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Jennifer Berkshire: The New Orleans Hoax Rises Again

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2025 //
2

Jennifer Berkshire writes a blog called The Education Wars, where she explains the latest attacks on public schools by entitled billionaires and their lackeys. In this one, she reviews the revival of the New Orleans “miracle,” you know, the claim that turning almost every public school in the city into a privately run charter schools produced dramatic gains. Not true.

She wrote:

Ten years ago, I wrote a piece about some of the many unintended consequences of New Orleans’ charter school experiment. Wildly at odds with the narrative of success and transformation being peddled by the education reform industry, the story was among my first real attempts to do ‘serious’ journalism, and I’m still really proud of it. (For those of you who don’t know, I got my start chronicling the excesses of education reform on a humorous blog.) I learned a lot working on that story, including that writers have no control over whatever terrible headline gets slapped on their masterpiece… But it was in New Orleans that I really began to understand something essential about education reform. If the vision of what’s on offer is narrower than what the community wants, these top-down efforts to “disrupt” public education are doomed from the start.

The twenty year mark since Hurricane Katrina has ushered in a predictable wave of celebratory accounts of the New Orleans miracle. I recommend giving them a miss and spending some time instead with an eye-opening new book by parent advocate Ashana Bigard. (Full disclosure: Ashana is one of my favorite people in the world, not to mention among the most amazing organizers I’ve ever met.) Called Beyond Resilience, Ashana’s book opens with a scene of a meeting held in the period after the hurricane erased whole neighborhoods, and claimed the lives of some 1,800 people. The purpose of these gatherings, Ashana writes, was to give local parents the opportunity to envision the sort of education future they wanted for their children. 

What they dreamed of was so much more than their children had before, and more than they themselves had had before. Having seen what was offered to children in other places, they wanted that and more for New Orleans’ children.

Among their demands: fully equipped science labs, theater programs, curriculum rich in local history, career and technical education that prepared students for jobs in the trades. The list was long. It was also grounded in the harsh reality of New Orleans’ brutal poverty. Parents asked for kids to be able to bring food home when money was tight, for washers and dryers in every school because so many laundromats had never reopened. And they wanted swim lessons in order to give their kids a fighting chance against the next hurricane.

The enormous gulf between those wishlists, compiled on flip charts and dry erase boards, and what the parents ultimately got is the subject of Beyond Resilience. “What they gave us instead was almost a cartoonish representation of the opposite of everything we had asked for,” writes Ashana. “The charter school operators and organizations that supported charter school reform efforts would listen to parents, guardians and community members, and then create schools that looked more like juvenile jail facilities than schools.”Subscribe

No excuses

I first encountered Ashana through her work as an advocate for students and parents who were caught up in the draconian discipline practices that took root during the early years of the New Orleans charter school experiment. While the rhetoric was all about preparing kids, or ‘scholars’ in charter parlance, for college, Ashana was spending more and more of her time intervening on behalf of kids who were being treated like criminals. There was the boy whose mother couldn’t afford to buy him the shoes that the uniform required, so got suspended and then expelled. There was the five year old who was repeatedly suspended for eating crackers on the bus. And there were the countless students accused of the vague yet sweeping offense known as “disruption of a school process,” who ended up, not just kicked out of school, but arrested. These children, writes Ashana, weren’t treated as human beings,

but as criminals who had already committed crimes and would most definitley commit more crimes if they weren’t guarded and watched every second of the day.

Since I’ve known Ashana, her criticism of the city’s schools has been remarkably consistent. At its core is this belief: a model of schooling centered on harsh discipline is developmentally inappropriate, especially for young kids. Early in the book, she recounts being told by Ben Kleban, a hard-charging charter school CEO who embodied the no-excuses ethos, that his K-2 elementary school was so quiet that “you could hear a pin drop.” Ashana was aghast. These were kids who should be playing, talking and singing. “[H]e went on to tell me that these kids were different.”

These children are different. That was the refrain. These Black children in New Orleans, who had lost everything, who were sleeping in abandonded buildings, grieving the loss of family members, friends, and entire neighborhoods were ‘different’ and therefore didn’t deserve the same developmental considerations as other children their age.

In recent years, Ashana has been part of an effort called Erase the Board that seeks to bring traditional public schools back to New Orleans. The group’s demands echo the ones put forth by those parents and community members so many years ago—schools that are human focused rather than test and discipline centered, music and art classes, trained teachers, and trauma informed practices. But Erase the Board is also challenging a central tenet of the New Orleans model: schools that fail to raise test scores are closed. Of the city’s 75 charter schools, 50 have been closed or reconstituted at some point. While that churn is in large part responsible for producing academic gains, it has also proven deeply unpopular with parents, who hate school closures even when said shuttering is being done for ‘the right reasons.’ 

The constant opening and closing of schools is also highly disruptive to students, Ashana argues. She tells the story of one student who attended twelve different schools: half he was pushed out of over disciplinary infractions, the other half closed. “You have schools closing, teachers moving in and out. Kids need stability and that’s the opposite of what we’ve got. All you’re showing these kids is displacement.” Among Erase the Board’s demands is that failing charter schools be reopened as traditional public schools. “We estimate that, at the rate that charter schools close, we’ll have half our city back in seven years,” says Ashana.

Selling the vision

“‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution,” was the title of the puffed piece that appeared in the Washington Post recently. Penned by a British scribe who used to pen speeches for former UK prime minister David Cameron, aka Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, it’s the sort of breathless sales pitch that abounded in the first decade after the hurricane. These days, the ‘miracle’ talk is harder to find, in part because so many holes have been poked in the claims of success, as teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein notes here. And while New Orleans may have ended up with a system ‘never seen before,’ the reality is that the same forces are coming for its charter schools that now threaten all public schools. 

