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Jan Resseger: What Ohio’s New School Grades Tell Us: It’s Better to be Rich!

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2026 //
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The fabulous cabaret singer Sophie Tucker, well known in the mid-20th century, said: “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better.”

If children have any say in the matter (they don’t), they should arrange to be born to a rich family. They would get regular medical care, nutritious meals, live in nice houses in safe neighborhoods. And their schools would get high ratings!

Jan Resseger writes about how schools in Ohio (and everywhere else) get high test scores:

Here is this morning’s post with new analysis added today from the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s data wonk, Rich Exner, on the meaning of Ohio’s 2026 School Report Cards.

Please do read Exner’s analysis published this afternoon.

Leading with a bar graph correlating the Census Bureau child poverty rate with Ohio school districts’ overall school report card rankings, Exner demonstrates that, once again in 2026, Ohio’s ratings of the state’s public school districts on the annual state report card correlate with school districts’ aggregate family income and other factors known to contribute to opportunity gaps.  The Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce (Ohio DEW) rates and ranks Ohio school districts based on standardized test scores along with several other factors the state now considers such as graduation rates and the amount of chronic absence among students.

Exner writes: “The 2026 Ohio school report cards released this week not only provided a snapshot of each school district, but they also once again drove home the point that wealthier districts usually do better, a cleveland.com analysis found. Perhaps the relationship is no clearer than in comparing districtwide child poverty rates from the Census Bureau to the overall star ratings issued by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Five-star districts, on average, have a child poverty rate of 6.1%, whereas schools scoring on the low-end with just two stars are nearly six times worse off for child poverty, at 35.1%, cleveland.com found.  The trend holds true at each step between, with child poverty averaging 8.5% for 4.5-star districts, 12.8% for four-star districts, 15.6% for 3.5-star districts, 23% for three-star districts and 30.1% for 2.5-star districts.”

Children’s test scores also correlate with related factors. For example, “Within the districts receiving two stars, just 15.6% of the adults age 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or above. In the five-star districts, the rate is more than three times as high, at 48.5%.”

Exner examines the correlation of a each school district’s aggregate child poverty rate and the percentage of adults with a B.A. or above with the state’s overall ratings, and with rankings in each of the subcategories the state considers: school achievement as measured by test scores; progress; gap closing; graduation rates; early literacy; and college, career workforce, and military readiness.  In each case he confirms the years-long trend correlating the state’s ratings of public schools with socioeconomic factors.

—– Here is the original post published this morning —–

What Ohio’s New School Report Cards Really Mean

Earlier this week, the Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce (Ohio DEW) released state report cards for each Ohio school district and every one of the state’s traditional public schools and charter schools. The Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock reports: “Overall, English and math scores inched up statewide. The rate of chronic absenteeism inched downward and remains far from the state’s goal.”

A follow-up from Plain Dealer reporter Rich Exner lists Ohio’s top scoring schools: “Solon was among three Cuyahoga County districts scoring in the top five, and among 10 from the Greater Cleveland area in the top 25 statewide… Following Solon at the top of the list, in order, were Marion schools from western Ohio’s Mercer County, Chagrin Falls, Mariemont from outside Cincinnati, and Rocky River.”  The three greater Cleveland districts in that list are Solon, Chagrin Falls and Rocky River, all upper-income suburbs.

Although Ohio DEW releases the school district report cards every fall with lots of hoopla as a kind of race with clear winners and losers, the causes of disparities in standardized test scores from school to school and district to district are far more complicated. Aggregate standardized test scores for any school or any school district are primarily shaped by one set of variables that are rarely named: family income and the overall income of the community.  The standardized test score ranking is, in reality, a measure of economic privilege.

For years now, Rich Exner, the Plain Dealer’s data wonk, has followed up the state’s release of the state report cards with a far more nuanced analysis.  In 2019, Exner presented a set of bar graphs demonstrating the following: “The latest set of Ohio school report cards not only provided a scorecard for each district statewide – they once again drove home the point that wealthier districts do better on such reports… To get an idea of how closely report card grades from the Ohio Department of Education follow demographic factors, cleveland.com (The Plain Dealer) compared those grades to U.S. Census Bureau community data for household income, child poverty and the education level of the adults.  In nearly every key report card category, the trends followed census data closely.” I include one of Exner’s 2019 bar graphs depicting the correlation of Ohio state school report card rankings with family income.

