Trump is a petty man who is filled with rage, grievance, and a passion for retribution. His current target is Harvard University because the nation’s most prestigious university told him no. Harvard’s President Alan Garber said it would not allow the federal government to control its curriculum, its admissions, and its hiring policies. No.
He would rather stop researchers who are trying to find cures for cancer, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases than back down on his efforts to stifle academic freedom and his vendetta against Harvard.
I don’t know about you, but I would rather see the federal government fund the search for a cure for MS than withdraw the funding. If he wants to fund trade schools, why should he do so at the expense of crucial research?
He wrote on Truth Social yesterday:
“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump said in a post on social media. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”
Meanwhile, Trump dreamed up another way to harass Harvard during the hours when he couldn’t get to sleep. He demanded that Harvard give him a list containing the names and countries of origin of all its foreign students. Harvard has nearly 7,000 foreign students. Why? What will he do with those names? Will he say they are spies and try again to expel them? Funny thing is he already has all their names and countries. They were registered when they applied for a visa. It’s all a campaign of endless vengeance by a petty, bitter man.
Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters in New York City, is a tireless advocate for reform policies that work. She has spent years collecting research about the benefits of class size reduction and prodding legislators to take action.
She wrote recently about the cross-pollination between New York State and Michigan, where state school board leaders used her research to advocate for lower class sizes.
She wrote:
On April 5 and 6, the Network for Public Education, on whose board I sit, held its annual conference in Columbus, Ohio. More than 400 parents, teachers, advocates, school board members, and other elected officials gathered to learn from each other’s work and be re-energized for the challenges of protecting our public schools from the ravages of budget cuts, right-wing censorship, and privatization.
It was a great weekend to reconnect with old friends, meet new ones, hear from eloquent education leaders, and participate in eye-opening workshops. I led a workshop on the risks of using AI in the classroom, along with Cassie Creswell of Illinois Families for Public Schools, and retired teacher/blogger extraordinaire, Peter Greene. You can take a look at our collective power point presentation here.
At one point, Diane Ravitch, the chair and founder of NPE,introduced each of the board members from the floor. When she told me to stand, I asked her to inform the attendees about the law we helped pass for class size reduction in NYC. She responded, you tell it –and so I briefly recounted how smaller class sizes are supposed to be phased in over the next three yearsin our schools, hoping this might lend encouragement to others in the room to advocate for similar measures in their own states and districts.
Perhaps the personal high point for me was the thrill of meeting Tim Walz, on his birthday no less, who said to me that indeed class size does matter. Here are videos with excerpts from some of the other terrific speeches at the conference.
Then, just four days ago, Prof. Julian Heilig Vasquez, another NPE board member, texted me a link to this news story from the Detroit News:
State Board of Education calls for smaller class sizes after Detroit News investigation
Lansing — Michigan’s State Board of Education approved a resolution Tuesday calling for limits on class sizes to be put in place by the 2030-31 school year, including a cap of 20 students per class for kindergarten through third grade.
The proposal, if enacted by state lawmakers, would represent a sea change for Michigan schools as leaders look to boost struggling literacy rates. Across the state, elementary school classes featuring more than 20 students have been widespread.
Mitchell Robinson, a Democratic member of the State Board of Education, authored the resolution and said action on class sizes was “overdue.”
“Smaller class sizes are going to be a better learning situation for kids and a better teaching situation for teachers,” said Robinson of Okemos, a former music teacher.
A months-long Detroit News investigation published in April found 206 elementary classes — ranging from kindergarten through fifth grade — across 49 schools over the 2023-24 and 2024-25 years that had at least 30 students in them. Among them was a kindergarten class at Bennett Elementary, where the Detroit Public Schools Community District said 30 students were enrolled.
Less than a month after The News’ probe, the Democratic-led State Board of Education, which advises state policymakers on education standards, voted 6-1 on Tuesday in favor of Robinson’s resolution. The resolution said lawmakers should provide funding in the next state budget for school districts with high rates of poverty to lower their student-to-teacher ratios in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms.
