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Trump Cancels Annual Hunger Survey

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2025 //
10

The Trump administration is canceling the federal government’s annual report on hunger, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Why? The administration says the data gets “politicized.” I think that means that lobbyists for the poor use the data to seek more funding for programs to feed people who are hungry.

The data, which is collected each December and analyzed by the U.S. Agriculture Department, measures food insecurity across states and demographic groups. 

The data has been collected every year since the mid-1990s, and is widely used by federal, state and local policymakers to make funding decisions for food-assistance programs, and to evaluate how well those programs work.  

The decision to discontinue the survey for 2025 was announced in meetings with USDA employees this past week by an administrator for the Economic Research Service, an arm of the Agriculture Department, according to people present at the meetings….

“This nonstatutory report became overly politicized and upon subsequent review, was unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department,” USDA spokesman Alec Varsamis said. 

He added that the 2024 report will be released on Oct. 22, but the 2025 report has been discontinued…

Employees inside the USDA as well as economists outside the agency who work closely with the data reacted with shock and anger as word spread about the cancellation. 

“For the past 30 years, the USDA food insecurity measure has provided insight into the extent that American families have been able to cover their food needs,” said Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University, who has been studying the data since its inception, and learned of the study’s cancellation from contacts inside USDA. “Not having this measure for 2025 is particularly troubling given the current rise in inflation and deterioration of labor market conditions, two conditions known to increase food insecurity.”

The administration has criticized government data related to the job market, saying it had been used as a political weapon. President Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a particularly poor jobs report. He accused her of manipulating the numbers to make him look bad, which economists have refuted…

The decision to end the USDA data collection comes at a time when more Americans are struggling to get enough to eat. Food banks have seen requests for assistance from households rise over the past few years, driven by the end of pandemic aid programs and the impact of inflation on grocery prices. 

In 2023, the USDA reported that an estimated 13.8 million children lived in households that struggled to get enough food at times, the highest number in nearly a decade, according to the most recent USDA survey. Data from 2024 is set to be released next month. 

Ignorance is bliss.

Categories Data, Poverty, Trump

Richard Rothstein: The Soft Bigotry of High Expectations

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2025 //
13

This may be the most important article you will read today.

Richard Rothstein has had a distinguished career as a journalist who writes about social science, most notably, achievement gaps, housing segregation, and the impact of poverty on academic performance. He has long been a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and before that was education editor of The New York Times.

Rothstein writes here about the origins of the belief that teachers are directly responsible for student academic performance. If students score poorly on tests, goes the theory, it’s because their teachers have low expectations for them. In the case of black students, teachers’ racism is likely to explain their low expectations. From this perspective, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top made perfect sense. The teachers needed high expectations or needed to be fired.

Rothstein writes:

Social psychologist Robert Rosenthal died at the age of 90 last month. He was best known for his 1968 book, Pygmalion in the Classroom, co-authored by Lenore Jacobson, an elementary school principal in South San Francisco.

No book in the second half of the 20th century did more, unintentionally perhaps, to undermine support for public education, and thus diminish educational opportunities for so many children, especially Black and Hispanic children, to this day. The book and its aftermath put the onus solely on teacher performance when it came to student achievement, disregarding so many critically important socioeconomic factors—at the top of the list, residential segregation.
How did it do that?

The book described an experiment conducted in Ms. Jacobson’s school in 1965. The authors gave pupils an IQ test and then randomly divided the test takers into two groups. They falsely told teachers that results showed that students in one of the groups were poised to dramatically raise their performance in the following year, while the others would not likely demonstrate similar improvement.

At the end of that year, they tested students again and found that the first and second graders in the group that was predicted to improve did so on average, while those in the other group did not. The book, as well as academic articles that Dr. Rosenthal and Ms. Jacobson published, claimed that the experiment showed that teacher expectations had a powerful influence on student achievement, especially of young children. Pupils whose teachers were told were more likely to improve then apparently worked harder to meet their teachers’ faith in them.1

Some psychologists were skeptical, believing that the experimental design was not sufficiently rigorous to support such a revolutionary conclusion. Even the reported results were ambiguous. Teacher expectations had no similar impact on children in grades three through six. Similar experiments elsewhere did not confirm the results even for first and second graders.2

Nonetheless, the book was very influential.
In the decades after Pygmalion, other studies examined teacher expectations. They showed that teachers have greater expectations of higher achieving students but couldn’t determine whether the teacher attitudes helped to cause better pupil performance. Perhaps teachers only developed those expectations after seeing that students were higher achieving.3 Only an experimental study, like Pygmalion, could establish causality, but contemporary ethical standards would often prohibit such experiments, requiring, as they must, lying to teachers about their students’ data.

Minority children in the South San Francisco school where Rosenthal and Jacobson experimented were Mexican-origin, not African American. Yet ignoring how scanty the evidence was, education policymakers concluded from their research that the Black-white gap in test scores at all grade levels resulted from teachers of Black children not expecting their pupils to do well. And that, they reasoned, should be an easy problem to solve—holding teachers accountable for results would force them to abandon the racial stereotypes that were keeping children behind.

The accountability movement grew in intensity during the Bill Clinton administration, while in Texas, Governor George W. Bush implemented a mandatory standardized testing program whose publicized results, he thought, would force teachers to improve by shaming them for the lower scores of their poorer Black and Hispanic pupils.

