplement which is estimated to cost $215 million over the biennium.”  What is the Performance Supplement? Slide 8 explains: “The Performance Supplement would rely on (each district’s)  state report card data, increasing funding by $13 per student times the number of stars on their state report card or progress report… Report card scores are built on testing performance as well as factors like chronic absenteeism, and the ‘breadth of coursework available in the district.’ ”

Policy Matters Slide 8 clearly identifies the injustice embedded in the Performance Supplement: “Low scores on these indicators should signal to policymakers that the school and the community it serves are devalued, under-resourced, and in need of more help, not less.  It explicitly reverses course on closing opportunity and education gaps, which would help schools improve.” In Slide 8, we also learn that the budget adds a $225 per student Enrollment Growth Supplement for the fastest growing suburban school districts. While the supplement will help meet the costs of serving new students moving to these districts, it is important to remember that these are districts serving wealthier families.

In the brief itself, you can link to your own school district’s profile to see how your district fares under the new budget here.

The New Budget Reduces Ohio’s State Income Tax—Undermining the State’s Capacity to Raise Its Share of Public School Funding.

The Plain Dealer‘s Anna Staver explains: “Lawmakers eliminated the state’s top income tax bracket, collapsing Ohio’s tax structure from two rates to one. It’s the last step in a decade-long push for a flat tax —and this final move amounts to a $1.14 billion cut.”  Signal Ohio‘s Andrew Tobias adds: “That new top tax rate of 2.75% is lower than any surrounding state and lower than any time in the past five decades… About 96% of the $1.1 billion in annual lost revenue… will stay in the pockets of those earning $138,000 or more….” Policy Matters Ohio’s Slide 10 depicts the legislature’s new flat tax diverting a billion dollars of essential state revenue to wealthy individuals and away from the state’s social contract. The new budget exacerbates a long trend of tax slashing in Ohio. Last fall, Policy Matters Ohio’s Bailey Williams tracked two decades of Ohio tax cuts that have progressively reduced Ohio’s capacity to support the needs of the public and to support the system of common schools promised in the Ohio Constitution.

The New Budget Allows Private School Vouchers to Continue Eating Up School Revenue.

In his June 27th On the Money¹ school funding expert Howard Fleeter describes another primary drain on state revenue: private school tuition vouchers will continue to eat up an increasingly large chunk of the new state budget. Fleeter compares the legislature’s investment in public school funding to the legislature’s investment in private school vouchers. Fleeter calculates, “that state foundation funding for Ohio’s traditional school districts—spread across the state’s 609 local school districts—will increase by $281.9 million over the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 biennium compared to current funding levels.” He continues: “Voucher funding is slated to increase by $327.1 million over the FY26-27 biennium…. This increase is $45 million more than the increase slated for the traditional K-12 districts over the biennium, despite the fact that K-12 districts educate roughly 8 times as many students as do private schools.”

In the New Budget, Legislators Shift the Responsibility for Funding Public Schools More Heavily onto Local School Districts.

We continue to hear a lot from our legislators about the danger of rising property taxes, but ironically, by reducing the state’s investment in public education, the legislature itself has made it necessary for school districts to increase reliance on local property taxes or cut programs and teachers. Howard Fleeter concludes¹ that, in the current fiscal year (FY 2025) under the budget that passed two years ago, the state is paying 38.4% of public school funding in Ohio. In the new budget, in which the legislature has failed to update the cost data in the formula, has cut the state income tax, and has kept on letting an uncapped voucher program grow,“the average state share (of total public school funding) will drop to 35.0% in FY 26 and to 32.2% in FY 27….”

When a state violates the social contract by reneging on its responsibility to fund public schools, the funding burden falls more heavily and more inequitably on local school districts.

¹Howard Fleeter, “On The Money,” Hannah News Service, June 27, 2025, (available free in many public library research collections).

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio, Parents, Privatization

Judd Legum: Elon Musk Company Sought Federal Designation as “Disadvantaged”

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2025 //
4

Judd Legum writes a terrific blog called Popular Information. He also has another blog called Musk Watch. He recently posted a story about one of Musk’s businesses, which applied for a federal grant designated for the economically disadvantaged.