By the 2030-31 school year, the resolution said, limits should be instituted to cap class sizes at 20 students per class in kindergarten through third grade, at 23 students per class in fourth grade through eighth grade, and at 25 students per class in high school.
“Many studies show that class size reduction leads to better student outcomes in every way that can be measured, including better grades and test scores, fewer behavior problems, greater likelihood to graduate from high school on time and subsequently enroll in college,” the resolution said.
The resolution added that the Legislature should increase funding to ensure schools are “able to lower class sizes to the mandated levels.”
In an interview, Pamela Pugh, the president of the state board, labeled the resolution an “urgent call” for action. Pugh said the board hasn’t made a similar request in the decade she’s served on the panel.
…Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have called for action on class sizes after the reporting from The News and as Michigan’s reading scores have fallen behind other states.
During her State of the State address in February, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were able to read proficiently. Michigan invests more per student than most states but achieves “bottom 10 results,” the governor said.
“I think the science would tell us that we’ve got to bring down class sizes,” Whitmer said in April.
On Wednesday, state Sen. Darrin Camilleri, D-Trenton, said he was open to a conversation about timelines for implementing class size limits and about how schools could achieve the proposed standards with staffing and physical space.
As I read the story, I was delighted, of course; and noticed that the class size caps cited in the resolution were identical to those required to be phased in for NYC schools. I also noted language in the resolution that echoed the words in some of our research summaries.
I reached out to Diane to ask her if she knew whether Mitchell Robinson had attended the NPE conference, and she confirmed that indeed he had. I then emailed him to ask if our New Yorklaw had played any role in his decision to introduce the resolution, and he immediately responded,
“Leonie, your work in NYC was the direct model and inspiration for this resolution! I was in your session in Columbus, and went home motivated to put together the resolution, using the figures from your bill and the research base on the website.”
He cautioned me that the proposal still has to be enacted into law, and that it would be “an uphill battle,” as Republicans hadretaken the state House.
Then he added: “But that doesn’t mean we sit on our hands for another 2 years—we need to stay on offense and advance good ideas whenever we can.”
I wholeheartedly agree. This resolution and what may hopefully follow for Michigan students reveals just how importantgatherings like the NPE conference are to enable the exchangeof ideas and positive examples of what’s occurring elsewhere. This sort of interaction can be vital to our collective struggle,not just to defend our public schools from the attempts of Trump et.al. to undermine them, but also to push for the sort of positive changes that will allow all our kids to receive the high qualityeducation they deserve.
I have been following the case of Kseniia Petrova, a cancer researcher at Harvard, with a sense of outrage and helplessness. She attended a conference in France and returned last February with samples of frog embryos for her laboratory. She was detained by Customs for failing to declare them and has been incarcerated ever since. The other day, the charge of bringing in an undeclared item was upgraded to a felony, and this young woman faces a possible 20 years in prison.
Is she the kind of dangerous, violent criminal that Trump promised to deport? No.
Jay Kuo is both a lawyer and a playwright, whose blog is called The Status Kuo. He writes about the case today in hopes of rallying support for her. Petrova left Russia to protest the invasion of Ukraine. If she is deported there, she will be immediately jailed.
He writes:
We need to pay close attention to the case of Kseniia Petrova. She’s a Russian-born researcher who was detained by Customs and Border Protection back in February when traveling back from a conference in France.
Like others caught up in the “immigration crackdown” by the Trump administration, Petrova has been held in ICE detention ever since. In her case, a custom agent alleged she had failed to declare frog embryo samples that she’d picked up from a colleague to bring back to the U.S.
For this, the government canceled Petrova’s visa and threatened to deport her. But her case is about far more than frog embryos.
For starters, her home country is Russia, where she was outspoken against the war in Ukraine and was part of the exodus of Russians opposed to Putin’s invasion. She now faces persecution or worse for her anti-war activism should she be sent home, even while the Trump administration bends over backwards for Putin and the Kremlin.
