Jennifer Berkshire: A New Path, with Less Opportunity and Less Social Mobility

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
10

Jennifer Berkshire sums up the malicious goals that are embedded in Trump’s One Big Ugly Budget Bill. It will widen the distance between those at the bottom and those at the top. It will reduce the number of students who can pay for graduate degrees. All to assure that the very rich get a a tax break.

While the media may have moved on from the big awful bill that is now the law of the land, I continue to mull over its mess and malice. The single best description I’ve come across of the legislation’s logic comes from the ACLU’s Stefan Smith, who reminds us that the endless culture warring is all a big distraction. The real agenda when you add up all of the elements is “creating more friction for those climbing up the economic ladder in order to ease competition for those already there.” In the future that this legislation entrenches, rich kids will have an even greater advantage over their poor peers, of whom there will be now be many more. Smith calls this “reordering pipelines;” moving the rungs on the ladder further apart or kicking the ladder away works too. However you phrase it, our ugly class chasm just got wider by design.

This is why, for instance, the legislation includes seemingly arbitrary caps on how much aspiring lawyers and doctors can borrow in order to pay for school. By lowering that amount, the GOP just narrowed the pipeline of who can, say, go to med school. As Virginia Caine, president of the National Medical Association, bluntly put it: “Only rich students will survive.” Indeed, college just got more expensive and a lot less accessible for anyone who isn’t a rich student. Meanwhile, cuts to federal Medicaid funding will lead to further cuts in spending on higher education—the sitting ducks of state budgets—meaning higher tuition and fewer faculty and programs at the state schools and community colleges that the vast majority of American students attend. All so that the wealthiest among us can enjoy a tax cut.

This is also the story of the federal school voucher program that has now been foisted upon us. While the final version was an improvement over the egregious tax-shelter-for-wealthy-donors that the school choice lobby wanted, the logic remains the same, as Citizen Stewart pointedly points out:

It’s a redistribution of public dollars upward. And it’s happening at the exact moment many of the same politicians championing school choice are cutting food assistance, slashing Medicaid, gutting student loan relief, and questioning whether children deserve meals at school.

In their coverage of the new program, the education reporters at the New York Times, who’ve been pretty awful on this beat of late, cite a highly-questionable study finding that students who avail themselves a voucher are more likely to go to college. In other words, maybe vouchers aren’t so bad! Except that this sunny view misses the fast-darkening bigger picture: as states divest from the schools that the vast majority of students still attend, the odds of many of those students attending college just got steeper. That’s because as voucher programs balloon in cost, states confront a math problem with no easy answer, namely that there isn’t enough money to fund two parallel education systems. (For the latest on where the money is and isn’t going, check out this eye-opening report from FutureEd.)

Add in the Trump Administration’s decision to withhold some $7 billion from school districts and you can see where this is headed. In fact, when the folks at New America crunched the numbers, they turned up the somewhat surprising finding that the schools that stand to lose the most due to the Trump hatchet are concentrated in red states. Take West Virginia, for example, which is home to 15 of the hardest-hit districts in the land. The state’s public schools must 1) reckon with $30 + million in federal cuts even as 2) a universal voucher program is hoovering up a growing portion of state resources while 3) said resources are shrinking dramatically due to repeated rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest West Virginians. That same dynamic is playing out in other red states too. Florida, which is increasingly straining to pay for vouchers and public schools, just lost $398 million. Texas, where voucher costs are estimated to reach $5 billion by 2030, just lost $738 million. While 28 states are now suing the administration over the funding freeze, no red state has spoken up.

Shrinking chances

On paper, budget cuts can seem bloodless. Part of the Trump Administration’s strategy is to bury the true cost of what’s being lost in acronyms and edu-lingo, trusting that pundits will shrug at the damage. But as states struggle with a rising tide of red ink, what’s lost are the very things that inspire kids to go to school and graduate: extra curriculars, special classes, a favorite teacher, the individualized attention that comes from not being in a class with 35 other kids. That’s why I’ve been heartened to see that even some long-time critics of traditional public schools are now voicing concern over what their destabilization is going to mean for students. Here’s Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, warning that the explosion of vouchers in red states is going to have dire consequences, not just for students in public schools but for the states themselves:

Enrollment loss will likely reduce the quality of schools that will continue to educate most children in the state. States will be left with large numbers of students who are unprepared for college and career success. 

David Osborne, who has been banging the drum for charter schools since the Clinton era, sounds even more worried. 

Over time, as more and more people use vouchers, the education market in Republican states will stratify by income far more than it does today. It will come to resemble any other market: for housing, automobiles or anything else. The affluent will buy schools that are the equivalent of BMWs and Mercedes; the merely comfortable will choose Toyotas and Acuras; the scraping-by middle class will buy Fords and Chevrolets; and the majority, lacking spare cash, will settle for the equivalent of used cars — mostly public schools.