Caleb Ecarma wrote:

On April 24, Elon Musk’s $9 billion neurotechnology company falsely self-certified as a “small disadvantaged business” (SDB) on a federal filing, a designation that qualifies the company for preferential treatment as part of a racial and ethnic diversity initiative.

The SDB designation can also only be legally claimed by companies owned by “economically disadvantaged individuals.”

Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces, registered with the government as an SDB while Musk leveraged his position at the White House to cut federal funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Excerpt from a Neuralink federal government filing, dated April 24, 2025.

The SDB designation is clearly defined by the Small Business Administration and in federal regulations. A SDB must be “unconditionally and directly” majority-owned (51%) by a member of a socially and economically disadvantaged group, meaning a demographic “subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias.”

Even if a business clears that hurdle, not all are eligible for the designation. To be considered an SDB, the company must also be majority-owned by an “economically disadvantaged individual.” According to the Code of Federal Regulations:

Economically disadvantaged individuals are socially disadvantaged individuals whose ability to compete in the free enterprise system has been impaired due to diminished capital and credit opportunities as compared to others in the same or similar line of business who are not socially disadvantaged.

Federal regulations state that individuals with a net worth exceeding $850,000, excluding the value of their primary residence, are not “economically disadvantaged individuals.”

Musk, the owner of Neuralink, has an estimated net worth of $404 billion. A South Africa-born white man raised in the Anglican Church, Musk is also not a part of any recognized disadvantaged ethnic or racial group.

As a private company, Neuralink’s exact ownership structure is opaque. But in a September 2018 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Neuralink lawyer Roel Campos wrote, “Neuralink is a private Delaware Corporation with its head offices at 3180 18th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, in which Mr. Musk has a majority ownership stake.” Neuralink has since reincorporated in Nevada. “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware,” Musk said in January 2024, a few days after Neuralink left the state of Delaware.

With the federal government awarding $50 billion to SDBs annually, carrying the SDB designation is a significant advantage for companies seeking government contracts. SDBs also receive increased visibility on federal databases, including the Small Business Administration’s Dynamic Small Business Search (DSBS). Neuralink currently appears on the DSBS as a “Self-Certified Small Disadvantaged Business.”Since 2017, Neuralink has made the SDB business claim in all 11 of its filings on SAM.gov, the federal government’s contracting database. Many of those filings were signed by Jared Birchall, Musk’s top fixer and Neuralink’s CEO. The SDB designation is also visible on the main page of the company’s SAM.gov profile. (Open the link to view the pdf. File.)

There is no indication that Neuralink has received federal funds, although it may have bid on federal contracts. Based on its SAM.gov filings, the company may have also requested grants, loans, or other financial assistance from the federal government while certifying itself as an SDB.

In three SAM.gov filings, Neuralink responded “Yes” to the question, “Does Neuralink Corp. wish to apply for a Federal financial assistance project or program, or is Neuralink Corp. currently the recipient of funding under any Federal financial assistance project or program?” Those filings were all submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic, in September 2020, May 2021, and August 2021.

Birchall and other Neuralink executives who signed the SDB self-certification forms attested to the following:

I understand that I may be subject to criminal prosecution under Section 1001, Title 18 of the United States Code or civil liability under the False Claims Act if I misrepresent NEURALINK CORPORATION in any of these representations or certifications to the Government.

Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.

The Department of Justice has prosecuted government contractors for submitting false self-certification claims or misrepresenting the status of their companies on federal databases. In 2023, one contractor received a 15-month prison sentence and was ordered to pay $72,000 in restitution after he fraudulently self-certified his company as a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. Last year, another company was fined nearly $4 million for misrepresenting itself as a women-owned small business on its SAM.gov profile.

Neuralink’s misrepresentation is particularly notable, given Musk’s past condemnations of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs aimed at helping members of historically disadvantaged groups. “DEI is just another word for racism,” Musk said in January of this year. “Shame on anyone who uses it,” he added. Musk has also described DEI as “actually illegal.”

While leading the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration’s austerity program, Musk claimed that he was ferreting out and terminating federal DEI initiatives. DOGE, under Musk’s guidance, focused on purging federal DEI grants and contracts for minority owned businesses, including legitimate SDBs.