In 2000, Bush was elected president; his campaign promised to demolish teachers’ “soft bigotry of low expectations.” During his first year in office, he led a bipartisan congressional majority to adopt the “No Child Left Behind Act” that required every state to conduct annual standardized testing in reading and math for pupils in the third through eighth grades. 

Shortly after the bill was signed, I met with the congressional staffer who had been primarily responsible for writing the legislation. She predicted that within two years, the publication of test scores would so embarrass teachers that they would work harder, with the result that racial differences in academic achievement would evaporate entirely.

Nothing of that sort has happened. Although test performance of both Black and white students has improved somewhat, the gap is not much different than it was two decades ago. But the public reputation of our teaching force has continued to deteriorate, as a conclusion spread that failure to equalize test results could be remedied by gimmicks like naming a school’s classrooms for the Ivy League colleges that teachers expected their students to attend.4 

Enthusiasm for charter schools escalated from a belief that operators could choose teachers with higher expectations, yet charter schools have not done any better (and in many cases worse) in closing the gap, once the sector’s ability to select students less likely to fail (and expel students who do) is taken into account.5

In 2008, I taught an education policy course for master’s degree candidates, many of whom had taught for two years in the Teach for America (TFA) program. It placed recent college graduates without teacher credentials in schools for lower-income Black and Hispanic students.

Funded heavily by private philanthropies, TFA embraced the low-expectations theory of below-average performance. Prior to their teaching assignments, TFA corps members were required to attend a summer institute whose curriculum featured a unit entitled “The Power of My Own Expectations” and required them to embrace the “mindset” of “I am totally responsible for the academic achievement of my students.”

None of my master’s degree students claimed that in their two years of teaching, their high expectations actually produced unusually high achievement. But most were so immunized against evidence and experience that they enrolled in a graduate program with the intention of creating new charter schools infused with high expectations. Only a few wondered what had gone wrong with their theory, besides having goals that still weren’t high enough.

Certainly, there are teachers with low expectations and harmful racial stereotypes, and it would be beneficial if those who can’t be trained to improve were removed from the profession. But I’ve visited many schools serving disadvantaged students. Most teachers I observed, white and Black, were dedicated, hard-working, engaged with their students, and frustrated about the social and economic challenges with which children daily came to school. I don’t claim that my observations were representative; I was more likely to be invited to visit schools that took great pride in their efforts, despite conditions they struggled to overcome.

No matter how high their expectations, teachers can’t do much about:

*their pupils’ higher rates of lead poisoning that impact cognitive ability;

*more frequent asthma—the result of living with more pollution, near industrial facilities, in less-well maintained buildings with more vermin in the environment—that may bring them to school drowsy from being awake at night, wheezing;

*neighborhoods without supermarkets that sell fresh and healthy food;

*stress intensified by being stopped and frisked by police without cause, and a discriminatory criminal justice system that disproportionately imprisons their fathers and brothers for trivial offenses;

*frequent moves due to rising rents, or landlords’ failure to keep units in habitable condition;

*absenteeism from a need to stay home to care for younger siblings while parents race from one low-wage job to another;

*poor health from living in neighborhoods with fewer primary care physicians or dentists;

*lower parental education levels that result in less academic support at home, combined with less adequate access to technology, a problem exacerbated since the pandemic;6

*and many other socioeconomic impediments to learning.7

Not every Black child suffers from these deprivations that affect their ability to take full advantage of the education that schools offer. But many do. Concentrating disadvantaged pupils in poorly resourced schools in poorly resourced and segregated neighborhoods overwhelms instructional and support staffs.

Such realities contributed to my conclusion that residential segregation, not low teacher expectations, was the most serious problem faced by U.S. education. It is what led to my recent books, The Color of Law, and its sequel (co-authored by my daughter, Leah Rothstein), Just Action; How to challenge segregation enacted under the Color of Law.

Robert Rosenthal’s Pygmalion theory set the stage for a national willingness to deny educational disparities’ true causes: the unconstitutional and unlawful public policies that imposed racial segregation upon our nation.

Footnotes:

1. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. 1968. Pygmalion in the Classroom: teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). For a technical summary by the authors, see. Rosenthal and Jacobson, “Pygmalion in the Classroom.” The Urban Review 3, September, 1968: 16-20.

2. See “Pygmalion in the Classroom.” The Urban Review 3, September, 1968, footnote on p. 19.

3. For example, see Thomas L. Good, Natasha Sterzinger, and Alyson Lavigne. 2018. “Expectation Effects: Pygmalion and the initial 20 years of research.” Educational Research and Evaluation 24 (3-5): 99-123.

4. See, for example, Richard Rothstein. 2010. “An overemphasis on teachers.” Commentary, Economic Policy Institute, October 18. 

5. Martin Carnoy, et al. 2005. The Charter School Dust-Up. (Washington, D.C.: The Economic Policy Institute).

6. In early 2020, I wrote that the pandemic would widen the achievement gap. The consequences turned out to be worse than I could have imagined. Teacher expectations had nothing to do with it. Richard Rothstein. 2020. “The Coronavirus Will Explode Achievement Gaps in Education.” Shelterforce.org, April 13.