For one, there aren’t enough kids, especially when you consider that the model entails constantly opening new schools. Back in 2022, New Schools for New Orleans, an architect of the all-charter model, warned “that schools citywide were nearing a tipping point in terms of enrolling enough students to pay for a full array of academics and services.” And that was before Louisiana enacted its ginormous new school voucher program. In a system that is entirely focused on test scores, the appeal of attending a private school where kids don’t take tests seems pretty obvious. 

Indeed, at a time when the GOP has largely moved on from charter schools, save for the classical variety, and gone full voucher, the New Orleans experiment—expensive, interventionist, couched in the language of civil rights—feels like a throwback. So too does one of the animating beliefs driving the experiment: that kids in one of the country’s poorest cities could overcome poverty if they all went to college. Hence the frustration in the final puffish piece I’ll mention: edupreneur Ravi Gupta’s lament for the 74: “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools.” Conservatives aren’t keen on the model’s aggressive intervention, complains Gupta, while Progressives are squeamish about the fact that New Orleans’ success required wiping out the city’s unionized teaching force, which made up much of its Black middle class. 

Gupta implores us to focus on the ‘hard numbers’ and avoid what he calls “the tyranny of the anecdote.” But Ashana Bigard and her powerful new book show exactly why that perspective is so short sighted. Why, if the model is so successful, asks Ashana, does the city require so many alternative schools and programs to catch the kids who ‘fall through the cracks’? Why are there so many ‘opportunity youth,’ kids who aren’t in school or working? Indeed, if you expand the frame beyond the metrics of academic achievement, it’s hard to make the case that life for young people in New Orleans has improved, the conclusion I reached back in 2015. “The math ain’t mathin’,” is how Ashana put it when we spoke recently.

That there’s been so little laudatory coverage of New Orleans’ education revolution “reveals something broken about our politics and media,” insists Gupta. But I think the real reason is much more simple. The reformers who drove the experiment never recovered from the scene that plays out at the start of Ashana’s book, when parents and community members, some of whom had been pushing for reform in the city’s schools long before Katrina, envisioned what education in New Orleans could be. Today, the gap between that vision of possibility for the city’s kids and what was delivered remains a chasm. 

Two decades after hurricane Katrina, Ashana is still fighting for the schools New Orleans’ children deserve. The rebuilding is still happening, she writes in the book’s conclusion.

But it’s not about getting back to what it was—it’s about creating something that never existed: a New Orleans where all of our children can thrive, where our culture is respected and our people are valued, where love and justice aren’t just words but ways of life, where the billions generated by our creativity flow back to strengthen our communities. 

An eternal optimist, Ashana ends on a hopeful note, insisting that “That New Orleans is possible. That future is within our reach.” 

I hope she’s right.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Hoax, Lies, New Orleans, Parents, Propaganda

Paul L. Thomas: There Is No Reading “Crisis!

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2025 //
14

Paul L. Thomas was a high school teacher in South Carolina for nearly twenty years, then became an English professor at Furman University, a small liberal arts college in South Carolina. He is a clear thinker and a straight talker.

He wrote this article for The Washington Post. He tackles one of my pet peeves: the misuse and abuse of NAEP proficiency levels. Politicians and pundits like to use NAEP “proficiency” to mean”grade level.” There is always a “crisis” because most students do not score “proficient.” Of course not! NAEP proficient is not grade level! NAEP publications warn readers not to make that error. NAEP proficient is equivalent to an A. If most students were rated that high, the media would complain that the tests were too easy. NAEP Basic is akin to grade level.

He writes:

After her controversial appointment, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted this apparently uncontroversial claim on social media: “When 70% of 8th graders in the U.S. can’t read proficiently, it’s not the students who are failing — it’s the education system that’s failing them.”

Americans are used to hearing about the nation’s reading crisis. In 2018, journalist Emily Hanford popularized the current “crisis” in her article “Hard Words,” writing, “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.”

Five years later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeated that statistic: “One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.”

Each of these statements about student reading achievement, though probably well-meaning, is misleading if not outright false. There is no reading crisis in the U.S. But there are major discrepancies between how the federal government and states define reading proficiency.

At the center of this confusion is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated assessment of student performance known also as the “nation’s report card.” The NAEP has three achievement levels: “basic,” “proficient” and “advanced.”

The disconnect lies with the second benchmark, “proficient.” According to the NAEP, students performing “at or above the NAEP Proficient level … demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” But this statement includes a significant clarification: “The NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).”

In almost every state, “grade level” proficiency on state testing correlates with the NAEP’s “basic” level; in 2022, 45 states set their standard for reading proficiency in the NAEP’s “basic” range. Therefore, it is inaccurate to say that nearly two-thirds of fourth-graders are not capable readers.

The NAEP has been a key mechanism for holding states accountable for student achievement for over 30 years. Yet, educators have expressed doubt over the assessment’s utility. In 2004, an analysis by the American Federation of Teachers raised concerns about the NAEP’s achievement levels: “The proficient level on NAEP for grade 4 and 8 reading is set at almost the 70th percentile,” the union wrote. “It would not be unreasonable to think that the proficiency levels on NAEP represent a standard of achievement that is more commonly associated with fairly advanced students.”

The NAEP has set unrealistic goals for student achievement, fueling alarm about a reading crisis in the United States that is overblown. The common misreading of NAEP data has allowed the country to ignore what is urgent: addressing the opportunity gap that negatively impacts Black and Brown students, impoverished students, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities.

To redirect our focus to these vulnerable populations, the departments of education at both the federal and state levels should adopt a unified set of achievement terms among the NAEP and state-level testing. For over three decades, one-third of students have been below NAEP “basic” — a figure that is concerning but does not constitute a widespread reading crisis. The government’s challenge will be to provide clearer data — instead of hyperbolic rhetoric — to determine a reasonable threshold for grade-level proficiency.