Meanwhile, the billions spent on vouchers will be subtracted from public school budgets, and the political constituency for public education will atrophy, leading to further cuts.

We’ve seen this movie before

Well, maybe not the exact same movie but a similar one. Anybody recall Kansas’ radical experiment in tax cutting? Roughly a decade ago, GOP pols slashed taxes on the wealthiest Kansans and cut the tax rate on some business profits to zero. Alas, the cuts failed to deliver the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. What they did bring was savage cuts in spending on public schools. As school funds dried up, programs were cut, teachers were pink slipped, and class sizes soared, all of which led to a dramatic increase in the number of students who dropped out. Meanwhile, the percentage of high schoolers going to college plunged. 

Young people in the state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward,” argues Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting experiment in Dying of Whiteness. Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans. 

But by taking a chainsaw to the public schools, the GOP also gave rise to a bipartisan parent uprising. And not only were lawmakers forced to reverse the tax cuts and restore funding for schools, but voters, who could see with their own eyes what the cuts had meant for their own kids and kids in their communities, threw the bums out the next time they had a chance. Today we’re watching as a growing number of states, with the aid of the federal government and the ‘big beautiful bill,’ embark on their own version of the Kansas experiment—slashing spending, destabilizing public schools, and limiting what’s possible for kids. They’re betting that red state voters will fall in line, sacrificing their own schools, and even their own kids, to ‘own the libs.’ That’s what the ideologues in Kansas thought too.

As I’ve been arguing in these pages, Trump’s education ‘action items’ represent the least popular parts of his agenda. Eliminating the Department of Education is a loser with voters, while cutting funds to schools fares even worse. The idea of cutting funds in order to further enrich the already rich has exactly one constituency: the rich. As the MAGA coalition begins to fragment and fall apart, we should keep reminding voters of all colors and stripes of this fact.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Cheating, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Economics, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fake, Fake News, Higher Education, Ignorance, Immigration, NPE Action Fund, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice

New Republic: SCOTUS’ Decision to Let Trump Abolish ED Dept is Shameful

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
10

During his campaign, Trump was outspoken about his determination to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. He blamed the Department for imposing DEI ideology on the nation’s schools, for teaching students “to hate America,” to indoctrinate students to believe whatever he opposes. He even blamed the Department for low test scores.

Never once did he acknowledge that federal law prohibits any federal official from influencing curriculum or instructional materials.

The vast majority of employees of the Department are career civil servants who manage grants, process applications, oversee procurements, and perform necessary tasks to maintain the flow of federal funds to states, school districts, and schools. They have nothing whatever to do with curriculum or test scores.

Trump’s ultimate goal is to withdraw federal funding from public schools. The purpose of federal funding, when the Elementary and Secondary Act was first passed in 1965, was equity, specifically, raising education spending in the poorest states.

Matt Ford of The New Republic describes how the Supreme Court ignored the Constitution and the law to let Trump do what he wants.

He writes:

To cover the Supreme Court these days is to catalogue its lawlessness. The conservative justices’ latest decision in McMahon v. New York allows the president to effectively demolish the Department of Education—a Cabinet-level department that was created by Congress, given duties and responsibilities by Congress, and funded by Congress to carry them out.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, a pro-wrestling promoter and sexual-abuse lawsuit defendant, made no secret of her goals after taking up her current job. In a speech in March, she declared that the department was to carry out its “final mission”: executing a mandate from President Donald Trump to shutter the department and transfer some of its functions to other agencies. Project 2025, the administration’s de facto policy blueprint, also said the department “should be eliminated.”

A week after taking up her post, McMahon put that plan into action by ordering a “reduction in force,” or RIF, of roughly half of the agency’s employees. The state of New York and other plaintiffs sued McMahon to stop the RIF by arguing that it was a back-door means to end the department’s statutory responsibilities by eliminating the staff responsible for carrying them out.

This was not particularly difficult for the plaintiffs to prove: Trump administration officials publicly described the RIF as part of the “final mission” in alignment with an executive order that directed McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” while also “ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely”—two obviously contradictory goals.

Unsurprisingly, a federal district-court judge granted the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order shortly thereafter. The lower court concluded from the record that the RIF’s actual goal was to “effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.” When the Trump administration appealed that restraining order to the Supreme Court, it pled ignorance. The district court, the Trump Justice Department argued, “[lacked] jurisdiction to second-guess the executive [branch]’s internal management decisions” and that the order was about “streamlining” the department.

“The government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices in his filing. “And the government has acknowledged the need to retain sufficient staff to continue fulfilling statutorily mandated functions and has kept the personnel that, in its judgment, are necessary for those tasks. The challenged RIF is fully consistent with that approach.”

