Archives for category: Privatization
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DOGE Aims to Privatize Federal Government Functions

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2025 //
11

Those of us who have watched the movement to privatize public education over the past 30 years have witnessed a long list of broken promises. Privately-run schools, we were told, would be more effective, more accountable, more transparent, more responsive to students and parents, and would save money!

Now we know that none of those claims were true.

Privatization, in the case of charter schools and vouchers, does not produce better results, except when the privatizers exclude the students with the greatest needs. Privatization does not save money; in fact, it’s more expensive because the business has to turn a profit. Privatization means less accountability and less transparency; lobbyists for the charter chains and voucher entities fight both accountability and transparency. Accountability and testing, it turns out, is only for public schools, not for religious and private schools. Privatization opens the way to graft, corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse.

The Washington Post wrote that the highest goal of Elon Musk’s DOGE plan is privatization of government services.

Mail delivery. Real estate. Foreign aid grants. The Trump administration is moving to privatize a sweeping number of government functions and assets — a long-standing Republican goal that’s being catalyzed by billionaire Elon Musk.

The slash-and-burn approach of Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is paving the way for a new shift to the private sector, reducing the size and power of the federal bureaucracy in a real-world test of the conservative theory — a version of which is also widely popular in Silicon Valley — that companies are better than government at saving money and responding to people’s needs.

Examples are popping up across Washington and in proposals from President Donald Trump’s allies, though the plans are at various stages of development and, in some cases, have already encountered resistance.

At the DOGE-allied General Services Administration, officials are quietly moving ahead with a push to sell hundreds of publicly owned buildings to private companies — which can then lease them back to the government, theoretically saving maintenance and upkeep costs for taxpayers, according to two people briefed on internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

At the Postal Service, whose leaders have tussled with DOGE representatives, a plan for full privatization appears to have lost steam after facing pushback and legal hurdles. But private firms are preparing for a piecemeal government effort to outsource mail and package handling and long-haul trucking routes, while off-loading leases for unprofitable post offices, according to six industry executives.

At the Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum has proposed allowing private developers to build on federal lands across the West. And in his first public address as treasury secretary, former hedge fund manager Scott Bessent vowed to “reprivatize the economy.”
Businesspeople and policymakers close to the administration are stepping up with additional proposals.

A Wall Street investor nominated to run the International Development Finance Corporation, a little-known foreign investment agency that works to align the private sector with U.S. foreign policy goals, has suggested redirecting a large portion of the $40 billion budget of the shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development to investors, start-ups and companies that work in developing countries.

The proposal, which was posted on X by the nominee, Ben Black, and tech investor Joe Lonsdale, is under consideration within the White House, according to a person familiar with it, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations. Bloomberg first reported that the initiative was under consideration.

The military contractor Erik Prince has pushed to turn over defense and immigration enforcement functions to private security firms, at one point pitching U.S. officials on a plan to execute operations in Africa, according to three people with knowledge of the idea, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. CNN reported that Prince also has floated the use of private military contractors to carry out operations against Houthi rebels in Yemen…

Traditional Republicans have long argued that private companies can do a better job of managing government services than civil servants. But Musk and his Silicon Valley associates want to push the idea much further than the mainstream GOP. At a Morgan Stanley technology conference this month, Musk said the government should privatize “everything we possibly can.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corruption, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Musk, Elon, Privatization, Trump

John Thompson: Why is Robert Pondiscio So Angry?

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2025 //
13

John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma. He keeps watch over the Red state politics of Oklahoma and follows the national education scene closely, He writes here about author Robert Pondiscio. I was at one time good friends with Pondiscio. We were on the same wave-length. But things changed. Curiously, as I moved from right to left in my views, he moved in the other direction.

John Thompson writes about him and his ideological journey here:

Since the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Robert Pondiscio agreed to join the Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ Executive Review Committee, I’ve wondered how he could collaborate with Russell Vought and the founders of Project 2025 in order to turn Oklahoma’s teaching standards into rightwing propaganda. (I should note that because of a scheduling problem, he wasn’t able to remain on the committee.)

Years ago, when I first met Pondiscio, he was focused on high quality curricula; the person I knew would have been horrified by Walters’ silently imposed standards, that, for instance: 

Would require that high school students “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results’ including”‘ sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.’”

After reading Pondiscio’s “The Last Days of Public School,” I’ve wondered what corporate school reformers would have thought if, in 2010, he had written the same things about the “Risks and Rewards” of school privatization. My reading of it is that Pondiscio now makes mostly the same statements about test-driven school privatization, as he did back then. But he’s switched sides, allying with both the Billionaires Boys Club and MAGAs in order to advance his personal agenda. 

Pondiscio has long supported Core Knowledge, but he and E.D. Hirsch sought tests for diagnostic purposes, not reward-and-punish. Pondiscio agreed with Hirsch that high-stakes tests “are fundamentally unfair to disadvantaged children, particularly low-income children of color.”

