Charlie Kirk Was the Voice of MAGA

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2025 //
15

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was vile, disgusting, and abhorrent. The perpetrator has apparently been identified and will be held accountable, as he should be.

Charlie was a bright star in the orbit of Donald Trump, and his many fans and admirers are raising him up on a pedestal because of his tragic death. A Florida member of Congress has proposed erecting a statue to him in the halls of Congress. Trump is awarding him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Senator Jim Banks spoke to Indiana Republicans after Charlie’s death and urged them to use redistricting to eliminate every Democratic Congressman because “they” killed Charlie. Of course, we now know, as Senator Banks did, that Charlie was not killed by Democrats or a cabal of left wing fanatics, but by a young white Utah man who was raised in a staunchly Republican home. At this writing, we do not know why he killed Charlie. We don’t know his views about politics, whether he objected to Charlie’s views from the left or from the far-far right.

Although his death has been mourned by people of all political views, it’s important to acknowledge what Charlie advocated and what he opposed.

The New York Times published a summary of some of his views. For example:

He opposed gay rights and transgender rights.

He opposed gun control and argued that more people should have guns. A few deaths every year, he said, was a small price to pay to preserve the Second Amendment.

He opposed the civil rights movement and belittled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an “awful” man. In 2021, he referred to George Floyd as a “scumbag.”

He opposed affirmative action. He called Justice Ketanji Brown Harris “a diversity hire.”

He opposed gender equality.

He published a list of academics called ProfessorWatch. They are/were people who teach about “gender ideology” and racial justice. On social media, professors whose names were on Charlie’s list said they were threatened, doxxed, suspended, harassed, even fired. So while he is supposedly a champion of free speech, he encouraged suppression of free speech by professors on his Watchlist.

Charlie, the Times reported, “rejected the idea that climate change posed an existential threat to humanity, describing it as ‘complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash’ in December 2024 to members of Turning Point UK, the British offshoot of Turning Point USA.”

In another source, Charlie stated his absolute opposition to abortion. Charlie compared abortion to the Holocaust. When a questioner asked what he would do if his daughter was raped and became pregnant at the age of 10, he said the baby should be born.

A reader of this blog who is called Quickwrit posted the following comment about Charlie’s ideology:

Kirk’s view of women clearly stated in a comment he addressed to Taylor Swift on her announcement of her engagement to Travis Kelce:

“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, August 26, 2025

Kirk comments on Civil Rights and race:

“We made a huge mistake when we passed the civil rights act in the 1960s” — at America Fest, December 2023.

“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, January 23, 2024

“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” – The Charlie Kirk Show, May 19, 2023

“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?” – The Charlie Kirk Show, January 3, 2024

“Michelle Obama and [U.S. Representative] Sheila Jackson Lee and [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Ketanji Brown Jackson…You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 13, 2023

“The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, March 20, 2024

“Islam is not compatible with western civilization.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, June 24, 2025

“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” — Charlie Kirk post on X September 8, 2025

“There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.” — The Charlie Kirk Show, July 6, 2022. (But in fact, in the First Amendment, the Constitution clearly forbids religion in government, and Founding Father James Madison, who our nation honors with the title “Father of the Constitution” made it clear why he and the other Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution very deliberately left out any mention of God, let alone of Jesus, in the Constitution; here is what The Father of our Constitution declared: “The religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man. [Government] MUST NOT PREFER ONE RELIGION OVER ANOTHER OR PROMOTE ANY RELIGION OVER NONBELIEF.”

Here are video clips of some of these comments.

The New Yorker wrote about the outpouring of grief for Charlie at Texas A&M, where he had spoken to a large audience about his evangelical Christian views.

Kirk’s evangelicalism inflected both the tone and content of his message. He was open to talk with anyone, but steadfast in his confidence that his path was the correct one. “If you do not have a religious basis, specifically a Christian one, for your society, something else is going to replace it,” he said at the Texas A. & M. event. He and his followers were locked in a battle with an enemy that was not just ideologically opposed but unwell, possibly evil. Democratic leaders, Kirk said, were “maggots, vermin, and swine”; transgender identity was a “middle finger to God.”

Charlie had every right to express his views and advocate for them. His murder was an abomination and a stain on our nation. Unlike Charlie, I support gun control. I don’t believe that the Second Amendment gives everyone a right to carry arms at will.

I disagreed with Charlie Kirk on every issue. I would have urged him to eliminate ProfessorWatch, which endangers professors who did not agree with him; it suppressed their free speech rights.

As Americans, our freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. We are entitled to believe what we want. No one should ever be murdered because of their views.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Extremism, Gender, Racism

Trump is a Divider Who Won’t Even Try to Unite Us

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
29

After horrible events, like political assassination or the explosion of a space vehicle, the President typically speaks to the nation and expresses grief and calls for national unity, reminding us that we are all Americans and we must help one another. I vividly recall Ronald Reagan’s talk to the nation after the space shuttle exploded, killing everyone, including Christa McAuliffe, who was going to be the first teacher in space.