What’s more, federal and state governments should consider redesigning achievement terms altogether. Identifying strengths and weaknesses in student reading would be better served by achievement levels determined by age, such as “below age level,” “age level” and “above age level.”

Age-level proficiency might be more accurate for policy and classroom instruction. As an example, we can look to Britain, where phonics instruction has been policy since 2006. Annual phonics assessments show score increases by birth month, suggesting the key role of age development in reading achievement.

In the United States, only the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment is age-based. Testing by age avoids having the sample of students corrupted by harmful policies such as grade retention, which removes the lowest-performing students from the test pool and then reintroduces them when they are older. Grade retention is punitive: It is disproportionately applied to students of color, students in poverty, multilingual learners and students with disabilities — the exact students most likely to struggle as readers.

Some evidence suggests that grade retention correlates with higher test scores. In a study of U.S. reading policy, education researchers John Westall and Amy Cummings concluded states that mandated third-grade retention based on state testing saw increases in reading scores.

However, the pair acknowledge that these were short-term benefits: For example, third-grade retention states such as Mississippi and Florida had exceptional NAEP reading scores among fourth-graders but scores fell back into the bottom 25 percent of all states among eighth-graders.

The researchers also caution that the available data does not prove whether test score increases are the result of grade retention or other state-sponsored learning interventions, such as high-dosage tutoring. Without stronger evidence, states might be tempted to trade higher test scores for punishing vulnerable students, all without permanent improvement in reading proficiency.

Hyperbole about a reading crisis ultimately fails the students who need education policy grounded in more credible evidence. Reforming achievement levels nationwide might be one step toward a more accurate and useful story about reading proficiency.

The article has many links. Rather than copying each one by hand, tedious process, I invite you to open the link and read the article.

As I was writing up this article, Mike Petrilli sent me the following graph from the 2024 NAEP. There was a decline in the scores of White, Black, and Hispanic fourth grade students “above basic.”

70% of White fourth-graders scored at or above grade level.

About 48% of Hispanics did.

About 43% of Blacks did.

The decline started before the pandemic. Was it the Common Core? Social media? Something else?

Should we be concerned? Yes. Should we use “crisis” language? What should we do?

Reduce class sizes so teachers can give more time to students who need it.

Do what is necessary to raise the prestige of the teaching profession: higher salaries, greater autonomy in the classroom. Legislators should stop telling teachers how to teach, stop assigning them grades, stop micromanaging the classroom.

Categories Data, Fake News, Hoax, Lies, Literacy, NAEP

CBS Sells Out, Capitulates to Trump’s Demand for Payoff

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2025 //
2

During the 2024 Presidential campaign, “60 Minutes” invited both Trump and Harris to sit for an interview. Harris accepted, Trump declined. The interview took about an hour. As is customary, the editors cut the interview back to 20 minutes, the customary time slot.

CBS used a short response from Harris about the war in Gaza to promote the show. In the show itself, the promotional clip was replaced by a different response. To the editors, it was a distinction without a difference, a routine editorial decision.

Trump, however, saw the switch in the short clip and the longer one as a financial opportunity. He sued “60 Minutes” and CBS for $10 billion (later raised to $20 billion) for portraying Harris in a favorable light, interfering in the election, and damaging his campaign.

Since he won the election, it’s hard to see how he could demonstrate that his campaign was damaged. Most outside observers thought it was a frivolous lawsuit and would be tossed out if it ever went to trial.

But Trump persisted because the owner of CBS and its parent company Paramount, Shari Redstone, needed the FCC’s approval to complete a deal to be purchased by another company. Trump could tell his friend Brendan Carr to approve the deal or to block it. Shari Redstone would be a billionaire if the deal went through.

A veteran producer at “60 Minutes” resigned in anticipation of corporate leaders selling out their premier news program. The president of CBS News followed him out the door.

As expected, corporate caved to Trump. CBS will pay $16 million towards the cost of his Presidential library. He once again humbled the press. He did it to ABC, he did it to META, he did it to The Washington Post.

Will any mainstream media dare to criticize him?

Larry Edelman of The Boston Globe wrote about Trump’s humbling of the most respected news program on network TV:

💵 A sell-out

The show is almost over for National Amusements, the entertainment conglomerate with humble beginnings as a Dedham drive-in movie theater chain.

Unlike most Hollywood endings, this one is a downer.

Shame on Shari Redstone.

Recap: Redstone is the daughter of Sumner Redstone, the larger-than-life dealmaker who transformed the theater company started by his father into the holding company that owns CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and the Paramount movie studio.

On Tuesday, Paramount Global, controlled by Shari Redstone, said it agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Trump’s widely criticized lawsuit stemming from the “60 Minutes” interview of Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s election campaign. The payment, after legal fees, will go to Trump’s presidential library.

Why it matters: It’s impossible not to see this as an unabashed payoff intended to win the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of Redstone’s multibillion-dollar deal to sell Paramount to Skydance Media, the studio behind movies including “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.”

Everyone involved denied the settlement was a quid pro quo. If you believe that, I have some Trump meme coins to sell you.

In a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS last year, Trump alleged that “60 Minutes,” part of CBS News, deceptively edited the Harris interview in order to interfere with the election.

Legal experts said Trump’s chances of winning the case were slim to none given CBS’s First Amendment protections for what was considered routine editing. But his election victory in November gave him enormous leverage over Redstone.

Reaction: “With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement after the settlement was announced.

“CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle,” a spokesperson for Trump’s lawyers said. The president was holding “the fake news accountable,” the spokesperson said. 

Of course, the lawsuit was all about putting the news media under the president’s thumb.