She’s also a researcher and valued member of the Harvard medical sciences community, which has been the constant target of the Trump White House. Being deliberately cruel to Petrova means Trump gets to traumatize Harvard in yet another way.
Petrova has been languishing in a detention facility in Louisiana, but things had begun to move her way. This week, Judge Christina Reiss, a federal judge in Vermont hearing Petrova’s habeas petition, questioned government lawyers over whether Customs and Border Protection actually had the authority to cancel Petrova’s visa. Judge Reiss had set a bail hearing for next Friday, and many viewed it as a hopeful signal that she was set to release Petrova from custody.
Not so fast, said the government. What they did next was frankly shocking, even in this corrosive and highly politicized environment.
The government charges Petrova criminally
Apparently out of sheer spite, and faced with the prospect of losing another case where they had egregiously overreached and overreacted, the government charged Petrova with felony smuggling. That’s a charge that carries up to 20 years in prison.
Felony smuggling laws are intended to deter profiteers from deliberately carrying in endangered species, not to punish researchers who fail to declare frog embryo samples.
Normally when you fail to declare something that should have been itemized at customs, you could face a fine. It’s considered a minor infraction. And in this case, it isn’t even clear that frog embryos count. According to Petrova’s lawyer, customs experts conveyed that that she “did not need a permit to bring in her non-living scientific samples that are not considered biological material under U.S. Customs law.”
The criminal complaint itself is a just single page attaching an affidavit from a Homeland Security agent. In that affidavit, the agent makes much of the fact that, after checking her text messages on her phone (!!), he learned that Petrova apparently had been told by a colleague that she should declare the samples. But she had joked about not having a plan to carry them in, saying, “I won’t be able to swallow them.”
When asked, Petrova told the agent that she was not sure she needed to declare anything. (I should add here that advice from a colleague is not the same as legal advice from a customs lawyer.) Per the Customs and Border Protection website, U.S. government agencies “regulate the importation of biological materials that can pose a threat to agriculture, public health, and natural resources” (emphasis added). But frog embryo samples don’t pose any threat. So it’s hardly clear that Petrova knew these had to be declared.
“Yesterday’s hearing in federal district court in Vermont confirmed that Customs and Border [Protection] officials had no legal basis for cancelling Kseniia’s visa and detaining her,” wrote Petrova’s attorney. The judge in Vermont seemed prepared to agree and to rule that canceling her visa over this was excessive.
Filing criminal charges now? Really?!
When someone is taken into custody by immigration officials, it is customary to charge them first with any crimes they have committed. This makes sense because criminal charges, which are far more serious, should always take priority over any immigration violations, which are normally just civil violations.
Once the individual has been prosecuted, explained Ingrid Eagly, co-director of the Criminal Justice Program at the UCLA School of Law, to the New York Times, the authorities can begin the process of removing them from the country. In Petrova’s case, “they put her in removal proceedings, and now are saying it is a criminal case.” Dr. Eagly explained that this was a “ratcheting up of the charges,” an atypical move that “seems retaliatory, designed for a particular end.”
Prof. Marisol Orihuela of Yale Law School told the Times that this was the first time she had seen a case where criminal charges were brought against someone who had already been in removal proceedings for so long. “The question it raises in my mind is why would it take three months” to decide to charge Petrova, remarked Prof. Orihuela. “It doesn’t really quite add up,” she added, wondering why the government would “need this amount of time if you thought this was a crime worth charging.”
Nor does it make any sense that after three whole months, there is still no further evidence beyond what one lone agent said Petrova did and said under questioning just before she was taken in. There are no interviews of Petrova’s colleagues. There is no showing, beyond a text thread with a colleague, that Petrova knew such samples must be declared. They’ve had three months, but the case has not advanced beyond what was known at the time.
On top of this, the timing of the charge is highly suspicious. Judge Reiss had only this week questioned whether Petrova’s visa revocation was proper, and from all accounts she would have likely ordered Petrova’s release on bail next Friday.