No President has ever been as divisive as Trump. With no evidence at hand, he blamed Democrats and “radical left lunatics” for the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Robert Reich wrote the commentary before the alleged killer’s name was known. We now know that Tyler Robinson was not a registered Democrat. He had not voted in the last two elections, according to local officials. He is white, his family are Republicans, he is apparently straight, he was enrolled in a program to become an electrician, he grew up with guns, his father was in law enforcement. He was a regular 22-year-old in a law-abiding family in a deep Red state.

Only Tyler–if he is the perpetrator– can explain his motives.

Yet our President was eager to blame the other political party. He is shameless.

Reich wrote:

The reaction by Trump to the horrendous assassination of Charlie Kirk has been as irresponsible as anything Trump has done to date to divide our nation.

When bad things happen, presidents traditionally use the highest office in the land to calm and reassure the public. The best of our presidents appeal to the better angels of our nature, asking that we harbor “malice toward none.” 

Trump consistently appeals to the worst of our demons, as he did Wednesday night after the shooting when he said:

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

I don’t know at this writing who was responsible for Kirk’s death, and Trump certainly didn’t know when he made these remarks Wednesday night. But for Trump to blame the “radical left” — a term he often uses to describe the whole Democratic Party — is an unconscionable provocation that further polarizes Americans at a time when we badly need to come together. 

It’s also a vehicle for silencing criticism of Trump’s own authoritarianism, advancing the presumption that if you criticize someone for being an authoritarian, or the member of an authoritarian political movement, you’re a terrorist who’s inciting murder. 

Trump continued:

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

It’s unclear what Trump is calling for here, but it sounds as if he may use the Kirk assassination as a pretext for unleashing the FBI and other federal law enforcement on every organization that could possibly be seen as contributing to the “radical left.” This becomes clearer from what he said next:

“From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health-care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Trump is attributing America’s rising tide of political violence to the “radical left,” ignoring the significant if not larger amount of political violence perpetrated by Trump supporters on the far-right.

The latter includes the shootings of two Minnesota Democratic legislators at their home earlier this summer, the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro in April, the series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022, the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, the attempted pipe bombings at the homes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2018, and the attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022. 

Trump’s list of so-called “radical-left” violence included attacks on ICE agents — which did not involve gunfire — but conveniently failed to mention the shooting a month ago at CDC headquarters, in which a man protesting Covid-19 vaccines fired more than 180 shots at the building and killed a police officer. 

Nor, obviously, did Trump include the violence he himself incited at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by over 1,500 followers who received prison terms — all of whom Trump subsequently pardoned. 

There is no excuse for political violence in America. Nor is there any excuse for provoking even more of it by blaming it on one side or the other. 

And no excuse for a president of the United States using a heinous killing as an occasion to treat his political opponents as accomplices to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack them. 

We have had enough violence, enough carnage, enough blame. We must do whatever we can to reduce the anger and hate that are consuming and destroying so much of this nation. 

It is time for all of us, including a president, to take some responsibility.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

The Biggest Liar in Texas

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
3

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

She writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Republicans do it all for the fossil fuel industry. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He always does this. 

Texas is the #1 state for doing business.

Texas is the #1 state for economic projects.

Texas is the #1 state for economic development.

Texas is the #1 state for exports.

Texas has a GDP $2.7 trillion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans are really bad at governing. 

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

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

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

Governor Abbott said the Texas Legislature fully funded public schools. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Texas: Some of the Worst-Performing Charters have Some of the Highest-Paid Superintendents

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
3

ProPublica has been working with The Texas Tribune to cover politics–but especially education–in the Lone Star State. In their latest report, they discovered that three charter districts had some of the highest paid superintendents in the state, despite the poor performance of their schools. In some of them, teachers were low-paid and teacher turnover was unusually high.

The report begins:

Three charter school superintendents who are among the highest paid in Texas are overseeing some of the lowest-performing districts in the state, newly released records show. One of them is at risk of closure by school year’s end.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune previously revealed that board members at Valere Public Schools had paid Superintendent Salvador Cavazos up to $870,000 annually in recent years, roughly triple what it reported publicly to the state and on its website. Two other districts the newsrooms covered, Faith Family Academy and Gateway Charter Academy, also substantially underreported the compensation paid to their top leaders.

The state determined that all three of those districts have had failing or near-failing levels of performance in recent years. The ratings, released last month by the Texas Education Agency, also show that charter schools make up the majority of the districts that have repeatedly had “unacceptable” performance, though they account for a small portion of public schools across Texas. The agency published two years’ worth of accountability ratings for the state’s public and charter schools that were previously undisclosed due to litigation.

Faith Family Academy, a Dallas-area district with two campuses, was one of eight charter school districts that are now on track to be shut down at the end of the school year after receiving a third consecutive “F” rating. Board members paid superintendent Mollie Purcell Mozley a peak annual compensation of $560,000 in recent years to run the district, which has about 3,000 students.

Education experts said they were troubled that the underperforming charter networks the newsrooms identified would invest so heavily in superintendent compensation instead of areas with a more direct impact on student achievement.