7. Richard Rothstein. 2004. Class and Schools. Using social, economic, and educational reform to close the black–white achievement gap. (Washington, D.C.: The Economic Policy Institute).

The text of this post was originally published on January 30, 2024 on the Working Economics Blog of the Economic Policy Institute.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Parents, Poverty, Students

The Biggest Liar in Texas

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
3

Michelle H. Davis writes a blog called “Lone Star Left,” where she chronicles the usually corrupt politics of Texas. In this post, she eviscerates Governor Abbott, who loves to brag about the economic success of his state. She calls him out for ignoring the people who are nott part of the state’s prosperity.

She writes:

Today, our feckless leader gave a State-of-the-State Address at the Baylor Club in Waco. Now, if you didn’t know, the Baylor Club is a prestigious private social club nestled within McLane Stadium, offering floor-to-ceiling panoramic views of the stadium, downtown Waco, and the Brazos River.

While many Texans are choosing between groceries and insulin, Abbott delivers big promises from an elite club perched over McLane Stadium. That should tell you all you need to know. 

It was about an hour long, so I watched it for you. Below, I’ve broken down everything he said and what he conveniently left out. 

He began the speech by bragging about having dinner with Governor Glenn Youngkin and then told him that Texas’ budget for building roads was $146 billion. He claimed Youngkin dropped his spoon, saying it was bigger than Virginia’s entire budget. He went on to say that Texas had the “largest road building fund in America.” 

It’s only partly true. According to TXDOT’s 10-year plan, we have allocated about $101.6 billion for projects and $45 billion for maintenance. But this road-building bonanza feels stupid without high-speed trains. Seriously, what are we doing? 

Trains would alleviate traffic, carbon emissions, congestion, and get us from Dallas to Houston in just 90 minutes. It’s faster and greener than driving, but we’re investing all our money in roads? 

Modern marvel, or not, no one likes this shit: 

But Republicans do it all for the fossil fuel industry. 

In related news, ConocoPhillips, headquartered in Houston, plans to lay off 25% of its global workforce. 

Then, he stoked the bigwigs in Waco for a little bit. 

Abbott discussed Waco’s significant economic success, noting its high job numbers and record-low unemployment. 

The unemployment rate in Waco in July was 4.1. In DFW, it was 4.0. In the Austin area, it was 3.5. So, really, it’s comparable to Texas. 

What he failed to mention at this invite-only event was that the poverty rate in Waco is about 24.3%, nearly double the state’s average. Or that in some neighborhoods in Waco, it’s as high as 38%. Meanwhile, 57% of Black children in Waco live below the poverty line.

And that’s the optics, right there. While Abbott spoke from his panoramic perch, over half of Waco’s Black children struggle to make ends meet. This is the story of what Texas has become under Republican control. 

It wouldn’t be a boastful Abbott speech if he didn’t brag about Texas’ economy. 

He always does this. 

Texas is the #1 state for doing business.

Texas is the #1 state for economic projects.

Texas is the #1 state for economic development.

Texas is the #1 state for exports.

Texas has a GDP $2.7 trillion.

But he never talks about how we’re the worst for basic health. Or how we have the most uninsured adults in America. Texas sits 43rd for overall child well-being. And 22% of Texas kids are hungry. In fact, over 5 million Texans don’t know where their next meal is coming from. He also forgot to mention that there’s a housing insecurity crisis, and that Texas cities rank the worst for air quality.

They wine and dine behind glass walls and chandeliers, as Abbott brags to the wealthy. The Baylor Club is a fortress of privilege where the powerful toast each other on gold plates, high above the city streets. 

Down below, children go to bed hungry, their bellies gnawing at them while Abbott gloats about GDP. Senior citizens, the same ones who built this state with their hands and backs, are being taxed out of their homes, cast onto the streets, the newest members of the unsheltered community.

How could you hear that and not burn with anger?…

Then, Abbott told the biggest, most monstrous lie of them all. 

I had to clip this 30-second video for you to see it. Otherwise, you might not believe a whopper this big. 

Abbott claimed that since the 2021 storm (Uri), they have bolstered the Texas electric grid, and it has remained perfect. He went on to say that since 2021, no Texan has lost power due to a deficiency in the grid. 

This is flat-out false. This is such a fucking stupid lie, do I even need to fact-check it? 

Ask the 2.3 million CenterPoint customers in Houston who lost power for over a week after Hurricane Beryl in July 2024. Or the nearly 1 million Texans left in the dark by the Houston derecho just two months earlier in May 2024. Families sweltered in the heat, elderly neighbors died waiting for oxygen refills, and Abbott wants to call that a “perfect” grid?

What he’s really doing is splitting hairs. ERCOT didn’t order rolling blackouts in those disasters. The distribution system collapsed. In other words, the wires and poles failed instead of the generators. But tell that to the family sitting in the dark with spoiled food and no air conditioning. To everyday Texans, it doesn’t matter whether it’s ERCOT or CenterPoint. The lights are off, the fridge is warm, and the Governor is lying.

This isn’t a story of resilience. It’s a story of deregulation, neglect, and profit over people.

Abbott claimed the Legislature made a “generational investment” in water. 

Also, bullshit. We talked about this in June: Did the 89th Legislature Address Texas’ Water Problems?