In May, after Neuralink secured $600 million in fresh funding, the company had a $9 billion before-cash valuation, according to Semafor.

Categories Ethics, Fraud, Funding, Musk, Elon

Trump’s “One Big Ugly Budget Bill” Increases Taxes on Some Colleges, Eliminates It on Others

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2025 //
3

In 2017, Trump imposed a tax of 1.4 % on the endowments of colleges and universities that had large endowments relative to the number of students enrolled. Institutions of higher education, like churches, foundations, and other non-profits, have never been taxed. Typically, endowment income is used for scholarships and operating expenses, so this tax cut the money available to help low-income students who were admitted to excellent colleges.

In 2025, the Trump administration proposed making the tax even higher, inflicting more pain.

But the GOP got twisted in knots over their wish to exclude rightwing Hillsdale College. At first, they thought they could exempt it by exempting religious institutions. But Hillsdale isn’t really a religious college, and the Senate Parliamentarian quashed that idea.

They they decided they could keep Hillsdale tax-free by exempting all colleges with fewer than 3,000 students. That worked.

But it also exempted a number of liberal arts colleges that had previously paid the 1.4 % tax.

I’m happy to report that my Alma mater Wellesley College is again tax-exempt, as all colleges and universities should be.

What will the GOP tax next? Churches, synagogues, mosques? Foundations? Museums and other cultural institutions? The March of Dimes? The ASPCA? Other charities?

To see the list of lucky colleges that will no longer be taxed and those that will see a tax increase, open the link.

Forbes reported:

Strange things happen when details of a massive tax and budget bill, like the one President Donald Trump signed…, are tweaked behind closed doors. Among them: A couple dozen of the nation’s wealthiest small private colleges will be getting a tax cut next year, even as bigger rich universities, including Princeton, MIT, Yale and Harvard, will be slammed with higher taxes.

It all began as an effort by House Republicans to dramatically raise the excise tax imposed on the earnings of college endowments, and particularly the endowments of wealthy “woke” schools like Harvard University that they (and President Donald Trump) have targeted.

But as it turns out, while Harvard’s tax bill will likely more than double, some smaller schools with famously left-leaning student bodies (e.g. Swarthmore College and Amherst College) are getting tax relief. That’s because schools with fewer than 3,000 full-time equivalent tuition-paying students will be exempt from the revamped endowment tax beginning next year. It currently applies to private schools with more than 500 full-time equivalent tuition-paying students and endowments worth more than $500,000 per student.

Using the latest available federal data from fiscal year 2023, Forbes identified at least 26 wealthy colleges that are likely subject to the endowment tax now, but will be exempt next year based on their size. Along with top liberal arts schools like Williams College, Wellesley College, Amherst and Swarthmore, the list includes the California Institute of Technology, a STEM powerhouse, and the Julliard School, the New York city institution known for its music, dance and drama training. Grinnell College in Iowa, which enrolled 1,790 students in 2023, will save around $2.4 million in tax each year as a result of the change, President Anne Harris said in an email to Forbes.

Here’s what happened. As passed by the House in late May, the One Big Beautiful Bill (its Trumpian name) increased the current 1.4% excise tax on college endowments’ investment earnings to as high as 21% for the richest institutions—those with endowments worth more than $2 million a student. (While these schools are all non-profits and traditionally tax exempt, the 1.4% tax on investment earnings was introduced by Trump’s big 2017 tax bill. According to Internal Revenue Service data, 56 schools paid a total of $381 million in endowment tax in calendar 2023.)

Along with raising the rate, the House voted to exempt from the tax both religiously-affiliated schools (think the University of Notre Dame) and those that don’t take federal student financial aid. (The religious exemption was structured in a way that Harvard, founded by the Puritans to train ministers, wouldn’t qualify.) The House also sought to penalize schools like Columbia University, with heavy international student enrollments, by excluding students who aren’t U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents from the per capita calculations.