“I don’t know what metrics the board’s reviewing to say that this is performance that would warrant this amount of pay,” said Toni Templeton, a research scientist at the University of Houston. “What we know from academic literature is when you put resources closest to the students, the students benefit the most. And the superintendent’s position is important, but it’s pretty far from the kids.”

The state’s “three strikes” law mandates that the state education agency automatically shut down a charter school district that has repeatedly failed to meet performance standards.

School leaders have a 30-day window to contest the ratings with the state education agency if they believe there were errors. The state will then release final scores in December that will determine whether failing campuses will be forced to close.

Keri Bickerstaff has sent four of her five children to school at Faith Family Academy but pulled most of them out after prekindergarten. She said she was shocked and saddened when she learned about the district’s payments to Purcell Mozley from ProPublica and the Tribune. At her children’s school in Waxahachie, south of Dallas, Bickerstaff observed crowded classrooms and felt that the teachers lacked experience and left the school at high rates. She was surprised that the superintendent had been paid so highly.

“I was under the impression that funding was an issue,” Bickerstaff said in an interview.

Purcell Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but in an Aug. 14 letter to parents and staff posted on the school’s website, she stated that the district planned to appeal the state’s rating. “While this rating is disappointing on its face,” Purcell Mozley wrote, “we want our community to know that we have conducted a thorough review of our performance data — and we strongly believe that our true score for 2025 reflects a solid C rating.”

Another small charter district in Dallas, Gateway Charter Academy, has two strikes against it after receiving a combination of “F” and “D” ratings over the last three school years. If the district receives another low score next year, it too will be forced to shutter its two campuses that serve around 600 students.

State education records show Gateway has been plagued by teacher turnover, with as many as 62% of its instructors leaving the district in recent years. The district has paid teachers about $10,000 less than the statewide average while paying superintendent Robbie Moore more than $426,000 in 2023, according to tax records— nearly double his base salary of $215,000.

Gateway and Moore did not respond to requests for comment. After it was originally contacted by the newsrooms about the previously undisclosed compensation, the district posted a new document on its website that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore.

While there are no state regulations limiting how much school districts can pay their superintendents, state lawmakers have tried to change that for years. Lawmakers filed at least eight proposals during the most recent regular legislative session that would have constrained administrators’ pay and severance packages at public and charter schools, but none passed. That included a bill authored by Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a Republican from Corpus Christi, that would have capped a superintendent’s income to twice that of the highest-paid teacher in the district.

Hinojosa filed another bill during a special session that began in July that would have allowed superintendents to earn up to three times as much as the top-paid teachers when their district scored an “A” rating. But if a district earned a “D” or “F” rating, a superintendent’s income could not exceed that of the top-paid instructors. The measure failed to reach a committee for discussion.

“If teachers are held accountable for student performance, administrators should be too,” Hinojosa said in a statement.

Although Valere received a “D” rating for the past two years, its board has compensated Cavazos hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on top of his base salary, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the country, the ProPublica and Tribune investigation found…

Holding Charter Schools Accountable

Texas’ A-F rating system was established in 2017 and uses metrics such as standardized test scores to grade each district and campus on student achievement, school progress and success with closing socioeconomic achievement gaps.

The new ratings come after a lengthy legal battle between Texas public school districts and the TEA over changes to the education agency’s ratings system. Districts twice sued Mike Morath, the TEA commissioner, to stop the release of the scores after the agency announced plans to revamp the system in 2023. The lawsuits successfully kept the scores from public view until this spring, when a state appeals court overturned a ruling in favor of the districts, setting the stage for the release of performance ratings for the 2022-23 school year in April, and ratings for the two most recent school years in August after a separate decision by the same appeals court.

The ratings affect charter schools and traditional public schools in different ways. A traditional public school district can potentially face state intervention after one of its campuses receives five years of failing ratings. The new TEA records show that there are five such districts at risk. By comparison, the state is required to automatically shut down an entire charter district that receives three years of failing scores.

Supporters often point to the “three strikes” law as evidence that charter schools are held to a higher level of performance standards than public schools.

The regulation, which was introduced in 2013, is one of many guardrails that has been put in place since charter schools were authorized in the 1990s with far less state oversight than public schools. Charter schools, for example, were originally shielded from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws until reports of leaders engaging in self-dealing and profiteering gradually prompted lawmakers to act.

Brian Whitley, a spokesperson for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said that Texas holds charter schools “more accountable, more quickly” when they don’t meet performance expectations, including through automatic closures.

Private schools are set to receive a similar level of protection from the laws that govern how traditional public schools spend their money: Under a landmark school voucher bill the Legislature passed this spring, the state plans to direct at least $1 billion public dollars to private education in the coming years. Earlier this month, an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune revealed more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest at Texas private schools that likely would have violated state laws had the schools been public.

These sorts of conflicts of interest and familial business entanglements have been common among at least two of the three charter districts that have made outsize payments to their leaders.