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority was gullible enough to believe that. As with almost any other shadow-docket ruling, the court did not bother to explain itself. It fell to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent alongside Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, to explain the gravity of the court’s error. For one thing, Sotomayor noted that black-letter federal law prohibits the Trump administration from doing exactly what it says it is doing.

Congress has prohibited the Secretary of Education from “aboli[shing] organizational entities established” in the Department’s organic statute. 20 U. S. C. §3473(a)(2). As for statutory entities “transferred to the Department,” the Secretary may only “consolidate, alter, or discontinue” a subset of entities specifically identified, after providing Congress with 90 days’ advance notice and a “statement of the action proposed . . . and the facts and circumstances relied upon in support of such proposed action.”

She also emphasized the damage that would result from the court’s decision. “Lifting the district court’s injunction will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended,” she explained. “The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues….”

Ford contrasts this decision with SCOTUS refusal to allow Biden to forgive student debt during a national emergency–the COVID pandemic.

To sum up: In Robertsworld, a Democratic president can’t use a federal law that lets the Department of Education “waive and modify” student loans during a national emergency—in this particular case, the COVID-19 pandemic—because Congress was too vague about it for the chief justice’s liking. (The trick here is to selectively treat broad statutes as vague ones.) But when Congress says, “Hey, we’re going to create a bunch of programs for the executive branch to carry out, we’re going to house them in the Department of Education, and we’re also going to create strict limits on how you can reorganize them,” those laws are…merely advisory for Republican presidents, I guess?

The theme of this Supreme Court, he concludes, is lawlessness. Trump can break laws with impunity, anticipating that this Court will approve.

What about the rule of law? A casualty of the Trump regime.

Categories Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Scandal, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Oklahoma: Board Members Shocked by Images of Nude Women on Ryan Walters’ Screen In Executive Session

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2025 //
15

Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters continues to make news, usually for trying to inject the Bible and the Ten Commandments into every classroom.

But recently he made a different kind of news. As the state board was meeting with Walters in executive session, two members saw that the video screen behind Superintendent Walters was showing naked women. Not women in bathing suits: Naked women!

The video has been viewed more than 90,000 times. He was called out for his hypocrisy. Mr. Family Values!

Tres Savage and Sasha Ndisabiye wrote in NonDoc:

Two members of the Oklahoma State Board of Education were “shocked and mad” when they saw a video featuring “naked women” on the television screen in Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters’ office during the executive session portion of Thursday’s meeting.

While neither Becky Carson nor Ryan Deatherage could tell what video was displaying nude women on Walters’ office TV, each told NonDoc they were the only people seated in a position to see the screen. Deatherage said he noticed the video first while a parent was speaking about her appeal of a district transfer denial. As Deatherage weighed his options about how to bring the video to the room’s attention, Carson noticed the nudity.

“I was like, ‘What am I seeing?’ I kind of was in shock, honestly. I started to question whether I was actually seeing what I was seeing,” Carson said. “I was like, ‘Is that woman naked?’ And then I was like, ‘No, she’s got a body suit on.’ And it happened very quickly, I was like, ‘That is not a body suit.’ And I hate to even use these terms, but I said, ‘Those are her nipples.’ And then I was looking closer, and I got a full-body view, and I was like, ‘That is pubic hair.’ Even right now, I couldn’t even tell you what I was watching….”

The State Board of Education regularly reviews complaints made against teachers and school staff members that involve allegations of misconduct. With that in mind, Deatherage and Carson each said Thursday’s bizarre scenario demands some sort of action toward Walters.

“Besides the shock value and the disturbance of it all and how it affected me as a woman, I think it’s the double standard,” Carson said. “The accountability we are putting on teachers — and we should, I’m not saying we shouldn’t hold teachers accountable — but we’re looking at teachers sometimes with lesser offenses.”

Deatherage said he believes that any other educator who accidentally displayed a nude video at their workplace would face a complaint, investigation and possibly ramifications.

Nothing quite as stunning as a Bible-thumper caught in the act as a hypocrite.

Categories Disruption, Hypocrisy, Oklahoma

New Hampshire: Do Parents Have the “Right” to Abuse and Neglect Their Children?

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2025 //
6

Andru Volinsky is a lawyer, a former elected official, and a public school activist in New Hampshire. In this post, he criticizes the Republican drive to increase home schooling, charter schools, and vouchers while rolling back child labor laws.

Writing in IndepthNH, Volinsky says:

A Book, an Idea and a Goat.

From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link:  https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page

By ANDRU VOLINSKY

Last week I wrote about Trump and the Freestaters’ War on Children. You can find that post here.

