Archives for category: Health

Last Words from the Late Vivian Connell

April 16, 2026 //

I first met Vivian Connell in 2012 at a conference for legislators in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was part of a panel of North Carolina teachers who spoke about the challenges and needs of their classrooms. She was brilliant and articulate. I later learned that she was both a lawyer and a teacher. I was impressed by her candor, her insight, her passion, and her deep connection to her students.

That happened to be the same year that the Network for Public Education was founded.

Four years later, the Network decided to hold its annual conference in North Carolina. The decision was controversial because the state legislature (the General Assembly) had just passed a bathroom bill requiring that everyone must use the bathroom aligned with their assigned gender at birth. HB2 was known as Hate Bill 2. Some thought we should avoid North Carolina, others said we should show up.

We decided to stay in North Carolina (had we canceled at the last minute, we would have gone bankrupt), and our decision was reinforced when our dear friends in the state were able to persuade the Reverend William Barber to be our keynote speaker.

Rev. Barber was indeed eloquent, and we were glad we decided to stand by our original decision to meet in Raleigh. Funnily enough, the major hotel we stayed in had three kinds of bathrooms: women’s, men’s, and gender neutral. I wondered if the General Assembly knew. Had it occurred to them that HB 2 was unenforceable unless they had an inspector at every public bathroom to visually inspect either birth certificates or genitalia.

One prominent North Carolinian was missing from our conference: Vivian Connell.

Vivian lived about an hour away but she couldn’t travel. She had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes physical degeneration and has no cure.

At the end of the last session, on April 17, 2016, several of us joined Bertis Downs to pay a visit to Vivian. Bertis is from Georgia; Colleen Wood is from Florida; Phyllis Bush, now deceased from cancer, was from Indiana; and I am from New York.

Surrounding Vivian at her home, Mr, Bertis Downs, Colleen Wood and Phylis Bush. Vivian, in her wheelchair, holds a first edition of one of her favorite books.

When we arrived at Vivian’s home, we met her husband Paul, her children Hadley and Hagan, and her aide. Vivian was in a wheelchair. She had no physical mobility and could not speak. She was able to communicate via an amazing device. She “typed” by looking at letters on a computer screen, which then expressed words. A member of our group gave her a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, one of her favorite books. Her husband announced that he was taking the kids to see Hamilton, their favorite show (they had memorized the lyrics.)

Soon after she received her diagnosis of ALS, she began writing a blog called “finALS.” When she began, she was still fully mobile. She documented her activities, checking off the items on her bucket list, and describing her deteriorating condition.

What follows is her final blog, which she wrote after we visited. We know that every word was laboriously written in a transfer from her eyes to the machine.

I hope you read it. You wil get a sense of her beautiful soul, which could conquer any obstacle but ALS.

One Last Time

[Prelude: It is June 24th, and I have at last finished my final post for finALS. It is not the masterpiece I dreamed of writing, but I am not a writer, and it is from my heart. This Monday, my medical team, husband and I will explore palliative sedation to manage the terrible choking and gagging that now dominate my waking hours. Some people adapt; some never wake up.

Before I go, I must spotlight my husband, Paul Connell, who has, from the beginning, eschewed any limelight. Never has a spouse been more constant or devoted. And though we each have big personalities that clash, he has never wavered in his devotion or care.

I dedicate all I have accomplished in law school and after my diagnosis to Paul, without whose selflessness, I could have done little.

VRC]

Well, I am back at last.

My doctor has called in hospice and used the phrase “last few months.”

And I have been paralyzed by the composition of this post.

You should all thank my writer friend David Klein that you are not reading my original idea. It involved stories of seeing Ken Burns speak in 2008–a version replete with quotations and commentary, I assure you–of how I wove segments from my beloved TV favorite, Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, into my teaching (again, with no shortage of inspirational anecdotes) and of how I discovered that the author and star of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, shares my love for the show.

But this is not to be an artful feature delineating again the ideals that inspired my teaching or the late-life leap to law school that validated my life’s work and filled the 27 months since I was diagnosed with ALS with wonder and opportunity. And I would love to regale you with the story of my Network for Public Education friends and colleagues visiting my home with both a signed first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird ( I know, right?) and my education policy hero, Diane Ravitch. I want to describe the tears of joy I cried when they left and the tears of joy my family enjoyed when we were gifted tickets to Hamilton! My husband wept because I couldn’t go. I bawled like a baby because they could.

And I want to tell you how my daughter ended up with an older script of Hamilton that Miranda had given to a journalist!

But this is not another post about serendipitous meetings and virtually miraculous joy that have so fully packed my life since I was diagnosed with this heinous, degenerative, and terminal disease.

I have covered my blessings pretty well.

These are to be my final words. Not a lesson from a dying teacher. Not an argument from a dying lawyer.

But one last time to attempt candor and artless honestly about my passions, my regrets, and wishing that this cup could be taken from me.

A LAST LITERARY LESSON

It feels important as well that I not leave anyone thinking too highly of me.

I was blessed to accomplish much I am proud of, mainly because I genuinely bought in to the best ideals of those before me and found the courage to follow my callings–to strive always to do more and do better.

Deepest thanks to my teachers and heroes.

I would be terribly remiss, however, if I failed to share at least a few of my representative fears and failings.

I’ve thought often of Hawthorne’s exhortation in The Scarlet Letter:

“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”

While I will not spend this post mimicking the poor guilty minister’s self-flagellation (you’re welcome), I will be sharing some of my less admirable choices. In retrospect, in fact, I am certain that my shame and regret–my failures–motivated me to keep striving to do better.

A loud conscience is a benefit, I think. At long as it brings about striving to do better rather than paralysis via self-loathing.

I diverge from many of my progressive parent friends because I take to heart that a reasonable and loving authority figure is healthy and character building.

I have no regrets about that aspect of my parenting: I think my kids knew that we rode them because we love them.

And I think this model is more effective when I ride myself equally.

And I encourage you not to procrastinate or ignore an urge to change or do better. Following these feelings brought all the most rewarding experiences of my life. And though I am far from done–though I have more public ( political) and private ( personal) battles to wage and improvements to make, I am out of time. And terribly sad about it.

So emulate the best of the heroes in Hamilton, our flawed founding fathers–yes, many of whom were paternalistic slave owners, but–who genuinely wanted to do better. The tireless work of Diane Ravitch, who once embraced the errant ideology of the failed Bush education mandate, No Child Left Behind (newsflash: many of our most vulnerable populations were “left behind”) but who now is standard-bearer for Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post, hundreds of leading education researchers, and hundreds of thousands of teachers and parents who are committed to the civic imperative of excellence and equity in public education.

And maybe even me: a self-absorbed, working-class only child who grew up oblivious to her privilege, pursuing only middle-class self-interest, but who learned through education and experience to change…

… To strive to be better, and in so doing, lived an adult life that makes it much less difficult to face death.

ON FAITH

I know my redeemer lives.

I did not embrace this belief until I was 28. And it is and has been the greatest gift of my life. I thank G-d for making him/herself real to me.

Every worthwhile accomplishment of my life–especially my love for my students and my passion for justice and tolerance–came from my faith.

My worst failings–especially my impatience, a hardness on others to live up to my (unjustified) expectations, and my intolerance for the intolerant–come from my failures to live out my faith.

I am grateful for forgiving friends and a forgiving G-d.

Regrets: Though I raised my children in church and strove to find churches that reflected the love of Jesus of Nazareth rather than the rules of so much organized religion, I never really prioritized participation in my church communities.

We moved several times when my kids were small, and I never fought hard enough to find the right church–a place that worked for social justice and where I could be confident that any person I invited would feel welcomed and loved for who they were.

For a couple of years, I asked my husband for us to tithe on our net, but I worried too much about birthday parties, vacations, activities, and home lifestyle to put giving first.

No Regrets: I did keep trying though, and about a year before leaving Charlotte, I bit the bullet and began shlepping my family to Warehouse 242, a place where I once saw one of my gay/trans high school students visit, and knew I had made the right decision! And when we moved to Chapel Hill, I at last found United Church of Chapel Hill, an open and affirming church community that focuses on serving “the least of these,” is active in the North Carolina Moral Monday movement for social justice, and actively promotes racial equity.

Despite my failures to live out my faith as I would have hoped, I was gifted lifelong friendship with several teens I led in a small group at a church in Charlotte that was much too legalistic for my comfort. I think I won these friendships because I never lied to the girls. I acknowledged the dissonance they perceived between the Jesus they knew or wanted to know and the legalism of our church and /or the politics of their parents.

Somehow I always respectfully challenged those I believe misrepresented the G-d who made himself real to me.

And for that, no regrets.

I do apologize to those with whom I disagreed, but failed to always love or respect. For example, the three arrogant social conservatives who poisoned my law school class: I held my ground against you in public, but I’m afraid I also referred to you surreptitiously as the unholy trinity.