Again last year, in 2025, when Ohio released the state school report cards, Exner reported the same pattern. While he notes a tiny number of encouraging exceptions when impoverished school districts made impressive test score gains, Exner explains: “For probably as long as the state has been issuing school report cards, one trend has held true – wealthier districts score better. Take this year when the richest 14 districts in the state based on the income of their residents all scored the highest available overall grade – five stars – on the new report cards.”  And he explains further: “Income, of course, is not the only measure tied to the trends. Where incomes are higher, this often increases the likelihood that parents in the districts have college degrees, or the existence of two-parent households, with two incomes. And there are other factors that raise challenges for individual school districts.”

Decades of Research Confirm the Trend Exner Identifies

The late professor of education and former president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Division of Educational Psychology at the American Psychological Association (APA), David Berliner explained: “The big problems of American education are not in America’s schools… It’s neither this nations’ teachers nor its curriculum that impede the achievement of our children. The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are often families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education.”

In Ohio, Douglas Downey, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University describes academic research showing that evaluating public schools based on standardized test scores is unfair to educators and misleading to the public. In a 2019 book, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong, Downey explains: “It turns out that gaps in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children are largely formed prior to kindergarten entry and then do not grow appreciably when children are in school.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 9) “Much of the ‘action’ of inequality therefore occurs very early in life… In addition to the fact that achievement gaps are primarily formed in early childhood, there is another reason to believe that schools are not as responsible for inequality as many think. It turns out that when children are in school during the nine-month academic year, achievement gaps are rather stable. Indeed, sometimes we even observe that socioeconomic gaps grow more slowly during school periods than during summers.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 28)

In 2017, Katherine Michelmore of Syracuse University and Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan studied data from Michigan to identify the role of economic disadvantage in achievement gaps as measured by test scores: “We use administrative data from Michigan to develop a… detailed measure of economic disadvantage… Children who spend all of their school years eligible for subsidized meals have the lowest scores, whereas those who are never eligible have the highest. In eighth grade, the score gap between these two groups is nearly a standard deviation.” “Sixty percent of Michigan’s eighth graders were eligible for subsidized lunch at least once during their time in public schools. But just a quarter of these children (14% of all eighth graders) were economically disadvantaged in every year between kindergarten and eighth grade… Ninety percent of the test score gap we observe in eighth grade between the persistently disadvantaged and the never disadvantaged is present by third grade.”

In 2011, Stanford University educational sociologist, Sean Reardon reported on growing residential segregation by income—which correlates with segregation by race. Reardon used a massive data set to document the consequences of widening economic inequality for children’s outcomes at school. Reardon showed that while in 1970, only 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods classified as affluent or poor, by 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods. By 2007, fewer families across America lived in mixed income communities. Reardon also demonstratedthat along with growing residential inequality and residential segregation by income is a simultaneous jump in an income-inequality school test score gap. The gap between the children with income in the top ten percent and the children with income in the bottom ten percent, was 30-40 percent wider among children born in 2001 than those born in 1975, and twice as large as the black-white test score gap.

Then in 2016, Reardon documented: “The socioeconomic profile of a district is a powerful predictor of the average test score performance of students in that district.” “The most and least socioeconomically advantaged districts have average performance levels more than four grade levels apart. Average test scores of black students are, on average, roughly two grade levels lower than those of white students in the same district; the Hispanic-white difference is roughly one-and-a-half grade levels. Achievement gaps are larger in districts where black and Hispanic students attend higher poverty schools than their white peers… and where large racial/ethnic gaps exist in parents’ educational attainment.  The size of the gaps has little or no association with average class size, a district’s per capita student spending or charter school enrollment.”

In 2022, Reardon commented on the factors that contribute to opportunity gaps: “We examine… test score gaps because they reflect… differences in access to educational opportunities. By ‘educational opportunities,’ we mean all experiences in a child’s life, from birth onward, that provide opportunities for her to learn, including experiences in children’s homes, child care settings, neighborhoods, peer groups, and their schools. This implies that test score gaps may result from unequal opportunities either in or out of school; they are not necessarily the result of differences in school quality, resources, or experience. Moreover, in saying that test score gaps reflect differences in opportunities, we also mean that they are not the result of innate group differences in cognitive skills or other genetic endowments… (D)ifferences in average scores should be understood as reflecting opportunity gaps….”

When standardized test scores are aggregated and compared from school district to school district, the disparities reflect economic inequality as well as economic segregation across U.S. school districts. Although in a smaller town a school district’s aggregate test scores may reflect the economic range of a diverse community, in any metropolitan area, some schools are filled with rich kids, while others are filled with poor kids.  And more important, test scores do not present any picture of what is happening in anybody’s schools. They don’t tell us anything about the richness of the curriculum or the extracurricular offerings for enrichment.  They don’t tell us anything about how teachers work with students or whether students come to love learning.