Here’s what I want to know. Who in the administration ordered Petrova to be criminally charged? Was there coordination between an overzealous Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Justice? When was the charging decision made? Did anyone object to it? Why was there apparently no investigation to obtain further evidence to support the charge?
Playing dangerous politics, holding political prisoners
Petrova’s case has been prominent in the headlines. She has received support from all across the country and the world. A feature on her plight was published in the New York Times. Her work as a scientist studying images for cancer diagnostics has been widely lauded, while her detention has been condemned as a pointless harm, not just to her but for medical science and the world.
It would not surprise me if orders to do everything possible to continue to punish and hold Petrova came from the very top of the Trump administration. After all, moving to criminally charge Petrova, three months after she was first detained, makes zero sense unless your point is to make an example of her and thumb your nose at customary prosecutorial practices.
The administration has basically said, “Oh, so you think you can get her out? We’ll stop you, just to show that we can. To hell with your ‘due process’ and ‘civil rights.’ We’re in charge, and she’s not going anywhere.”
This is of course the same position the government has taken with Kilmar Abrego García and all the other political prisoners in El Salvador’s CECOT facility.
I say “political prisoners” because that is precisely what they’ve now become. Petrova, Abrego García, and others are being held for purely political reasons, by or at the request of the U.S. government. It’s not because they’ve committed any actual crimes or are in any way deserving of the treatment they are receiving. Rather, it’s because the administration wants to telegraph strength and cruelty, just like any other fascist regime.
It’s also why the White House is so desperate to cast them as “criminals” and stretch the laws and the truth, even to absurd degrees, to fit its narrative. That makes this fight not just about achieving justice for those wrongly arrested and held, but also about rejecting the raw politicization of their cases and of our immigration and criminal justice systems.
Indeed, fighting for justice for Petrova and others now means no less than fighting for the rule of law, democracy and the very soul of our nation, now put at serious risk by the tyranny of the Trump regime.
Petrova is not a dangerous criminal. She has not raped or murdered anyone. She is a researcher trying to find a cure for cancer.
The Trump administration is determined to punish Harvard University for defiance of its efforts to take control of Harvard’s curriculum, admissions, and faculty hiring policies. Having already suspended $2.2 billion in research grants, the Trump administration expanded its attack on Harvard.
This level of petty vengefulness is unprecedented. Trump is turning his wrath upon Harvard and weaponizing the entire federal government to force the nation’s most prestigious institution of higher education to surrender.
In yet another escalation of its fight against higher education, the Trump administration has moved to terminate scores of research grants at Harvard University and its medical school, imperiling scores of research projects and potentially upending the futures of dozens of young scientists.
Harvard researchers who rely on federal grants to study cancer, infectious diseases and a range of other topics began receiving termination notices en masse on Thursday from a number of federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Energy, according to emails shared with the Globe.
The termination notices threaten tens of millions of dollars in research funding for Harvard and affect a broad swath of the university’s scientific community, including graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are dependent on federal funding for income.
While not unexpected, the wave of termination letters has roiled the Harvard campus in Cambridge and has left many young scientists anxious about their futures, while others are scrambling to find ways to replace the anticipated loss of federal funding.
One of the most determined opponents of vouchers in Texas was the Pastors for Texas Children. While some faith leaders celebrated the opportunity to get public money for their religious schools, the PTC stood firm for separation of church and state. They believe it is the state’s responsibility to provide good public schools, and it is the duty of religious groups to support their own faith.
They know the research. They know that most of the $1 billion in vouchers will be used to subsidize students already enrolled in private schools. They know that many private schools will raise their tuition in response to the state subsidy. They know that the public schools, which serve the vast majority of students, will continue to be underfunded.
PTC sent out the following message:
The Signing of HB 3
An old preacher once said that God’s Justice was figuring out what belongs to whom and giving it to them.
Universal education for ALL children is God’s Justice. A $1 billion voucher subsidy program for children already in private schools— mostly religious schools that use Caesar to support their religion— is not.