At the same time that the MAGA Right pushes to expand taxpayer-funded school vouchers in NH and elsewhere, it also presses to relax child labor laws. Remember, these nasties coordinate their efforts to undermine the public good through forums like ALEC. This same tandem of legislation is happening in state legislatures across the country. Twenty-eight states introduced legislation in the last few terms to turn back the clock on child labor protections. Thirty states have some form of taxpayer-funded school voucher program. Project 2025, the Trumpian roadmap, includes a provision to reverse protections against children working in inherently hazardous jobs and justifies this rollback as a way of respecting “parental choice” in the matter.

States regulate the hours and conditions of child labor. Federal legislation focuses on hazardous jobs. In 2022, the NH legislature passed and Governor Chris Sununu signed into law a bill that expanded permissible working hours for 16 and 17 year olds and lowered the age at which children can work in establishments that serve liquor to 14.

The bill was sponsored by Senators Hennessey (R) and Guida (R) and was roughly passed on party lines with the exception of Manchester’s then two senators, Donna Soucy (D) and Kevin Cavanaugh (D), who voted to support the less restrictive child labor laws that affect restaurants and bars not owned by the parents of the working child.

Is this where we are heading?

Abuse and Neglect in NH’s Home Schooled Population

Is abuse or neglect in home schooled children a problem? Is it more prevalent in families who home school their children than in families where children are in regular contact with educators and other staff at public or private schools? I classify families who home school but who have their children regularly participate in some public school programming as traditional school families.

My post last week mentioned that I filed a public information request seeking documents that concern NH Department of Education studies of abuse or neglect in the vulnerable population of children who are home schooled. Most states have mechanisms for querying public officials about the existence of documents. NH’s law is called, “Right to Know.“ The federal law is called the “Freedom of Information Act” (or FOIA).

Since NH will now pay any family in the state a bounty of $2500 to take their kids out of public school, it would be good to know that we, as a state, are meeting our responsibility to protect these children from abuse and neglect. That’s why I asked for access to relevant documents of the NH Department of Education.

Drumroll please….

The state’s responses show that during the eight years that Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and State Education Board Chair Drew Cline were in charge and pushed for expanding taxpayer-funded vouchers to remove children from public schools, they did nothing to determine if home schooled children are abused, neglected or, for that matter, if they learn.

1. The NH Department of Education did not collect any information about children who are withdrawn from public school including even those children who school personnel specifically identified as being potentially abused or neglected.

The above is true even though a parent or guardian need only fill out a form to remove a child from school and can fill out the form retroactively. The home schooling initiation process is ready made to protect a parent or guardian when s/he gets wind of an abuse or neglect investigation. Simply keep the kid home and fill out a form after the fact.

2. While public schools are subject to all kinds of regulations and assessments, NH has not collected any data about the “efficacy” of home schooling in New Hampshire. I defined “efficacy” as “how well or poorly a child is prepared to pursue higher education or move into the work force or join the military after completing the equivalent of a high school degree.“

In NH, home schooling is defined by statute as “Instruction shall be deemed home education if it consists of instruction in science, mathematics, language, government, history, health, reading, writing, spelling, the history of the constitutions of New Hampshire and the United States, and an exposure to and appreciation of art and music. Home education shall be provided, coordinated, or directed by a parent for his or her own child.” The NH Education Department, the local school district or a non-public school may work with parents to meet these requirements, but only if the parents ask.

There is also no required, meaningful assessment process, evaluation of the home school curriculum or even review of a home schooler’s portfolio, unless the parent specifically asks for it and then the parent chooses the evaluator, who need not be a credentialed educator. The home school portfolio is expressly made property of the parents, I assume, so it cannot be reviewed without a search warrant. Certification of the completion of a program of home schooling is accomplished by the parent filing a form saying the kid is done. NH law absolves school districts from any liability if a home schooled fails to receive a free appropriate public education (FAPE) which is the requirement for a proper program of studies for children with disabilities who qualify for special ed.

The NH Department of Education produced some basic survey data about home schooling and private education. The data come from a report commissioned by the NH Department of Education and released January 2, 2024 entitled, “Key Findings From New Hampshire Department of Education Study of Non-Public-Schooling Parents.” The 15-page study asked private school and home schooled families their views of public schools.

Two notes about the report. First, the sample size was minuscule and self-selected.

Just over 165,000 children attended public school in NH during the target year for the survey. These families’ opinions were not part of the survey. About 10-12 percent of school-aged children in NH attend private schools or are home schooled. That’s 16,000 to about 20,000 children. Since NH doesn’t keep track of these kids, there was no list to contact these families. The surveyors instead used various opt-in methods and only managed to get 334 responses, about one third from home schoolers. Yet, Edelblut published the report.