When being interviewed by Larry Ferlazzo, Pondiscio denounced the corporate reformers, who were non-educators, who believed that improving teacher quality and lifting charter school caps was a simple solution. They believed their “reforms” could overcome the extreme poverty and multiple traumas that his and my students endured. Moreover, he was repelled by stories about “Rubber Rooms” in order to engage in “bashing teachers.”

And, rather than blame public schools for wasting money, he pointed out the huge amounts of money spent for implementing the hunches of corporate reformers seeking disruptive and transformative change.

By 2018, however, Pondiscio seemed fully committed to his new test-driven, competition-driven allies. For instance, he enthusiastically supported New Orleans’ Superintendent John White, who was a true-believer in school privatization, Teach for America, and high-stakes testing. When debating Diane Ravitch about school choice, he “retorted that school choice was not a ‘rightwing agenda,’ it was a ‘moral agenda.’”

Even today, when explaining how public schools (which he confusingly calls the “legacy system”) are doomed, Pondiscio seems to acknowledge that punitive, market-driven policies have failed in the ways we defenders of public schools predicted. He acknowledges that student outcomes were declining before Covid hit. But it contributed to “mounting challenges: historic declines in student achievement, chronic absenteeism, discipline crises, and plummeting teacher morale. Even as schools return to normal, confidence in public education has suffered hammer blows.”

To his credit, Pondiscio also cites the challenges of the  “baby bust”—a decline in the birth rate that will reduce the number of school-age children by an estimated two to three million over the next decade.

It is to his discredit, I believe, that he doesn’t mention the damage done by the Trump administrations, and the extreme anti-public school propaganda funded by the “Billionaires Boys Club.”

Pondiscio now writes that “the zip code–driven default mode of educating our children is unlikely to disappear entirely. It will remain a common mode for a significant number of children if only because of habit and inertia. But we have hit and passed peak public education. Its influence and dominance can only wane.”

While remaining on the AEI team and being open to working with the Heritage Foundation effort to dismantle public education, Pondiscio writes, “In practice, this means almost any parent can opt out of public education and redirect funds to offset the cost of private school, pay for tutoring, and purchase textbooks, technology, and almost any conceivable service they deem necessary to meet the educational needs of their child.”

While supporting this outcome, Pondiscio writes:

While public schools have largely failed to be the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” Mann envisioned, they have at least aspired to provide a shared foundation of civic knowledge and literacy. In a world where education is fully customizable, we risk losing the common civic framework that binds a diverse nation together. Schools transmit not just knowledge but shared values, norms, and narratives.

Moreover:

School choice does not guarantee better schools—only different ones. The same market forces that produce elite private schools could also create a “long tail” of low-quality options. Moreover, as more middle-class and engaged families exit public schools, the legacy system risks becoming the school of last resort for the most disadvantaged students—further intensifying educational inequality. 

Why would Pondiscio, who makes such acknowledgements, seem to go along with the destruction of public education in order to defeat educators who disagree with him on curriculum and other aspects of instruction? 

Reading his AEI posts, I’m struck by the anger he spews about educators who “worship to excess at the altar of student engagement.” I’m struck by his repeatedly blaming “Wokism.” Why does he invest so much in attacking schools as “Ideological Boot Camps?”  At a time when Elon Musk and President Trump are trying to destroy the Education Department, why is Pondiscio doubling down on its administrators who he says order schools to “Comply with our enlightened vision or risk a civil rights probe that could cost you your federal funding?”

In other words, why is Pondiscio focusing more on defeating advocates for hands-on learning and civil rights, than defending the poor children of color that he and I taught?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice

Stephen Dyer: Vouchers in Ohio Subsidize 91% of Students in Private Schools

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2025 //
5

Stephen Dyer is a former state legislator in Ohio. He is a practicing lawyer, an accomplished journalist, and a close observer of state education policy.

He wrote on his blog 10th Period:

According to state data from this year, a whopping 91% of parents with enrolled private school students are getting publicly subsidized tuition.

Ninety. One. Percent.

Back when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Cleveland’s voucher program was Constitutional in 2002, that number was 1.9%…

This has been done at the expense of Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students.

By the end of the currently proposed state budget, Public School students, who make up 84% of Ohio’s total student population, will receive 77.3% of all state K-12 funding. While the 9% of students whose parents receive taxpayer tuition subsidies will eat up 11% of all state K-12 funding¹.

Once again, the “money following the student” bullshit is laid bare by actual facts. 

If money were really just “following the student”, then each of the three systems’ share of funding should match their share of population.

Yet the state’s privately run Charter Schools and private school tuition subsidies for mostly wealthy parents make up a larger share of funding than they do population. 

At whose expense? 