Then the bill went to the Senate, where the Finance Committee settled on more modest–albeit still stiff–rate hikes. Schools with endowments of $500,000 to $750,000 per capita would still pay at a 1.4% rate, while those with endowments above $750,000 and up to $2 million would pay 4%. Those with endowments worth more than $2 million per student would pay an 8% tax on their earnings, not the 21% passed by the House.

Enter Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who makes decisions on the Senate’s Byrd rule, which requires parts of a budget reconciliation bill like this one to have a primary purpose related to the budget—not other types of policy. The Byrd rule was put in place because reconciliation isn’t subject to filibuster. “You can’t get into a lot of prescriptive activity” in a budget reconciliation bill, explains Dean Zerbe, a national managing director for Alliantgroup, who worked on college endowment issues back when he was tax counsel for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “Like, ‘you’ve got to hop on one foot,’ or ‘you’ve got to make tuition affordable,’ or ‘you’ve got to do better in terms of admission.’”

The Parliamentarian ruled that those three House provisions—exempting religious-affiliated schools, exempting schools that don’t take federal aid, and excluding foreign students from the per capita calculation—didn’t pass the Byrd test.

At that point, Republican senators settled on the 3,000-student threshold in large part to specifically exempt one school from the tax: Hillsdale College, an ultra-conservative, Christian liberal arts college in Hillsdale, Michigan and a GOP darling. It enrolled 1,794 students in 2023, had an endowment worth $584,000 per-student, and notably accepts no federal money, including student aid. (So both the religious exemption and the one for schools taking no federal student aid would have presumably shielded Hillsdale from the endowment tax—before the Parliamentarian gave them the thumbs down.)

There was also a broader group of small schools pushing for the exemption, notes Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. “They made an argument that I think got some positive reception among Republican senators of saying that essentially, while their endowments may be big relative to the fact that they have small student bodies … their endowments weren’t big.” A school like Amherst, he adds, “might have a big endowment for a small school, but they don’t have a big endowment relative to the Ivies and the more heavily resourced [universities].”

House Republicans, under intense pressure to meet Trump’s July 4th deadline, ended up accepting the final Senate product in full. That meant exempting the smaller schools, including the “woke” ones, while levying a rate of up to 8% on the endowments of bigger schools. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation estimates colleges will now pay an extra $761 million in tax over 10 years, compared to the extra $6.7 billion they would have paid under the House version with its higher 21% rate and broader reach.

Based on data from 2023, Forbes estimates that at least 10 universities will have their endowment earnings taxed at an 8% or 4% rate in 2026, while five will continue to pay the 1.4% rate.

Update: Smith College, which likely would have been subject to the 4% tax given its 2023 stats—an endowment worth $2.47 billion, which worked out to $780,000 for each of its 3,192 students—contacted Forbes on July 8 to note that its full-time tuition-paying student enrollment is now below 3,000. The school currently pays a 1.4% tax on its endowment (worth $2.6 billion as of June 30, 2024). Starting in January, Smith will likely be exempt from an endowment tax. Smith declined to say how much tax it has been paying.

Three schools—Princeton University, Yale University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—will likely be required to pay an 8% excise tax on their endowment earnings. Another seven, including Harvard, Stanford University, Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University, will likely pay a 4% tax. The remaining five schools—Emory University, Duke University, Washington University in St Louis, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University—would pay the same 1.4% endowment tax rate they’re paying now, based on fiscal 2023 numbers.

One school that will likely pay 4% is the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic-affiliated school which would have been exempt from the tax were it not for the Byrd rule. “We are deeply disappointed by the removal of language protecting religious institutions of higher education from the endowment tax before passage of the final bill,” Notre Dame wrote in a statement to Forbes. “Any expansion of the endowment tax threatens to undermine the ability of a broad range of faith-based institutions to serve their religious purpose. We are proud to have stood with a coalition of these institutions against that threat, and we are encouraged by the strong support for a religious exemption received from both chambers.”

Fansmith, for his part, won’t call the exemption of the small schools a win. “We think the tax is a bad idea and it’s bad policy, and no schools should be paying it. But, by the standard that fewer schools are paying, it’s better, but it’s still not good,” he says. “It’s not really about revenue,” adds Fansmith. “It’s really about punishing these schools that right now a segment of the Republican party doesn’t like.” The schools make the argument that it’s students who are being punished, since around half of endowment spending pays for student scholarships.