And Andrew Brown, if you wonder why you practically had to rewrite your Law Review piece in which you demonized homosexuals and their rights as adoptive parents, well, that was me spending over twenty hours to eviscerate your pseudo-academic arguments and discredit your sources.

Oh, and Andrew, if you were my student and had used brackets to skew a quote to dishonestly promote your argument, I would have disciplined you to the outer boundaries of academic protocol.

Did you see what I did there?

I showed you that I enjoy kicking over the moneylenders’ tables in the temple a bit too much.

I think I was called to be a fighter, but I don’t think I always fought with love and humility.

May we all seek truth and justice while simultaneously striving to love our enemies as they are loved.

G-d help us all. S/he loves when we try and shows us unlimited forgiveness. This I know, and for this I am grateful.

ON RACE

It’s been a major issue in my life. And one I hate to leave on the table. Along with money in politics, corporate personhood, and the future of public education.

And so I find myself thinking of Greensboro.

The legendary lunch counter sit-ins.

This North Carolina city is now home to the Racial Equity Institute. My principal at Phoenix Academy, the alternative high school, sagely invested in each of his employees by sending us to the two-day introductory seminar of REI. The main reaction of attendees is “life-changing.” No guilting or emotional manipulation in sight, but two days of systematic realities steeped in history and taught by a diverse and largely dispassionate team. They are not crusading, but if you are interested in the statistics–the outcomes for people of color in health care, financial services, law enforcement, education, and other social structures, then they have the facts.

If you are ready and willing to face the not-so-just realities.

And Greensboro is also the home of my former law school classmate and honors writing scholar, Jessica. She married an African-American man, and they have three of the most beautiful biracial children I have ever seen. And though she has been busy with three children under five, she has come to Chapel Hill and fed me and my family on multiple occasions, and today she drove round-trip from Greensboro so that I could meet her two-month-old daughter before she had to pick up her toddler boys … or be charged a dollar a minute.

When I see the videos of those bad apples in law enforcement dragging black teenage girls in swimsuits to the ground or toppling one out of her school desk, or arresting Sandra Bland, I think of Jessica’s daughter. When I see the statistics and remember the stories of everything from violence to injustice to mere humiliation endured by my former students and my friends, I think of all our citizens of color and the ugly truth of Americans who must raise their children in fear.

And I hurt for white America, too many of whom deny the reality of our country’s latent and simmering injustice to so many people of color.

A child of the Deep South born in 1964 to parents raised on farms and in rental shacks around Vidalia, Georgia, I was lucky.

My parents taught me the right words:

Don’t judge people by skin color.
Everyone should be treated equally.
Don’t use the N-word.

But there were no black kids in my Mississippi elementary school and no black families in my neighborhoods… ever.

And the bulk of my south Georgia relatives never got the N-word memo.

By high school, I was passively non-racist but had never had a non-white friend.

Regrets : My worst memories…

When I was a high school sophomore, some popular girls I longed to befriend me asked me to go out after the football game. We got sundaes at the McDonald’s, and one had a hair in it. And so we circled round to request a replacement. Four privileged white girls in nice clothes carrying their generous allowances and riding in a parent’s new sedan. When we returned to the drive-thru, my new friend spoke into the speaker to the African-American girl at the window: “We need another sundae, and this time, hold the ni–er hair.”
I alone didn’t laugh, but I also didn’t speak up or get out of the car. And I still burn with shame at the memory.

No regrets: Junior year University, I brought my roommate home for Thanksgiving. I did not even think to tell my parents she was black. But when my poor mother said that she was afraid of what the neighbors would think, I stood up.

Dr. Anne Sharp, Dr. Albert Somers, Dr. Zach Kelehear and the wonderful English and Education professors unmasked the systematic racism of our education systems and even our very linguistics.

Never in my teaching career could I say “with liberty and justice for all” without adding “someday, if we all work for it.”

I am proud to have passed these lessons to my students and to reap the harvest of watching them work for a more just society. And of course, the root of the problem is not race alone, but the evil human propensity to divide ourselves by skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and myriad other traits. We declare our own group best or righteous, then marginalize and scapegoat “the other.” And in doing so, we undermine the promises of equality in both our Declaration and Constitution. We also fail to love our brothers as ourselves. As shared before, here is the story of my finest hour. Which I pray will counter the all-too-prevalent voices of evil flourishing in our political, and even religious arenas.

I have celebrated the election of our first biracial president only to witness a stunning political backlash and obstruction. I have witnessed racial attacks on President Obama and even his family. I witnessed the police attacks on black men and women, and the overtly racist slaughter in a Charleston church.

And now I have seen the most openly racist candidate become the GOP nominee for the upcoming presidential election. Ken Burns shares my concerns.

But:

I go with hope.

My children mirror my generational progress. My professors at UNC Law and the leaders in my church are standing up… and long have been. And oh, my amazing law school classmates, at so many centers and organizations, working for true equality for all.

I am so grateful to know them all. And to see Ta-Nehisi Coates win a genius grant. And to see Hamilton become the greatest Broadway sensation with a predominantly non-white cast portraying our crusty white founding fathers.

My hope is that America’s majority culture can admit that it is harder to be a person of color here and that this reality does not comport with our ideals.

For soon after that tipping point, this ugly reality will cease to be part of our identity.

“Someday… If we all work for it.”

ON LAW & POLITICS

I am failing fast: my abilities to swallow and breathe are plummeting. I will therefore need to be succinct and, hopefully compelling in this potentially off-putting yet crucial section.

REGRETS:

In 1981 I told my A.P. English teacher that I was apolitical. Though I doubt I knew that term. I’m sure my arrogance was less articulate.

I believe I made this claim because she asked me a question about politics, and I was far too self-involved to watch even the evening news, and so I could not give a knowledgeable answer to her question.

But I remember her upbraiding, partly because she was right, and partly because this truth haunted me and grew in me for decades.

She called bullshit like only a legendary, scholarly, and terrifying old English teacher who has been setting entitled little snots straight for decades can.

She looked me in the eyes and told me not delude myself. For we are all political. She described how almost all of our choices–where we shop, what we buy, where we live, where we educate our children–are all political actions. The only question, she assured me, was whether these choices would be informed decisions or whether I would be too lazy to become informed.

I am loath to admit how slow I was on this curve.

No regrets: During college, life abroad, graduate school, and almost two decades of teaching, I never forgot the clarion truth of Ms. Braswell’s words. I only wish that I had been more informed and much more civically active sooner.

Two tough truths I learned along the way:

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
― Paulo Freire
“Allowing the ratio of time we spend enjoying our freedom, wealth, and justice to materially surpass the time we spend preserving those blessings virtually guarantees they will diminish, or even be lost while we are not looking.” – Vivian Connell

When I came to UNC Law in 2010, North Carolina was a moderate state, considered progressive for the South. The Triangle of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill topped lists of best places to live in America.

But then moderates and progressives busy enjoying this status looked away, and paid a disastrous price when dark money flipped our General Assembly to the radical right. It hadn’t happened in a century, but it happened the moment citizens disengaged from civic attentiveness. We have seen national model education programs dismantled, and our voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, and, most recently HB2,”the Bathroom Bill,” have pitted us against federal authorities and made us a national laughingstock.

Of course, these developments are no joke to the poor without health care, to minorities facing all kinds of discrimination, or to public school teachers and advocates who have seen their resources and rankings plummet.

Here are a few of the fights that must be fought when citizens in a democracy cannot be bothered with the work of politics:

Me, just out of law school in 2013

NPR

The U.S. Department of Justice

It is really this simple: you are political whether you knowingly control the influence you wield or whether you cede your power to others through superficial participation or non-participation.

Informed participation, though. How the hell does one manage it?

Where can one find the truth untainted by special interests?

Obviously, by reading and viewing a variety of sources, some of which do not rely upon special interests for funding.

And if you become frustrated by how “they” have made terrible laws or skewed public policy in a way in which you disapprove, you might want to become one of “them.” I did, and I sought to get to the heart of the democratic process by attending law school.

Now would be a good time to be succinct.

The gravamen of almost every issue demands that we prioritize either our ideals or our economy. And while we need to maintain our economy, there are two essential ways that we have prioritized money to an extent that it is undermining our democracy.

money in politics
quarterly capitalism

Money in politics

Because of a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United–often named along with Dred Scott, Plessy, and Bush v. Gore as the potentially worst Court decision ever–uber-wealthy entities can buy elections.

We must support campaign finance reform so that ideas determine victors. We must find, recruit, and elect representatives who will govern for the greater good. We must recognize and reject empty rhetoric in superficial, soundbite ads.

When one of our most conservative representatives challenged Democratic senator Kay Hagan in 2014, I agreed to act as spokesperson in a $3 million ad buy for the NEA. I loathed the simplistic script because I knew Thom Tillis’s record on education and would have vastly preferred an hour-long, fact-based debate on a website that would not have cost the educators I represented a penny.

But the National Rifle Association outspent the teachers, and Tillis won by roughly a percentage point. I wrote about it for Salon.