Voters will decide in November whether or not we make that investment, which will not be nearly enough money to cover the extent of Texas’ water problems, but it’s a start. 

Abbott claimed that they prioritized small businesses with the new “DOGE law.” A spin if there ever was one. It’s a new bureaucratic agency added to the Governor’s office, which will look for “ways to make regulations more effective, streamline the regulatory process, reduce department costs, and increase public access to regulatory information.”

If you followed along with Lone Star Left during the weeks where we watched the Texas budget hearings, you may remember that every Texas agency is running on outdated computer systems (if they aren’t still using paper), they are all understaffed, they are in buildings that are falling apart, and most government employees aren’t even making a livable wage. 

Republicans have already run every inch of this state into the ground, and the idea that they are going to use a new government agency to run it into the ground even further is ludicrous. 

Running our state agencies in such an inefficient, broken-down way doesn’t save money. It raises costs. Outdated systems, paper records, and skeleton crews result in Texans waiting longer for services, errors piling up, and agencies paying more in overtime and contract work to keep the lights on.

Republicans are really bad at governing. 

The human toll is brutal. Employment turnover in some state agencies runs as high as 50%. Think about that, half the workforce gone, year after year. When you’re constantly training new people instead of keeping experienced staff, services collapse. And nowhere is this clearer than in our Health and Human Services agencies.

These are the people who process Medicaid applications, SNAP benefits, and health services for children and seniors. Understaffed offices and burned-out employees mean months-long backlogs. Families in crisis are told to wait for food assistance. Elderly Texans often lack home health care due to a shortage of caseworkers. Disabled children get lost in the system while Abbott’s donors laugh from the Baylor Club balcony.

This is intentional sabotage. Republicans have hollowed out the very agencies that keep Texans alive. Then they use the dysfunction as an excuse to privatize more, deregulate more, and funnel more contracts to their cronies. The suffering of everyday Texans is the plan.

Governor Abbott said the Texas Legislature fully funded public schools. 

The basic allotment (the base per-student funding) sat at $6,160 from 2019 through 2024. 2025’s package adds $8.5B with strings and only a modest BA bump debated (far short of inflation, per district leaders). Many districts still report deficits and cuts. “Fully funded” is another flat-out lie.

But when your audience is a bunch of wealthy CEOs who paid $2,000 a plate to get in to hear you speak, lies like that don’t matter. Surely all of those CEOs are sending their kids to private school, on the taxpayer’s dime, with the shiny new vouchers Mr. Let-Them-Eat-Cake got for all his wealthy donors. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to vote this motherfucker out. 

Every year he lies a little bigger, every year he sells us out a little deeper, and every year the gap between those sipping cocktails at the Baylor Club and those wondering how to feed their kids grows wider.

The truth is, the wealth inequality in Texas right now is more drastic than the wealth inequality in France shortly before their revolution. You know what happened then.

And I’ll leave you with this, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 

“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”

So let’s be ready. Let’s be angry. And let’s be organized. Because November 2026 is coming, and it’s time to flip this state.

Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Texas, Vouchers

Becky Pringle: Hungry Children Can’t Learn

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
6

Trump and his compliant allies in Congress took pride in the One Big Ugly Bill that they passed in early July. But it offers reasons for shame, not pride. The Trump bill finances tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting food for schoolchildren and Medicaid for millions of children.

The Republican budget bill locks in benefits for the rich and hunger for children of the poor.

Imagine laughing, applauding, and feeling proud of this heartless bill! I

President Trump Signs His "Big, Beautiful Bill" Into Law And Celebrates Independence Day At The White House

President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cut federal spending on SNAP by around $186 billion over the next decade. Samuel Corum—Getty Images

Becky Pringle, President of the NEA, writes in TIME magazine about the shamefulness of this legislation.

She writes:

Hunger in America’s public schools is a real problem, and it is heartbreaking. As the head of the largest union of educators in the country, I hear stories almost daily of how kids struggle and how schools and teachers step up to fill the gaps. It’s the school community in Kentucky filling a Blessing Box with foods to help fellow students and families who don’t have enough. It’s the teacher in Rhode Island who started a food “recycling” program to ensure no food goes to waste and to give students access to healthy snacks like cheese sticks, apples, yogurt, and milk.

School meals are more than a budget line item. They are lifelines that help millions of students learn and grow. But as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals.

President Donald Trump’s newly-signed tax bill, which Republicans overwhelmingly voted to pass, slashes food assistance benefits via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by an estimated $186 billion over the next decade—thelargest cut in American history. These devastating reductions will result in an estimated 18 million children losing access to free school meals.

The cuts shift the cost of school lunches to the states, costing them more than they can afford when they are already grappling with tighter budgets and substantial Republican-led Medicaid cuts.Twenty-three governors warned these cuts will lead to millions of Americans losing vital food assistance.

It’s hard to understand if you’ve never faced hunger, but millions of American children do not have access to enough food each day. In a recent survey of 1,000 teachers nationwide, three out of every four reported that their students are already coming to school hungry. 

Our children can’t learn if they are hungry. As a middle-school science teacher for more than 30 years, I have seen the pain that hunger creates. It’s the student who skips breakfast so she can give it to her little brother. It’s the student who misbehaves because his stomach is rumbling. It’s the students who struggle in class after a weekend where they didn’t have a single full meal. Educators see this pain everyday, and that’s why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students. 