Meanwhile, Zerbe warns the now exempt schools shouldn’t take that status for granted. “Once revenue raisers are in play and out there, they come back again and again,” he says. “It would be a disaster for [colleges] to think somehow this was a win for them. This was a billion dollar hit on them and there’s more to come later.”

Categories Ethics, Funding, Higher Education

Arnold and Carol Hillman: What We Learned in Our Nine Years in South Carolina

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
2

Arnold and Carol Hillman spent their careers as educators in Pennsylvania. When they retired, they decided to live in a retirement community in South Carolina. But while other retirees were playing golf or relaxing at the pool, they decided to get involved in rural schools. They wanted to be helpful. After nine years in South Carolina, they decided to move closer to their children, so they moved to Massachusetts. I invited them to write about their experiences in South Carolina. And Arnold wrote this account, edited by Carol.

We have always been compulsive people. On a cold winter’s day in February of 2015, we decided to move to a senior community (Sun City) in Bluffton, South Carolina. We did have some friends there who encouraged us to join them. So, on July 31st of that year, we moved there— lock, stock and barrel.

It wasn’t more than a week or two, after disposing of our many boxes, that we decided to go to a local school board meeting. We lived in an especially wealthy area of SC. The reason for its wealth were the many grey heads that retired to SC because of the meager taxes that one had to pay. 

We were very surprised at the board meeting. There were issues that were foreign to us. Although much of the meeting revolved around educational issues, the tone of the meeting was not to our liking. For one thing, they never mentioned the students or education. The superintendent acted as if he was the school district attorney. He was later fired because of ethics violations. An elderly member of the board spoke about books that he did not like and made no sense. The meeting seemed disorganized from our perspective. We came away from the meeting with the idea of finding out more about education in South Carolina.

Since we were familiar with the superintendent’s organization in Pennsylvania, we discovered that the then Superintendent of Education in South Carolina was the former executive director of the SC organization of superintendents. We called her, Molly Spearman, and invoked our PA connection and got to speak with her. 

We said that we had been advocates for rural schools and communities for many years and would like to see if we could be of some assistance to them here in South Carolina. She told us of five rural school districts around the area in which we lived and suggested that we give them a call.

We called all five and only one returned our call. Dr. Vashti Washington, Superintendent of the Jasper County School District, one of the poorest districts in the state, said that she would be happy to see us and work out some things that we could do in the district.

We eventually began a program called “Roso” – Reach one Save one. It was already in the works at the Ridgeland Hardeeville High School. The assistant principal, L.R. Dinkins, had been looking for someone to help him get it started, and we were the ones.

The program involved mentoring 10 young men and 10 young women and having them mentor fifth graders who were having trouble in school. The program lasted from 2015-2021. It ended when Covid began. However, the students that we worked with are still in touch with us and many have been successful in their lives. Others have not had that kind of success.

During the time we were working at Ridgeland Hardeeville, we decided that we would try to visit as many rural school districts as we could. We wound up visiting 21 districts out of about 35 (consolidation has made that 30 rural districts).

We were astonished at what we saw in each of those districts. What we saw was the equivalent of shoveling against the tide. Administrators and teachers do their best without the proper resources. 

In some districts the buildings were dilapidated. One in particular startled us when we saw sewage seeping into the hallways. Fortunately, that school was closed and replaced by a new building.

Many school districts lacked teachers of science, math, and special education. Many rural districts recruited foreign teachers to fill vacancies, but these teachers often had difficulty communicating in English. Those who stayed for more than a year became more fluent in English and more successful as teachers. Nonetheless, rural districts often lacked the courses available in economically advantaged districts.

Most rural districts lacked student services. Guidance counselors and psychologists were in short supply, as were career counselors and STEM counselors.

Like many other rural areas across the country, Internet connections are not readily available in rural South Carolina. Thus many schools were unable to produce online coursework for their students during the pandemic.

Some of the outcomes were spectacular, but in the end the children did not get all that they needed for success in life.