Records show that Gateway Charter Academy has hired employees related to administrators, including Moore. According to Gateway’s 2017 financial audit, Moore also married an “instructional coach” in the district that year. Records show that the coach’s compensation increased from $75,000 to $221,000 during the 2022-23 school year, after she was promoted to director of curriculum development. She did not respond to requests for comment.

At Faith Family Academy, Gene Lewis, one of the founding board members who hired Purcell Mozley and reviews her performance, is also her uncle, according to bond documents. Lewis’ wife also sits on the board of a separate entity that oversees the district, according to Faith Family Academy’s tax filings.

Lewis and his wife did not respond to requests for comment.

.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Texas

Wyoming: The Fight Against Vouchers Continues

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
1

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy in Funding reported on the continuing fight to stop universal vouchers in Wyoming. Every student in the state is eligible for a voucher, regardless of family income. Parents are concerned that their child may be excluded by private schools, such as those with special needs. Parents and teachers sued to block the program, based on the state Constitution. A judge just approved their request to sue.

Phillis writes:

School vouchers have never been supported by a majority of the people of any state in a statewide ballot. Neither are school vouchers currently being approved by the courts. Wyoming judge denies state’s motion to dismiss. In June, EdChoice vouchers in Ohio were declared unconstitutional by Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page.

All states have constitutional provisions for public education. (After the Civil War no state could be admitted into the Union without a constitutional provision for public education.) The plain language of state constitutions require public education available for all, but not private education as a state funding responsibility. Private schools should not expect to be supported by public funds. 

Judge denies Wyoming’s motion to dismiss school voucher lawsuit

Laramie District Court judge finds plaintiffs do have standing to claim harm in lawsuit against the state’s new school-choice program, which remains in limbo.

by Katie Klingsporn

In the latest blow to Wyoming’s controversial universal school voucher program, a judge has denied the state’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit challenging it. 

The Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act program has been dogged by constitutionality concerns since well before it was enacted into law in March. Educators and parents filed suit in June, and Wyoming’s attempts to advance the voucher payments in the face of the lawsuit have repeatedly failed. 

The program is designed to offer Wyoming families $7,000 per child annually for K-12 non-public-school costs like tuition or tutoring. The scholarship would also offer money for pre-K costs, but only to income-qualified families at or below 250% of the federal poverty level. It was passed amid a wave of school-choice laws, particularly in Republican-led states like Wyoming. 

However, Wyoming’s constitution makes public education a paramount state commitment. Critics of the universal voucher program say spending public funds on private education violates several of the state’s constitutional obligations and have long warned the matter would end up in the courts. 

So far, state gambits to circumvent legal challenges have been unsuccessful. Laramie County District Court Judge Peter Froelicher granted a temporary injunction pausing the voucher program in June, then extended that injunction in July. More recently, he denied a request by Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan 

Degenfelder and others to let the law take effect while they challenge the injunction.

In the newest decision, issued Aug. 28, Froelicher denied the state’s motion to dismiss, determining that plaintiffs do have standing to sue. In the order, Froelicher also determined that Wyoming’s State Treasurer Curt Meier, who the lawsuit names, is a valid defendant. The state asked that Meier be dropped from the suit.

Degenfelder, who championed the voucher program as a major school-choice win, has expressed dismay over the lawsuit’s impacts on families who had already applied and were awaiting funds to pay for costs like textbooks, tutoring or private school uniforms for the 2025-26 school year. 

Rocky road 

The universal voucher program represents a major expansion of the state’s 2024 education savings accounts, which offered money to income-qualified students for private school tuition or homeschool costs. 

The 2025 bill transformed that program by stripping income qualifications so that the $7,000 would be available to everyone. 

The bill ignited one of the hottest debates of the recent session. It sparked a deluge of feedback, both from school-choice proponents and critics who called it unconstitutional.

Lawmakers transformed it before it passed out of the Legislature; they brought 26 amendments, including 11 that passed. They also repeatedly questioned the constitutionality of the expanded program. Many urged colleagues to hold off and allow the existing education savings account program to roll out before changing it so drastically. Those requests did not sway the body.

The new program’s application opened on May 15, attracting nearly 4,000 student applications. But in June, nine parents of school-aged children and the Wyoming Education Association, which represents more than 6,000 of the state’s public school employees, sued Degenfelder, Meier and the state of Wyoming.

A previous Wyoming Supreme Court ruling on education funding “found that ‘education is a fundamental right’ in Wyoming, that ‘all aspects of the school finance system are subject to strict scrutiny,’ and that ‘any state action interfering with [the right to equal educational opportunity] must be closely examined before it can be said to pass constitutional muster,’” the lawsuit reads.

This voucher program, plaintiffs assert, does not pass that muster. That’s because “the state cannot circumvent those requirements by funding private education that is not uniform and that meets none of the required state constitutional standards for education.”

In addition, the program is unconstitutional because it violates constitutional language that allows the state to give public funds only for the necessary support of the poor, the lawsuit argues. Instead, it’s an example of “gratuitously funneling public funds to private individuals and entities, regardless of whether they are poor and regardless of whether that support is necessary.” 