Categories Accountability, Health, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Medicine, Ohio, Standardized Testing

Paul Krugman: The Billionaire Backlash

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2026 //
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Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote about the public awakening to the menace of billionaires who hoard wealth and buy power. Not all billionaires are bad. McKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has given away billions to worthy causes. But she is not typical. Others are using their money, like Larry Ellison, to destroy our independent media, or to buy elections, usually for reactionaries who promise them lower taxes.

Krugman’s post:

Suddenly it’s OK to sound the alarm about the political power of billionaires. And I do mean suddenly. The chart above, from political scientist Andrew Hall, examines fundraising emails to track the extent to which politicians say negative things about the hyper-wealthy. Not surprisingly, almost all mentions are negative. Until 2025 there were remarkably few such mentions – that is, until the cavalcade of fawning tech bros at the Trump inauguration abruptly made criticism of billionaires and their influence mainstream.

Hall calls this “billionaire bashing.” Tyler Cowencalls it “billionaire derangement syndrome,” as if it were unreasonable to worry about the political power of a handful of incredibly wealthy menwho are bestowing tens of millions in favors to the Trump administration and the Trump family, as well as spending vast sums to influence elections and Supreme Court nominations. The real puzzle is why it didn’t happen sooner.

You don’t need statistics to realize that there has been an explosion of wealth at the very top of the scale. From their titanic yachts to their life extension treatments, the hyper-wealthy are flaunting their billions almost everywhere one looks. For example, a few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a report on a new trend: “landmaxxing,” as in, the hyper-wealthy are increasingly buying giant estates:

And the statistics bear out the impressionistic evidence: there has been an explosion of wealth at the very top. In last Sunday’s primer I noted that in 1982, the first year Forbes compiled its list of the 400 richest Americans, the combined wealth of the 400 was only $92 billion. In 2025 it was $6.6 trillion. Even adjusting for inflation, the growth of wealth at the top has dwarfed gains in income and wealth for the average American:

So why should the rest of us care about how the other 0.0002% live? One important reason is that wealth at the top is, to a significant extent, coming at the expense of American workers. As a recent report from the New York Feddocuments, the share of national income going to workers is at an 80-year low:

Line chart tracking labor share in percentage (vertical axis) from 1945 through 2025 (horizontal axis); starting in the early 2000s, labor share entered a sustained decline, with a particularly sharp drop during the global financial crisis.

Source: Liberty Street Economics

A second, even more important reason is the fact that the hyper-wealthy aren’t just landmaxxing — they’re powermaxxing.They are seriously undermining American democracy as well as lowering the living standards of ordinary Americans.

The Journal article about mega-estates name-checked Larry Ellison, who is America’s 2ndrichest man, and Ken Griffin, who is only the 21strichest, with a mere $50 billion in net worth. In addition to buying huge compounds, both men are very much buying political influence. Ellison’s family has taken control of CBS, which it is rapidly corrupting into a right-wing mouthpiece, and is trying to take over CNN too. And the day after the report on landmaxxing, the Journal published this:

Again, statistical data bear out the impressionistic evidence. As recently as the 2000s, the hyper-wealthy played little direct role in campaign finance, although influence campaigns by the likes of the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife were already having a major effect on the politics of taxation, climate and more. Since then the combination of soaring billionaire wealth and the Citizens United decision by the Roberts Supreme Court — a court whose Trump-enabling, anti-democraticslant was itself largely engineered by the Kochs — have opened the floodgates. Billionaires accounted for almost 20 percent of campaign spending in 2024, and that surely understates their influence:

Massive political spending has given billionaires massive political power. True, some of what the Trump administration does reflects Trump’s personal whims, obsessions and vanity — which is why the Iran debacle happened and is turning into a quagmire. But a large part of federal policy now is government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.

What do billionaires want and get? Money isn’t their only object. Some of them genuinely believe in causes beyond their own further enrichment. Unfortunately, these causes are on average loathsome. Elon Musk, to take the most prominent example, appears to be personally committed to white supremacy and right-wing extremism. Peter Thiel, who bought JD Vance his Ohio Senate seat, appears to be genuinely crazy: he’s called for a return to monarchy and is now ranting about the antichrist. As Henry Farrellargues, we shouldn’t be talking about billionaire derangement syndrome, we should be talking about deranged billionaire syndrome.

Obligatory disclaimer: not all billionaires are deranged, and some are public-spirited figures who try to use their wealth and power to help others. However, the Citizens United decision, along with the Trump administration’s raw corruption, opened the door for the all too numerous predatory billionaires to acquire more political power in order to further rig a system that is already greatly tilted in their favor. Want to pollute air and water? Want your anti-competitive merger approved? Want a big tax cut that benefits the billionaire class while stripping ordering people of their healthcare? Want to eliminate financial regulation so that you can play games with and siphon off other people’s money? No problem on all those counts.