As we have learned during our time in South Carolina, and over the past year, the children in the rural areas of South Carolina must climb mountains to gain the same kind of success that their brothers and sisters have in the well-resourced school districts.

Some statistics will show the differences. At the beginning of the 2024-25 school year there were 1,043 open positions for educators in South Carolina. Most of these vacancies were in rural school districts. From January 2020 till now, of the 75 school districts in SC, only 21 school districts have retained their school superintendents. Of those 72% that have left, many of them are from rural school districts.

South Carolina’s legislature and administration have succeeded in raising teachers’ salaries. However, their priorities have not addressed the problems with resources for rural schools. The new Superintendent of education is a right-wing conservative, with a former Heritage Foundation background and a less than stellar resume in education. She has instigated a program in cooperation with Prager University that will provide school districts with videos that rewrite American history to minimize the underside of the past..

The legislature and the administration have viewed budget surpluses as a means of getting votes from their constituents. Although state taxes are low, they have consistently rebated taxes to taxpayers. In the 2022 legislative session they rebated almost one billion dollars. This was done when school districts and other parts of the state could have used those funds to improve the number of children and other needy folks.

South Carolina does not fare well in comparison with other states in the nation when it comes to education. Looking at 4 differing rating agencies, SC ranks 44th, 43rd, 41st and 41st. You may not agree that these are the most accurate numbers, but a number of agencies use many variables to come to these conclusions.

And how is South Carolina doing in comparison to other states and the nation on national tests such as the ACTs? According to the South Carolina Department of Education and their statistics, the average of all states using an ACT composite is 19.4. South Carolina’s composite score is 18.4. The ACT is widely used in Southern and Mid-Western states. There are 24 states that use it primarily and of the 24, two states switched to the SATs, but still use the ACTs. Many of the rural school districts are far below the 18.4 mean.

To counter some of these negative things about South Carolina education, Carol and I, along with several rural school superintendents, created an organization called SCORS (South Carolina Organization of Rural Schools). Its purpose was to alert South Carolinians to the plight of rural schools and communities. We did research, wrotearticles, and even interviewed gubernatorial candidates. Most of what we did may have helped a small bit, but not enough to move either the legislature or the administration.

It will take many years and the rise of a new generation before anything changes in South Carolina. We still are in contact with many of the young people whom we mentored. 

Most of the students that we mentored came from very economically depressed backgrounds. Their parents sometimes worked two or three jobs. The students also worked to supplement family incomes. They were wonderful youngsters who would have had many more opportunities if they lived in different states.

We called the groups that we mentored Jasper Gentlemen (they all lived in Jasper County). The young ladies were named Diamonds and Pearls. As you suspect, I worked with the young men and Carol the young ladies. There were about 25 students in all. We took them to colleges in South Carolina and even sent some of them up to Howard University in Washington on bus trips set up by a friend who was the head of the Howard alumni association of South Carolina. Of all the students we mentored, none of them dropped out of high school. They all graduated.

I believe only about 30% of them went on to college. Many of the parents wanted the youngsters to stay home and did not want them to leave the area. Money was the biggest problem. The cost of college, even the state schools, was too much for the family to fund. Even with Pell grants and other scholarships it was just too much.

We did offer them some scholarships that we funded personally. Some of the students dropped out after their freshman year. We even had some athletes who got partial scholarships that did not last. Some of the South Carolina colleges, both public and private, had terrible 4-year graduation rates. One of them, a state school, had a 4-year graduation rate of 14.5%.

The “Corridor of Shame” refers to the rural school districts in South Carolina along route 95. It was part of a short documentary about education in South Carolina by Pat Conroy, whose book is about his teaching in Daufuskie Island. Most of the school districts in that area were predominantly African American.

It is difficult to describe the pervasive racism in South Carolina. It is not hidden. It is all on the surface. As members of the NAACP, Carol and I saw it everywhere–from gerrymandering of voting districts to the daily treatment of the African-American community. The neglect of human capital in South Carolina is astounding. Those in charge do not see education as an important economic development tool. Nor do they consider the tragic waste of human potential that is the result of neglecting education.