“The enemy of the people” — Trump’s words — is a power base Trump wants desperately to neutralize, along with other perceived foes such as elite universities and big law firms.

Columbia University and law firms including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison have already caved. Harvard University had no choice but to come to the negotiating table, though it also is battling the White House in court.

“The President is using government to intimidate news outlets that publish stories he doesn’t like,” the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote.

For what it’s worth: The two points I’d like to make here may seem obvious but are worth repeating.

First: The ownership of news outlets by big corporations is a double-edged sword. 

Yes, they can provide financial shelter from devastation wrought by Google and Meta — and the brewing storm coming from artificial intelligence. 

But they also own bigger — and more profitable — businesses that need to maintain at least a civil relationship with the federal government.

That’s why Disney ended Trump’s dubious defamation case against ABC News by agreeing to “donate” $15 million to the presidential library, and why Meta, the parent of Facebook, coughed up $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit over the company’s suspension of his accounts after the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. 

Second: Private sector extortion — multiple law firms promised $100 million in pro-bono work for causes favored by Trump — dovetails with the president’s use of the power of the office to make money for himself and his family.

Trump’s crypto ventures, including the shameless $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, have added at least $620 million to his fortune in a few months, Bloomberg reported this week. Then there are all those real estate deals in the Middle East, the Qatari jet, and the licensed products, from bibles to a mobile phone service.

Shari Redstone’s $16 million payment is chump change by comparison. And it makes perfect business sense. It smooths the way for National Amusements to salvage at least $1.75 billion from the sale of its stake in Paramount. Sumner Redstone, a consummate dealmaker, would have done the same thing.

Skydance, by the way, was launched by another child of a billionaire, David Ellison.

His father, Larry Ellison, founded software giant Oracle and is worth nearly $250 billion. Oracle is negotiating to take a role in the sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner, a transaction being orchestrated by Trump.

Small world, eh?

Final thought: After nearly 90 years in business, National Amusements, now based in Norwood, is going out with a whimper, not a bang.

The company has struggled with heavy debt, declining cable network profits, and huge costs for building out its streaming business. Paramount’s market value has dropped to $9 billion from $26 billion when Viacom recombined with CBS to form the new company in 2019.

To get the Skydance rescue deal done, Redstone, 71, sold out the journalists at CBS News — the onetime home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and still one of the most respected names in the business.

That’s one bummer of an ending.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Fake News, Freedom of the Press, Hoax, Media, Politics, Trump

Anand: The Plutocrats Stop Pretending to be Philanthropists

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2025 //
7

Anand Girihadaras writes in his blog “The Ink” that the billionaire elite have given up their pretense of using their fortunes to make a better world. Two events stripped away the veil: one, the greedy gaudy wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice and the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan that they are abandoning their lofty goals of curing the world of disease.

Naked greed is in, big-hearted philanthropy is out. The oligarchs revel in their splendor.

Anand writes:

Like bottomless mimosas and a mother’s unsolicited advice, eras don’t just end. The new thing elbows its way in, the old thing lingers like a houseguest, and they compete for primacy. Only eventually — sometimes long after — do you notice the eclipse.

No one was ever going to announce that the era of performative elite do-gooding had ceded to the era of naked oligarchy. But this week three events made that eclipse clear.

The first was the multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’s wedding, in Venice, to Lauren Sánchez, who would surely float if she fell into a canal. As celebrities poured into a city already strained by tourism, and the happy couple was photographed frolicking in a literal foam party aboard a yacht, there was an almost refreshing, well, nakedness to the avarice, to the carelessness, to the not-giving of civic fucks.

There was a reminder of the omnipotence and the utter loneliness at the commanding heights: you can get anyone you want to your wedding, and the people you want are the people you’d invite if you told your assistant to run to the dentist’s office, pick up People magazine, write down names in it, and invite them. These are people who have everything, and who don’t have the thing everybody else does.

The second was the inevitable announcement by multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable foundation, run with his wife, Priscilla Chan, that it is no longer focused on ending all the diseases, as it once promised. Rather, in the Trump era, it is focused on things that would not be any trouble to Trump. “Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?” read a screen behind the couple at a rehearsal in 2016. The answer turns out to be: No. The Washington Post, owned by the oligarch in the above item, nonetheless rightly warned, in the Zuckerberg-Chan case, of “the risks for communities reliant on wealthy private donors.”

The third event was the passage today of Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ budget, a document of searing meanness that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the “Worst Bill in History” — a “giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill.” Like the Bezos wedding and the Zuckerberg-Chan pivot, the bill had one refreshing quality, though. It made zero effort to mask its ugliness. It said the cruel part out loud.

There is a nakedness to our oligarchy now, and it is pruny as hell. But at least there is this: As far as I can tell, the era of highly performative elite do-gooding is passing. The billionaires who felt the need to give TED talks about eradicating poverty while also causing poverty. The incessant blabbing about Africa by oligarchs who rarely left Connecticut. The pledges to save democracy, save the planet, and, yes, end all diseases. The buy-one-donate-one products. Red things involving Bono.Subscribe

I wrote a whole book about that era and its maneuvers and deceptions and costs, and it occurs to me now that the entire complex of activities I chronicled is giving way to something altogether different. What is ascendant now is nakedness — of greed, of sociopathy, of power thirst. Somewhere along the way, the professed goal of the elite morphed from fighting inequality from above to defending their castles in the sky.

There is a kind of progress in this, because what is naked is easier to see, even if pruny.

This eclipsing of performative virtue by pungent avarice, of fake billionaire “change” by real billionaire wolfishness, is part of why figures like Zohran Mamdani are rising. When I published Winners Take All in 2018, the things I was trying to deconstruct took explaining. That is, after all, why you write a book. I’m not sure a book is needed now.