Above all, the billionaires want low taxes for themselves. A recent paper by Balkir et alestimates that because we tax income from wealth at much lower rates than income from wages, the wealthiest 400 people in American pay an average tax rate of 24%, compared with 30% for the population at large and 45% for high-income Americans who derive their income from earnings rather than ownership of assets.

As I noted Sunday, low taxes on the hyper-wealthy feed a downward spiral of oligarchy in which low taxes make it easier for huge fortunes to grow even larger, and in which the power of vast wealth keeps increasing, leading to even more favorable policies for the few.

This downward spiral has been taking place for decades. As I said, the real question about the backlash against billionaires is why it didn’t happen sooner.

Please open the link to finish.

Categories Billionaires, Extremism, Inequality

Jan Resseger: Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Endangers the Well-Being of Children

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2026 //
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Jan Resseger is a perceptive observer of policy and a passionate defender of children. She writes on this post about the myriad ways in which Trump’s signature legislation harms children. This bill will make many children hungrier, poorer, and less healthy.

She writes:

Huge omnibus laws filled with myriad amendments and unrelated provisions are always passed without sufficient public attention to the details and long term consequences.  House Resolution 1, which the President has called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” was an omnibus tax and reconciliation law. President Trump signed HR 1 into law just a year ago on the 4th of July. The law poses a number of threats to the well-being of children and to public schooling.  Many of us who follow public education policy are well aware of the Trump administration’s expansion of the privatization of public education with the new tuition tax credit school voucher program buried in HR 1, but other provisions of this federal law have also begun imperiling the welfare of our society’s most vulnerable children. The damage will only expand in the coming months and years.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently updated threats to children’s welfare in HR1: “Already the law is raising costs for families and taking away health coverage, food assistance, and other essentials from people who are already struggling to afford to meet their basic needs—all while showering more tax breaks on the wealthiest households and funding a violent immigration detention and deportation agenda. The law’s harm will only deepen as its more than $1 trillion in cuts for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act… marketplaces fully take effect and states fully implement SNAP eligibility restrictions and take drastic measures ahead of the federal government’s significant shift of SNAP costs to states… (T)he law’s cuts will expand the still-deep inequities long experienced by those who face the most economic discrimination and poverty, including Black, Latino, and Indigenous people and families with people who are immigrants.”

For political reasons, many of HR 1’s punitive provisions were delayed so that they will kick in only after the 2026 midterm election. The provisions with some of the most serious implications for families with children include future cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities predicts: “The harmful… megabill will take health coverage away from millions of people and dramatically raise health care costs for millions more.  The law cuts $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and ACA marketplaces… The work requirement… will take away coverage for childless adults and some parents who can’t prove that they are participating in countable ‘community engagement’ activities at least 80 hours per month.”

KFF adds: “For the first time, the law conditions Medicaid eligibility for Medicaid expansion enrollees on meeting work and reporting requirements. These work requirements, which will go into effect in January 2027, or sooner at state option, represent the largest source of enrollment declines in the law.”

There are, however, two areas in which HR 1 has already seriously impacted families with children.

Sharp Drop in SNAP Participation     It has been widely predicted that millions of families who need food assistance will, by 2028, loose access to food stamps (SNAP) due to the provisions of HR 1. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Dottie Rosenbaum and Joseph Llobrera report, however, that the sharp drop in access to SNAP has actually begun in 2026:

“Millions of people are losing food assistance through SNAP due to the 2025… HR 1.  This includes many children and others not targeted by HR 1’s eligibility restrictions.  In fact, more people are losing SNAP, and faster, than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted.  The latest data show that about 4.7 million fewer people (including 808,000 children)  participated in SNAP in March 2026 compared to the average month in fiscal year 2025… The most likely reason is the impact of HR 1’s shifting of enormous new SNAP costs to states, which they owe starting in fiscal year 2028.  CBO estimated the cost shift mandate would have no impact until 2028, but it has already led many states to erect barriers to people’s SNAP participation, such as requiring more paperwork and imposing other requirements that states often don’t have the staff to administer.”  In 2028, HR 1 requires states to start paying part of SNAP costs, and states are already trying to make participation “harder to navigate” with “more paperwork, shortening certification periods or adding more case reviews.” (Emphasis is mine.) HR 1 ‘s SNAP requirements will reduce future coverage among parents by adding a work requirement for parents and caregivers of children who are 14 years old or over.