Public School students. And Public School parents, who now have to raise more property taxes to make up for this massive diversion of state funds that has meant they’re receiving 8% less state funding than their population would demand.

Footnote:

(1). And this just includes formula funding for Charter Schools and the Voucher payments. If you include all the additional funding streams for Charter School facilities (and other giveaways), and the administrative cost and auxiliary services reimbursements for private schools, along with transportation funding for both privately run systems, these percentages are even a few percentages higher for Charters and Vouchers and lower for publics. But I wanted to be conservative in my estimate and keep it to just the foundation payments to Charters and the Vouchers only for privates.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, 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

Why So Much Trump on This Blog?

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2025 //
38

I am a historian of education. I started the blog in 2012 to draw attention to the nefarious push for privatization. The privatization movement was and is well-funded by billionaires and highly coordinated. Its leaders attacked public schools as “failing,” they railed against teachers, and they advocated for charter schools. And of course, they hate unions. They pushed the idea that “school choice” would inevitably lead to better education, as parents would of course choose the best schools. Competition would produce better schools.

But the idea they really pushed was that schools are a consumer choice, not a public good. Charter schools were a step on the road to vouchers. Vouchers completely destroy the fundamental idea that public schools are a civic responsibility that all of us pay for because all of us benefit, whether or not we have children in public schools.

I wrote three books to spread the word about the hoax of the privatization movement. It directed public money to Walmart-style chains, grifters and entrepreneurs.

But since the re-election of grifter Trump, I have written far more about Trump than about education.

You deserve an explanation.

Trump is a threat to our democracy.

He has turned control of the government over to Elon Musk, a man lacking in understanding of government and lacking in empathy. Musk is ransacking every part of the federal government, ruthlessly firing civil servants and cutting contracts but leaving untouched the billions he receives every year.

Trump has upended the world by insulting our allies and praising authoritarians.

He attacks NATO and the EU. He scorns Ukraine, which was ruthlessly invaded by Russia. He sides with Putin. He opens a tariff war with our neighbors.

I have lived a long life and I have never been more afraid for the survival of the country I love than I am now. We are led by fools and scoundrels.

Trump and Musk are trying to dismantle the federal government. The damage they are inflicting will take years to repair. Valuable agencies like USAID and the Department of Education have been closed without bothering to get approval from Congress. Thousands of civil servants have been fired with no due process or evaluation of their significance.

And we are only two months into his term.

The survival of our public schools depends on the survival of our society.

Trump hates public schools. He wants to fund vouchers everywhere so that children may be indoctrinated in religious schools, so that parents can be paid for home schooling, so that rich parents can be subsidized.

We are in a terrible place.

Trump is a puppet of Putin. He has never said anything critical of Putin, although he is fast to insult everyone else. Why? What does Putin have over Trump?

He has appointed the least qualified people to head every department, with the possible exception of Marco Rubio, who has abandoned his core beliefs to serve Trump.

Of course, I am worried about the survival of public schools.

I’m even more concerned about the survival of our democracy.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Privatization, Trump

Tom Ultican: An Important New Book by Katherine Stewart

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2025 //
8

Tom Ultican is a retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California. He is also a close observer of the privatization movement. He writes here about Katherine Stewart’s important new book Money Lies and God. Stewart is one of the nation’s keenest observers of the rise of Christian nationalism and its intrusion into the education system. She not only does the research to understand their history, she attends their events to gain first-hand knowledge of their leaders and goals.

Ultican writes:

Author Katherine Stewart is a friend of mine. OK, we are not bosom buddies and have only met face to face once briefly. However, in 2017, I wrote about her book The Good News Club and we began communicating by email. In 2019, when she published The Power Worshippers, I again reviewed her book and our email communications were enhanced. Now, she has completed the trilogy with Money Lies and God, her just released book, which continues a deep dive into Christian nationalism and the extreme right’s anti-democratic agenda….

Building toward a Trilogy

Living in Santa Barbara, California in the early 2000s, Stewart was stunned to learn that her daughter’s elementary school had a protestant after school program for students called “The Good News Club.” For the past almost two decades this discovery has driven her to research how religious organizations are now allowed to proselytize babies in public facilities. The more she dug, the scarier reality became.

A significant figure in the tearing down of the separation of church and state was lawyer Jay Sekulow. Born into a Jewish family he converted to evangelical Christianity in the 1980s. In 1990, Pat Robertson brought Sekulow together with a few other lawyers to form the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) (notice how closely the acronym is to ACLU). In 1994, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) added its name to the growing roster of well financed Christian legal organizations and is backed by groups that are a veritable who’s who of the Christian Right.

In 2001, this legal juggernaut succeeded again in their efforts to undermine the separation of church and state with its victory in Good News Club v. Milford Central School. Stewart commented:

“An alien visitor to planet First Amendment could be forgiven for summarizing the entire story thus: Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, together with a few fellow travelers on the Supreme Court and their friends in the ADF and ACLJ, got together and ordered that the United States should establish a nationwide network of evangelical churches housed in taxpayer-financed school facilities.”  