Texans know that. They have rejected voucher programs for 30 years.
Gov. Greg Abbott had to rely on a Philadelphia billionaire to give him over $12 million dollars to defeat conservative, rural Republican state representatives who opposed vouchers on deep conviction and moral principle.
We take no pleasure in calling out our governor’s lies and bullying against these decent public servants. God is not mocked by Gov. Abbott’s corruption.
The voucher bill was signed on Saturday. Also on Saturday Texans all over the state overwhelmingly approved public school bond programs and elected pro-public ed trustees as a direct response to Abbott’s voucher scam.
We will have another opportunity to express our will on public education and against the privatization of it:
In the aftermath of the passage of the voucher bill, voters in several districts responded by ousting hard-line conservative school board members. Texan Michelle H. Davis described the devastating losses of MAGA school board members across the state.
It was a tough night for MAGA-aligned candidates in Texas. In the May 3, 2025, local elections, voters across the state decisively rejected far-right candidates, particularly in school board and city council races. From Tarrant County to Collin County, and from San Antonio to Dallas, communities chose leaders who prioritize public education, inclusivity, and pragmatic governance over culture wars and partisan agendas. This widespread shift signals a growing resistance to extremist politics at the local level.
Last night, voters across Texas sent a message loud enough to rattle the far-right out of their echo chambers: we’re done with your culture wars, your book bans, and your crusade against public schools. Voters chose community over chaos, educators over agitators, and progress over extremism.
The local elections weren’t just a series of wins but a sweep. MAGA-backed candidates got absolutely trounced across the state. This was the result of deep organizing, years of work by local Democrats, and voters who are fed up with the far-right hijacking of school boards and city councils to push their agenda.
Texas isn’t turning blue overnight, but make no mistake: the MAGA movement had a very bad night, and the momentum is shifting.
Tarrant County.
The Republican Party poured money, endorsements, and out-of-state personalities into these Tarrant County races, and they got wiped. Every single candidate backed by Patriot Mobile, the far-right Christian nationalist group trying to take over school boards, lost. That’s losses in Mansfield ISD, Keller ISD, and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD. A clean sweep.
The Tarrant County GOP went 0-for-11 in the county’s three largest cities: Fort Worth, Arlington, and Mansfield. Let that sink in. They didn’t just lose a few races. They got shut out entirely. In Mansfield, Republican Rep. David Cook’s backyard, where Allen West himself came out to rally the troops, the GOP lost all five races they backed.
Meanwhile, Democrats made real gains on the Fort Worth City Council. One of the biggest victories was Debrah Peoples’s victory in her race. A longtime activist and former Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair, Peoples gave progressive voters a reason to celebrate in a city that’s often overlooked on the statewide map.
Huge, huge shout out to the Tarrant County Young Democrats. They didn’t just show up, they organized, knocked on doors, made calls, and fought for every single school board seat they were targeting. And guess what? They swept them all. That’s the kind of ground game that wins elections. That’s the kind of energy we need to keep building.
Open the link to continue reading about the pushback in Texas against bookbanning rightwing MAGA culture warriors.
Since Trump invited Elon Musk and his DOGE team to cut the federal budget, the federal government has been subject to a bloodbath of firings, layoffs, and closed agencies. Some of the most shocking budget cuts have focused on scientific research. Reckless cuts have been imposed on the National Science Foundation and on every part of the Department of Health and Human Services, where the Secretary–conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.–is crushing genuine research and prioritizing his obsession with vaccines as the cause of autism, which has been debunked.
Trump has blocked the payment of millions of dollars to universities that fund basic science research. He is using those blocks to force universities to stop DEI programs.
We can understand why Kennedy wants to destroy science: it has an annoying tendency to undercut his pet conspiracy theories. No matter what science says, he will continue to warn the public that vaccines are dangerous, that fluoridating water is dangerous, and anything that contradicts his ideology is fake, regardless of how many scientists disagree. WHO you gonna believe? The addled RFK Jr. or the world’s top scientists? Or Ghostbusters?