The moves, the lust, the underlying goals — all of it is in the open. This era is less confusing. And people are voting accordingly.

It’s also why a generation gap is opening. The old guard power elite, seeing Mamdani’s rise, is terrified that the Soviet Union could soon be coming to a bodega near them, even though they probably don’t live near any bodegas and probably think the word “bodega” is Arabic. But their children and grandchildren are not afraid of free buses and childcare. They’re willing to take a chance on something that would switch their trajectory off the track from nothing to nowhere and on to a course of life.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Cruelty, Ethics, Fake, Hoax

Trump Shows His Fascist Face

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2025 //
6

It was inevitable. And now it’s happening. During his first term, Trump repeatedly encouraged violence. He told police officers in New York not to be so nice when they arrest people. He asked “his” generals if they could shoot protestors in the legs. He broadcast fake videos showing him beating up a cartoon character labeled CNN. He urged his crowds at rallies to beat up protestors and said he would pay their legal fees. He wants to seem like a real man, a tough guy. But don’t forget that this tough guy dodged the draft five times with a podiatrist’s note about bone spurs in his feet.

This week, his troubles were mounting. There was the very public split with Musk, who dropped hints about Trump’s name in the still confidential Epstein files. There was Elon’s claim that Trump would have lost the election and control of the House without Elon’s help. What kind of “help”? There was the tariff mess, which was causing a global economic disruption and predictions of inflation. And Trump’s poll numbers were plummeting.

What a perfect time to send in large numbers of ICE agents to immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles! Send them to Home Depot, where immigrants cluster in search of work–not the “criminals, rapists, and murderers” he warned us about, but laborers looking for work.

Voila! Their friends, families, and neighbors turned out to protest the ICE raids, and all at once there are crowds and people waving Mexican flags (a big mistake, they should have waved American flags). The situation was volatile but there was no reason to think that local and state police couldn’t handle it.

Trump is shrewd: he saw his chance to distract public attention from his failing policies, and he took it. Without bothering to contact Governor Newsom, Trump mobilized the National Guard. He ordered 2,000 into the troubled neighborhood. Then he sent in another 2,000, plus 700 Marines.

Only the Governor can call up his state’s National Guard, except in the most exceptional situations (the last time it happened was 1965, when President Johnson mobilized the National Guard in Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators because Governor George Wallace refused to do so).

It is even more unusual for a President to call in the military to oppose ordinary people, which is normally handled by state and local police. There is an act-the Posse Comitatus Act–that specifically forbids the Army and Air Force from acting against civilians on American soil. A different law, 10 U.S. Code 275, forbids Navy and Marine Corps members from the same thing. Trump claims that the anti-ICE protests are an insurrection, which allows him to call in the Marines. Legal scholars disagree, but most think he overreached and that there was no insurrection in Los Angeles.

Indeed, the large show of force drew an even larger crowd to the protests and made it more dangerous. Nonetheless, there seem to be more military at the scene than protestors.

Miraculously, no one has been killed (unlike the genuinely violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, where Trump rioters viciously beat police officers and several people died). He sat back and watched the insurrection on television and is now considering whether to reimburse them for their legal expenses after being imprisoned for engaging in insurrection.

Trump said on national television that “many people” had been killed during the protests (not true) and that if he had not sent in the troops, the city would have been “obliterated.” This is nonsense. The clash between the protesters and the military is contained to a few blocks of a very large city.

Today, there were spontaneous peaceful rallies in many cities to show support for the demonstrators in Los Angeles.

The best response: show up for a “No Kings” rally on Saturday. Check the website http://www.nokings.org to find one or create one where you live. Be peaceable. Sing. Dance. Bring American flags. The Constitution protects the right to assemble peacefully.

Trump is not only diverting attention from his monstrous One Ugly Bill, he is laying the groundwork for martial law and dictatorship.

Categories Accountability, California, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Hoax, Resistance, Trump, Tyranny

Jamelle Bouie: Don’t Be Fooled Again by the GOP Tax Plan

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
3

Jamelle Bouie writes an opinion column for The New York Times, and he is my favorite on that site. His insights are clear and sharp. In this column, he reminds us that Republicans have a long history of promises about tax cuts for the middle class that have ended up enriching the wealthiest and increasing inequality.

He writes:

It’s 1981. A Republican president and his allies in Congress are promising large, broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2001. A Republican president is promising broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2003. That same president is promising another round of broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

It’s 2017. Yet another Republican president is promising broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.

With each new Republican administration, it is the same promise. With each round of tax cuts, it is the same result: vast benefits for the wealthiest Americans and a pittance for everyone else. There is little growth but widening inequality and an even starker gap between the haves and have-nots.

President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, which inaugurated the pattern, slashed the top tax rate on investment income to 50 percent from 70 percent and the capital gains rate to 20 percent from 28 percent. “New tax benefits for business were so generous,” Michael J. Graetz writes in “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America,” “that corporate tax receipts declined from about 15 percent to less than 9 percent of federal revenues.” The law, he continues, “substantially cut taxes on income generated from wealth, increased opportunities for tax-free savings by upper-income Americans and greatly expanded tax-shelter opportunities for high-income individuals and corporations.” It also “reduced taxes on transfers of wealth from the richest Americans to their descendants by exempting all but a small fraction of the wealthiest 1 percent” from the estate tax.

Over the next decade, Reagan and his successor George H.W. Bush were forced to raise taxes as a result of this profligacy. Reagan signed deficit-reducing tax increases in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1987. Bush signed a significant tax increase in 1990, breaking his “Read my lips” election-year promise not to raise taxes.