I pray that with Citizens United‘s author, Justice Antonin Scalia, deceased and the legion of young Sanders supporters, the coming years will see true campaign finance reform. The reality of special interests and corporations disproportionately deciding ought to horrify anyone who loves this country and the truly democratic ideals for which it stands.

Or consider the words of the inimitable Andy Borowitz.

Quarterly capitalism

My Business Associations class–a course called Corporations at some law schools– enlightened me as to the core legal atrocity that undermines the ability of American companies to contribute to not only our economy but also to the greater good of our society.

Do you wonder why so few corporate officers or companies ever pay for their bad, or virtually fraudulent choices? It’s because our laws protect them from virtually any risk they take. If they can concoct any rationale that their risk was a potential money maker for share holders, then they are protected.

Worst, this singular focus on immediate profit means that corporate leaders face not only disincentive but potential lawsuits should they wish to take a longer and broader view of corporate citizenship. The law prevents them from investing in worker training, more research and development, community betterment, education enhancement, programs to reward and protect their consumer base, or other forward-looking ideas that would enrich all of the corporation’s constituents.

Please listen to this indictment of this system, in which corporate officers decline to consider actions for the long-term benefit of their companies and their constituents–investors, workers, clients, neighbors, and their habitat–if doing so might mean dropping even one penny off their stock price for the quarter.

Thus, we have codified greed and outlawed wisdom.

Our companies should make more than money. They should enrich their communities, workers, business, and society.

Even our Judeo-Christian tradition tells us of a year of jubilee in which debts were forgiven and indentured servants freed. And while I suggest nothing so radical, I insist that we must reform our corporate law AND adhere to financial reforms in Dodd-Frank if we are to retain a robust middle class and remain a society in which business serves people, and not vice versa.

If you can, see Robert Reich’s Inequality for All.

ON EDUCATION

My heart aches. Other than wife and mother, I have predominantly been a public school teacher. It hurts and angers me to see what special interests and the last two administrations, Bush and Obama, have done to this cherished civic responsibility.

It is funny–not “ha-ha” funny, of course–that I wanted this to be the richest section, a big finale, but it is likely to be the most truncated. I am sleeping more each day and struggling to swallow and breathe during the hours I am awake. And as much as I might write about various policy initiatives, like charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, and especially the insidious philosophy of market-based reform (that would have us apply profit-making principles to the complex, subtle, and sacred art of educating our populace), I want to get to the core.

REGRETS:

I have spent over three hours this morning working with my hospice nurse, my saint of a caregiver husband, my tireless and loyal assistant, to clear my secretions and stop this horrific gagging and choking, so I regret leaving this section for last!

But seriously, folks…

I regret failing to integrate the promotion of civic engagement during the early years of my teaching. It certainly distinguished the final years of my career, and I am grateful to have lived to see so many of my students become teachers, lawyers and activists.

No Regrets:

The hundred-plus emails and messages from students, the tens of visits ( most from Charlotte to Chapel Hill) made by students and even a couple of parents who helped unpack from my move (Jodi Brown) and even execute a plethora of retirement and insurance documents to assure our children’s trust would be the beneficiary (Hallie Hawkins) are major blessings. A couple of weeks ago, two young women visited– including one who feels a profound connection with my daughter, for which I am so delighted – – and when we had a nurse cancel, they cared for me like I was their own mother.

I hope this means that they know I really loved them.

Even when overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, and demeaned by many who genuinely believe that “those who can’t, teach, ” I regret not even one day I spent in the classroom.

Closing comments about education policy:

First, in lieu of embarking upon a treatise on education policy, I’ll let a passionate young history teacher who just marched to Raleigh to practice civil disobedience tell the story in a much more engaging manner.

And if You wish to remain informed about public education and align yourself with one of the most important social movements of the age, follow Diane Ravitch and support The Network for Public Education. They will be on the right side of history.

I am most concerned with all schemes to create “for-profit” charters for K-12 education. A quick Google search of charter school and fraud yields over 1 million results. Which makes sense: as you will remember from our discussion of quarterly capitalism, businesses exist to serve their owners. (If anyone wants to read my rather prescient Law Review note eviscerating corruption in for-profit higher education.

Can any first-rate, moral country exist and thrive without providing its citizenry with quality education?

I want my final commentary to address the purpose of education, a topic which ought be at the heart of every education debate yet which too often parents, businessmen, and the general populace presume to be settled.

But is the goal of education to produce a workforce or enlightenment? Should it indoctrinate children to sustain and succeed within the status quo or to challenge what is and strive ever for progress, even if change is painful?

As a country born of revolution and the Enlightenment, our answer must be the latter. Every educated citizen should have a working understanding of our government, as well as a belief that their civic engagement is essential to maintaining our democracy and that they can make a profound difference in their worlds.

Children in our best schools already come away with this understanding. Unfortunately, many of today’s education reformers are powerful business entities and politicians who would defund the liberal arts.

North Carolina governor Pat McCrory made the following telling remark: Liberal arts Programs, he said, ought to continue, but not receive government subsidies.

Let me translate: If you are wealthy enough to attend a prestigious private university, then you may study whatever you like: anthropology, minority Literature, developing political systems, gender studies, dance. But if not, you ought to be required to study subjects that promote the economic interests of those in power–business, technology, and skill majors. The goal of the education haves can be enrichment; the education have-nots will be herded into a compliant labor force.

Governor McCrory did not mention that his undergraduate degree from a private school is in philosophy.

Or that the majority of U.S. senators majored in the liberal arts. So did the majority of lawyers.

The study of history, Literature and the arts inspires and empowers, and it must remain accessible to all. And all of our public schools must equitably prepare every child to pursue his or her calling, whatever it may be.

And as long as there exist schools in our communities that are not considered good enough for some children, yet which remain the only option for other kids, we must acknowledge that the playing field of the American dream is not level.

And that until it is, we continue to fall short of justice for all.

Finally, most of you will have heard of “the achievement gap”–the disparity in educational outcomes between the predominantly successful students and those who fail to thrive or become functional members of society. Researchers have long (and largely accurately) identified poverty as the key demographic of “failing schools.”

But about a year ago, a Gallup poll found a more specific predictor of academic success: hope. And the miracle of Tangelo Park has born out the truth of this finding.

These poor minority students–kids many middle-class and affluent parents don’t want their kids to have to go to school with–suddenly began graduating at over 95 percent, one of the best in the country. Why?

Because they knew that if they got into college, they could go. It would be paid for. They were given the power to win in a system stacked against them.

They were given hope.

And none of us should rest until every American child has that hope.

GOODBYE

I have arrived at the end time of this disease, and it is horrific as they say. As I struggle not to choke and gag, I do wish that I had fewer regrets. Of course, these wishes that I had been a better wife, mother, and friend are tempered by all the love and mercy with which I have been blessed.

I want to thank the many amazing and generous people who have helped us in too many ways to innumerate. And thank the thousands of you who have read and shared my blog ; I am deeply honored that anyone has found value, comfort, or inspiration in my words.

May G-d bless and keep you all.

As I often told my students, few of us will be a Mother Teresa or a Hitler, but we will each make the world a little better or worse.

May we all strive to make it better. May we engage responsibly in the miraculous gift of our democracy and support public-interest lawyers and entities working for social justice. It feels so much better than following thoughtlessly in consumerism and self-interest.

History has its eyes on us all.

And as for death, I will quote Grandpa Blakeslee from Olive AnnBurns’s novel, Cold Sassy Tree: “Hit’s what you get for living.”

And though ALS is one of the worst demises imaginable, I’ll take the trade.

Love,

Vivian

P. S. I will be listening to the beautiful Gilead, the Harry Potter audio books as well as all my favorite playlists. (As Dumbledore says, “Ah music. A magic beyond all we do.”) My whole family will be listening to Hamilton–and how lucky I was to be alive right now. And I made it through The West Wing and The Newsroom again. Bless all of you who listened and watched with me, especially my patient and loving husband and my wonderful and Sorkin-savvy children! Thanks also kids for sharing Doctor Who. I would not have missed it for the world.

Categories Character, Courage, Creativity, Ethics, Health, Love, Racism, Religion

A Song About Trump’s Education Policies: “We Believe in Local Control”

By dianeravitch

April 1, 2026 //

A good way to start off April Fool’s Day is by listening to this song by a group of young people in Colorado. The lyrics were written by Kevin Welner and are posted at the website of the National Education Policy Center.

The Trump regime says clearly “We believe in local control.” Except when they don’t.

Trump has issued executive orders about what may or may not be taught. Trump’s executive order #14253, signed on March 27, 2025, was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” What it meant in practice was to censor any teaching or displays that showed the shameful aspects of American history, and to focus instead on “patriotic history.”

Trump has launched a campaign to oust diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as gender studies, African-American studies, and studies of other groups.

Trump has tried to seize control of institutions of higher education institutions by falsely accusing them of anti-Semitism. He has sought to control the admission of students, the curriculum, and the hiring of faculty.