Free school meals represent commonsense and cost-effective public policy. They don’t just prevent hunger, they help kids succeed. Decades of research reviewed by the Food Research & Action Center shows that when students participate in school breakfast programs, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement go up and tardiness goes down. When I stand in a room of bright and curious children, it breaks my heart that some of them are going without the food they need to learn and thrive—not because America can’t afford to feed them, but because adults in Washington decided they’d rather spend the money on tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

The cuts from the Republican tax bill will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many. In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced lunch during the 2022-2023 school year.

These are not abstract numbers. These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America’s kids deserve better. 

The National School Lunch Act of 1946 laid the foundation that public schools are places where children can receive a free breakfast and lunch each day. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike expanded school lunch programs, operating under the shared understanding that no child should go hungry at school in the richest country in the world.

But the extreme right wing of today’s Republican Party has walked away from that moral consensus—ripping away these programs to give another tax break to billionaires.

The Trump Administration’s authoritarian blueprint outlined in Project 2025 takes the anti-public education attacks even further by attempting to gut the Department of Education and to send tax dollars to private schools, and promoting ideologically-driven book bans and classroom censorship.

And now, as the Trump Administration and its allies work to destroy public education, they also have attempted tointimidate the National Education Association and our 3 million educators. They know we are powerful and vocal advocates for students and a formidable opponent to their attacks on public education. Last month, the relentless efforts of organized educators and our allies got the Trump Administration to release $7 billion in education funds it had tried to withhold.

Together, we will fight forward: for our vision where every student attends a safe, inclusive, supportive, and well-resourced public school, which includes nutritious meals for all students regardless of race or place. 

We are educators. We don’t quit. We will continue to engage with school boards, town halls, state legislatures, and Congress to fight for students. Public education does not belong to politicians trying to dismantle it. It is for every student, parent, and educator who understands it has the power to transform lives.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Poverty, Trump

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

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​

 

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

Congressional Budget Office: Trump Tax Plan Will Enrich the Rich, Reduce Income for the Poor

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2025 //
11

Democratic leaders asked the nonpartisan, highly respected Congressional Budget Office to evaluate the consequences of the Trump tax plan. In brief, the bill would widen the gap between haves and have nots and would increase the number in poverty.

The Financial Times reported:

Donald Trump’s landmark tax bill would make the most prosperous Americans $12,000 richer each year, while wiping $1,600 off the disposable income of the nation’s poorest, Congress’s fiscal watchdog said on Thursday. 

Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” narrowly passed the House of Representatives last month, extending tax cuts introduced during the US president’s first term in the White House in 2017. 

The Congressional Budget Office said in a letter that the top 10 per cent of Americans by income would, on average, see their resources rise by $12,000 a year, or 2.3 per cent of their projected income, should Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” pass the Senate in broadly the same form that it passed the House. 

“The changes would not be evenly distributed among households,” said CBO director Phillip Swagel in the letter addressed to Democrat lawmakers Brendan Boyle and Hakeem Jeffries, who had requested the analysis. 

“The agency estimates that, in general, resources would decrease for households towards the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the middle and the top of the income distribution.” 

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Poverty

What Can the Federal Government Do to Promote Learning?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2025 //
12

On May 10, Dana Goldstein wrote a long article in The New York Times about how education disappeared as a national or federal issue. Why, she wondered, did the two major parties ignore education in the 2024 campaign? Kamala Harris supported public schools and welcomed the support of the two big teachers’ unions, but she did not offer a flashy new program to raise test scores. Trump campaigned on a promise to privatize public funding, promote vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, home schooling–anything but public schools, which he regularly attacked as dens of iniquity, indoctrination, and DEI.

Goldstein is the best education writer at The Times, and her reflections are worth considering.

She started:

What happened to learning as a national priority?

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.

At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.

President Trump has been fixated in his second term on imposing ideological obedience on schools.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”Since taking office, he has pursued this goal with startling energy — assaulting higher education while adopting a strategy of neglect toward the federal government’s traditional role in primary and secondary schools. He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress, and ended efforts to share knowledge with schools about which teaching strategies lead to the best results. A spokeswoman for the administration said that low test scores justify cuts in federal spending. “What we are doing right now with education is clearly not working,” she said.

Mr. Trump has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be “patriotic” — a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.

Actually, federal law explicitly forbids any federal official from attempting to influence the curriculum or textbooks in schools.

Education lawyer Dan Gordon wrote about the multiple laws that prevent any federal official from trying to dictate, supervise, control or interfere with curriculum. There is no sterner prohibition in federal law than the one that keeps federal officials from trying to dictate what schools teach.

Of course, Trump never worries about the limits imposed by laws. He does what he wants and leaves the courts to decide whether he went too far.

Goldstein continued:

Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Mr. Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. When Kamala Harris was running for president last year, she spoke about student loan forgiveness and resisting right-wing book bans. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.

All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.

“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”

I have been writing about federal education policy for almost fifty years. There are things we have learned since Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. That law was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s agenda. Its purpose was to send federal funds to the schools enrolling the poorest students. Its purpose was not to raise test scores but to provide greater equity of resources.