But we do not know why Trump put the nation’s public health agencies into the hands of a man who does not respect science.
Why does Trump want more children to die of measles? Why does he allow Elon Musk to shut down agencies like USAID that have saved millions of lives? Why he is cancelling grants to universities for basic scientific research? Why does he want to stop the work of scientists who are seeking cures for cancer, tuberculosis, AIDS, and other lethal diseases? I don’t know.
Frankly, the cuts are coming so fast that I can’t keep track of them all. I hope soon to find a comprehensive summary of the destruction of federally-funded scientific research.
In the meanwhile, this is the best overview I have seen.
Late yesterday, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to run the National Science Foundation five years ago, quit. He didn’t say why, but it was clear enough: Last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 active research awards from the N.S.F., and he is pressing Congress to halve the agency’s $9 billion budget.
The Trump administration has targeted the American scientific enterprise, an engine of research and innovation that has thrummed for decades. It has slashed or frozen budgets at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA. It has fired or defunded thousands of researchers.
The chaos is confusing: Isn’t science a force for good? Hasn’t it contained disease? Won’t it help us in the competition with China? Doesn’t it attract the kind of immigrants the president says he wants? In this edition of the newsletter, we break out our macroscope to make sense of the turmoil.
An investment
American research thrives under a patronage system that funnels congressionally approved dollars to universities, national labs and institutes. This knowledge factory employs tens of thousands of researchers, draws talent from around the world and generates scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes.
It’s a slow-moving system, because science moves slowly. Discoveries are often indirect and iterative, involving collaboration among researchers who need years of subsidized education to become expert. Startups and corporations, which need quick returns on their investment, typically can’t wait as long or risk as much money.
President Trump is less patient. He has defunded university studies on AIDS, pediatric cancer and solar physics. (Two prominent researchers are compiling lists of lost N.I.H. grants and N.S.F. awards.) The administration has also laid off thousands of federal scientists, including meteorologists at the National Weather Service; pandemic-preparedness experts at the C.D.C.; black-lung researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. A next-generation space observatory, already built with $3.5 billion over a decade, awaits a launch that now may never happen.
Alienating scientists
Administration officials offer various reasons for the crackdown: cost-cutting, government efficiency, “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” Many grants were eliminated because they contain words, including climate, diversity, disability, trans or women. Some drew the administration’s ire because the applications included D.E.I. statements required by the previous administration.
It doesn’t take a telescope to see where this leads. American leaders have historically seen science as an investment in the future. Will this administration foreclose it? One-third of America’s Nobel Prize winners have been foreign-born, but an immigration crackdown has swept up scientists like Kseniia Petrova, a Russian who studied aging at Harvard and now sits in a Louisiana detention center. Australian academics have stopped attending conferences in the U.S. for fear of being detained, The Guardian has reported.
Now some American scientists are looking for the exits. France, Canada and other countries are courting our researchers. In a recent poll by the journal Nature, more than 1,200 American scientists said they were considering working abroad. The journal’s job-search platform saw 32 percent more applications for positions overseas between January and March 2025 than during the same period a year earlier.
Redefining ‘science’
These are mechanical threats to science — who gets money, what they work on. But there is a more existential worry. The Trump administration is trying to change what counts as science.
One effort aims at what science should show — and at achieving results agreeable to the administration. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wants to reopen research into a long-debunked link between vaccines and autism. He doesn’t want to study vaccine hesitancy. The National Science Foundation says it will no longer fund “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” A Justice Department official has accused prominent medical journals of political bias for not airing “competing viewpoints.”
Another gambit is to suppress or avoid politically off-message results, even if the message isn’t yet clear. The government has expunged public data sets on air quality, earthquake intensity and seabed geology. Why cut the budget by erasing records? Perhaps the data would point toward efforts (pollution reduction? seabed mining limits?) that officials might one day need to undertake. We pursue knowledge in order to act: to prevent things, to improve things. But action is expensive, at a moment when the Trump administration wants the government to do as little as possible. Perhaps it’s best to not even know.