The destruction of the first amendment was well underway.

In The Power Worshippers, Stewart dove deeply into the world of Christian nationalism. Among the many insightful items she shared were the actions of Paul Weyrich. He coined the term “moral majority.” He also co-founded the Heritage Foundation, The Free Congress Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Weyrich made 12 trips to Russia and Eastern Europe before his death in 2008 and became a strong supporter of closer relations with Russia. Stewart reports, “He was writing and speaking frequently in defense of Russia and facilitating visits between U.S. conservatives and Russian political leaders.” (Power Page 270)

In 2013, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association called Putin a “lion of Christianity.” In 2014, Franklin Graham defended Putin for his efforts “to protect his nations’ children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.”He also lamented that Americans have “abdicated our moral leadership.” In 2015, Graham met privately with Putin for 45-minutes. In 2016, Mike Pence said Putin was “a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country.” (Power Page 272)

Donald J. Trumpski’s embrace of Putin and other despotic world leaders is an outcome spurred by Christian nationalism.

Completing the Trilogy

In the introduction to Money Lies and God, Stewart states, “There is no world in which America will become the ‘Christian nation’ that it never actually was; there is only a world in which a theocratic oligarchy imposes a corrupt and despotic order in the name of sectarian values.”  (Money Page 7)

In these pages, Stewart expands beyond just the evangelical community to include the Conservative Catholic community that has joined forces with the evangelicals. The reader is introduced to Opus Dei, the ultraconservative and secretive Catholic group founded in fascist Spain. “Opus Dei does not disclose its membership, but Leonard Leo has a listed entry on the website of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., which is operated by Opus Dei …” (Money Page 43)

Stewart reports on the big 2023 Mom’s for Liberty event in Philadelphia. That same year, she attended the Network for Public Education event also in Philadelphia which is where I had my face to face encounter with my “friend.” She writes about both events.

The book does a lot of documenting of the tremendous amount of money right wingers are pouring into their agenda. She cites the spending by the DeVos-Prince family, Texan Tim Dunn, Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein, the Corkerys, Mike Rydin, Rebekah Mercer, Charles Koch and more. You meet the Ziklag group, a secretive organizations for high net-worth Christian nationalists. ProPublica’s article asserts, “Ziklag appears to be the first coordinated effort to get wealthy donors to fund an overtly Christian nationalist agenda …”

I was surprised that our American psychosis is being spread rapidly around the world. Stewart attended the 2023 National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in London where she saw representative of Victor Orban, the ADF, and the Heritage foundation.

Stewart summarizes the NatCon pitch:

“The sum of all our problems—and the greatest threat that the United States and its sister republics around the world have ever faced—is the rise of the ‘woke’ elite. Cosmopolitan, overeducated, gender-fluid, parasitic, anti-Christian idolaters who worship at the shrine of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the leaders of this progressive cabal are bent on elevating undeserving people of color while crushing hardworking ‘real’ Americans (or real Britons, or whoever is in the audience).”(Money Page 100)

In the “The Rise of the Spirit Warriors” chapter, Stewart notes,

“In October 2023, the spirit warriors notched another stunning victory when one of their own … became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana indicated on his first day as Speaker that God himself had a hand in his ascension to a position second in line to the presidency.” (Money Page 163)

Late in the book, Stewart contends, “The axis around which a sector of the global antidemocratic reaction now turns is an extraordinary alliance between a dominant wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.”(Money Page 214)

I hope you read Money Lies and God.  It is an extraordinarily well written and researched endeavor.  

Categories Bigotry, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, Religion

Julie Vassilatos: Why Trump Wants to Kill the Education Department

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2025 //
3

Julie Vassilatos lives in Chicago, where she has been active as a parent in the resistance to privatization. In this post, she explains why Trump insists on closing the U.S. Department of Educatuon.

She writes:

What a difference a year makes. 

One minute you’re watching your city absorb tens of thousands of new residents, asylum seekers bussed up unannounced from Texas wearing shorts and flip flops in the dead of winter, watching your city do the best they can to make room, to make a home, to help integrate these new neighbors into our city of immigrants. 

Blink, and it’s the next winter. Now you see ICE snatching parents from school drop off, right in front of their kids. 

It’s a whole new world. But one, at least, in which deportation chief Tom Homan is really quite far behind in his local quotas because “the people in Chicago are too educated about their rights.” Apparently this makes his work difficult.

Or take another example. A year ago we lived in a country with a Department of Education. 

Blink, and that Department is in rubble on the ground, drastically defunded and illegally dismantled. 

We’re not quite there yet. But we’re about to be. The right has been hollering about shutting down the Department of Education almost since its modern inception. Now they get everything they have ever wanted with Elon Musk doing the chopping in the interest of cost savings. 