Over time, the federal government took on an assertive role in defending the rights of students to an education: students with disabilities; students who did not speak English; and students attending illegally segregated schools.

In 1983, a commission appointed by President Reagan’s Secretary of Education Terrell Bell declared that American schools were in crisis because of low academic standards. Many states began implementing state tests and raising standards for promotion and graduation.

President George H.W. Bush convened a meeting of the nation’s governors, and they endorsed an ambitious set of “national goals” for the year 2000. E.g., the U.S. will be first in the world by the year 2000; all children will start school ready to learn by 2000. None of the goals–other than the rise of the high school graduation rate to 90%–was met.

The Clinton administration endorsed the national goals and passed legislation (“Goals 2000”) to encourages states to create their own standards and tests. President Clinton made clear, however, that he hoped for national standards and tests.

President George W. Bush came to office with a far-reaching, unprecedented plan called “No Child Left Behind” to reform education by a heavy emphasis on annual testing of reading and math. He claimed that because of his test-based policy, there had been a “Texas Miracle,” which could be replicated on a national scale. NCLB set unreachable goals, saying that every school would have 100% of their students reach proficiency by the year 2014. And if they were not on track to meet that impossible goals, the schools would face increasingly harsh punishments.

In no nation in the world have 100% of all students ever reached proficiency.

Scores rose, as did test-prep. Many untested subjects lost time in the curriculum or disappeared. Reading and math were tested every year from grades 3-8, as the law prescribed. What didn’t matter were science, history, civics, the arts, even recess.

Some schools were sanctioned or even closed for falling behind. Schools were dominated by the all-important reading and math tests. Some districts cheated. Some superintendents were jailed.

In 2001, there were scholars who warned that the “Texas Miracle” was a hoax. Congress didn’t listen. In time the nation learned that there was no Texas Miracle, never had been. But Congress clung to NCLB because they had no other ideas.

When Obama took office in 2009, educators hoped for relief from the annual testing mandates but they were soon disappointed. Obama chose Arne Duncan, who had led the Chicago schools but had never been a teacher. Duncan worked with consultants from the Gates and Broad Foundations and created a national competition for the states called Race to the Top. Duncan had a pot of $5 billion that Congress had given him for education reform.

Race to the Top offered big rewards to states that applied and won. To be eligible, states had to authorize the creation of charter schools (almost every state did); they had to agree to adopt common national standards (that meant the Common Core standards, funded wholly by the Gates Foundation and not yet completed); sign up for one of two federally funded standardized tests (PARCC or Smarter Balanced) ; and agree to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students. Eighteen states won huge rewards. There were other conditions but these were the most consequential.

Tennessee won $500 million. It is hard to see what, if anything, is better in Tennessee because of that audacious prize. The state put $100 million into an “Achievement School District,” which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools into a new district and turned them into charters. Chris Barbic, leader of the YES Prep charter chain in Houston was hired to run it. He pledged that within five years, the lowest-performing schools in the state would rank among the top 20% in the state. None of them did. The ASD was ultimately closed down.

Duncan had a great fondness for charter schools because they were the latest thing in Chicago; while superintendent, he had launched a program he called Renaissance 2010, in which he pledged to close 80 public schools and open 100 charter schools. Duncan viewed charters as miraculous. Ultimately Chicago’s charter sector produced numerous scandals but no miracles.

I have written a lot about Race to the Top over the years. It was layered on top of Bush’s NCLB, but it was even more punitive. It targeted teachers and blamed them if students got low scores. Its requirement that states evaluate teachers by student test scores was a dismal failure. The American Statistical Association warned against it from the outset, pointing out that students’ home life affected test scores more than their teachers.

Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 failed. It destroyed communities. Its strategy of closing neighborhood schools and dispersing students encountered growing resistance. The first schools that Duncan launched as his exemplars were eventually closed. In 2021, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to end its largest “school turnaround” program, managed by a private group, and return its 31 campuses to district control. Duncan’s fervent belief in “turnaround” schools was derided as a historical relic.

Race to the Top failed. The proliferation of charter schools, aided by a hefty federal subsidy, drained students and resources from public schools. Charter schools close their doors at a rapid pace: 26% are gone in their first five years; 39% in their first ten years. In addition, due to lax accountability, charters have demonstrated egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Common Core was supposed to lift test scores and reduce achievement gaps, but it did neither. Conservative commentator Mike Petrilli referred to 2007-2017 as “the lost decade.” Scores stagnated and achievement gaps barely budged.

So what have we learned?

This is what I have learned: politicians are not good at telling educators how to teach. The Department of Education (which barely exists as of now) is not made up of educators. It was not in a position to lead school reform. Nor is the Secretary of Education. Nor is the President. Would you want the State legislature or Congress telling surgeons how to do their job?

The most important thing that the national government can do is to ensure that schools have the funding they need to pay their staff, reduce class sizes, and update their facilities.

The federal government should have a robust program of data collection, so we have accurate information about students, teachers, and schools.

The federal government should not replicate its past failures.

What Congress can do very effectively is to ensure that the nation’s schools have the resources they need; that children have access to nutrition and medical care; and that pregnant women get prenatal care so that their babies are born healthy.