This week the Center for American Progress released a report demonstrating that HR 1 may eventually  also reduce free school meals for children and school districts that now qualify: “When children lose access to SNAP and Medicaid, they may also lose their direct certification for free school meals. This harm expands beyond individual impacts. As a result, schools participating in the Community Eligibility Provision CEP may fall below the 25 percent of direct certified students required to qualify for the CEP, ending free school meals for the entire school or district.”

Spending on Immigration     Last July, the American Immigrant Council summed up how HR 1 would help fund the President’s expanded immigration enforcement—what we have watched during the past year: “H.R. 1 provides $170.7 billion in additional funding for immigration- and border enforcement-related activities to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP, as well as for the Department of Defense (DOD) for activities related to the military’s presence along parts of the southern border.”

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) details some of the consequences so far for children in immigrant families across the United States: “This historic ballooning of immigration enforcement funding has turbocharged family separations and child and family detention, threatening child safety and well-being. An estimated 205,000 children, 145,000 of whom are U.S. citizens, have experienced having a parent in detention… Moreover, the high level of disenrollment in SNAP and Medicaid is in part due to HR 1’s exclusion of lawfully present immigrants, such as asylum seekers and refugees, as well as the chilling effect on people whose children are likely eligible but are disenrolling because they are concerned about their participation being used against them in immigration proceedings.”

Research has shown for decades that family poverty and problems like hunger and homelessness contribute to achievement gaps as children enter school.  Thirty years ago in The Manufactured Crisis, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle declared: “the larger the proportion of citizens who live in poverty, the greater challenge for public schools.” (p. 220)

More recently the National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner explained the correlation of children’s economic circumstances with their school achievement: “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America. School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economic inequality. When children are born in the United States, their educational and life outcomes can all be predicted based on their parents’ education, income and wealth… Inequality in the U.S. is stark and enduring.”

The tangled issues buried in the mammoth HR 1, what President Trump calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” threaten the well-being of millions of poor children enrolled in our nation’s urban and rural public schools. It will be urgently important for educators and public school advocates to press Congress to correct the bill’s myriad injustices.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Democrats, Evil, Extremism, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Vouchers

William Kristol: For the People Born on Third Base

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2026 //
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William Kristol had a storied career as a conservative and neoconservative. His father Irving Kristol (a friend of mine) was considered “the father of neoconservativism,” that is, disillusioned liberals. Bill Kristol was chief of staff to Vice-President Dan Quayle. He founded The Weekly Standard, a magazine of cutting-edge neoconservative commentary.

But he couldn’t tolerate Trump. When Trump was elected in 2020, Bill changed his party registration from Republican to Independent. In 2026, he registered as a Democrat. He is now an editor and writer at The Bulwark. What a transformation! As you will read in this article, his change of mind is more than skin-deep.

He wrote, in the same post that carried Jim Swift’s piece, the following about the indifference and arrogance of the elites:

America today has lots of hard-working immigrants, and plenty of native-born citizens who accept and respect them. But there are also plenty of Americans these days who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.

I hasten to say there’s no fault in being born on third base. Indeed, all of us, whether rich or poor, who were born in today’s America might be said, in the grand historical scheme of things, to have been born on third base. A healthy American patriotism begins with acknowledgment of our good fortune, and with gratitude for what our forebears—most of whom were not born on third base—did to make our privileged lives today possible.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with also taking pride in what we and our contemporaries have accomplished. And if we sometimes overestimate our own achievements and underrate those of our predecessors—and therefore underrate our simple good fortune in being born here—well, that’s human nature, and it’s probably not worth getting all worked up about.

But what is worth getting worked up about is those who have no sympathy for others who didn’t happen to enjoy good fortune. What’s worth getting worked up about is those who have contempt for and who revel in cruelty toward the less fortunate.

There are lots of those people in America today. They include our president. They include many in his administration. They include many in the world of MAGA.

And they include Megyn Kelly, who was so proud of what she said on her show yesterday after the Supreme Court’s TPS decision that she then posted the clip on X:

Megyn sends a message to the Haitians who lost their TPS today:

“Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us . . . GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI!”

Kelly thinks that “we” made America great with “our work ethic, culture, and values.” But most Americans of Kelly’s generation—and, to be clear, of mine—have had to do little in the way of heavy lifting to make America great. And is it clear that today’s culture and values are so exceptionally wonderful?

It was our forebears who made America great. Many of them were immigrants and refugees, whom earlier generations of nativists treated with hostility, bigotry, and cruelty.