Trump has taken institutions of higher education hostage by withholding or cancelling billions of dollars for research into medicine and science unless they turned control over to the federal government.

But, as the song says, “We believe in local control!”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Higher Education, Lies, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

International Report: Democracy in the USA is in Jeopardy

By dianeravitch

March 27, 2026 //

The Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden, publishes an annual report on the state of democracy around the world. In the recently published report, the authors made clear that democracy in the world is in retreat. Nowhere has it declined as dramatically as in the United States.

A special section of the report is focused on the United States. Under Trump, democracy in the USA is under attack. The President has centralized power in his office. The Republican-dominated Congress has ceded almost all of its Constitutional powers to Trump. The word “almost” may be an overstatement, as it’s difficult to remember an issue when Congress said no to a Presidential power grab.

The V-DEM report begins its special section about the “autocratization” of power in the United States:

*Under Trump’s presidency, the level of democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965.

Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era. In 2025, the derailment of democracy is marked by executive overreach undermining the rule of law, along with far-reaching suppression and intimidation of media and dissenting voices.

*The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.

*Legislative Constraints – the worst affected aspect of democracy – is losing one-third of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years.

*Civil Rights and Equality before the Law are also rapidly declining, falling to late 1960s levels.

*Freedom of Expression is now at its lowest level since the end of WWII.

*Electoral components of democracy remain stable. Election-specific indicators are re-assessed only in electoral years, and the 2025 scores are based on the quality of the 2024 elections.

The scale and speed of autocratization under the Trump administration are unprecedented in modern times. Within one year, the USA’s LDI score has declined by 24%; its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations. The level of democracy on the LDI is dwindling to 1965 level – the year that most regard as the start of a real, modern democracy in the USA.

Yet the deficiencies of American democracy today are fundamentally different from that of the Civil Rights era. As the V-Dem data and other evidence below show, the autocratization now is marked by executive overreach, alongside attacks on the press, academia, civilliberties, and dissenting voices.

The Most Dramatic Decline in American History

In 2023, the USA scored 0.79 on the LDI – shortly before the 2024 election year when first deteriorations were registered. The scores plummeted to 0.57 in 2025 (Figure 22). With such a sharp drop on the LDI, the level of democracy at the end of 2025 is back to the 1965 level. Symbolically, that is the year that most analysts consider the USA began its transition to a real democracy.

Democracy in the USA is now at its worst in 60 years. We are not alone in this assessment. Professor Steven Levitsky at Harvard University says the regime in the USA is now some type of authoritarianism. The Century Foundation argues that “American democracy is already collapsing…”

By magnitude of decline on the LDI, the 2025 plunge is the largest one-year drop in American history going back to 1789 – that is, in the entire period covered by V-Dem data. Only Trump 1.0 compares, when the LDI in the USA fell from 0.85 to 0.73 in four years, bringing the country back to its 1976 level and far below the regional average (Figure 22). American democracy survived Trump 1.0 but did not recover fully.

One notable shift is the transformation of the Republican Party to endorsing a far-right, nationalist, and anti-pluralist agenda. Nationalist, anti-liberal, far-right parties and leaders have largely driven the “third waveof autocratization.” Yet the USA stands out as the only case where such movement seized control over one party in a rigid two-party system.

Please open the link and read the report to review the sources and to understand how dramatically democracy has been undercut during the first year of Trump’s second term.

The Founding Fathers thought they had written a Constitution that would prevent the rise of tyranny. They were wrong.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, For-Profit, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, Health, Privatization, Separation of church and state, Trump

Trump’s Insane War on Science

By dianeravitch

March 6, 2026 //

The New York Times published this excellent article by Jeneen Interlandi about the Trump administration’s mad effort to defund and distort science. Our nation’s leadership in science has been extraordinary. Our scientists have led the world in discovering cures for diseases, extending the human life span, exploring space and the oceans, and extending the bounds of knowledge. This is a gift article, meaning you can open it without a subscription. You should open it to see the many photographs and illustrations.

Interlandi writes:

Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, science, medicine and public health have been hijacked by a cadre of grifters and ideologues and by the politicians in obvious thrall to both. Federal institutions have been all but dismantled. Researchers have been defunded en masse and the universities that support them deliberately destabilized. Discourse on crucial scientific questions and key public health challenges has been stifled. And along the way, trust has been broken between scientists and the nation’s leaders — and the people that both are supposed to serve.

It’s tempting to view this undoing as temporary. Americans love science and revere innovation, almost as a rule, and politicians of every stripe have spent the better part of a century promoting and protecting both. However imperfect the resulting system was, hardly a modern convenience exists that can’t be traced back to it — central air-conditioning, the internet and ChatGPT; polio vaccines, statins and weight-loss drugs; the human genome sequence and CRISPR gene editing. The National Institutes of Health alone generates about $2.50 in economic returns for every dollar of investment. It’s also the largest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world and until recently was the envy of scientists across the globe.

The president’s attacks on this legacy have been relentless and all encompassing. He has turned the federal health department over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer. For months, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget all but froze operations at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His newly established so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired thousands of civil servants from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a process that was wildly disorganized, frequently unlawful and needlessly cruel. Global health initiatives were also eviscerated.

Stacked against these measures, the administration’s explanations — which focus on cutting waste and eliminating so-called woke politics from science — have been inadequate and disingenuous.

It can be difficult to imagine a future in which American science does not prevail. But, as the president’s many critics have warned, institutions like the C.D.C., F.D.A. and N.I.H. will be far more difficult to rebuild than they have been to destroy — especially if their intended beneficiaries lose all faith in them or forget why they existed in the first place.

The current administration seems to understand as much. Top officials have taken pains to describe the nation’s scientific bodies as corrupt and ineffective and the nation’s scientists as elitist and excessively woke. “Science and public health have achieved much more than current leaders seem to recognize,” said Tom Frieden, the author of “The Formula for Better Health” and president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. “We actually know a lot about how to make America healthier. But very little of that knowledge is in line with what the current administration has done so far.”

Nowhere is this disconnect on fuller display than in the long war against H.I.V. Forty years ago, the infection was a mystery and a death sentence. Today, thanks to a combination of biomedical breakthroughs and diligent, boots-on-the-ground public health (testing, education, robust social safety nets), it is a chronic but manageable condition that really flourishes only among society’s most marginalized groups.

The first Trump administration vowed to finally end the American H.I.V. epidemic no later than 2030 by doubling down on prevention efforts in the hardest-hit communities. The resulting initiative has clearly paid off: Transmission rates are down in the targeted ZIP codes, according to the National Minority AIDS Council, a nonprofit devoted to stopping the virus’s spread. Racial health gaps are narrowing as a result, and because prevention is cheaper than treatment, money is being saved.

The second Trump administration seems determined to reverse course anyway.

On March 20 of last year, Kathryn Macapagal, a clinical psychologist and a faculty researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, was sitting at her in-laws’ dining room table when her phone and laptop began pinging and ringing furiously.

Ping. The Adolescent Trials Network, a huge research apparatus focused on treating and preventing H.I.V. infection in teenagers and young adults, was abruptly closed. The network was responsible for several studies that Macapagal and her colleagues were collaborating on.

Ping. A close colleague’s 10-year study on H.I.V. and substance use in L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers and young adults was suspended. So was another project on reducing H.I.V. risk in relationship.

Ring. Another of her projects, on how to improve the measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal surveys, was also done for. So were at least two fellowship programs for early-career scientists who wanted to specialize, as she did, in L.G.B.T.Q. health and dozens of other projects affecting just about everyone she worked with or knew professionally.

Her husband, Dan Fridberg (also a scientist, also reliant on N.I.H. funding), paced frantically behind her as she announced each new bit of carnage. “At this rate, you’ll be out of a job by dinnertime,” he said. “Oh, my God. What are we going to do?”

“I cannot go there right now,” she replied. She was determined to remain calm. She was also too stunned to panic, although in truth, she was not surprised. Her research sat in just about every one of the administration’s cross hairs: All of her projects included the new red-flag terms, and most of the researchers on her staff fell into at least one disfavored category. All of their salaries (including hers) were reliant on N.I.H. funding, and all of their jobs were now gravely imperiled.

And not just theirs: Federal grants were the lifeblood of academic research. They supported scientists and students, institutes and administrators. They covered overhead costs. It was not uncommon for one person to be funded by several grants, nor was it rare for professors like Macapagal, working at elite universities like Northwestern, to be wholly dependent on grants that had to be renewed every few years. It was a deeply precarious arrangement, sustained for decades by the certainty that, come what may, the federal government would honor its commitments.

When the dust finally settled, four of Macapagal’s grants had been terminated, nearly a quarter of her salary was gone, and a project she had spent many months developing was on seemingly permanent hold. As they struggled to make sense of what was happening, she and her colleagues found themselves drawing grim battlefield analogies: It was as if a bomb had gone off and some of them were dead on the field and others, like her, were maimed. “One colleague who lost everything told me that he thought I actually had it worse,” she said. “Because, you know, if you’re going to die, it’s probably better to do it quickly.”