Categories Civil Rights, Closing schools, Curriculum, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Graduation rates, Health, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Republicans, Segregation, Special Education, Standardized Testing, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

PBS: What You Need to Know About Medicaid

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2025 //
16

Republicans are struggling to get the votes they need to pass Trump’s budget bill. They have a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, and they need almost every Republican vote to put the bill through. Much of the debate focuses on the fate of Medicaid.

Medicaid and Medicare are often confused. Medicare is health insurance for senior citizens, funded by their lifetime deductions from their income. Medicaid is health insurance for low-income persons.

Trump and most of the party want to cut Medicaid to pay for the Trump tax cuts, which are focused on high-income individuals and corporations. Even with deep cuts to Medicaid, the tax cuts will increase the deficits.

Lisa Desjardins of PBS assembled a fact sheet about Medicaid.

LET’S TALK ABOUT MEDICAID

By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent
 
Hello from just outside the chambers of House Speaker Mike Johnson.
 
I am waiting with a handful of other reporters as a small group of House Republicans try to work out a compromise over the party’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill.” (I am looking for a shorthand for the bill, perhaps OB3?) 
 
Republicans do not have the votes for this — yet. But they could agree at any point in the next day or two. If not, they face a weekend standoff or the possibility of leaving for Memorial Day recess without the progress Johnson has promised.
 
There is much at stake here. We’d like to pull off one major piece and break down some highlights. Let’s talk about Medicaid.
 
The basics

  • Medicaid is the federal health care program for low-income Americans. 
  • Close to 71.3 million Americans get their health care this way. 
  • CHIP is the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which, along with states, provides health care for kids whose families can’t afford health care but earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. 
  • Nearly 7.3 million American kids are enrolled in CHIP.
  • Income thresholds: As this chart by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows, it varies by state and can vary on whether you have children or are pregnant. 
  • Medicaid expansion is a program in which the federal government pays 90 percent of the cost for any state that expands Medicaid to include those making up to 138 percent of poverty. In 2025, that is $21,597 a year for individuals or $44,367 for families of four. 
  • 40 states (plus Washington, D.C.)have Medicaid expansion.

 
The funding

We are about to get really nerdy. 
 
The federal government and states share the costs of Medicaid. But the rate of federal sharing varies by state, based on a formula.
 
Something called FMAP, the Federal Matching Assistance Program, helps determine how much each state gets, based on the state’s average income level. These range from a 50 to 77 percent match in the states. 
 
But that match rate is just one half of the formula. The other is how much states spend. Medicaid is often the largest single expenditure for any state. The largest portion of money comes from the state’s general fund or general budget. 
 
But states also use something called a “provider tax,” which is a fee charged on health care providers. Think nursing homes or hospitals.
 
Here is the thing about the provider tax. It is a system whereby states can actually profit.  
 
Think about it this way. States charge hospitals and nursing homes a fee. They spend that fee on Medicaid, upping the amount the federal government must match. (More state spending triggers more federal match.) And then those federal dollars go back to the state and to the providers, as people get care. So states and providers don’t lose money, in theory.
 
But they trigger more federal matching.
 
Why it matters
 
Fiscal conservative holdouts who oppose the current “One Big Beautiful Bill” want action on these provider taxes and potentially on the FMAP level.
 
But the latest draft instead reforms Medicaid primarily by setting up new work requirements for “able-bodied” people, or those without disabilities, in the program. That requirement is currently set to phase in over the next two years.
 
Per the Congressional Budget Office, this Republican Medicaid plan would lead to 8.6 million Americans losing their health insurance over the next decade.  
 
(Changes to the Affordable Care Act would lead to millions more losing coverage, per CBO.)
 
Republicans argue that these are programs the United States cannot afford. 
 
And all of it revolves around precisely how Medicaid works, and how states pay for it.

Categories Health, Poverty, Republicans, Trump

NEA: The Purpose of Block Grants is to Diminish Federal Responsibility for Education

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2025 //
2

Project 2025’s section on education proposes that the U.S. Department of Education’s largest funding streams for K-12 schools be turned into block grants to the states with minimal oversight. The two big programs are Title 1 for poor kids and the funding for students with disabilities (IDEA).

The states would be free to convert these funds into vouchers, instead of spending them on low-income students or students with disabilities.

The National Education Association explains here:

Block Grant Overview

Typically, the deal between the federal government and states when specific program funds are block-granted is that the federal government will provide less funding in return for less regulation and requirements. With less regulation, the assumption is that states should be able to do as much or more with less money. While it may be appealing initially to those who administer federal grants at the state and local level, in reality, fewer dollars mean fewer programs and services. States and school districts may have more flexibility in using federal funds but it comes at the expense of the students the federal grant program was designed to help in the first place.

 Many states already underfund their commitment to public education. If states and districts don’t cover the shortfall, students receiving Title I and IDEA services will suffer. Furthermore, both Title I and IDEA have maintenance of effort and supplement, not supplant requirements to ensure states and districts hold up their levels of spending when receiving federal funds. Those requirements will fall away, too, and, most likely, so will the funding commitments by states and districts.