The rhetoric of yesterday’s Court ruling is not itself bigoted or cruel. But the policies it permits are bigoted and cruel. They are the policies of people who found themselves, mostly by good fortune, standing on third base. Many of them aren’t particularly good hitters or fast runners. But they’ve decided to protect their status by making sure no one else—especially no one else of a different skin color or background—will have a chance to get up to bat.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Character, Citizenship, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Immigration, Inequality

Heather Cox Richardson: The Fight for Democracy, from Brown to Callais

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2026 //
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Heather Cox Richardson sums up the struggle for equal rights since the Brown decision of May 17, 1954. The struggle has continued in the years since then, aided especially by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The VRA enabled Black Americans to have a voice, representation, and genuine political power. The U.S. Supreme Court decided on April 29, 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais that there is no longer any need for federal protection of voting rights for Black Americans, and they made a decision that is certain to lead to the loss of meaningful representation for Blacks, who–the Court majority decided–no longer needed federal protection. The former Confederacy proceeded to enact redistricting that will wipe out many Black-held seats in Congress. Racism is alive.

Richardson writes:

Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Three years after the Brown v. Board decision, in the face of massive resistance to desegregation in the South, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Black Americans to vote, using the federal government to overrule the state laws that limited voter registration and kept Black voters from the polls. To prevent the passage of the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

(Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) broke Thurmond’s record on March 31 through April 1, 2025, speaking for 25 hours, 5 minutes, and 59 seconds, but his speech was not a filibuster.)

Southern Democrats known as “Dixiecrats” managed to weaken the measure, but Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX) managed to wrestle the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, and Black Americans and their white allies began trying to register Black Americans to vote.

But the law proved too weak to force white registrars to allow Black voters onto the rolls, and by 1961, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) were at work in Mississippi to promote voter registration. In 1964 they launched the “Freedom Summer,” bringing college students from northern schools to work together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters.

Just as the project was getting underway, three organizers—James Chaney, from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York—disappeared outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Lyndon Johnson, president by then, used the popular rage over the three missing voting rights workers to pressure Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, designed to try to hold back the white supremacists and to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. The measure passed, and on July 2, Johnson signed it into law.

On August 4, investigators found the bodies of the three missing men. Ku Klux Klan members working with local law enforcement officers had murdered them and then buried the bodies in an earthen dam that was under construction.

And still, white officials refused to accept the idea of Black voting. In Selma, Alabama, where the city’s voting rolls were 99% white even though Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, local Black organizers had launched a voter registration drive in 1963, but a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake, Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.

Today, thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation and political power in America.”

Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.

“They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voted rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.”

—

Notes:

https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/civil-rightAs-act-1957

https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2026/05/mass-mobilization-expected-in-selma-montgomery-this-weekend-after-supreme-court-decision.html

https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2026/05/church-buses-and-charter-buses-are-heading-to-selma-and-montgomery-for-a-reclamation-of-power.html

https://www.booker.senate.gov/senator-bookers-marathon-speech

Bluesky:

indivisible.org/post/3mlyzqeapbs2g

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, History, Inequality, Injustice, Racism

The Number of Billionaires Is Soaring, Thanks to Trump Tax Cuts!

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2026 //
19

In the midst of an article about Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a favorite retreat for the super-rich, we learned about the expansion of America’s billionaires.

That so much wealth could co-exist with so much poverty is no accident. It is a consequence of policy.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

A New York Times analysis shows the stunning velocity at which the fortunes of the 1 percent have increased across the country since President Trump first took office in 2017. The richest Americans saw their net worth soar 120 percent between 2017 and 2025, a colossal leap from the 45 percent growth they had seen over the previous nine years.

The number of U.S. billionaires jumped 50 percent by some estimates between 2017 and 2025, to more than 900 people.

More and more billionaires

The United States added new billionaires in 20 out of the last 25 years, as fortunes grew.

Source: New York Times analysis of the Forbes billionaires list.

Karl Russell/The New York Times

The list includes Elon Musk, who could become a trillionaire, and celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods, Bruce Springsteen and Jerry Seinfeld. But it also includes a number of people who are largely unknown to most Americans, people whose fortunes were lifted by investments and assets whose values have skyrocketed.

The minting of dozens of new billionaires occurred in the immediate wake of the 2017 tax cuts championed by Mr. Trump at the beginning of his first term, the nation’s biggest tax overhaul since 1986. The legislation, which slashed personal income taxes and doubled the estate tax exemption, was billed by Mr. Trump as “tax cuts for American families.” But the Times analysis, backed up by a range of new studies, shows that it disproportionately benefited wealthier taxpayers.