But even if it cost nothing, the DoE would have to be extinguished under our current regime. Because it only exists for one reason. It only has ever existed for one reason. It first came into a short-lived existence for only one reason. And that reason is really, really out of style just at the moment.

The only reason for the Department of Education is equity.

The very first time the idea of a national department of education came up was in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Congressman James A. Garfield—very much understanding the leveling capabilities of education—persuaded Congress to create a department whose sole purpose was to support public education for all Americans, particularly for new immigrants and formerly enslaved people. He thought that “improving the education of citizens was the wisest expenditure a government could make” (Goodyear, 171). And, sure enough, right off the bat, Democratic opponents of such a federal authority cranked and complained about Why do we have to support millions of lazy people who already are hogging at the government trough blah blah Why should Congress have to appropriate public funds for “illegal and improper political purposes” blah blah blah blah….ad nauseam (Goodyear, 173). 

(Cue the creepy Twilight Zone music as the reader slowly realizes that we may be permanently stuck in some kind of post-Civil War time loop)

In short order, Garfield’s embattled Department was whittled down to a Bureau; educational equity for all Americans went very out of vogue in the decades post-Reconstruction. 

Fast forward eighty years and the nation was still, unsurprisingly, mired in educational inequity. Segregated by race, schools for Black Americans were grossly underfunded and inadequate. 1954’s Brown v Board of Education established school desegregation, but after a painful 20 years and with public schools still not serving all Americans remotely equally, the modern Department of Education was created by Congress in 1979. 

This is its first stated goal: “to strengthen the Federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”

It’s had a rocky life, with folks on the right wanting to kill it immediately upon birth, and ever since. But its goals have always remained the same: to advance educational equity in a nation sorely in need of it. 

Anyway you can see why it has to die now, for so many obvious reasons. Take your pick. 

Nothing that exists solely to promote equity must be allowed. 

That is a bad goal. 

Trump doesn’t like it. 

We already have it. 

The word “equity” makes white people feel bad and sad. 

If someone is horning in on my equity it’s not fair. 

Some people are more equity than others. 

Now we have a newly minted Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, who on her first day sent out a missive concerning her department’s “final mission.” She knows little about its proper work and brings with her to the role, mainly decades of a white-dominant WWE culture that is steeped in racist tropes. Freshly confirmed, McMahon is here to burn it all down, and she is happy to. 

But what is this department that’s dying, anyway? What is this beast that needs to be sacrificed? Former IL congressman Adam Kinzinger shared a good, brief explainer last week, “The Grinch Who Stole Education,” about what it does and doesn’t do. It does financially support struggling schools, administer student loans, uphold federal laws supporting disabled students, and enforce civil rights laws in public education. It does not dictate curriculum or teacher standards or exercise local control, despite what Trump says. 

A much deeper dive, “Cruel to Your School,” comes from Jennifer Berkshire in The Baffler, for those interested in well-narrated, riveting history. Her conclusion is the same as Kinzinger’s—that the entire point of those who want to kill the DoE is to increase the wealth of the wealthy at the expense of children and the marginalized. Cutting this department, as well as all the others, will pay for a $4.5T tax cut for the wealthiest. “Children in need are in the crosshairs,” says Kinzinger, and the wealthy elites who stand to benefit the most are Trump, Musk, and friends. Berkshire notes that “Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew seek to deepen inequality by dismantling not just the federal Department of Education, but the institution of public education itself.” After all, in the world according to Musk, “a cognitive elite with the highest IQs deserves to rule over the rest of us, all in our natural places” in a “good and natural” hierarchy. “In this fixed economy of spoils, there is little point to an institution whose goal is ‘equalizing.’ It can’t be done.”

Peter Greene of Curmudgucation recently explained that these people hate the notion of equity so much that they have set up a tattle line for school districts. If you spot anything like equity happening at your school, you are to whisper your findings to a special website, promoted by Mom for Liberty Tiffany Justice. (I’ve written about her and her cronies….here.) So in the rubble of the former Department of Education, we will at least still have a federal mechanism to root out every last trace of equity from our public school system—as long as we have one. 

In this rather horrifying moment, in this context of the violent bludgeoning of a basic and centuries-long effort to create an equitable public education system, I’m giving the last word to Eve Ewing. When those with power strip everything away, shred every value, crush every intention toward a society of justice and equity, it is not enough merely to be angry about what has been taken away. We must—we MUST—dream a good and right future. There is no other way. 

“[I]t’s imperative to understand this nightmarish moment as actually being a reflection of someone else’s dream. Groups like Moms for Liberty and The Heritage Foundation have spent years bringing their most deeply held conjurations across the threshold into reality. Regardless of who prevails in the halls of power, who has more lawmakers and more funding on their side, in this one matter — the matter of imagination — we are equals. So how do we use our dreams as a map forward?