George W. Bush rejected his father’s fiscal heterodoxy in favor of the unrepentant supply-side orthodoxy of Reagan’s first year. Sold as middle-class tax relief, the $1.7 trillion George W. Bush tax cuts — passed in 2001 and 2003 — were by and large a handout to the wealthiest Americans. As Graetz notes, they “reduced federal revenues from 20 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 to 15.6 percent in 2004,” and when all the changes were phased in, “they raised the after-tax incomes of people in the top 1 percent by nearly 6.5 percent — $54,000 on average — compared to about 1 percent, or an average of $207, for the bottom 40 percent.” In a 2017 analysis of the legacy of the George W. Bush tax cuts, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the top 1 percent of households received an average tax cut of over $570,000 from 2004 to 2012. Not surprisingly, it also found that these cuts “did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.”

We can basically copy and paste this dynamic from Reagan and George W. Bush to Donald Trump, who sold his 2017 tax cuts as — you guessed it — middle-class relief. “Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America,” he told supporters in the fall of 2017. “The plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe fitters, the people that like me best.”

Except — surprise! — a vast majority of the benefits of the $1.9 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went to the highest earners — millionaire chief executives and billionaire owners of large companies. Americans in the middle received an average tax cut of $910. Americans in the top 1 percent received an average cut of $61,090. The 2017 law also cut estate taxes and gave new advantages to real estate investors, direct benefits for Trump and his family.

We are now looking at another round of Republican tax cuts. Yet again the claim is that this will benefit most Americans. “The next phase of our plan to deliver the greatest economy in history is for this Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody,” Trump said in his March 4 address to Congress. But as Paul Krugman points out in his Substack newsletter, this latest package is both a shameless giveaway to the rich and a ruinous cut to safety net programs for lower-income and working Americans.

The tax and benefit cuts are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. To pay for the more than $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for people with incomes above $500,000, the House Republican framework would cut $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — snatching food assistance away from millions of low-income families — and $800 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, leaving an estimated 10 million or more Americans without health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The top 0.1 percent of earners would see their income grow; the bottom 20 percent would see it plummet.

It remains to be seen whether Republicans can pass their bill in the form they want. They have had some trouble moving it out of the House of Representatives and into the Senate. But if they can, it’s hard to imagine that there will be much appetite to kill the president’s “big, beautiful bill.”

Which is all to say that it’s 2025, and a Republican president has promised a broad tax cut that will help the middle class and strengthen the economy. I think we know what is going to come next.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Hoax, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Maurice Cunningham: DFER Moves into MAGA Orbit

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
2

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the university of Massachusetts and a specialist on dark money in education, exposes the rightward shift of Democrats for Education Reform, as well as its continuing disintegration. DFER spent years cheerleading for charter schools and test-based teacher evaluation, but its pretense has dissolved. Cunningham said it is now closely aligned with rightwing groups.

Cunningham writes:

Democrats for Education Reform, the front operation for billionaire privateering of public education, has gone all-in for right-wing policies. This likely reflects two factors: the collapse of DFER nationally, and an opportunistic pivot to Trump’s MAGA regime.

DFER was established upon the premise, according to its hedge fund co-founder Whitney Tilson, that it would spend lavishly as part of an “inside job” to turn the Democratic Party away from teachers unions and public education and toward charter schools. Its CEO Jorge Elorza has just announced the organization will race even further to the right: DFER will now “Explore innovative funding models such as education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers, and tax credit programs.” (emphasis in original). This is the program of billionaires Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos–and Donald Trump.

Judging by the number of high-level staff fleeing from DFER, Elorza has been driving the operation into the ground. Jessical Giles, who served for six years as Washington, D.C. executive director recently resigned because DFER’s policies “no longer align with my values and vision.” 

Other DFER leaders have complained of the group’s gallop toward political extremism. In a complaint filed in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, former Massachusetts executive director Mary Tamer wrote that Elorza retaliated against her for “inquiring about Mr. Elorza’s decision to join a Koch-funded right-wing coalition that seemed contrary to the organization’s best interests and mission.” The right-wing coalition seems to be the No More Lines Coalition, which includes not only Koch aligned organizations but Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Childrenand the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Elorza has been a guest speaker at the Charles Koch Institute. Tamer is seeking damages against  DFER, and the allied Education Reform Now and Education Reform Now Advocacy for gender and age discrimination.

Tamer’s complaint alleges a number of defections by key DFER leaders. Within months of Elorza’s arrival COO Shakira Petit left, and CFO Sheri Adebiyi was fired. Board Chair Marlon Marshall and Charles Ledley, a co-founder, resigned. The complaint further alleges that “Ms. Tamer is one of several women in leadership positions who have been terminated or pushed out by the Defendants.” That list includes Connecticut state director Amy Dowell and Jen Walmer of Colorado, a close adviser on education to Governor Jared Polis and one of DFER’s most effective advocates.

Despite the name, DFER has raised millions over the years from Republican-backing billionaires. The Walton Family Foundation, the non-profit corporation of the notoriously anti-union family that owns WalMart, has sustained DFER. Rupert Murchoch, who regards K-12 education as a $500 billion market gave DFER at least $1 million, apparently in the hopes the operation would help his ed tech company. 

Elorza’s announcement of DFER’s shift leans on the “market-based solutions” language of neo-liberal privateering, but the reality is that neo-liberalism is not where the action is in 2025. Families for Excellent Schools, at one time a privateering powerhouse, collapsed in 2018. In 2011 Stand for Children president Jonah Edelman boasted his organization had nine state affiliates and would grow to twenty states by the end of 2015. In 2025 Stand for Children is hanging on in seven states. 

Since its 2007 founding, DFER has claimedchapters in nineteen different states plus D.C. and a teachers group. By February 2025 only four chapters remained. In January 2023, DFER listed thirteen national staffers. By February 2025, it had only four. As of May 2025, the “States” and “National Staff” links on DFER’s webpage have disappeared. An Elorza biography lives on. 