Second, to hide the minuscule survey size, all responses in the report are presented only in a percentage format. A whopping 73 percent of home school parents reported that they believe their child would be emotionally or mentally safer at home than in public school. What a condemnation of the public school system! But, as there were just over 100 home school parents that participated, this means about 75 people (+/- 10 percent) felt this way.

My educator friends can comment on whether Frank Edelblut’s study would have been acceptable as a homework assignment. For my part, I think it’s a hit job by a bunch of hacks.

I also asked about the NH Department efforts to determine how many home schooled children lack adult supervision during the school day and learned there was no effort to examine this concern.

Kids at work aren’t supervised by parents. This is the part that provides a direct tie-in to relaxation of child labor laws.

Finally, since it is our good legislators who voted to drastically expand taxpayer-funded voucher bounties, I asked if the legislature requested the Department of Education to study any of these subjects and was informed no requests were made.

So much for the law enforcement types interested in protecting children.

The Clawback of Public Education Funding

Some newer estimates put the Trump administration’s withholding of public education funds previously authorized by Congress at more than $8 billion, not $6.2 billion as previously thought. These are havoc-wrecking clawbacks, not cuts in future funding.

The NH political operatives who occupy the positions of Attorney General and Governor have still not joined the twenty-four attorneys general who have challenged Trump’s illegal action in court even though to do so would be in the obvious better interests of the state.

Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education has shared a good set of tools for demanding action. The Network for Public Education was founded by Diane Ravitch, a NYU education historian. Carol is a retired public school principal and executive director of the Network. Here is what Carol suggests with active links:

Tell Linda McMahon: Release the Funds

What You Can Do Right Now:

1. Email Linda McMahon. Demand she release the funds.


2. Share this action link with friends, family, and your community with this link https://networkforpubliceducation.org/releasefunds4schools/


3. Email Congress. Even if you’ve written before, send another message.


4. Call the U.S. Department of Education at this number: 1-800-647-8733. Press 5 to report a violation of law regarding the disbursement of federal funds by the U.S. Department of Education. You can leave a message.

Categories Education Reform

El Paso: IDEA’s First Graduating Class Lost Half Its Students

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2025 //
3

When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, she gifted the IDEA charter chain with $225 million to expand, mostly in Texas. She expected that they would flourish, especially in El Paso, where they intended to open 20 charter schools.

IDEA’s first charter school in El Paso recently held its graduation ceremonies. Only half the students who were enrolled in eighth grade remained to graduate. The others had returned to the public schools.

Claudia Lorena Silva reported in El Paso Matters about the shrinkage of the class:

As the first graduating class of IDEA Public Schools in El Paso donned caps and gowns mid-May, it was less than half the size that were in the school system in eighth grade four years earlier.

In 2021, IDEA’s first two El Paso campuses, Edgemere and Rio Vista, had a combined 256 eighth-graders, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. Four years later, 124 seniors were enrolled in IDEA’s class of 2025 at graduation time, all set to continue their education in college.

IDEA contends that students return to public schools because IDEA’s curriculum is too rigorous. But IDEA students do not consistently outperform those in public schools.

IDEA boasts that all its graduates enroll in college. They do not mention that many students attend colleges that accept all applicants.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Texas

Trump Administration Releases School Funding It Was Withholding

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2025 //
3

Jan Resseger writes here about the decision by the Trump administration to release the billions of dollars to public schools that it had not distributed. Districts were unable to plan their budgets because of the uncertainty. Apparently enough Republicans heard from unhappy constituents and communicated their displeasure to Secretary McMahon. It shows that when parents and educators speak loudly, they are heard. Even in this anti-public school administration.

Jan Resseger wrote about it-

Today’s post is an update.  Yesterday this blog traced what has happened since the Trump administration refused to send $6.8 billion to U.S. public schools, money that had, in March, been approved by Congress in a continuing budget resolution and promised for delivery on July 1, the day that school districts regularly receive federal funding prior to the beginning of a new school year.

This afternoon, July 25, the Trump administration announced that it will release $5 billion of the funds and begin delivering them next week. Last week the administration released $1.4 billion of the funds for 21st Century Community Learning Center after-school programs.

This blog will take a one week break.  Look for a new post on Tuesday, August 5, 2025.

This afternoon Chalkbeat reported: “The Trump administration will release billions in frozen education funds after widespread outcry, including from Republican members of Congress….”

Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman reports: “Roughly $5 billion will flow beginning the week of July 28 to states through four K-12 education grant programs…. The affected grant programs… are… for migrant education… professional development and teacher training… English-learner services… and academic enrichment…. News that the education funding freeze is ending first emerged July 25 at noon in a post on X from Rep. Don Bacon, R.-Neb., one of a small handful of Congressional Republicans who publicly urged the Trump administration to release the money.”