Title I of the ESEA and IDEA were created to ensure all students have equal access to an education, regardless of family income or disability. Many states were failing to adequately educate students in these populations, if at all. The federal role here was clear: where a student lived or their circumstances should not determine the quality of their education. ESEA and IDEA enshrined this principle and attached specific conditions and requirements that states must follow, in return for federal financial assistance, to ensure that students from lower-income families and communities and those with disabilities have the same opportunity to learn as any other student. “No-strings-attached” block grant funding turns the clock back 60 years on education policy and progress, and turns its back on our nation’s commitment to educating all students. While one would like to think that we can trust states to do the right thing on behalf of all students, history tells us differently. 

Providing states with federal aid and fewer requirements leaves the door open for states to do as they wish. Title I of ESEA and IDEA include important requirements and protections for students and families precisely because they were lacking previously. At its core, the Department of Education is a civil rights agency, providing dollars, regulations, requirements, guidance, technical assistance, research, monitoring, and compliance enforcement to preserve and protect students’ access to a free and appropriate education. Strip it away, and you strip away the rights of certain students to a meaningful education.  

 

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Home Schooling, Inequity, Poverty, Privatization, Special Education, Trump, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Why the Department of Education Matters

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2025 //
6

Peter Greene, veteran teacher, master writer, the voice of wisdom and experience, sets the record straight about the purpose of the U.S. Department of Education. Contrary to what wrestling-entrepreneur Linda McMahon (Trump’s Secretary of Education) says, the Department was not created to raise test scores. The Department was created to promote equal access to educational opportunity. That equalization of resources has not yet been achieved, but Trump intends to abolish the goal altogether. In his thinking, everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike him, who was born into wealth and privilege.

Peter Greene writes:

The official assault on the Department of Education has begun.

If it seems like there’s an awful lot more talking around this compared to, say, the gutting of the IRS or USAID, that may be because the regime doesn’t have the legal authority to do the stuff that they are saying they want to do. The executive order is itself pretty weak sauce– “the secretary is to investigate a way to form a way to do stuff provided it’s legal.” And that apparently involves sitting down in front of every camera and microphone and trying to make a case.

A major part of that involves some lies and misdirection. The Trumpian line that we spend more than anyone and get the worst results in the world is a lie. But it is also a misdirection, a misstatement about the department’s actual purpose.

Likewise, it’s a misstatement when the American Federation of Children characterizes the “failed public policy” of “the centralization of American education.” But the Department wasn’t meant–or built–to centralize US education.

The department’s job is not to make sure that American education is great. It is expressly forbidden to exert control over the what and how of education on the state and local level.

The Trump administration is certainly not the first to ignore any of that. One of the legacies of No Child Left Behind is the idea that feds can grab the levers of power to attempt control of education in the states. Common Core was the ultimate pretzel– “Don’t call it a curriculum because we know that would be illegal, but we are going to do our damnedest to standardize the curriculum across every school in every state.” For twenty-some years, various reformsters have tried to use the levers of power in DC to reconfigure US education as a centrally planned and coordinated operation (despite the fact that there is nowhere on the globe to point to that model as a successful one). And even supporters of the department are speaking as if the department is an essential hub for the mighty wheel of US education.

Trump is just working with the tools left lying around by the bipartisan supporters of modern education reform.

So if the department’s mission is not to create central organization and coordination, then what is it?

I’d argue that the roots of the department are not the Carter administration, but the civil rights movement of the sixties and the recognition that some states and communities, left to their own devices, would try to cheat some children out of the promise of public education. Derek Black’s new book Dangerous Learning traces generations of attempts to keep Black children away from education. It was (roughly) the 1960s when the country started to grapple more effectively with the need for federal power to oppose those who would stand between children and their rights.

The programs that now rest with the department came before the department itself, programs meant to level the playing field so that the poor (Title I) and the students with special needs (IDEA) would get full access. The creation of the department stepped up that effort and, importantly, added an education-specific Civil Rights office to the effort.

And it was all created to very carefully not usurp the power of the states. When Trump says he’ll return control of education to the states, he’s speaking bunk, because the control of education has always remained with the states– for better or worse.

The federal mission was to make the field more level, to provide guardrails to keep the states playing fair with all students, to make sure that students had the best possible access to the education they were promised.

Trump has promised that none of the grant programs or college loan programs would be cut (and you can take a Trump promise to the… well, somewhere) but if all the money is still going to keep flowing, then what would the loss of the department really mean?

For one thing, the pieces that aren’t there any more. The Office of Civil Rights is now gutted and repurposed to care only about violations of white christianist rights. The National Center of Education Statistics was the source of any data about how education was working out (much of it junk, some of it not). The threat of turning grants into unregulated block grants, or being withheld from schools that dare to vaccinate or recognize diversity or keep naughty books in the library.

So the money will still flow, but the purpose will no longer be to level the playing field. It will not be about making sure every child gets the education they’re entitled to– or rather, it will rest on the MAGA foundation, the assumption that some people deserve less than others.

That’s what the loss of the department means– a loss of a department that, however imperfectly, is supposed to protect the rights of students to an education, regardless of race, creed, zip code, special needs, or the disinterest and prejudice of a state or community. Has the department itself lost sight of that mission from time to time? Sure has. Have they always done a great job of pursuing that mission? Not at all. But if nobody at all is supposed to be pursuing that goal, what will that get us?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Poverty, Privatization, Racism, Republicans, School Choice, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers
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