Of the 1.2 million people living with H.I.V. in the United States, more than 60 percent are Black or Latino. Transgender women, gay and bisexual men and teenagers and young adults of color face the greatest overall risk of contracting the virus in any given year.

Those inequities are no mystery: less access to health care, more social stigma and a negative feedback loop, wherein a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities begets a higher prevalence of the virus in certain communities. But resolving them is no small feat.

In the years leading up to 2025, as she tried to do exactly that, Macapagal was consumed by several thorny challenges. A troubling dichotomy had emerged since the medication that prevents H.I.V. transmission (known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP) first became widely available. Within the gay community, middle-aged white professionals had embraced the treatment as an ordinary component of overall health and wellness. But younger adults, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities still had not.

“It’s not unlike birth control when it was first introduced,” said Jim Pickett, a board member of TaskForce, an L.G.B.T.Q. youth center on Chicago’s West Side and a collaborator of Macapagal’s. “It’s pretty straightforward as a treatment, but it’s attached to all of this cultural baggage that makes it challenging to get across.”

In 2018, when PrEP was approved for adolescent use, Pickett and Macapagal began searching for ways to overcome these challenges. They knew teens would be an especially tough sell. Health care systems intimidated the boldest of them, sexual identities were still developing at that age, and this particular form of protection could easily become a source of embarrassment or even shame.

They enlisted, among others, Skai Underwood, TaskForce’s dance instructor and youth engagement specialist, in their quest.

Underwood, who was assigned male at birth, knew by the age of 5 that she was a girl but did not medically transition until her early 20s. She was intimately familiar with the shame and isolation that gay and transgender people often faced — how even friends and family would signal their rejection when you declared yourself, how that rejection could lead you to retreat inward. Her goal was to help TaskForce teens resist that impulse, so that instead of hiding, they might thrive.

To her, the solution to Macapagal’s public health conundrum was clear: If you wanted to teach teenagers — or anyone else — to take safe sex seriously, you had to convince them that there was something to protect in the first place. “What it really comes down to is self-love,” she told me when I visited TaskForce in November.

With that in mind, she, Macapagal and Pickett created a two-pronged public health initiative called PrEP-4-Teens. The first prong involved a media campaign linking safe sex to empowerment and joy. The second wove an L.G.B.T.Q. sexual education curriculum into a suite of community-building activities. “They basically come together to dance and make art,” Underwood said. “We celebrate queer identity, and then in between all of the fun, we teach them how to protect themselves.”

The program’s early results were promising: Among other things, participants came away with an understanding of PrEP and a sense that it was no more shameful to use than condoms or birth control. But before they could scale it up or study it in greater depth, a new administration began.

On his first days in office, the president issued a flurry of executive orders rolling back transgender rights and bringing federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to an abrupt end. By many accounts, the DOGE officials tasked with carrying out those orders had little to no understanding of the projects they were supposed to evaluate. “They seem to have confused D.E.I., which is about diversifying the work force, with health equity, which is about reducing health disparities in marginalized communities,” Amy Knopf, a professor at Indiana University’s School of Nursing, told me. “They’re making it so that you can’t study certain groups without violating these edicts. But you can’t really tackle H.I.V., or any number of other conditions, without looking at those exact groups.”

In the weeks after the March 20 Massacre (as some of them had taken to calling it), Macapagal and her colleagues began working furiously to cover as much and as many of their salaries as they could. The main conference space morphed into a war room of sorts, as her boss, Brian Mustanski, tried to match any open position or bit of unused grant money he heard of with whichever recently defunded staff member who was qualified.

Macapagal’s job was saved by one colleague who stepped up without even being asked. “We have some money that we’re not using yet and some work that you could definitely do,” the woman explained. “Let me add you to that project.” Macapagal accepted and for many months afterward would tear up just recalling the kindness.

In April the federal government froze some $790 million in funding for Northwestern, without notice or explanation. The university was apparently being accused of antisemitism and racism over its diversity initiatives, but it was unclear whether the freeze was related to those charges, and no one seemed to know when or whether or how the funds would be restored. Researchers would have to tighten their belts as much as possible, university officials explained, while they tried to sort out the situation.

Among other things, the new strictures meant that Macapagal would not be able to pay Pickett for all the work he had done on her projects. He had presided for decades over a community center that prided itself on perseverance, and he took the news in stride. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make do.” But she felt awful.

Nobody outside the scientific community seemed to realize what was happening. Friends and family had all tried to reassure her that everything would be fine in the long run, that she just needed to hang in there until the midterms or the next presidential election. She found it exhausting to explain how irreversible the damage was. They had lost years of research in a matter of weeks. Whole labs had been closed, and successful, decades-long careers ended — and none of it appeared to have anything to do with the quality or import of the research itself. The decisions were political and ideological. They were also arbitrary and needlessly cruel.

Trust had been broken as a result, at just about every level of the scientific enterprise (between study participants and scientists, between scientists and universities and between universities and the federal government). Whatever came next, it seemed extremely unlikely to her that any of them, let alone all of them together, would be able to just pick up where they had left off.

In the meantime, those who were left — the maimed but still breathing — leaned on one another. When they were advised to pre-emptively change the language in their public-facing documents, Macapagal and her colleagues did the edits together, grousing in unison over the aggravation of revising terms like “inclusion criteria” and the moral grossness of erasing the word “transgender” from their work.

It was not the first time their field had been forced to make such compromises; the eldest among them remembered culling words like “gay” and “sex” back in the early 1990s. But this was different. In the past, even if they had to change a word or two, they still got to do their research. Now Macapagal found herself contorting a study on H.I.V. vaccine misinformation (her attempt to get ahead of the hesitancy that had plagued Covid vaccines) into something else entirely.

She found herself making other changes, too, including dyeing her pink hair back to a soft brown. “It might be safer for me to not be so out there with how I look,” she said. Some of her friends and colleagues were taking similar precautions. They were losing facial piercings and gay pride stickers. They were also changing slide deck images to include more white people, even when the conditions they studied did not, for the most part, affect white people. It felt gross because it was gross, but what else could they do? They had families and mortgages and work that they still wanted to complete. They knew people who had been doxxed and threatened — and worse — just for studying gender-affirming care. And they were anxious and, in some cases, afraid.

As spring bled into summer and the university explained that it could no longer provide offices with free coffee or free tissues, Macapagal turned a worried eye to her lab and began doing what she could to help people secure other jobs. It was a risky gamble: If they left and her funding was then restored, she’d be hamstrung. But she thought of the group as a kind of family, and she wanted to protect whomever she could.

Her lab manager, Andrés Alvarado Avila, was here on an H-1B visa, and if his funding was cut, he would have just 60 days to find another job, secure an exception or return to Mexico. Her project coordinator, Zach Buehler, was only a few years out of college. She found herself wondering if it was fair or right to encourage him down a career path whose future looked so bleak. Like many of her lab members, Alvarado Avila and Buehler were gay men. As anachronistic as it sounded, she could not help but worry about what that might mean for their futures, in an America that was less recognizable by the day and that seemed to be coming for them all.

In the past year or so, scientists funded through the National Institutes of Health have developed potential treatments for pancreatic cancer, broken the logjam on Huntington’s disease, shepherded a male birth control pill through clinical trials and saved a baby’s life with the first personalized gene editing procedure. In a different time and place, any one of those breakthroughs would have been hailed as the triumph of an epoch and might have lured a new generation of talent to the cause of scientific research.

Instead, six years after the pandemic began and one year into the second Trump administration, we have the opposite: seasoned scientists fleeing the profession (or the country) and younger prospects deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicines those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.

What seems clear is that Americans have entered a grim new era, one in which science itself is a political weapon, rather than a tool for the collective good. It would be simplistic to argue that the two — science and politics — should be wholly disentangled. (As a human endeavor that involves trade-offs and requires public support, science is inherently political.) But real data and hard, neutral facts still drive the work that most scientists do, and the best of that work should still frame public discourse and, ideally, inform public policy. And right now, it does not.

Last June the F.D.A. approved the latest version of PrEP: an injection that patients would need to receive only twice a year and that appeared to work even better than its predecessors at preventing infection. In July the N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, laid out yet another strategy for eliminating H.I.V. in the United States. Rather than pour limited resources into more basic research, his agency would simply deploy existing PrEP medications. “Why is there any reason to wait?” he asked on his podcast. “Why don’t we just really commit to ending the H.I.V. epidemic, actually doing it with the tool kit we have now?”

The director’s epiphany frustrated H.I.V. specialists. He was right about the import of using existing tools more effectively. But many of them, including Macapagal, had been working on exactly that challenge when Bhattacharya’s agency cut their funding back in March. What’s more, almost all of the current administration’s stances — not only on science but also on health care and public health, immigration and social safety nets — were anathema to his stated goals.