On July 1, the Trump administration also withheld federal funding for adult basic education.  Lieberman reports: “The notice to states didn’t mention the $715 million for adult education the Trump administration has also withheld since July 1. Information about that program typically flows to states separately from information about other education funding streams.”

Certainly the release of the funds is a blessing for school districts whose leaders had been frantically scrambling to figure out how to provide necessary and in some cases legally required services for students when public schools open for the fall semester, which begins in many school districts in the last couple of weeks of August.

Categories Extremism, Funding, Trump

Mark Joseph Stern: The Supreme Court Majority Are MAGA Sycophants

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
3

Mark Joseph Stern writes about the law for Slate. In this post, he writes about the Supreme Court’s acquiescence to Trump’s effort to become the all-powerful authoritarian of the federal government, unfettered by laws, Congressional powers, precedent, or norms.

This is a Court whose majority claims to be “originalists”, “textualists,” faithful to the language of the Constitution.

But now we can say with certainty that the six-member reactionary majority will reliably give Trump whatever power he wants.

The most recent example of the Court’s obsequiesence to Trump is its ruling that gave Trump the power to fire members of independent commissions whose members can be removed–by law–only “for cause,” such as corruption, malfeasance, failure to act responsibly.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, History, Injustice, Trump

The Supreme Court Majority Are MAGA Sycophants

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
9

I hoped, as I’m sure you did, that the Supreme Court might be a moderating force during Trump’s second term, even though he appointed three of its 6-members Republican majority. Back in the day, conservative Republicans were not extremists. They respected the rule of law and the Constitution.

But the Roberts Court is turning out to be a patsy for MAGA extremism and an all-powerful executive branch.

The Republicans on the Court claim to be “originalists” and “textualists,” rendering every decision with fidelity to the Constitution.

But now we can say with certainty that the six-member reactionary majority will reliably give Trump whatever power he wants.

If the Founders were united on one principle, it was the balancing of power among the three branches: the President, the Congress, and the Judiciary. No one of them was to reign supreme.

And yet the Roberts Court has allowed Donald Trump to run roughshod over the Congress, the Judiciary, even the law.

Trump and his handlers have spent six months assuming the powers of Congress, especially the power of the purse. and ignoring the laws passed by Congress.

The Supreme Court has approved his mass firings, even those firings that resulted in the elimination of Departments, agencies, and functions written into law by Congress. SCOTUS greenlighted his seizure of USAID and approved his evisceration of the Education Department. SCOTUS disregarded the fact that the President cannot abolish functions authorized by Congress without Cingressional approval.

If Trump and his handler want to take control of an agency or abolish it, the Suprreme Ciurt gives him a thumbs up.

His disregard for law and norms began with his mass firing of Inspectors General. These are the high-level, nonpartisan ombudsmen in every department who guard against waste, fraud, and abuse. Gone.

Then he peremptorily fired members of independent agencies and boards who were appointed for a set term and cannot be fired for any reason other than malfeasance and neglect of duty. These independent bodies were supposed to be insulated from partisan politics. Trump ignored the safeguards and began firing Democrats, on grounds that they would not support his agenda.

Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox as chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Cathy Harris as chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). The two women were appointed by Biden. Lower courts enjoined their firing, but the DC Court of Appeals said it was ok for Trump to remove them.

NPR said:

These agencies and many others have historically operated with a degree of autonomy granted by Congress. Their structure, with Democratic and Republican members serving staggered terms, has helped ensure some distance and independence from the White House.

Members are nominated by presidents and confirmed by the Senate. But in creating those agencies, Congress held that presidents can only fire members for cause, such as neglect of duty or malfeasance.

In 1935, the Supreme Court upheld those limits on the president’s power in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor about another independent agency, the Federal Trade Commission. Now the future of that 90-year-old decision is highly uncertain.

In March, Trump fired the two Biden appointees on the Federal Trade Commission, Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. His letter of ouster said that the commissioner’s “continued service on the F.T.C. is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.”

Trump removed Christopher Hanson, a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Hanson said he was removed without cause, flatly contradicting the law and precedent.

Democracy Docket reported on the Supreme Court decision released this week, which gave its approval to Trump’s firing of the Democratic members of independent agencies. The majority did not write an opinion. The dissenters did.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump’s emergency request to fire members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) without cause. The ruling allows Trump to proceed with his purge of three Democratic CPSC commissioners and replace them with appointees of his choosing, despite federal law requiring “neglect of duty or malfeasance” for removal.

In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the decision allows for “the permanent transfer of authority, piece by piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another.”

The court, in a 6-3 vote, blocked a lower court ruling Wednesday that reinstated the fired commissioners, siding with Trump and halting the lower court’s enforcement of statutory protections.

In its ruling, the Court cited a similar decision from May, Trump v. Wilcox, which allowed Trump to remove Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board. 