Parents who signed onto the case oppose the voucher plan due to the harmful impact it will have on their children, according to the lawsuit, “because private schools receiving voucher funding can refuse admission to children with disabilities … and are not required to provide special education services or comply with [individualized education programs].” They are also concerned that private schools can refuse to admit and educate children who identify as queer, transgender or non-binary.

The voucher program will also negatively impact funding at public schools that the parents’ children attend, the lawsuit says.

By rejecting the state’s motion to dismiss, Froelicher accepts “the individual harms alleged in the complaint as true,” according to his order. 

What’s next 

The Wyoming Attorney General’s office in July appealed Froelicher’s preliminary injunction preventing the Wyoming Department of Education from transferring or paying out funds to participants of the program. 

In a July update on the Wyoming Department of Education’s site, Degenfelder said she is grateful the attorney general appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court, but informed the public that “the appeals process is still extensive, and, unless the injunction is stayed while the appeal proceeds, may cause the program funds to be unavailable for most of the 2025-26 school year.”

Katie Klingsporn

Katie Klingsporn reports on outdoor recreation, public lands, education and general news for WyoFile. She’s been a journalist and editor covering the American West for 20 years. Her freelance work has… More by Katie Klingsporn

Categories Education Industry, Resistance, Vouchers, Wyoming

Trump’s Tariffs and Foreign Policy are a Disaster for U.S.

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2025 //
13

Writing in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria explains how Trump has driven pivotal countries–like India, Brazil, and South Africa–into the embrace of our enemies: Russia, China, and North Korea. For his own bizarre and inexplicable reasons, Trump has tried to cozy up to the leaders of those countries, which have a common interest in opposing democratic countries. He has boasted about his close friendship with Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un, but they are laughing at him. Trump’s insane tariffs have been harsh towards our allies, which makes no sense at all.

Zakaria wrote:

Look at the pictures that dominated this week’s world news. They are vivid illustrations of the failures of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

The photographs that captured most attention were of China’s massive military parade and of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un striding together. Those visuals were to be expected — a reminder that the West faces a determined set of adversaries who see it as their mission to destroy the Western-led international order.

What was surprising were the images from the days before, when the Shanghai Cooperation Organization hosted leaders from India, Turkey, Vietnam and Egypt, among others. All these regional powers were generally considered closer to Washington than Beijing. But a toxic combination of tariffs, hostile rhetoric and ideological demands is moving many of the world’s pivotal states away from the United States and toward China. It might be the greatest own goal in modern foreign policy.

Consider the BRICS, a grouping of countries originally meant to represent the big emerging markets of the future — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — along with several other members now, too. At meetings, three of the core countries, Brazil, India and South Africa, would generally resist the Russian and Chinese effort to turn the organization into an anti-American grouping. For decades, Washington has been building ties with these three countries, each a leader in its region, to ensure that as they grew in size and stature, they would be favorably inclined toward the United States.

But Trump has treated those pivotal states to some of his most vicious rhetoric and aggressive policies. He unleashed the highest tariff rate in the world against India. He punished Brazil with equally high tariffs and levied sanctions and visa bans against Brazilian officials. South Africa faces 30 percent tariffs, a total cutoff of foreign aid and potential sanctions against government officials.

The governments and people in these countries are outraged at their treatment. India used to be overwhelmingly pro-American. Now it is rapidly shifting toward a deep suspicion of Washington. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s sagging poll numbers have risen as he stands up to Trump’s bullying. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa gained stature when he politely responded to Trump’s Oval Office hectoring. It is worth remembering that other countries have nationalist sentiment, too!

There is no strategic rationale for these policy reversals. Trump is punishing Brazil because that country’s independent courts are holding accountable Trump’s ideological soulmate, Jair Bolsonaro, for his efforts to reject the results of free and fair elections. South Africa faces Trump’s ire because of a land reform law that is an attempt to address some of the vast disparities in landholding and wealth caused by decades of apartheid. These reasons have nothing to do with restoring America’s manufacturing base or reducing trade deficits. The U.S. actually runs a trade surplus with Brazil.

While Washington has been alienating these countries, China has been courting them. It has outlined a plan with Brazil for a transformative railway network connecting its Atlantic coast to Peru’s Pacific one. Xi managed to get Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit China for the first time in seven years. China has courted South Africa with trade and aid, and public sentiment in that country has moved to be quite favorably inclined toward Beijing.

We are often told that Trump likes to talk tough to get the best deal. But his policies are producing real pain and misery on the ground — people losing their jobs and many being pushed back into poverty. That’s why even if these deals are renegotiated and things settle on less brutal terms, the memories will linger. Countries will always know that Washington could treat them as it has and they will want to hedge their bets and keep strong ties with China and Russia, just in case.

American foreign policy these days is a collection of the random slights, insults and ideological obsessions of one man. In general, Trump likes smaller countries he can bully or ideological soulmates who cozy up to him. He doesn’t enjoy dealing with large, messy democracies with their own internal dynamics, pride and nationalism.