Most important, it cut the corporate tax rate and laid the groundwork for a surge in stock prices — creating a phenomenal accretion of wealth. The coronavirus pandemic intensified the dynamic. Tech prices soared as employees geared up to work at home and inflation tripled, weighing on the middle class and devastating the poor.

While the rich have been getting richer at a fairly steady pace over the years, the analysis shows that the net worths of those who were already billionaires experienced a pronounced shift after the tax cuts were signed into law, growing by 49 percent over eight years.

The irony in this significant u crease in billionaires is that it started with Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 and expanded with his tax cuts in 2025. And all the while, he was elected and re-elected by people who got the short end of the stick. MAGA was a front for the super-rich. It did nothing for Trump’s loyal base. He played them.

It worked.

Giving credit where it’s due: Andrew Tobias brought this article to my attention in his newsletter.

Categories Billionaires, Inequality

Nick Covington Interviews Me About My Memoirs

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2026 //
4

This is a terrific interview conducted by Nick Covington about my bio, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

Please listen.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Democracy, Education Reform, Inequality, NCLB, Racism, Ravitch, Diane

Why Do So Many Believe in Frauds and Hoaxes?

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2026 //
8

Last Friday, Mary and I took our oldest grandson, who is now 32, to The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. The Morgan is a small but breath-taking collection of books and manuscripts that belonged to the personal collection of J.P. Morgan. The building is breathtaking, as are the books, which include an original Gutenberg Bible.

We began by seeing an exhibition of illustrated Bibles and other religious books that were over 1,000 years old. I kept thinking of the Hebrew scribes and Christian monks who spent years writing and illustrating these gorgeous volumes. Every letter, every line was perfect. How did they do it?

Then we visited the main library, a magnificent room with three layers of leather-bound books.

Mr. J.P. Morgan’s Library
Another view of this magnificent room

The room included a jewel-encrusted Bible, made in France and Austria in the 9th century

Mr. Morgan’s jewel-encrusted Bible

All of this splendor reminded me of the poverty in the streets outside his library and home, but I doubt that he thought much about the people outside.

In an exhibition case, there were several unusual printed documents. One was about a woman named Mary Toth or Toths, an English woman who pulled off an elaborate hoax in 1726, when she was 23 years old. She told doctors that she had given birth to bunnies. The illustration showed her, a few doctors, and many bunnies. The story spread rapidly, and many people believed that she had in fact given birth to bunnies. She was eventually discredited, briefly jailed, and eventually the charges against her were dismissed.

I said to my grandson, if that happened today, it would spread like wildfire on the internet and many people would swear it was true. My grandson said, “Some people will believe anything because they are ignorant.”

The stranger standing next to us interjected, “Some things never change.”

On the same day that we visited The Morgan Library, our frequent commenter Bob Shepherd left the following observation about why people are so gullible:

Three of the most powerful and important experiments ever performed were Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiment, Solomon Asche’s line length determination experiment, and Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment. I won’t go into the details of these here. You can look them up in a quick Google search if you are fuzzy on their details. What these experiments, which have been repeatedly replicated, show conclusively is that about two thirds of people are so driven by desire to be accepted by the group that they will conform to and actively participate in the most egregious behavior toward others in order to be themselves accepted by a perceived “authority.” Next time you are in a public place–at a game, in a restaurant, in a club–look around you. Two thirds of the people you see are potential collaborators–people capable of extreme evil, which, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is TYPICALLY characterized by mediocrity. 

Years ago, when I was a baby editor, I went to work for McDougal, Littell. Ms. Littell–the co-founder’s wife–was the editor of their literature program at the time, and she had chosen for the 12th-grade book an essay by the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper about what an “evil genius” Hitler was. Well, I risked my job by objecting to this piece because Hitler was not a genius. He was a common thug and a psychopath, and people are sheep, easily led, easily bullied into submission and acquiescence. Or consider John Gotti–the psychopathic criminal Mafia thug. The press created an image of the brilliant “Dapper Don,” who could constantly evade punishment. But after he was finally imprisoned, tapes of wire taps on Gotti were released, and these showed that he was the lowest sort of ignorant thug, incapable of clear reasoning or speech, driven by the basest motivations, and unable to say anything without accompanying it with a string of curses that stood in for the words lacking in his fourth-grade vocabulary. 

People want to belong. They want to get along. They want Daddy to tell everyone what to do. And they will idolize absolute monsters if they get that from them.

Bob is a polymath—an author, editor, guitarist, teacher, and humorist–who seems to have read deeply in every field.

Oh, we stopped in the gift shop, and I bought a couple of delightful books. One was titled Rejected Books: The Most Unpublishable Books of All Time.