“The stay we issued in Wilcox reflected our judgment that the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer,” the Court wrote. “The same is true on the facts presented here.”

Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson,  issued a blistering dissent accusing the majority of upending nearly a century of legal precedent that protects the independence of federal agencies – all without full briefing, oral argument or a decision on the merits. 

“Once again, this Court uses its emergency docket to destroy the independence of an independent agency, as established by Congress,” Kagan wrote.

Kagan mocked the stacking of precedent with no clear rationale, noting that the court’s only justification was its previous order in Wilcox.

“Next time, though, the majority will have two (if still under-reasoned) orders to cite,” Kagan added. “Truly, this is turtles all the way down.”

Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, recently told Democracy Docket that in not offering explanations, the Supreme Court is damaging its own authority. 

“The power of the Court is its judgment. It doesn’t have the power of the purse nor the power of the sword,” Kreis said. “So, when six justices fail to explain the Supreme Court’s rulings and let major changes in the federal government’s structure go forward that appear to be inconsistent with the law, one must ask why?”

The CPSC was designed by Congress to be bipartisan, with five members serving staggered terms. By law, the president cannot remove commissioners without cause and no more than three of the Commissioners can be affiliated with the same political party.

The same structure governs other independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Communications Commission. Trump’s firings — now twice greenlit by the court — appear to break that model. 

The justices did not rule on the case’s legal merits yet. But by staying the lower court’s ruling, the court effectively sided with Trump’s expansive view of executive authority while appeals proceed. 

By allowing Trump to remove Democratic appointees on independent boards without cause, in direct violation of the law, the 6-member majority presents itself as a wing of MAGA. The majority is enabling a remarkable concentration of power in the hands of the President. The Imperial Presidency arrives, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Assuming that the Democrats regain control of the White House in a future election, the Supreme Court has removed the guardrails that protect a balance of power.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Trump

Florida: School Libraries Told to Remove 55 Books–But Most Had Never Been Checked Out

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
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The Orlando Sentinel reported that school libraries were directed to remove books, because they are “pornographic.” On review, it turns out that most of the books had never been checked out.

Steven Walker wrote:

Upset that “pornographic” novels were in public school libraries, state leaders demanded administrators remove 55 books from their shelves, and Orange County Public Schools complied last month. But newly obtained library data shows many of those books were rarely, if ever, checked out by students during the past academic year.


OCPS had 41 of the books on the state list in circulation during the 2024-25 school year, district data shows. Twenty-two of the books were never checked out from any of the district’s schools. The 19 that were checked out left the shelves fewer than 10 times each in a district with almost 60,000 high school students.


The state’s push to rid schools of the 55 books — documented first in a threatening letter from Florida’s attorney general to Hillsborough County schools — frustrated some Orange school leaders who called it a “non-issue” given that most of the books never got checked out.

Categories Censorship, Florida

Brookings Institution: What Recent Supreme Court Decisions Mean for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
3

It is obvious that the rightwing Supreme Court tilts decidedly in favor of religious rights and religious schools. The six-member majority seems to have forgotten about separation of church and state and about the “establishment clause,” which forbids government endorsement of religious schools.

The Brookings Institution invited noted scholars to reflect on the Court’s recent decisions and how they are likely to affect public schools.

This is an excellent collection of short commentaries by scholars, not ideologues.

It opens:

The 2024-2025 Supreme Court term was a consequential one for K-12 public education. The Court considered the legality of religious charter schools (Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond), the rights of students with disabilities to access a public education (A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools), and whether parents should be allowed to opt their children out of lessons or access to curriculum material that conflicts with their religious beliefs (Mahmoud v. Taylor).

In this piece, we invited experts on education law and policy to share their reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions this term.

A few excerpts.

Robert Kim writes that the Supreme Court is enthralled by the “free exercise clause” of the First Amendment.

There is a way to characterize the results in the three Supreme Court cases this term touching most directly on K-12 public education in minimalist fashion. Let’s begin there.

In AJT v. Osseo School District (2025), the Court held that parents of students with disabilities who sue public schools for discriminating against their child in violation of federal disability rights laws must prove no more than what litigants would have to prove in other disability discrimination contexts. This holding is logical, unsurprising, and consistent with Supreme Court rulings in recent years that affirm the rights of students with disabilities and eliminate administrative legal hurdles in their path (see Endrew F. and Fry in 2017, and Perez in 2023).

Staying with the minimalist approach, in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), the Court ruled that the disallowing parents the ability to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum violated parents’ rights to religious free exercise under the First Amendment. The Court’s ruling does notprohibit public schools from adopting inclusive curriculum on LGBTQ+ issues or any other topic, nor does it disturb the basic equal protection principle that public schools must treat all students equally. Parents have long had the ability to opt their children out of various school curricula and activities, so in a sense, Mahmoud simply attaches more finely polished First Amendment armament to an existing right. 