Thus, America under Trump has befriended a strange collection of strongmen, in El Salvador, Hungary, Pakistan and the Gulf monarchies. It is at odds with the democracies of India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Canada and most of Europe. Does this make any sense?

Categories Democracy, Economy, International, Stupid, Trump

Glenn Kessler: Trump Is the Master of Bullshit

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2025 //
9

I seldom recommend a blog that requires payment. Here is an exception: Glenn Kessler. He served for many years as the Fact Checker for The Washington Post. He is remarkably good as a fact checker. After many years, he left The Post and started his own blog, as so many other journalists have done. He is a member of the International Society of Factcheckers. He relies on facts, not opinion. Consider subscribing. He has my stamp of approval.

Kessler recently started a series about Trump’s long history of bullshitting. As he explains here, there is a difference between lying and bullshit.

Kessler writes:

This is the first in a series of Substack essays looking at Trump’s bullshit. Future installments will be available to paid subscribers.

Twenty years ago this month, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published his seminal work On Bullshit, which argued that bullshit was worse than lying. His point was that a liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide or distort it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all — they care only about the impression they make.

When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage in 2015, Frankfurt wrote in Time magazine that Trump was the epitome of the bullshit artist he had identified a decade earlier.

“Trump freely offers extravagant claims about his own talents and accomplishments,” Frankfurt said. “He maintains, for example, that he has the greatest memory in the world. This is farcically unalloyed bullshit.”

When I managed The Fact Checker for The Washington Post, readers constantly asked: Why rely only on Pinocchio ratings? Why don’t you call Trump a liar?

I thought “liar” was a conversation stopper — it would be my judgment that he lied. With Trump, it’s hard to tell. He might actually believe some of the stuff he says, or has convinced himself it’s true.

The one time I clearly labeled a lie was when I had convincing evidence. Trump had insisted he knew nothing about hush-money payments to silence alleged paramours before he was elected president. Then his former attorney released a recording of Trump discussing an arrangement with the National Enquirer to pay $150,000 to one woman. Trump was caught on tape, so there was no doubt Trump had lied.

But, following Frankfurt’s theory, focusing only on Trump’s lies obscures a deeper danger to American society. As a bullshitter, Trump doesn’t care whether what he says reflects reality. He says whatever serves his momentary purpose, often contradicting himself without hesitation or shame. This indifference to truth makes Trump’s bullshit more insidious than lies.

Trump is the dominant political figure of the past decade — perhaps of our lifetimes. Tens of millions of Americans support his policies, or at least disdain the policies of his Democratic opponents. In the last election, he narrowly won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. He views those victories as a mandate for a reordering of the federal government, with an unchallenged executive wielding vast power.

The danger is that Trump’s bullshit has become woven into the fabric of American life. Many citizens now struggle to discern reality from spin. Was January 6 a violent attack on democracy — or a peaceful protest demonized by the media? Was Joe Biden legitimately elected — or did Democrats steal the presidency in the greatest fraud in U.S. history?

Trump bullshits to construct an alternative reality — one that almost half the country has accepted as fact. He has been aided by the balkanization of American society, where people live in blue or red zones and often absorb information that confirms what they already believe. Social media, unfiltered and often partisan, has replaced legacy media as a source of information.

Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic in his first term was disastrous, with the exception of producing vaccines in record time. Yet Americans seemed to erase that period from memory. Thanks to Trump’s relentless bullshit during his first term about having created the “greatest economy in history” — in reality, it was on the brink of recession when the pandemic struck — many Americans retained halcyon memories of Trump’s economic policies, especially once inflation soared in the pandemic’s aftermath.

I often wondered how, if Trump had been re-elected in 2020, he would have explained the runaway inflation. I can only guess, but in any case, he would have spouted bullshit. Most economists agree Biden’s policies added some inflationary pressures on the margins, but pandemic-related supply-chain issues were mostly responsible.

In his second term, Trump has weaponized his bullshit. He is surrounded by lackeys who echo and defend his untruths.

No accurate damage estimate was available when Trump in June declared Iranian nuclear weapons sites had been obliterated. So when he made the statement he was bullshitting. In previous administrations, the results of such an attack might have received positive spin from unnamed officials, but since Trump is never wrong, once he puts it in his own words, the rest of government must twist its findings to conform with Trump’s claim.

Sometimes Trump gets lucky, and his bullshit turns out to be true. But more often than not, he just pretends he was right even when he was wrong.

Trump a few weeks ago fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because job-growth estimates were revised downward — a common occurrence, especially if an economy is stumbling. Trump claimed the BLS director had manipulated the figures because she was a Biden appointee. That was bullshit. The BLS director cannot manipulate the job numbers, which are derived from surveys conducted by professionals many rungs below in the Labor Department. Yet Trump’s bullshit now threatens to erode faith in the accuracy of federal data.

This week provided another example. Trump, desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize ever since Barack Obama did, keeps claiming he ended six wars in six months. This is, of course, exaggerated, as numerous fact checks have documented. But Trump took it a step further when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders visited the Oval Office and Trump explained to reporters why he had dropped his demand for a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war.