If health officials really wanted to extirpate H.I.V. from the United States, they would increase access to health care, ramp up testing and education and fortify the social safety net.

At every turn, Trump and his deputies did the exact opposite. They tried to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for H.I.V. testing, treatment and prevention services. They cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars and played chicken with Democrats over Affordable Care Act subsidies. They also weakened the social safety net, sowed terror in immigrant communities and upended public health programs just about everywhere.

If those policies persisted, even as the newest PrEP medication was made commercially available, H.I.V. would continue to linger. “Most of what we’ve done to beat back AIDS comes down to this extremely fragile safety net that is right now being destroyed,” Dr. Jon Mannheim, a pediatric H.I.V. specialist who sometimes collaborates with Macapagal, told me when I visited Chicago in November. Illinois was facing one of the largest Medicaid cuts in the nation, and his clinic was already bracing for impact. Among other things, he worried that fewer social workers would be hired for even less pay than before.

Without them, he said, the whole system might collapse. Patients who lost health insurance would have a harder time getting into the fail-safe programs meant to keep them on PrEP (and to keep AIDS at bay). The pregnant women he treated would lose their main point of contact for a whole suite of stabilizing services. “I don’t know how many babies would have to be born with H.I.V. for the federal government to care,” he said. “But I guess we’ll find out.”

In the meantime, his Latin American patients were still avoiding the clinic altogether, months after ICE had descended on the city. He had lost several of them to follow-up care over the summer. The one that troubled him most was a 10-year-old girl from Venezuela who lived in a car with her mother and whose H.I.V. infection might have already progressed to AIDS. “I have not seen her in months,” he said. “She could be dead by now.”

A few miles away in Chicago, the TaskForce community center was facing similar challenges. It had lost some $500,000 in anticipated funding, thanks not only to state and federal budget cuts but also to a new reluctance among donors. “We heard a lot of, ‘Hey, these dollars that we thought that we could give you we actually can’t now, because you’re L.G.B.T.Q., which is a no, and BIPOC, which is also a big no,’” said the center’s director, Chris Balthazar, using an acronym for “Black, Indigenous and people of color.”

It was getting by, but the strain of moving through the world with so many targets on its back was starting to show. One of its regulars, a 15-year-old Haitian boy, had nearly taken his own life after his parents were abruptly deported. And Underwood had detected a new reluctance in some of her L.G.B.T.Q. students. They were not expressing themselves as freely as they did before, she thought. Some mentioned creeping anxieties, when she asked. Others talked about fear.

She wanted to prevent those feelings from dimming the light she saw in each of them, but it was complicated. Self-expression and personal safety could cut brutally against each other for a gay or transgender teen, and a lot of her TaskForce students had bigger worries, in any case. They did not always have enough food to eat or safe places to stay; winter was coming, and they needed warm coats. “It’s OK,” was sometimes all she could think to tell them. “This is nothing new. We’re just going to keep on jumping these hurdles, one at a time, until we’re free and clear.”

By the start of 2026, Macapagal and her colleagues had settled into an uncertain quiet. The university’s funding was unfrozen in December, and thanks to a couple of lawsuits, most of the grants that her group had lost were in the process of being restored. But confusion still reigned: When would that money be disbursed? Would researchers be given additional time to complete their work? What would happen when those grants came up for renewal in the coming year?

No one seemed to know, but the N.I.H. was still expecting annual progress reports from all its grantees in the meantime. “We are supposed to tell them what we did with the money they gave us and what progress we’ve made in our research,” Alvarado Avila explained. “But they did not really give us the money, and our biggest barrier to progress has been them. How do you say that in a way that’s diplomatic?” The institute where Macapagal worked had 30 fewer staff members now and lots of empty offices and cubicles. One conference room had become a storage facility for the H.I.V. and sexually transmitted infection test kits that they had planned to send to study participants.

“These are supplies that your tax dollars paid for, to get people tested for H.I.V. and S.T.I.s in the context of a research study,” Macapagal said. “And now they’re just sitting there, and like any medical kit, they will eventually expire.” She was torn about the future. On the one hand, she could not help but hope. State officials had expressed interest in partnering with her and TaskForce to expand the Prep-4-Teens program, and she had just applied for yet another N.I.H. grant based on the agency’s stated interest in using implementation science to conquer H.I.V.

On the other hand, hope seemed a delusional response to the events of the past year. Word was that new grant applications would ultimately be decided on not by fellow scientists, as had always been the case, but by political appointees who had apparently effectively taken over the N.I.H. Macapagal had spent nearly all of her adult life cultivating expertise in behavioral health and disease prevention and then training the next generation to do the same. She could not help but wonder now what the point of any of that had been.

She still wanted to show up for her team. She believed that the work was important, and she knew that Alvarado Avila, Buehler and their peers were its future. But truth be told, she was also thinking about going into private practice.

Alvarado Avila was holding off on applying to graduate programs for now, in part because prospects were skimpy for noncitizen scientists who wanted to stay in the United States and also because he had watched ICE agents descend on Chicago and raid the communities around him. He had also watched them kill an unarmed woman in Minnesota — who was a mother and a poet and a white U.S. citizen and who happened to be a lesbian — and his heart was sick and he was angry.

“They say that by focusing on marginalized groups, we are discriminating against everyone else,” he said. “But those are the communities most impacted by these issues. They say visa holders like me are stealing jobs from Americans. I don’t think they understand that, one, for a specialty visa, you have to prove to the government that you can do the work and, two, we contribute to a tax system that we have no assurance that we will get back from.”

More and more, he wondered what fighting back looked like and whether it was incompatible with a career that forced you to erase whole categories of people from your work or treat words like “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” as toxins instead of virtues. More and more he wondered if America, where he had lived, studied and worked for most of his life, was still the place for him.

Buehler, for his part, had applied to more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, almost all of them focused on exactly the kind of research he was doing in Macapagal’s lab. “I love this work,” he told me. “I really want to create the kind of programs that I wish I’d had when I was coming up.” He knew the risks, knew that he was probably consigning himself to a path marked by deep uncertainty and that he would find neither glory nor gratitude on the other side of that struggle. But he also knew that perseverance was the key to progress. And the way he saw it, resilience could be an identity, too.

Categories Creativity, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

New Hampshire: The Legislative Push to Eliminate ALL Vaccine Requirements

By dianeravitch

February 20, 2026 //

New Hampshire is an unusual state. It is a magnet for libertarians. A significant number of them have been elected to the legislature, where they use their clout to “free” people from government.

Their current goal is to eliminate all vaccine requirements. Diseases that were long ago eliminated will come roaring back. People will die of diseases that could have been avoided. But they won’t be subject to government mandates.

At the same time, with no sense of irony, Some New Hampshire legislstors are demanding greater state control over what is taught in the classroom.

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH reports:

Two bills coming before the House this week are indicative of the New Hampshire Legislature: where it is heading and where it has been for the last three terms.

It is not a pretty picture unless you want to end government as we know it, or you want to use the sledgehammer of government to force everyone to believe what you do.

HB 1811 would repeal the immunization requirements for children in state statutes. All of them.

They include, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, and Hepatitis B.

Last week the House passed a bill to remove the Hepatitis b vaccine from the list.

The “compromise” position, said the prime sponsor of the bill, Rep. Matt Drew, R-Manchester, is to retain the polio vaccine requirements.

House Bill 1792 or the “Charlie Kirk Act,” which would fittingly prohibit public schools from teaching critical race theory, LGBTQ+ ideologies and other alleged Marxist derived educational theories.

The bill also gives those who believe the law was breached, the right to bring a civil suit against the school and educators as well as code of conduct allegations against the teacher which could result in loss of license.

Over the last several years, the US District Court has struck down laws passed by this legislature on critical race theory or divisive concepts, and outlawing diversity, equality and inclusion programs calling them overly vague putting educators in harm’s way.

It is hard to imagine this law would pass muster either.

In the broader picture, most of the childhood diseases that plagued school children 60 or 70 years ago have been, if not eliminated, made negligible.

But measles is making a comeback in the last few years as is whooping cough because the vaccination rates in children have been trending down as parents seek to opt them out for religious or medical reasons.

In the past, immunizations were not an issue. People had their children vaccinated to protect them from the ravages of the diseases and ultimately to protect the population in general from the newborns to the elderly.

It was the responsible thing to do.

People like Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. have long disparaged vaccines, as he and others gaslighted many into believing they cause autism.

The vaccination question found a red hot burner with the new COVID 19 shots when the decade began.…

It didn’t matter that the protesters were never going to get the COVID vaccine, they wanted to block the state’s most vulnerable to the disease from having a jab.

Two years ago, lawmakers passed a bill that would have taken away the Department of Health and Human Services’ authority to determine what vaccines children need, and would have had the legislature set the list, but it failed to become law.

These same folks also wanted to eliminate the state’s free vaccination program in conjunction with insurance companies, but had to settle for a study committee instead.