One sure way to shut down knowledge is to question who can gather it. The administration is painting scientists with the same liberal brush it has applied to academics more broadly — what Project 2025 describes as “the ‘enlightened,’ highly educated managerial elite.” The N.I.H. is controlled by “a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders,” the Project 2025 authors write. The regulatory work of the Environmental Protection Agency “should embrace so-called citizen science” and be left “for the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct.”
In science, as in a democracy, there’s plenty of room for skepticism and debate. That’s what makes it work. But at some point, calls for “further research” become disingenuous efforts to obscure inconvenient facts. It’s an old playbook, exploited in the 1960s by the tobacco industry and more recently by fossil-fuel companies.
Now it’s being weaponized by the government against science generally. Facts are elite, facts are fungible, facts are false. And once nothing is true, anything can be true.
Samuel Abrams has deep experience in the study of education privatization; for many years, he directed an institute on that subject at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is now working with the International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization.
He is also affiliated with the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he published a new report on the problems with education savings accounts (aka, vouchers).
Read the report.
Here is his executive summary:
Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) were first enacted in Arizona in 2011 as a particularly deregulated way to offer vouchers for specific students, particularly those with disabilities. As opposed to conventional private school tuition vouchers, ESAs could be used to cover tuition plus a range of other educational services. Soon thereafter, four additional states substantially replicated this new form of funding. But in 2022, Arizona and West Virginia took ESAs to another level, constructing them as universal vouchers, with all students eligible to participate, without regard to family income, prior public school attendance, or student disability. ESAs in these states could be used to cover either tuition at minimally regulated private schools or pods (mini schools with children of likeminded parents); or costs associated with homeschooling, from books and online curricula to field trips and ancillary goods and services deemed essential. Nine states have since followed suit and more appear poised to do the same. These ESAs constitute a dramatic elevation of educational outsourcing, at once fulfilling Milton Friedman’s long-argued libertarian vision for vouchers and comport-ing with the Trump administration’s commitment to downsize government and let the market fill the void.
Because of the unregulated nature of ESAs, accountability issues quickly emerged regarding both spending and pedagogy. Proper monitoring of spending by parents dispersed throughout a given state, for so many different types of goods and services, has swamped the capacity of state offices. The same holds regarding accountability for the quality of instruction in private schools, pods, and homeschools now supported with taxpayer money.
Meanwhile, because ESAs and other voucher programs tend to serve families who have already opted for private schools or homeschooling, two fiscal outcomes have become apparent. First, the programs create a new entitlement burden for taxpayers; rather than merely shifting an existing subsidy from public to private schools, the programs obligate taxpayers to support new groups of students. Second, the new subsidies have incentivized private schools to bump up tuition, on the grounds that families now have extra money to pay the higher tuition.
In addition, ESAs impact public schools. These schools suffer when substantial funding follows students who use ESAs for homeschooling or attendance at private schools or pods. The stubbornness of fixed costs for core operations for public schools often necessitates cuts to staff, from teachers to nurses, and resources, from microscopes to musical instruments. The impact on rural public schools and thus rural civic life may be greatest. Charter schools and conventional vouchers have played little role in rural America, as filling seats in charter or private schools in sparsely populated parts of the country represents a steep challenge. But with ESAs, students may leave public schools for pods or homeschooling. If enough students leave some small rural schools, those schools will have to consolidate with schools in neighboring towns, meaning significant travel for students and the forfeiture of much community life.
As with conventional vouchers, ESAs can lead to inequities and discrimination in student admissions and retention. Few protections exist in private schools, particularly religious schools, against discrimination based on disabilities, religion, or sexual orientation. Participating schools have also been documented to push out low-achieving students, thus adding to the problem of concentrating these students in default neighborhood public schools. For faculty and most staff, participating religious schools also generally afford no protection from dismissal on the grounds of religious affiliation or sexual orientation.