“It’s not enough to be afraid of the laws and rules we don’t want to see in schools. We have to clarify our visions of what, how, where and with whom see we want our beloveds to learn. What are we fighting for? Who are the young people you love most, and what do you dream for them? What are the values you hold dear that you want desperately for them to understand, to inherit? What are the histories, the legacies, the ancestors you need them to know? Where can you and the people you trust build collective power to make space for that teaching, for that learning?”

Beyond using your imagination in powerful ways, what are some things you can do?

There’s the ever-necessary Call Your Congressman.

Go to school board meetings. Go to PTA meetings or Local School Council meetings. Find your allies and band together. Throw in your lot with larger orgs and increase your power. 

Use that above-mentioned equity tattle line in ways that seem appropriate to the moment. 

Get acquainted with the work of the Journey 4 Justice Alliance and attend their upcoming national virtual town hall, “The Threats of Dismantling the USDOE on Black and Brown School Districts,” Thursday, March 20th, 7 pm EST. 

Listen to the outstanding Jennifer Berkshire/Jack Schneider podcast about public education, “Have You Heard?” You’ll learn a lot and it’s painless, even entertaining, and sometimes actually hopeful.

Categories Bigotry, Chicago, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Ignorance, Parents, Privatization, Trump

Joyce Vance: DOGE Is Gutting the National Weather Service, Which Serves All of Us

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
16

Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor in Alabama who writes a blog called “Civil Discourse.” In this post, she explains the damage that Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are imposing on NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By making NOAA less effective, they are setting it up to be privatized and available for a fee, not freely available to the public. Their destruction of NOAA will hurt everyone, red and blue states alike.

She writes:

On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s “reductions in force” directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep.

In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it. 

Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse.

Saturday was even worse. Here in Birmingham, the alerts started midday.

At 12:27 pm, I got the first alert through the UA campus system, telling me that in light of what was expected, I should seek shelter now instead of waiting for an actual tornado warning. The system sends alerts after the National Weather Service makes the call about what to expect. The National Weather Service (NWS) is a component of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We’ve grown accustomed to getting this level of detail. NOAA’s information gets pushed out ahead of these events, causing people to plan in advance. Hard helmets were in short supply here yesterday as people prepared for the storms.

We were relatively lucky in Birmingham. But other places were far less fortunate. By Saturday morning, ABC News reported 36 people were dead in the wake of the storms. This was what the devastation looked like in Tylertown, Mississippi. As I’m writing this, the storm is heading east into Georgia.

How much worse would it have been without the accurate forecasting that let our local news people and local emergency systems warn folks in the storms’ paths sufficiently in advance to get to their safe places? As much as I don’t like to think about it, if Trump and DOGE stay on their current path, we are going to be forced to. Mother Nature doesn’t care who you voted for. If there’s a tornado headed your direction, you need access to early warning systems. Gutting NOAA means you won’t have that.

An example of the tornado warnings issued by National Weather Services offices in Alabama throughout the day Saturday, permitting people to find shelter and take cover in advance.

At 8:52 p.m., local television in central Alabama pushed out a message from the National Weather Service: Talladega, take cover now. It was a tornado on the ground near the famous Superspeedway. Alerts meant people were able to stay safe, which is a good thing—this photo of a bus that ended up on the roof of a nearby high school makes it clear that these early warning systems are critically important. What happens if the National Weather Service is no longer there to do that?

Image

Apparently, the Trump administration is not concerned with that. ABC is reporting that NOAA is down about 2,000 employees since January “as a result of the first round of the Trump administration’s cuts.” California Congressman Jared Huffman, who chairs one of the relevant House subcommittees, said, “There is no way to absorb cuts of this magnitude without cutting into these core missions. This is not about efficiency and it’s certainly not about waste, fraud and abuse. This is taking programs that people depend on to save lives and emasculating them.”

Cuts that sound like a good idea to Elon Musk and Donald Trump have real impacts on the rest of us. That is only just beginning to dawn on people, who I’m sure you’re hearing, like I am, saying, “But I didn’t vote for this.” Trump 2.0, as I’ve written previously, isn’t a pick-your-own-adventure experience. You go to the carnival, you get all of the rides.

We were fortunate last night. Everyone in our house (chickens included) is okay, we just have a little cleanup to do. But so many people weren’t that lucky. They lost houses and lives. They will need support from FEMA and other federal services. If DOGE continues its romp through essential federal work that we, as taxpayers, fund and rely on, it’s only going to get worse. 

When will Republicans wake up? Will their Senators and members of Congress protest what DOGE is doing? Will they even fight for their own backyards? If they continue to bend the knee on this, then instead of demanding that government work for their constituents, they are permitting it to work for the financial interests of the powerful. 