The prime sponsor of House Bill 1792, Rep. Mike Belcher, at the public hearing on the bill alleged a straight-line connection between Karl Marx’s theories and ideologies to the education system that fosters concepts like critical race theory, the oppressor and the oppressed models, LGBTQ+ ideologies, identity based ideologies and systemic inequity based on identity groups, or anti-constitutional narratives.

He claimed these ideologies undermine learning and unity, and the right of parents to direct their children’s upbringing.

He claimed these worldviews are responsible for the divisions in this country and have fostered the view that white Americans are inherently racists.

Belcher claimed his bill does not infringe on a teacher’s free speech, noting a teacher has no right to say anything he wants to children who are captive.

Legislation reaching down into classroom curriculum, which always has been the responsibility of local school boards and administrations, has been a recent trend with book and material bans, anti-abortion requirements and just plain interference and requirements meant to disrupt the system while many public schools struggle to provide a quality education under the burden of high property taxes, while the state fails to meets its constitutional obligation to fund an adequate education.

Before these attempts, bills targeting public education had always been quickly dismissed, but that was before there was an organized effort to end public education.

The chair of the Education Policy and Administration Committee Kristin Noble, R-Bedford, is a co-sponsor, as is Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn.

Noble recently posted on social media that schools should be segregated to separate Republicans from Democrats and called public schools Marxist indoctrination centers, while Osborne called them black boxes where children go in, but you don’t know what comes out.

Not that long ago, people followed the concept of the public good, or the long established “Social Contract” espoused by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The concept is that people surrender some of their freedoms in exchange for protection of their remaining rights, security and social stability, with the sovereign power residing in the people as a whole.

Under that concept, the industrialized world has been able to eliminate polio and other deadly diseases to benefit society as a whole.

But that concept has been eroding along with what was once considered the moral responsibility to look after your neighbors and the most vulnerable as well as yourself. Now it’s just yourself.

The idea of individual rights overriding the greater good is not new, but the founding fathers sought to protect against the tyranny of the majority overriding the rights of the minority.

What we have today is a tyranny of the majority in the legislature driven by Free Staters and Libertarians who want to impose their will on the people of New Hampshire in education, medicine, local planning and zoning, religion and social services. It is tyranny of the minority of New Hampshire residents.

One Republican representative, Travis Corcoran of Weare said in a social media post: “The point of Republican legislation is not just to change the laws, it’s to demoralize the left . . . and encourage them to leave.”

He is a co-sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Act.

If you are passing laws for reasons like that you do not belong in New Hampshire which has always been a welcoming state with a live and let live attitude.

Maybe we should have been more discerning about people moving here who claim to be for freedom, while they trample the freedoms of those who disagree with them.

That is the definition of hypocrisy.

And voters need to be more discerning about who they send to Concord.

Yesterday, the New Hampshire legislature voted on the bill to ban all vaccine mandates: it was defeated, 192-155.

However, the bill to prohibit “woke” curriculum passed by 184-164 and now goes to the State Senate. The bill is called the Charlie Kirk Act, after the founder of the rightwing Turning Points America, who was assassinated last year.

The bill prohibits the teaching of critical race theory, LGBT ideology, or other allegedly Marxist materials. Citizens can file civil suits against teachers found teaching prohibited ideas, and teachers might ultimately lose their license.

A similar law was previously struck down by the federal district court on grounds of vagueness.

Categories Extremism, Health, Medicine, New Hampshire, Science

Annie Andrews: There Is Only One Way to Stop the Spread of Measles

By dianeravitch

February 18, 2026 //

Annie Andrews is a pediatrician in South Carolina. She is running against Senator Lindsey Graham in the November election.

She wrote:

I’ve been a pediatrician for 20 years. When I learned how to take a pediatric patient’s history, I was taught to ask parents: “Are your child’s immunizations up to date?” At the beginning of my career I’d already be writing down the answer “yes,” without hesitation or uncertainty. Now when I ask that question, I brace myself.

Right now, a measles outbreak is surging in my home state of South Carolina, where there are already more than 900 confirmed cases, most of them unvaccinated children, with hundreds in quarantine and more exposures being reported daily.

That’s hundreds of parents missing work. Kids missing weeks of school. Newborns, seniors and the immunocompromised being forced to gamble their health on their neighbors’ choices. Hospitals and health centers bracing for what comes next.

This was all preventable, and we need to be honest about how we got here.

We have an incredibly safe and effective vaccine for measles. One of the reasons scientists worked with urgency to develop the measles vaccine was because of how contagious the virus is, far more contagious than the flu or Covid-19. Every person with measles infects 20 other people, on average. Someone with measles can walk into a room, cough and leave, and the virus can still be alive in that room for hours. This is why measles doesn’t “fade out” on its own. It spreads like wildfire when community immunity drops.

So no, measles doesn’t spread like this just because a virus is good at its job. It spreads when the systems meant to protect families get replaced with noise, doubt, lies and deliberate confusion.

At the highest levels of our federal government, we have watched medical expertise get shoved aside while conspiracy theories get promoted. The message Americans keep getting is that expertise is suspect, that doubt is bravery and that your Facebook feed is just as good as your doctor’s advice. When the people at the top signal that science is subjective, confusion becomes contagious.

That message has consequences. It becomes the air people breathe. It shapes what a parent believes about vaccinations as they scroll their social media feed in the preschool pickup line. It erodes trust in medicine and threatens the fabric of our nation’s public health system.

The outbreak isn’t the fault of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alone, but we’re kidding ourselves if we pretend leadership doesn’t matter.

Kennedy has been a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement for decades, which has led communities across the country to slip below the herd immunity threshold for the prevention of outbreaks of infections like measles. Even if you replaced the name on the door at HHS tomorrow (which a responsible Congress would do), trust doesn’t snap back like a rubber band. It takes years to build and minutes to burn.

And the burn is not theoretical. Just this month, the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization, stepping away from the very kind of coordination that helps countries spot outbreaks early and stop them before they spread. Meanwhile, the world is looking back at us: a nation on the brink of losing elimination status for measles, a disease we fully eliminated in 2000.

We are flirting with the return of an old killer, not because the science changed, not because the virus itself changed, but because our politics did.

I didn’t set out to become a politician. I’m a pediatrician and mom of three, which means I understand deeply what it feels like to be responsible for a tiny human you’d do anything to protect. I know how heavy it is to make decisions in a world that feels more chaotic and less trustworthy by the day. And I understand that when politics is injected into public health, parents’ jobs get harder and children suffer. That is why I stepped up to fight on behalf of America’s children and the families who love them.

So here’s my plea, doctor to country, mother to community.

Stop letting politicians play games with public health. Put scientific expertise back where it belongs: in government, in policy and in the language we use when the stakes are life and death.

If you want to stop measles, you should get vaccinated.

If you want to stop the next iteration of this, you stop rewarding people who profit from confusion. You stop letting unserious leaders turn public health into a culture war. You put serious, qualified people back in the rooms where decisions are made.

Measles doesn’t care who you voted for. It cares whether we protect each other. And we still can.

Annie Andrews

Categories Ethics, Health, Science, South Carolina

Trump Reverses Climate Change Policies, Alarms Scientists

By dianeravitch

February 12, 2026 //

We have long known that Donald Trump despises science. We also know that he refuses to accept the science concerning climate change. Yesterday, Trump accepted an award as the “Champion of Coal.” He wants to turn the clock back a century. He will go down in history for his willful ignorance and for the harm he has unleashed on the public.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

*The Trump administration has repealed the 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, eliminating the foundation of much of U.S. climate policy.

*The decision reverses decades of environmental progress despite overwhelming scientific evidence and opposition from health experts, environmental groups, 50 cities and 17 states.

*Experts warn the repeal will increase pollution, respiratory disease and planet-warming emissions over the coming decades.

The Trump administration on Thursday reversed the U.S. government’s longstanding scientific assertion that planet-heating pollution seriously threatens Americans, erasing a foundational piece of the country’s efforts to address climate change.

The repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding — a conclusion based on decades of science that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare — represents one of the biggest environmental rollbacks in U.S. history, and the latest in a series of actions by President Trump to scrap policies and regulations designed to curb the use of fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to clean energy.

The administration on Thursday also repealed all federal regulations governing vehicle emissions.

Experts and scientists condemned the action. The Environmental Protection Network — a bipartisan group of more than 700 former staff and appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency — described it as “unprecedented and dangerous.”

“This move is a fundamental betrayal of EPA’s responsibility to protect human health,” said Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation. “It is legally indefensible, morally bankrupt and completely untethered from the scientific record.”

Independent researchers around the world have long concluded that greenhouse gases released by the burning of gasoline, diesel and other fossil fuels are warming the planet and worsening weather disasters.

Categories Environment, Fake News, Health, Trump

Tom Ultican: Leave Trans Kids Alone!

By dianeravitch

February 11, 2026 //

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, insisted that the war on trans athletes should stop. In his view, the widely publicized debate about letting them participate on high school and college teams is a bogus issue.