“If you look at the six deals that I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires,” Trump said.

That was bullshit. At least three of the conflicts on Trump’s “six wars” list were halted with ceasefires. But Trump needed to explain why he folded on his demand for an immediate ceasefire — embraced by Ukraine — in the face of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s charm offensive in Alaska last week.

So he just invented bullshit on the spot. The consequence is that Russia feels no pressure to end the war and can continue shelling Ukrainian cities. More people will die.

As part of this Substack, I intend to write a series of essays that examine specific examples of Trump’s bullshit and the consequences. I will likely start with Trump’s claim that he was a self-made business success — so central to the myth that carried him into office — but I also welcome suggestions from readers. Future posts on this theme will be limited to paid subscribers, so please consider signing up. 

Trump’s central tactic is saturation — flood the zone with bullshit until the truth becomes impossible to locate. I intend to create a record of what happened before it’s lost in a storm of revisionism and propaganda.

To open the next Glenn Kessler fact-checks, become a subscriber.

Categories Accountability, Character, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Trump

Trump Will Restore Prayer in the Schools

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2025 //
14

Trump announced that he will bring back prayer in the schools. This is a prize for his Christian nationalist base, who want the nation to be a theological, Bible-based state.

Trump recently appeared at the Museum of the Bible (who knew?) where he made clear his plans.

This is alarming but also amusing. Trump is probably the least religious man ever elected President. Sunday mornings, he is on the golf course, not in church. He has violated every one of the Ten Commandments.

Politico reported:

President Donald Trump on Monday said that the Department of Education would soon be instituting new guidelines on the right to prayer in public schools.

Speaking from an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, Trump said there are “grave threats to religious liberty in American schools.”

“For most of our country’s history, the Bible was found in every classroom in the nation, yet in many schools today students are instead indoctrinated with anti-religious propaganda and some are punished for their religious beliefs. Very, very strongly punished,” Trump said. “It is ridiculous.”

Trump did not detail what the new guidance will include, but during the 2024 campaign he promised to “bring back prayer” to public schools.

In a statement to POLITICO, Savannah Newhouse, press secretary for the Education Department said, “The Department of Education looks forward to supporting President Trump’s vision to promote religious liberty in our schools across the country.” 

While religion is not banned in public schools, the Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that state-sponsored prayer in public schools violates the First Amendment.

Categories Education Reform

Charlie Kirk, Political Violence, and Gun Control

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2025 //
52

When I heard that MAGA firebrand Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed at a campus rally in Utah, I got a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had a visceral memory of the day that President John F. Kennedy was killed, the day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, the day that Bobby Kennedy was killed.

I loved them. I didn’t love or admire Charlie Kirk. I never agreed with anything he said.

But I despise political violence. I am sorry for his family.

We are supposed to be a nation that protects dissent, protest, and diverse opinions. If speaking against the grain makes you a target of assassins, our country is in deep trouble.

It seems obvious to me that our country needs gun control. But it’s equally obvious that the Supreme Court and the GOP have made almost any kind of gun control impossible. Just this week, a court in Florida struck down a ban on open-carry of guns. The judges said that it was a violation of the Second Amendment to forbid people to carry their gun openly.

We are all targets.

Children in school, people in malls and at concerts will continue to die because of the current insane interpretation of the Second Amendment. Guns are currently the leading cause of death for children and teens. Learning how to react to a murderer is now a rite of passage in school–every kind of school.

The right claims that it’s devoted to the “right to life.” But that’s not true. The right to life is secondary to the right to carry a gun.

The deaths of scores of children and the blood of Charlie Kirk stain the hands of the Supreme Court majority, which strikes down any effort to control access to guns, to require gun-owners to keep their weapons locked away, and to make gun safety a priority rather than a violation of the Second Amendment.

I don’t expect this love affair with deadly weapons will end in my lifetime. I hope it ends someday. Many people will needlessly die before then.

Categories Evil, Extremism, Guns

Why America Still Needs Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2025 //
15

It’s important these days to remember that public schools were created by communities, districts, and states to serve all children and to contribute to the betterment of society. As a result of demands by parents, activists, the courts, and legislators, public schools must serve all children, not just those they choose to admit.

Sidney Shapiro, a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University, and Joseph P. Romain, a Professor of Law at the University of Cinncinatti, co-authored a paper on the need for and purpose of public schools.

While the White House’s fight with elite universities such as Columbia and Harvard has recently dominated the headlines, the feud overshadows the broader and more far-reaching assault on K-12 public education by the Trump administration and many states.

The Trump administration has gutted the Department of Education, imperiling efforts to protect students’ civil rights, and proposed billions in public education cuts for fiscal year 2026. Meanwhile, the administration is diverting billions of taxpayer funds into K-12 private schools. These moves build upon similar efforts by conservative states to rein in public education going back decades.