The action now is with extremist organizations like the Koch and Leonard Leo aligned Parents Defending Education and Heritage Foundation offspring Moms for Liberty. 

Self-described “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis accurately sees that DFER has joined with the far right on education privateering.  DeAngelis was the face of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children  until he was fired after revelations he had starred in gay sex porn films. He is now a “senior fellow” at the American Culture Project, which is tied to the Koch network through the Franklin News Foundation. DeAngelis is cheering DFER’s embrace of the Republican education privateering platform. 

What has DFER really joined here? The end game was spelled out in a 2017 memorandumfrom the secretive Council for National Policy to Trump and DeVos: abandon public education in favor of “free-market private schools, church schools and home schools.” 

That is your “choice.” 

DFER has never been a membership organization—there are few real Democrats involved. To be sure, it has gotten donations from charter favoring Democratic billionaires as well as an array of Republican privateers, plus millions of dollars in untraceable dark money. DFER’s organizational drift and rank political opportunism have now cemented its bond with Trump’s MAGA regime.

Maurice T. Cunningham is a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization(2021).

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dark Money, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Hoax, Koch Brothers

Jonathan V. Last: MAHA Is a Fraud

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2025 //
3

Jonathan V. Last writes for and edits one of the liveliest and most informative sites on the Internet: The Bulwark. That is home base for a significant number of Republican Never Trumpers. In this post, he explains that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not only unqualified in medical issues but his ignorance puts all of us in danger.

America has never been healthier. Going backwards is going to mean more people getting sick and dying.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

1. The Past Sucked

I had a great conversation with Your Local Epidemiologist, Katelyn Jetelina, yesterday. It’s here if you missed it.

As she was explaining the state of play with measles outbreaks and falling vaccination rates, I asked her if there was any analog to this moment in the history of public health. She couldn’t think of one.

What America’s new public health establishment—by which I don’t mean actual public health experts but their dilettante conspiracist bosses—is doing is choosing to move the country backwards. Less medical research, a pull-back on life-saving vaccines, turning away from science and embracing folk medicine.

Our new health establishment is explicit about wanting to go backwards. It’s right there on the hat: Make America Healthy Again.

Again.

Meaning: America used to be “healthy” and now is not.

I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet people where they are and give them a loving truth sandwich, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

Does anyone remember what “health” looked like in America a generation or two ago? Half the country smoked. People dropped dead at 50 on the reg. Child birth was dangerous. Seatbelts were suss. Drug use was off the charts.

Dangerous communicable diseases were still around. Cancer was a death sentence. AIDS looked like an unstoppable tsunami.

Food? Do remember what grocery stores looked like in 1980? Aisles of canned vegetables, processed foods, and frozen TV dinners. Fresh produce? Good luck. That section of the Acme was a shoebox.

But that’s all anecdotal. Let’s look at the data. Because it shows—absolutely, unequivocally—that this is the healthiest period in American history.

Let’s start with the dumbest possible metric: life expectancy.

We’ve had a slight downtick in the last year or two largely driven by COVID. You know why a lot of people died from COVID? Because they refused to follow public health advice during the pandemic and then refused to get vaccinated once we had vaccines in hand. So it was precisely the MAHA idiocy that moved our life expectancy backward.

Let’s zoom out and look at America compared to the rest of the developed world:

You want to “Make America Healthy Again”? Get the fucking COVID vaccine like everyone else in the civilized world did.

How about infant mortality? That’s another excellent marker of health in a society. Oh, look—it’s incredibly low: 5.61 deaths per 1,000 live births. This is up slightly from 2020 because, again, COVID. But it’s still a historic low.

When do you think the golden, “healthy” past was? In 1980, the infant mortality rate was more than double what it is today (12.0). In 1960 it was more double that number (25.9).

Real problems do exist. For instance: Access to healthcare for African-American women. The black infant mortality rate is double that of white Americans and the maternal mortality rate for African-American women has been rising sharply for a generation.

These statistics are absolutely shameful. Yet you don’t hear a lot about them from the beef-tallow crowd, do you?

How about infectious diseases? In 1900 half of all deaths in America were from communicable diseases. Through medical advances—especially vaccines—we got that number down to about 5 percent—until COVID. All by itself COVID accounted for 12 percent of all deaths in the United States in 2021.

So again: If you want America to be healthy you’d do exactly the opposite of what the Trump administration is doing and urge everyone to get vaccinated.

And while we’re talking about healthy habits: Americans don’t smoke like they used to.

Also, forty years ago less than a fifth of people in cars used seatbelts. Today that number is well over 90 percent.

2. The Big C

Let’s talk about cancer. You ever feel like, “Man, people are getting cancer like crazy these days?”

Here’s what happened. There was a huge spike in the incidence of cancer diagnoses from 1975 to 1995. Why? Two things.

First, people were living longer and you have to die of something. Since people weren’t dying from polio, measles, and communicable diseases, they were living long enough to get cancer.

Second, medical science developed more tools to detect cancer. Inventing effective tests and screenings means finding more incidences. Donald Trump knows this.

So when you look at this graph the solid lines are cancer incidences. You see that they go up, and then down. But I want you to look at the dotted lines:

The dotted lines are the cancer mortality rates. And what you see is that in the early 1990s, people started surviving cancer at higher rates even as the incidences of cancer increased. And from 1995 to 2000, as the cancer incidence rate peaked, the mortality rate fell off a cliff.

Why?

Because better tests = more cancer diagnoses = earlier interventions + therapeutic advances = much higher survival rates.

The pattern we see with cancer incidence describes a lot of our health challenges today. Why do so many people get dementia or Alzheimer’s now? Because they’re surviving cancer and—again—something is going to get us eventually.