Some of those unpublishable books:

Famous People in Owl Masks
Unalphabetized Dictionary
Terrible Drawings of Horses

And I loved this cover and title.

People who write books should be fearless.

Categories Billionaires, Hoax, Ignorance, Inequality, Libraries, Lies

Bernie Sanders: The World We Need and Deserve

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2025 //
28

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont shared his year-end thoughts along with his hopes for the future. As the first year of Trump’s second term winds down, it’s hard to believe that the dreams he describes can come true. Every day brings a new blow to the environment, to our health care, to our schools, to our children, to the rule of law, to our allies, to our national sense of purpose.

Yet we will persist. We have no other choice.

Sisters and Brothers – 

As we come to the end of a very difficult year, I want to wish everyone a very happy holiday season, a wonderful new year and thank you all for the support you have given our progressive movement.

Let me take this opportunity to share some end-of-the-year thoughts with you. 

As I reflect on the moment in which we’re living, what is most disturbing to me is not just that a handful of multi-billionaires control our economic life, our political life, and our media. That’s bad, and extremely dangerous. But, what is even worse is the degree to which these Oligarchs, through their wealth and power, have created an environment that limits our imaginations and our expectations as to what we deserve as human beings.

It really is quite amazing.

We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and, yet, we are asked to accept as “normal” the reality that tens of millions of Americans struggle every day to afford the basic necessities of life – food, housing, health care or education. 

We live in a “democracy,” but we are told that it is legal and proper for one man, the wealthiest person on earth, to spend $270 million in campaign contributions to help elect a president who then provides huge tax breaks and other benefits to the very rich. 

We live in a nation whose Declaration of Independence in 1776 boldly proclaimed “that all men are created equal” while, today, the gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever and the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 93%.

We live under a criminal justice system which punishes people for being poor, but rewards fossil fuel tycoons whose carbon emissions are wreaking havoc on the lives of billions of people and posing an existential threat to the planet.

As we enter the new year, our job is clear. We don’t have to accept the Oligarchs’ determination as to what is possible and what is not. We must think big, not small. We must reject status quo politics and economics. We must imagine, and fight for, a world very different than the one in which we now live. We must demand and create a world of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.

Yes. We no longer have to be the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care for all as a human right. The function of healthcare must not be to make the insurance companies and drug companies even richer. We CAN create a high quality cost-effective health care system that focuses on disease prevention, extends our life expectancy and is publicly funded. This is not a radical idea.

Yes. In a highly competitive global economy we CAN have the best public educational system in the world from child care to graduate school. As a nation, we must respect the importance of education and adequately compensate educators for the important work they do. We must strengthen and improve our primary and secondary educational systems and make child care and public colleges and universities tuition free. This is not a radical idea.

Yes. We CAN end the housing crisis and the reality that 800,000 Americans are homeless and millions spend half of their incomes to put a roof over their heads. We must build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing and, in the process, create many good paying union construction jobs. This is not a radical idea. 

YES. With effective regulation we CAN utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics to improve the lives of all, not just the billionaires who own that technology. As worker- productivity increases we can raise wages, improve working conditions and reduce the work week. Making sure that AI and robotics benefit all of society and not the wealthy few is not a radical idea.

YES. We CAN address the outrageous level of income and wealth inequality that we are now experiencing. While we can respect talented businesspeople and entrepreneurial skills, we do not have to accept the outrageous level of greed and vulgarity that the billionaire class too often exhibits. It is beyond absurd that we have a tax system in which the richest people in this country often pay an effective tax rate that is lower than truck drivers or nurses. Demanding that the 1% and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes is not a radical idea. 

At a time when we live in a dangerous and unprecedented moment in American history, and part of a rapidly changing world, it is absolutely imperative that we boldly respond to the crises that we face. This is not the time for timidity. Our agenda must be fearless and straightforward. Nothing less than the preservation of democracy, the well-being of the planet and the future of humanity is a stake.

As we enter the new year, let us go forward together. 

In Solidarity. 

Bernie

IN THAT SPIRIT, dear friends, Happy New Year!

Don’t stop believing in the power of conscience and collective action.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

🍾🍾🍾🍾🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂

Categories Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Hope, Inequality, Injustice, Justice

Bloomberg News: Trump Is Reshaping the Economy

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2025 //
7

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-capital-flow-trump/

This is a gift article that appeared in Bloomberg News. It describes the dramatic changes that Trump has made by executive order to redirect the flow of money.

It’s unlikely that Trump wrote these orders or even understood their implications. He is surrounded by people who know precisely what they are doing: windfalls for the rich.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Economy, Ethics, Inequality, Trump
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