But the consequences of withdrawing from public education could be dire for the U.S. In our 2024 book, “How Government Built America,” we explore the history of public education, from Horace Mann’s “common school movement” in the early 19th century to the GI Bill in the 20th that helped millions of veterans go to college and become homeowners after World War II.

We found that public education has been essential for not only creating an educated workforce but for inculcating the United States’ fundamental values of liberty, equality, fairness and the common good.

In the public good

Opponents of public education often refer to public schools as “government schools,” a pejorative that seems intended to associate public education with “big government” – seemingly at odds with the small government preferenceof many Americans.

But, as we have previously explored, government has always been a significant partner with the private market system in achieving the country’s fundamental political values. Public education has been an important part of that partnership.

Education is what economists call a public good, which means it not only benefits students but the country as well.

Mann, an education reformer often dubbed the father of the American public school system, argued that universal, publicly funded, nonsectarian public schools would help sustain American political institutions, expand the economy and fend off social disorder. Horace Mann was a pioneer of free public schools and Massachusetts’ first secretary of education.

In researching Mann’s common schools and other educational history for our book, two lessons stood out to us.

One is that the U.S. investment in public education over the past 150 years has created a well-educated workforce that has fueled innovation and unparalleled prosperity.

As our book documents, for example, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the states expanded public education to include high school to meet the increasing demand for a more educated citizenry as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And the GI Bill made it possible for returning veterans to earn college degrees or train for vocations, support young families and buy homes, farms or businesses, and it encouraged them to become more engaged citizens, making “U.S. democracy more vibrant in the middle of the twentieth century.”

The other, equally significant lesson is that the democratic and republican principals that propelled Mann’s vision of the common school have colored many Americans’ assumptions about public schooling ever since. Mann’s goal was a “virtuous republican citizenry” – that is, a citizenry educated in “good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being.”

Mann believed there was nothing more important than “the proper training of the rising generation,” calling it the country’s “highest earthly duty.”

Attacking public education

Today, Mann’s vision and all that’s been accomplished by public education is under threat.

Trump’s second term has supercharged efforts by conservatives over the past 75 years to control what is taught in the public schools and to replace public education with private schools.

Most notably, Trump has begun dismantling the Department of Education to devolve more policymaking to the state level. The department is responsible for, among other things, distributing federal funds to public schools, protecting students’ civil rights and supporting high-quality educational research. It has also been responsible for managing over a trillion dollars in student loans – a function that the administration is moving to the Small Business Administration, which has no experience in loan management.

The president’s March 2025 executive order has slashed the department’s staff in half, with especially deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which, as noted, protects student from illegal discrimination.

Trump’s efforts to slash education funding has so far hit roadblocks with Congress and the public. The administration is aiming to cut education funding by US$12 billion for fiscal year 2026, which Congress is currently negotiating.

And contradicting its stance on ceding more control to states and local communities, the administration has also been mandating what can’t and must be taught in public schools. For example, it’s threatened funding for school districts that recognize transgender identities or teach about structural racism, white privilege and similar concepts. On the other hand, the White House is pushing the use of “patriotic” education that depicts the founding of the U.S. as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling.”

Promoting private education

As Trump and states have cut funding and resources to public education, they’ve been shifting more money to K-12 private schools.

Most recently, the budget bill passed by Congress in July 2025 gives taxpayers a tax credit for donations to organizations that fund private school scholarships. The credit, which unlike a deduction counts directly against how much tax someone owes, is $1,700 for individuals and double for married couples. The total cost could run into the billions, since it’s unclear how many taxpayers will take advantage.

Meanwhile, 33 states direct public money toward private schools by providing vouchers, tax credits or another form of financial assistance to parents. All together, states allocated $8.2 billion to support private school education in 2024.

Government funding of private schools diverts money away from public education and makes it more difficult for public schools to provide the quality of education that would most benefit students and the public at large. In Arizona, for example, many public schools are closing their doors permanently as a result of the state’s support for charter schools, homeschooling and private school vouchers.

That’s because public schools are funded based on how many students they have. As more students switch to private schools, there’s less money to cover teacher salaries and fixed costs such as building maintenance. Ultimately, that means fewer resources to educate the students who remain in the public school system.

Living up to aspirations

We believe the harm to the country of promoting private schools while rolling back support for public education is about more than dollars and cents.

It would mean abandoning the principle of universal, nonsectarian education for America’s children. And in so doing, Mann’s “virtuous citizenry” will be much harder to build and maintain.

America’s private market system, in which individuals are free to contract with each other with minimal government interference, has been important to building prosperity and opportunity in the U.S., as our book documents. But, as we also establish, relying on private markets to educate America’s youth makes it harder to create equal opportunity for children to learn and be economically successful, leaving the country less prosperous and more divided.

Sidney Shapiro is a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University. He is affiliated with the Center for Progressive Reform.

Joseph P. Tomain is a Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati. He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Private and religious schools, in comparison, choose their students. They choose those who are a “good fit.” They choose their co-religionists. They may reject students for any reason. They may say they have the staff to help students with disabilities or those who don’t speak English or those who struggle with school work. The choice is theirs.

Categories Education Reform
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