Finally, in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond (2025), the Court issued a one-sentence per curiam (unauthored) opinion announcing that it was “equally divided” (due to Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recusal from the case). The 4-4 deadlock thus affirmed a prior Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling prohibiting what would have been, for the first time in modern U.S. history, the establishment of a religious public school.

And yet. When we remove our minimalist blinders, one can’t help but be deeply troubled by what the two latter cases involving religion portend for the future. There’s language in the majority opinion in Mahmoud that signals the Court’s desire to resist a growing perception–fueled in part by the Court’s own, still-recent rulings sanctioning same-sex marriage and prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ+ employees–that LGBTQ+ equality is a normative value in American law and society. And, but for Justice Barrett’s recusal in Drummond, the Court almost certainly would have approved the establishment of a public school run by the Catholic Church.

Running through Mahmoud and the oral argument in Drummond are signs that this Court continues to be enthralled by the Free Exercise Clause–to such an extent that it is willing elevate religious rights above other constitutional interests, including the separation of church and state and equal protection. These signs, I fear, spell deep trouble for public education and the rights of students in ways that will be revealed by the Court over the next couple of years.

Derek Black sees trouble ahead:

Public education survived what risked being the most painfully consequential decision in half a century in Drummond—or at least survived to fight another day—while suffering a stiff smack on the hand in Mahmoud. 

With Drummond, forcing states to approve religious charter schools would have delivered control over what it means to be a public school into private hands. Taxpayers would have to pick up the bill for religious schools but have no control over what those schools teach or whether all students have equal access to them. Publicly funding religious schools would also radically reshape funding for public schools. Religious schools that have long operated on tuition may shift their costs onto taxpayers, and many new religious charter schools would surely open. States would face either increasing taxes or cutting the already-too-small education pie into smaller and smaller pieces. The consequences of religious charter schools are important to understand, since the question will almost certainly come before the Court again in the coming years.

Mahmoud is trickier. The threshold question was whether the school’s LGBTQ+ books and curriculum burden parental rights. Prior precedent would have said no, but courts have been exceedingly stingy in recognizing burdens on parental rights and exceedingly deferential on the related matter of school curriculum and the possibility of censorship—almost to the point of absurdity. Whatever you think of the parental burdens issue, we were long overdue for an update on where the Court stands vis-à-vis curriculum. The problem for the Court has been how to draw a line that does not micromanage local school decision-making. It remains unclear where exactly the line on parental burden is now, but it is clear the court lowered the bar for establishing religious burden. That means schools can expect new challenges on topics like vaccine requirements, absences, and student codes of conduct.

Regardless, schools are still free to promote inclusive values and curriculum. And to be clear, the Court did not give students license to harass others based on religious beliefs. Schools can and should continue to prohibit and punish inappropriate behavior—and stick to their values.

Rachel M. Perera predicts that the Court’s decisions have created thorny challenges for schools:

Public education is under attack—from the expansion of universal private school choice programs that are siphoning monies away from already cash-strapped public schools to the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal education department and the recent withholding of Congressionally mandated federal school funding. And the Drummond and Mahmoud decisions indicate that the Court is more likely to accelerate attacks on public education than to forestall them.  

Both Drummond and Mahmoud, along with other recent decisions of this court—e.g., Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (a ruling in favor of a high school football coach who was fired from a public school for leading postgame prayers) and Carson v. Makin (which struck down a Maine law prohibiting the use of public funds for religious schools)—are evidence of rapidly eroding divides between religion and public life.  

Public schools narrowly avoided catastrophe with the split 4-4 decision in Drummond, but the question of religious charter schools will almost certainly come before the Court again—and under more favorable conditions. Religious charter schools would have major implications for the health of our public education system, the charter school sector, and education funding.

With Mahmoud, the Court ruled that parents should be allowed to opt their children out of school curriculum and programming that conflicts with their religious beliefs. Where future courts will draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate concerns remains to be seen. But what we do know is that this decision adds another layer of costly complexity to the already challenging landscape that school districts are facing given the rise in statewide universal private school choice programs, enrollment declines, and budget shortfalls.

Worse, the Mahmoud decision will undermine local efforts to make school programming and curriculum more pluralistic and inclusive. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, because school districts are resource-constrained and risk-averse, “schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections.” And we’ve seen this happen before. After the wave of anti-critical race theory state laws in 2021 and 2022, many teachers reported preemptively changing their instruction in the face of potentially costly conflict.

At a time when schools are in dire need of more resources and support, the Court has added only more challenges to their plate.

Open the link to read the excellent contributions by Derek Black and Preston Green.

Categories Curriculum, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers
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