He writes:

With our lying President, we don’t know if he is actually a homophobe or just plays one on TV. His Department of Education recently reported finding San Jose State University violated Title IX regarding a transgender volleyball player. The transgender player, Blaire Fleming, was on the San José State roster for three seasons after transferring from Coastal Carolina. Her status as transgender apparently became known when Southern Utah forfeited its match against San Jose State in September, 2024. It was Flemming’s third year on the team.

Shortly after this came to light, San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and two former Spartans were incensed by the new knowledge about Fleming and sued the Mountain West Conference over its policies they claim muzzled them. While Slusser was the central figure among the three players that were outraged, it is very likely that a lot of that outrage was fueled by Brooke’s Christian Nationalist mother, Kim Slusser.

A dive into Kim’s Facebook page, shows that she is much more focused on being a mom supporting her kids than she is politics. However, she did recently post to Facebook “Let’s go Leigh Wambsganss for Texas Senate.” Leigh is the wife of a former Southlake mayor, founder of Southlake Family PAC and Leader of a Patriots Mobil PAC designed to take over public schools. Mike Hixenbaugh quoted Wambsganss in his book They Came for the Schools:

“… Leigh Wambsganas … said there was no hope of changing the minds of any Black Lives Matter activists. ‘Sadly, they need to die.’” (Pages 108 and179)

Besides politically supporting crazed right-wing religious zealots, Kim Slusser also posted a graphic encouraging people to listen to the Megyn Kelly show.

A Post in Kim Slusser’s Facebook

The President’s attack on transgender people is fueled by bigoted ideology.

Transgender Reality

A 2022 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute identified of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming. The LGBTQIA WIKI defines gender nonconforming:

“Gender non-conforming is a term describing people who do not follow gender stereotypes and differ from their society’s conventional binary expectations of masculine men and feminine women. Gender non-conformity can encompass many things, such as gender expression, gender roles, or another aspect of gender. It is typically apparent in people whose gender identity is a binary gender, whether they are cisgender or transgender; for instance, a feminine trans man and a feminine cis man are both non-conforming with expectations of masculinity.”

From the 2022 study cited above about 700,000 transgender people are between 13 and 24. Extrapolating from these numbers, I would expect less than 400,000 of them to be transgender women. It is a small but not insignificant number of people considering that there are about 350 million people in America.

The bottom line is that a small subset of human beings is born with gender-dysphoria, a mismatch between gender identity and their own personal sense of gender. Scientific American reported almost all major American medical groups have “policy statements and guidelines on how to provide age-appropriate gender-affirming care”and “find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.”

Columbia University Psychiatry reports:

“It is well documented that TGNB [transgender non-binary] adolescents and young adults experience anxiety and depression, as well as suicidal ideation, at a much higher rate than their cisgender peers. According to The Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, 54 percent of young people who identified as transgender or nonbinary reported having seriously considered suicide in the last year, and 29 percent have made an attempt to end their lives.”

Both homosexuality and gender dysphoria are naturally occurring phenomena. They are not a mistake and they are human beings worthy of maximum respect.

The PBS article “Why is the GOP Escalating Attacks on Trans Rights? Experts say the Goal is to make sure Evangelicals Vote” reports that “Survey after survey show that Americans support LGBTQ+ equality, and Republicans are no exception.” When Donald Trump first ran for office, he briefly vowed to be an ally to queer Americans. “In office, his administration made so many policy moves against LGBTQ+ Americans that advocacy organizations branded his leadership ‘The Discrimination Administration.”’

Even though the Evangelical community is a minority in the Republican Party, their strong unity on cultural issues has made them a must get for victorious GOP candidates. Our President quickly realized he needed them and apparently had no problem abandoning his vow to be an ally to Queer Americans.

Respecting Life and Protecting People

Sixteen-years-old trans-student, Nex Benedict, was attacked in the girl’s bathroom at her Oklahoma high school. The attack was severe enough to require some medical attention, but she was well enough to go home that night. The next day she committed suicide. Caught in a web of ignorance and bigotry she was convinced that life was not worth living. She would be about the same age as San Jose State’s volleyball player, Blaire Fleming, if she had lived until today.

A new law, that took effect January 2025 in California, says teachers, counselors and schools are not to disclose a student’s apparent gender-dysphoria to their parents without the student’s permission. The arguments in the Bill noted, “Unfortunately, not all young people are able to be their authentic selves at home safely, and, in those cases, schools can be a critical source of support.” It also highlighted the large tendency for trans students like Nex Benedict to engage in suicide. The bill claimed that students with “access to affirming homes, schools, community events, and online spaces reported lower rates of attempting suicide.”

That same month, President Trump signed many executive orders including:

“This executive order directs federal agencies and federal employees to interpret “sex” solely as an immutable binary biological classification determined at conception. The order also requires all federal agencies to enforce sex-based rights, protections and accommodations using this definition of “sex.”

A few months before Trump became President, a symposium organized by the National Human Genome Research Institute, an institute of the US National Institutes of Health completely rejected the Trumpian view. “Throughout the symposium, many speakers argued that any attempt to categorize sex runs into the same issue—human variation always provides an exception to the rule.”

An interesting case was presented by Physician Tucker Pyle, from Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. A person who was born in the 1980s was raised as a girl but felt like a boy. As a teenager, the patient received feminizing hormones but still experienced dysphoria. Years later, he learned doctors performed surgery on him as a baby to make his genitalia, which weren’t clearly a penis or a vulva, look like a vulva. But he ultimately identified as male and socially and hormonally transitioned.

A Personal Opinion

In a dialogue with youth, Daisaku Ikeda said:

“Everyone has a right to flower, to reveal his or her full potential as a human being, to fulfill his or her mission in this world. You have this right and so does everyone else. To scorn and violate people’s human rights destroys the natural order of things. We must become people who prize human rights and respect others.” Faith into Action page 276

This current attack on gay people is evil. Some gay people are not the sharpest tool in the woodshed and some are possessed of brilliance, but more importantly they are all human beings with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They all deserve respect.

I think trans kids in sports is a made-up issue. Participating in sports with their preferred gender should be accommodated. There are more gender nonconforming females whose male side leads to sporting victories than any unfairness caused by the few transgender participants.

Should someone disagree with this position, we should listen if they have valid points. However, I do not think transgender athletes are the problem that needs reforming.

It is benighted bigots who must be reformed; whose ideology must be shunned.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Gender, Health, Medicine

The Kind of Schools That We Need Right Now

By dianeravitch

February 9, 2026 //

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

South Carolina: Major Measles Outbreak! Thanks, RFK JR.!

By dianeravitch

January 30, 2026 //

In the year 2000, health officials declared that measles had been eliminated in the United States, thanks to a successful program to vaccinate all children against the disease.

But, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is now Secretary of Health and Human Services, measles is back.

RFK Jr. is often described as a “vaccine skeptic.” He would be more accurately described as a fierce opponent of vaccines.

South Carolina reported nearly 800 cases last Tuesday, and the number is likely to grow.

CNN reported:

With 789 cases reported as of Tuesday, the South Carolina outbreak surpassed a massive outbreak in Texas, which reached 762 cases before it ended in August last year. Two children died during the outbreak in Texas…

“It breaks my heart to see that my state is the number one outbreak currently in the United States since the 1990s,” Dr. Anna Kathryn Rye Burch, a pediatric infectious diseases physician with Prisma Health in South Carolina, told CNN Wednesday. “We have this amazing vaccine that would help protect us all from getting the measles, and we are just seeing that people aren’t as excited about getting that vaccine anymore. This is why we’re seeing measles come back into the United States…”

Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, meaning there has not been continuous transmission for more than a year at a time.

Before 2025, there were an average of about 180 measles cases reported each year since elimination, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The US reported more than 2,200 confirmed measles cases in 2025 — significantly more than there have been in any year since 2000.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/health/largest-us-measles-outbreak-south-carolina?utm_source=cnn_Evening+Newsletter+-+Thursday%2C+January+29%2C+2026&utm_medium=email&bt_ee=gvqCy2mCVeUEqO7zOX61HyRkKAF7F461fS0rgklCK%2Bs9goDd85EFJdHLZMXX1kfC&bt_ts=1769725134216

Categories Ethics, Failure, Health, Medicine, Science

Last Words from the Late Vivian Connell

One Last Time

A Song About Trump’s Education Policies: “We Believe in Local Control”

International Report: Democracy in the USA is in Jeopardy

Trump’s Insane War on Science

New Hampshire: The Legislative Push to Eliminate ALL Vaccine Requirements

Annie Andrews: There Is Only One Way to Stop the Spread of Measles

Trump Reverses Climate Change Policies, Alarms Scientists

Tom Ultican: Leave Trans Kids Alone!

Transgender Reality

Respecting Life and Protecting People

A Personal Opinion

The Kind of Schools That We Need Right Now

South Carolina: Major Measles Outbreak! Thanks, RFK JR.!

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