We know what to do about this. With this piece, and the one Friday night about an Idaho Fair Housing Council that I hope you’ll go back and readif you missed it, we’re putting a face on the people DOGE hurts. It’s not about waste and fraud; it’s about people. People who need their government to work for them. Here’s the phone number for the House switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Here’s that number for the Senate: (202) 224-3121. Make sure your representatives know how you feel.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Categories Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Privatization, Stupid, Trump

Josh Cowen: Michigan Doesn’t Want Vouchers, But Trump May Impose Them

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2025 //
2

The DeVos family has poured millions into persuading the people of Michigan to endorse vouchers but they have failed. So far. In a statewide referendum in 2000 sponsored by the DeVoses, voters resoundingly rejected vouchers. Since no voucher referendum has ever passed in any state, the voucher pushers have to find another route that does not include letting voters decide.

Josh Owen thinks they may have found the strategy. He wrote the following editorial for The Detroit Free Press. His article was republished by the Network for Public Education.

New post on Network for Public Education.

Josh Cowen: Another GOP attempt to sneak school vouchers into Michigan — this time, it may work

Noted voucher scholar Josh Cowen wrote an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press warning Michigan that the GOP is trying yet another backdoor approach to getting vouchers into the state. 

Michiganders don’t want school vouchers. But the federal government might force vouchers into Michigan, whether we want them to or not.

In the coming days, Congress will consider whether to include the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA) among many GOP priorities as part of the budget reconciliation process that will set federal spending for next year and beyond.

That bill, which GOP leaders have introduced in both the Senate and the House, is a school voucher plan mixed with a tax credit that would allow donors to divert all or part of what they owe in federal taxes to other organizations that then distribute those funds for private K-12 tuition and other private educational expenses.

Put another way, this is the federal version of the voucher plans spreading in red states across the country — except this one is nestled inside a tax shelter for mostly wealthy donors. Those donors can give either $5,000 or up to 10% of their adjusted income — whichever is greater — for $10 billion in diverted revenue in the first year alone. Then that spending cap can go up. A similar, Michigan-specific version of this scheme was unsuccessfully backed by Betsy DeVos and allies three years ago.

The new federal bill would top off voucher spending in states that have those systems already, and force vouchers into states that have don’t have or want them — states like Michigan.

Our state constitution bans state funding from going to private K-12 schools. But the new voucher tax credit could circumvent that ban by using federal dollars instead. So much for “giving education back to the states,” as the Trump Administration says it wants to do.

Read the full op-ed here. You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/josh-cowen-another-gop-attempt-to-sneak-school-vouchers-into-michigan-this-time-it-may-work/

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: Elon Musk Is Pillaging Our Government

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2025 //
8

Heather Cox Richardson reports on the depredation of Elon Musk, whom Trump has empowered to destroy government services. This destruction is the prelude to privatization. At the Department of Agriculture, his DOGE boys laid off bird flu experts. At the Departnent of Transportation, they laid off air traffic controllers. The story was repeated across the government. Nothing is off-limits from the DOGE vandals, other than the billions of dollars awarded to Elon Musk every year. One can’t help wondering, at least I can’t, whether this crippling of our government was Putin’s idea.

Richardson wrote:

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to slash the federal government and to privatize its current services. As the stock market has dropped and economists have warned of a dramatic slowdown in the economy, he told CNBC “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”

Bessent’s comments reveal that the White House is beginning to feel the pressure of the unpopularity of its policies. Trump’s rejection of 80 years of U.S. foreign policy in order to prop up Russia’s Vladimir Putin has left many Americans as well as allies aghast. Trump’s claims that Putin wants peace were belied when Russia launched massive strikes at Ukraine as soon as Trump stopped sharing intelligence with Ukrainian forces that enabled them to shoot down incoming fire.

The administration’s dramatic—and likely illegal and unconstitutional—cuts are infuriating Americans who did not expect Trump to reorder the American government so completely. While billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump repeatedly say they are cutting only “waste, fraud, and abuse” from the government, that insistence appears to be rhetorical rather than backed by fact. And yesterday, new cuts appeared to continue the gutting of government services that generally appear to be important to Americans’ health, safety, and economic security.

On Friday night, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—about 80,000 of them—received an email offering them a buyout of up to $25,000 if they resign and giving them a deadline of March 14 to respond. Also as of Friday, nearly 230 cases of measles have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, and two people have died.

The secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is frustrating even allies with his response to the outbreak. Kennedy, who has long been an anti-vaccine activist, said last week that measles outbreaks were “not unusual,” and then on Sunday he posted pictures of himself hiking above Coachella Valley in California. On Monday the top spokesperson at HHS, a former Kennedy ally, quit in protest. As Adam Cancryn of Politicoreported, Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine protects children and the community, but has said the decision to vaccinate is personal and that parents should talk to healthcare providers about their options. He has also talked a lot about the benefits of nutritional supplements like cod liver oil, which is high in Vitamin A, in treating measles. In fact, vaccines are the key element in preventing people from contracting the disease..