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RECOMMENDATIONS:
Given the damage Education Savings Accounts can do, the following measures are recommended:
State Departments of Education
• Implement stricter oversight of what goods and services may be purchased with ESA funds.
• Strengthen state capacity to monitor ESA-related purchases.
• Require publication of all participating schools, their graduation rates, and their availability to students with disabilities.
State Lawmakers
• Most importantly, legislators should repeal existing programs.
• If ESAs cannot be repealed in states where they have already taken hold:
o Oppose any expansion of these programs to include new groups or cohorts.
o Pass legislation that imposes clear budget and spending limits on ESA programs to rein in cost overruns that have become common with these programs.o Require stricter oversight of what goods and services can be purchased with ESA funds and strengthen state capacity to monitor ESA-related purchases.
o Mandate periodic audits of curriculum and instructional practices in ESA-receiving schools.
o Require ESA-receiving schools to hire certified teachers.
o Require ESA-receiving schools to conduct the same annual academic assessments that public schools are required to administer.
o Require ESA-receiving schools to abide by existing federal and state civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, especially related to students with disabilities and LGBTQ+ students and faculty.
o Require that any effort to create a new ESA program be subject to open public hearings and, if feasible, public referenda.
Local Government Officials
• In states where ESAs exist, document the effects these programs have on students, families, and local public schools.
• In these same states, seek legislation to alleviate negative effects.
• Engage in awareness-raising efforts, such as informing local constituents of the po-
tential harms of ESAs, especially in rural communities, and adopting resolutions opposing ESAs.
Trump’s war on our federal government continues unabated. Among his least noticed targets is data collection. If we don’t collect data, we don’t know where to focus our efforts and where we are succeeding or failing. Trump is not smart enough to figure this out on his own. Someone put this malevolent plan in action on his behalf. We know he is destroying our government, firing essential personnel, closing down Congressionally authorized agencies by eliminating their staff. But we don’t yet know why. He is not cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. He is literally disabling every department. Is he the Manchurian Candidate or is it Musk? The attack on data collection appears to be a direct hit on knowledge.
More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.
We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.
The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.
Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.
The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:
The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse-gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.
The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)
And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.
Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.
Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)
Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.
Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.
Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”
Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.
It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.
But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.
Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.
Of course, the racist, homophobic, xenophobic Trump administration threatened to cut off Harvard’s federal research grants if they didn’t do more to combat anti-Semitism, a phony issue. Trump demanded an apology from Harvard for “egregious anti-Semitism.” Garber, the President of Harvard, is Jewish.
The administration also demanded that Harvard abolish all programs to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. But then it demanded that Harvard hire new professors to guarantee “diversity” of viewpoint. Is Trump for or against diversity?
Garber wrote:
For three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that, along with investments by the universities themselves, has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields. These innovations have made countless people in our country and throughout the world healthier and safer. In recent weeks, the federal government has threatened its partnerships with several universities, including Harvard, over accusations of antisemitism on our campuses. These partnerships are among the most productive and beneficial in American history. New frontiers beckon us with the prospect of life-changing advances—from treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering, and numerous other areas of possibility. For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.
Certainly, Garber wrote, Harvard would fight anti-Semitism, but it would not sacrifice its independence.
The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.
Garner made clear that Harvard would not allow the government to control teaching and learning at Harvard.
Yesterday, Trump threatened to strip Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Doing so is literally illegal but law never gets in Trump’s way.
This is tyranny and a blatant attack on academic freedom.
The ignorant, self-centered Trump wants to wipe out academic freedom from any institution that does not kneel to his wishes.
Be it noted that Elise Stefanik, a graduate of Harvard, cheered on Trump’s attack on her alma mater. She wrote on Twitter: “Harvard University has rightfully earned its place as the epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education,” she posted on X, and said that Harvard should lose its tax exemption. She obviously was not brainwashed at Harvard. She should return her diploma.
Happily, Harvard has the resources to fight Trump. He picked on the wrong target.
Diane Ravitch's blog 