Why so many autism diagnoses? Because 40 years ago doctors didn’t understand what they were seeing in kids who had ASD. Now they do. Once medical science understands what it’s looking at, you’re going to get more diagnoses. This isn’t hard to understand.

Look: There are some things that have legitimately gotten worse over time. The incidence of Type 2 diabetes has increased dramatically since 1950. Some of this is linked to increasing obesity.

What’s the answer? Diet and exercise, which you may recall Michelle Obama talking a lot about (and getting ridiculed by Republicans for her trouble). Semaglutide drugs show tremendous potential for helping curb obesity and reduce the incidence of diabetes.

You may be surprised to hear that MAHA does not like this class of pharmaceuticals.

So what’s going on here? Why does the “Make America Healthy Again” movement romanticize the health outcomes of the past (which were worse) and misunderstand the health outcomes of the present (which are significantly better along the most important vectors and continue to improve over time)?

Why do people like RFK Jr. oppose medical practices that create better outcomes (vaccines; the Ozempic-class drugs)?

I don’t know. Maybe you have a theory and can discuss it in the comments.

But at the end of the day, the “why” doesn’t matter. What matters is the results. And the results are going to be bad.

3. Worse Than Fraud

Buildings used to catch on fire all the time in America. It was a serious problem. That’s why cities had as many fire stations as churches.

Over time, we cut way down on the number of fires. We switched construction materials. We came up with safer mechanisms for delivering gas and electricity. We developed best-practices and enshrined them in building codes. The big thing was the invention of the sprinkler system.

The result was that even as the total number of buildings in America kept growing, the annual number of structure fires kept going down. Dramatically.

Imagine a movement that looked at this data and decided America didn’t need sprinkler systems anymore.

Modern building costs are too high. There’s too much red tape. We spend billions on sprinkler systems every year that are never used. Let’s go back to the old ways. Make Buildings Great Again.

After all, we don’t have to worry about fires anymore.

The MAHA movement is like that. Except that while trying to get rid of sprinkler systems and building codes, they are also walking around carelessly tossing lit matches.

These people aren’t just frauds. They’re arsonists. And right now they run the U.S. government, the CDC, the NIH, and the fire department, too.

Categories Health, Hoax, Science

North Dakota Becomes 47th State to Authorize Charter Schools Despite Decades of Broken Promises

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2025 //
2

North Dakota became the 47th state to authorize charter schools. There are three states that do not have a charter sschool law. Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont. Kentucky has a law but its courts declared them unconstitutional.

When charter schools first began in 1991, they were sold to the public as a miracle cure. Their promoters said they would operate with greater accountability, no bureaucracy, and the freedom to hire and fire at will. Because of this flexibility, charters would produce higher test scores, would cost less, would “save” the failing students, would close if they didn’t get the promised results, and would produce innovations that would help public schools.

None of these promises came true. The charters are no better than public schools, and many are far worse. The ones that produce higher scores choose their students carefully and avoid the neediest, most difficult students. Charters have produced no innovations. They have a well-funded lobby that fights accountability and seeks more funding. They close at a startling rate: more than one of every four are gone within five years of opening.

Charters have also been notorious for waste, fraud, and abuse. Scores of charters have been rife with fraud and outright theft. One online charter operator in Ohio collected $1 billion over twenty years, donated generously to elected officials, and when confronted by an audit and demand for repayment, declared bankruptcy. An online charter operator in California stole nearly $100 million. Some operators of brick-and-mortar charter schools have gone to jail for financial fraud.

The Network for Public Education keeps track of charter frauds. All this information is freely available. Yet North Dakota Governor Kelly Armstrong recited the same broken promises in signing charter legislation. The charters will not produce higher student scores, will push out students they don’t want, and will not produce innovation. In coming sessions of the legislature, their lobbyists will weaken or eliminate the provisions they don’t like. If North Dakota is fortunate, the big charter chains will ignore them because the market is small.

Edsource reported:

North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong signed Senate Bill 2241 Monday, allowing public charter schools to operate in the state.

The legislation takes effect Aug. 1.

Charter schools are state-funded public schools that have greater flexibility in hiring, curriculum, management and other aspects of their operations. Unlike traditional public schools that are run by school districts with an elected school board and a board-appointed superintendent, most charter schools are run by organizations with self-appointed boards.

Senate Bill 2241 requires charter schools to operate under a performance agreement with the state Superintendent of Public Instruction, according to a media release from the governor’s office. The schools must meet or exceed state academic and graduation requirements and be open to all North Dakota students.

“The public charter schools authorized by this bill can drive innovation, improve student outcomes and increase parent satisfaction,” Armstrong said in a statement.

Categories Charter Schools, Data, Hoax

Washington Post: Social Security Facing Chaos After DOGE Cuts

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2025 //
6

What is Elon Musk’s agenda? His DOGE teams are wreaking havoc across the federal government. His claims of saving “billions” are making government inefficient. Thousands of researchers, scientists, and essential personnel have been fired. Is he working to destroy our government? Or is he settting up a scenario of failure as a prelude to privatization?

The Washington Post reported on chaos at the Social Security Administratuin:

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.

The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example, many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.

The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.

“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.

“It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.

The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.

The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.

A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.

The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.

“We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”

The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.

Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.

The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.

Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.

In other instances, managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.

The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.

But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.

At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outages have occurred during “high volume use of the network.”

“Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.

Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated.………..

What readers are saying

The comments express strong concerns about the recent IT staff cuts and website outages at the Social Security Administration, suggesting these actions are deliberate attempts to undermine the system. Many commenters believe this is part of a broader strategy to privatize Social Security.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Hoax, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Science, Stupid, Trump
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