“It’s a serious role, he’s just a couple of weeks in and measles is not a common occurrence, and it should be all hands on deck,” one former Trump official told Adam Cancryn, Sophie Garder, and Chelsea Cirruzzo of Politico. “When you’re taking a selfie out at Coachella, it’s pretty clear that you’re checked out.”

In another blockbuster story that dropped yesterday, the Social Security Administration announced it will begin to withhold 100% of a person’s Social Security benefits if they are overpaid, even if the overpayment is not their fault. Under President Joe Biden the agency had changed the policy to recover overpayments at 10% of monthly benefits or $10, whichever was greater.

Those who can’t afford that level of repayment can contact Social Security, the notice says, but acting commissioner Leland Dudek has said he plans to cut at least 7,000 jobs—more than 12% of the agency—although its staff is already at a 50-year low. He is also closing field offices, and senior staff with the agency have either left or been fired.

Dudek yesterday retracted an order from the day before that required parents of babies born in Maine to go to a Social Security office to register their baby rather than filling out a form in the hospital. Another on Thursday would also have stopped funeral homes from filing death records electronically.

One new father told Joe Lawlor of the Portland Press Herald that he had filled out the form for his son’s social security number and then his wife got a call saying they would have to go to the Social Security office. But when he tried to call Social Security headquarters to figure out what was going on, the wait time was an estimated two hours. So he called a local office, where no one knew what he was talking about. “They keep talking about efficiency,” he said. “This seemed to be something that worked incredibly efficiently, and they broke it overnight.”

The administration did not explain why it had imposed this rule in Maine. Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, said he was glad the administration had changed its mind, but added that “this rapid reversal has raised concerns among Maine people and left many unanswered questions about the Social Security Administration’s motivations.”

Trump has said that Social Security “won’t be touched” as his administration slashes through the federal government.

Trump also said there would not be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but on Wednesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which figures the financial cost of legislation, said that Republicans will have to cut either Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to meet their goal of cutting at least $880 billion from the funding controlled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Cutting the funding for every other program in the committee’s purview would save a maximum of $135 billion, Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post noted, meaning the committee will have to turn to the biggest ticket items: healthcare programs.

Also yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was getting rid of union protections for the approximately 47,000 employees of the Transportation Security Administration who screen about 2.5 million passengers a day before they can board airplanes. A new agreement in May 2024 raised wages for TSA workers, whose pay has lagged behind that of other government employees. Union leaders say the move is retaliation for its challenges to the actions of the administration toward the 800,000 or so federal workers it represents.

As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times have reported more detail about the Cabinet meeting Trump convened abruptly on Thursday, we have learned more about Musk’s determination to cut the government. As Musk appeared to take charge of the meeting, he clashed with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who complained that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to lay off air traffic controllers.

Swan and Haberman report that Duffy asked what he was supposed to do. He continued by saying: I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? Musk said it was a lie that they were laying off air traffic controllers, and also insisted that there were people hired under diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives working as air traffic controllers. When Duffy pushed back, Musk said Duffy should call him with any concerns, an echo of the message he gave to members of Congress. Like them, Cabinet members are constitutionally part of the government. Musk is not.

What Musk is, according to an interview published today by Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson in Public Notice, is a businessman who believes that there is waste wherever you look and that it is always possible to do something more cheaply. Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, who wrote a book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Character Limit, said that creating confusion is part of the point. Musk creates drama, Conger said, to scare away workers he doesn’t want and attract ones he does.

The pain that he is inflicting on the country is not making him popular, though. Protests at Tesla dealerships that handle his cars are growing, as are instances of vandalism against Tesla dealerships and charging stations, which now number more than a dozen, including attacks with bottles filled with gasoline and set on fire. Pranshu Verma and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post report that Tesla’s stock has dropped more than 35% since Trump took office. Tesla sales have dropped 76% in Germany, 48% in Norway and Denmark, and 45% in France.

On Thursday, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded, raining debris near south Florida and the Bahamas. The Federal Aviation Administration said 240 flights were disrupted by the debris.

The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”

The editorial board did not let Trump hide behind Musk entirely, noting that he has increased instability not only with DOGE, but also “with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies.”

One of the things that the radical extremists in power hated about the modern American state was that it was a nonpartisan machine that functioned pretty well regardless of which party was in charge. Now Musk, who is acting as if he is not bound by the constitution that set up that machine, is taking a sledgehammer to it.

In the Public Notice interview, Thor Benson asked Ryan Mac: “What’s something about Elon’s huge role in the Trump administration that people perhaps aren’t understanding?” Mac answered that Musk is the manifestation of the nation’s extreme wealth inequality. “What happens,” he asked, “when there is unfettered capitalism that allows people to accumulate this much money and this much power?”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Funding, Health, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Privatization, Republicans, Trump
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