Here is an example of the blatant racism we saw. A good friend of ours–a person with a doctorate who teaches at a university—would always ask us to call to make restaurant reservations. She also asked that we call stores to get information about products. The rude treatment she received at car dealerships and local stores was beyond our comprehension. Of course, she is Black.

The children had to climb huge barriers compared to most students in the United States to get to college. It is a wonder to Carol and me that any of them were able to do it. We are so proud of some of them who not only got through school but went on to get master’s degrees. We are still not sure if we made a difference, but we tried. 

We are proud of our mentees. Some have climbed over the barriers to achieve success. Jeremiah comes from a wonderful family with few resources. He is the first of his siblings to go to college. He is a phenomenal football player and an even better student. He hopes to play in the NFL in a few years. He graduated from Hampton University and is studying for his master’s degree in logistics at Alabama State. He has one year of football eligibility. To complete his college degree, he took 21 credits in his final semester and was saddened when he got one B+ instead of all As.

Irvin was the valedictorian in his senior year at Ridgeland Hardeeville High School. He was also the drum major in the band, among many extracurricular activities. He went to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida. He applied for a job at Boeing. It took a year and some to get his security clearance. While he was waiting, he worked in construction. He now works at Boeing in Virginia on things he cannot tell me about.

Rashamel is closer to us than any of the other students. We have known him for 10 years. He is not only a fine student but a wonderful basketballl player. When he was in high school, he wrote for the local newspaper. They seem to have been written by a professional. His post-high school years were confounded by advice he got from his coaches to go to a community college in Rochester, New York. The school was set up for basketball. Since Rashamel was not an inner-city African American, his coach had no clue about how to approach him. He was placed in remedial courses. He got As and A+s. However, since these courses were non-credited, he was behind 15 credits when he left. He spent two years at South Carolina State, an HBCU, and did well academically. He did not enjoy playing there. He finally left and had a great year at Pfeiffer University in North Carolina. He is now taking his master’s degree in sports psychology and working two jobs in Augusta, Georgia.

Lakiasa entered the service because she did not know what she wanted to do in college. She enlisted in the Army where she was trained to help military personnel deal with financial problems. In the Army, she realized that she had grown up very poor. Her Army experience taught her how to handle money. In the three years that she has been in the Army, she has purchased her first car and is the only one in her family who has bought a house. Because she likes to help people, she has made plans to study and become a radiology technician.

Lataye went to a leadership camp between her sophomore and junior year in high school, sponsored by Clemson University. It was the first time she had seen a waterfall, went swimming in a lake, and sat around a campfire singing songs. As a result of that experience, she was determined to go to college. She was studying to be a teacher when she was invited to be a volunteer in the college’s lab school, where she taught math to fifth graders and followed them through their eighth grade year. She made the honor society’s

Geovana was her family’s interpreter. She was expected to go to college. She thought seriously about becoming an attorney. She now wants to be a peduatrician. She is working in a dermatologist’s office for the summer. She will spend a post-college year working while studying for the MCATS.

In the Fall of 2023, I was afflicted with chronic kidney disease. It came to a point where I was about to have dialysis. The only good hospital in the state was in Charleston. They invented a procedure that allowed me to get back to normal.

However, our children insisted that we move closer to them. We went up to Massachusetts to look around for a place that was close to our daughter. We found a continuous care community and moved in on October 23, 2024. We have been there ever since.

As I said, we are still in contact with many of the students we mentored and try and help out any way that we can. We are also in contact with a number of families. Many of them are still not doing well. We hope that the future holds more positive results for them. We miss them all.

​

 

Categories Funding, Poverty, Rural Schools, South Carolina, Students

John Thompson: Trump’s “One Big Ugly Bill” Will Kill Millions of People And Won’t Save Money

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2025 //
4

Trump (or more likely, his puppetmaster Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Budget and Management [OMB]) pulled the wool over the eyes of the Republicans who control Congress.

Trump insisted that he would rein in the budget; he brought in Elon Musk and his Kiddie Corps, to shut down vital functions of the federal government and pare the federal workforce. But Trump’s newly enacted budget adds at least 3 trillions to the deficit.

But first a word about Russell Vought. He was the primary author and editor of Project 2025, which is a blueprint for Trump’s second term. He worked at the far-right Heritage Foundation before the election. Now as director of OMB, he holds the most consequential job in the federal government. OMB decides which programs are priorities and which are not, which need more funding and which do not.

To understand the Trump administration’s policies and goals, read Project 2025. During the campaign, Trump pretended to know nothing about Project 2025. He lied.

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the real human costs of this evil plan.

He writes:

Even though my primary focus is on public education, I have been concentrating on President Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which is estimated to increase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion, or more. 

My biggest concerns, however, were budget cuts that will likely result in the world-wide loss of untold millions of lives. For instance, even before Trump dramatically increased the subsidies for fossil fuel production, and undercut non-fossil fuel production, it was estimated that by 2049 global warming would cost the global economy $38 trillion per year, and that over 2 billion years of healthy lives would be lost by 2050.

Moreover, Robert F. Kennedy’s attacks on medical science and vaccines could result in pandemics that cost millions of lives. In fact, Kennedy’s attacks on Gavi vaccines would undermine a public health process which would likely save an estimated 8 million lives across the world by 2030.     

And it is estimated that the USAID programs Trump cut “have saved over 90 million lives over the past two decades.” It is now estimated that by 2030 those cuts could cost the lives of 14 million people.

Since the Trump plan passed through Congress, I’ve been catching up on the interconnected ways that it undermines education.

As Chalkbeat reported, this bill:

Slashes spending on Medicaid, which provides health insurance to some 37 million children and is a critical revenue source for schools. It also limits eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides food assistance to over 13 million children and makes kids automatically eligible for free meals at school.

Its revised tax credit will hurt an additional two million children. 

Moreover, the cuts will hurt the funding of hospitals and other medical service providers.

And anti-immigration raids will increase chronic absenteeism rates, and “have significant effects on children’s physical and mental health, as well as on broader school climate.”

And that brings me back to the damage done to Oklahoma students. As the Oklahoma Voice reports:

The Trump administration is indefinitely withholding more than $70 million in federal education programs meant for Oklahoma students and educators, including money for teacher development, English learners, after-care programs and migrant children.

Every day I hear about the results caused by threats to the $15.68 million that were authorized, but not delivered for before- and after-school programs, and the “$6.43 million dedicated for the 13% of Oklahoma students learning English as their non-native language.” 

In the Oklahoma City Public Schools, for instance, “47% of students are learning English as their second language. The district expected $1.1 million in federal revenue from Title III, which supports English learners.”

Finally, I recently attended the OK Justice Circle’s Breaking Bread with the Hispanic Community where educators and service providers described the cruelty that Hispanic students were facing. For instance, as a panelist was leaving for the conference, a student told her that she is studying the Holocaust. The student was worried about the tragedies that immigrants like her were experiencing, and how awful they could become.

The educator further explained that a big majority of her students are Hispanic. Due in large part to the current deportation campaign, at times, absenteeism has surged to 30% to 40%. And many students come to school every day with their birth certificates in the backpack in case they have to face raids by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The panelists explained how deportations of family members have produced a surge in the wide, interconnected, and painful crises that undermine student learning.

One of the services that schools can provide is referring students and families to nonprofit and public institutions. In an especially revealing set of discussions, educators described their “do-s and don’t-s” when sharing immigration information with patrons. 

But those statements are based on trust in the law and procedures that ICE agents are required to follow.  Today, it was agreed, it is hard to trust the immigration process.

As I struggled to reach the best possible emotional balance when evaluating the brutality imposed on children, families, and people across the world, I received a message from the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. It’s Executive Director, Colleen McCarty, expressed the frustration that I continually hear:

Congress passed the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—a piece of legislation wrapped in soundbites and flag pins—that will strip thousands of Oklahomans of life-saving healthcare. It will supercharge Immigration and Customs Enforcement, giving new power and resources to deport millions of people, tear families apart, and criminalize human existence based on borders and skin color. 

But she is committed to “stand in one courtroom fighting for freedom,” even though she leaves “to find the government systematically dismantling it on the largest scale imaginable.” 

We also must continue to fight both legal and political battles in defense of our democracy.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Funding, Health, Science, Trump
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