Trump Administration Releases School Funding It Was Withholding

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2025 //
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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 //
7

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

Jan Resseger: Ohio Legislature Robs Public Schools to Fill Pockets of the Rich

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
1

Jan Resseger writes here about the injustice of the budget for public schools passed by the Ohio legislature. Firmly in the control of hard-right Republicans, the legislature eagerly funds vouchers and charter schools while underfunding the public schools. As in every other state, the vast majority of Ohio students attend public schools. The only evaluation of the Ohio voucher program showed that most students who used the vouchers were already attending private schools; those who transferred from public schools fell behind the peers they left behind.

Ohio legislators know that vouchers and charters do not increase educational opportunity. They don’t care. Parents of public school students must inform themselves and act to protect their public schools.

She writes:

In the last week of June, two important events happened almost simultaneously in Ohio: A district court in Columbus found the state’s EdChoice voucher program unconstitutional, and the state legislature passed a budget that at the same time shorts the state’s public schools that serve the mass of our state’s children, significantly cuts the state income tax, and increases funding for private school vouchers over the next two years.

We all desperately hope the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit will save our public schools, but appeals of the case to higher courts will likely take several years, a period when the  new budget’s underfunding of the Fair School Funding Plan, the effect of the income tax cuts and the diversion money to private school vouchers will inevitably continue to diminish the state’s investment in Ohio’s public schools.

In the new budget, the legislature technically phased in a new Fair School Funding Plan—a mathematical formula to ensure that the state will guarantee adequate and equitably distributed state school funding. However, after the House Speaker called the plan unsustainable, the legislature failed fully to fund the new formula’s provisions and thereby ensured the new formula’s ultimate failure before Ohio can even try it out.

The Ohio legislature’s income tax reduction along with lawmakers’ choice to permit continuing growth of publicly funded, universal EdChoice private school tuition vouchers emerges from a philosophy that government’s responsibility is to protect individual parents’ freedom. Solid support for the state’s public schools would instead embody a commitment to what we call the social contract, explained here by economist Joseph Stiglitz:

“A social contract defines the relationship between individuals and societies, much as an actual contract would, outlining the obligations of the parties to the contract and to each other. There is one big difference between the social contract and ordinary contracts. When an actual contract is breached, there are consequences both for the relationship and especially for the breaching party… But when the state violates what it is supposed to do, there is no corresponding mechanism for enforcing the social contract.” The Road to Freedom, p. 86)

Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution definesthe state’s responsibility to provide a strong system of public education as part of the social contract: “The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.”

Here are three ways in which the new state budget undermines Ohio’s public education social contract.

The New Ohio Budget Does Not Commit the State to Equitable and Adequate Public School Funding.

In a new brief, Lawmakers Underfund Ohio Schools by $2.86B in FY26-27; Veto Overrides Risk Another $330M, along with an attached PowerPoint slide presentation, Policy Matters Ohio shows how Ohio’s Fiscal Year 2026-2027 budget undermines the new Fair School Funding Plan just as it is being launched.

The first slide of Policy Matters’ PowerPoint presentation summarizes the impact of the new budget for the state’s public schools: “Ohio lawmakers give a billion-dollar annual tax break to Ohioans earning six figures, underfund (public) schools by $2.86 billion, and leave behind students with the greatest need.”

In Slide 3, Policy Matters compares the amount of public school funding allocated in the new state budget to the amount the new Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP) would have awarded to each school district if the legislature had, as the formula requires it to do, correctly factored in the district’s current costs instead of old cost data from FY 2022. “Under the enacted plan, 74% of Ohio’s school districts will receive less than what the FSFP says they need to meet the costs of an adequate education.”

In a recent Hannah News Service publication, Howard Fleeter, Ohio’s well known school finance expert, explains¹ exactly how the legislature robs school districts of what they had expected under the Fair School Funding Plan: “One of the most important features of the Fair School Funding Plan is its utilization of an inputs-based approach to determining adequacy, which results in a base per-pupil amount which can vary across districts based on the number of students and their distribution across grade levels… In order to not just fully phase in the funding formula but to adequately fund it, the base cost in FY 26 should be based on FY 24 input data and the base cost in FY 27 should be based on FY 25 data.” However, this year the legislature used old, FY 2022 cost data, thereby failing accurately to measure school districts’ costs. In other words, the state should recognize that school district expenses rise year after year due to inflation, and the formula should recognize that school districts have to keep up or risk losing teachers and services.

In Policy Matters’ Slide 5, a bar graph demonstrates that in the new budget, legislators leave farthest behind the school districts serving concentrations of the state’s poorest students. These school districts will fall 107% behind what the FSFP would have brought them in state funding. Their school funding is actually being cut this year.

Part of the loss to school districts serving masses of poor children comes from a recalculation of Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid.  Slide 7 explains that the legislature used “direct certification, a process of identifying low-income students by relying on public benefits data that will lead to fewer low-income students being counted in the system and fewer DPIA dollars going to the places that desperately need them.” Why has the legislature chosen to base DPIA on a data set that will, “cut more than $200 million in DPIA funds over the next biennium, from FY 2025 levels of support”?

Slide 7 adds, as a preface to Slide 8, that the new budget, “appears use that money to offset the ‘performance’ supplement which is estimated to cost $215 million over the biennium.”  What is the Performance Supplement? Slide 8 explains: “The Performance Supplement would rely on (each district’s)  state report card data, increasing funding by $13 per student times the number of stars on their state report card or progress report… Report card scores are built on testing performance as well as factors like chronic absenteeism, and the ‘breadth of coursework available in the district.’ ”

Policy Matters Slide 8 clearly identifies the injustice embedded in the Performance Supplement: “Low scores on these indicators should signal to policymakers that the school and the community it serves are devalued, under-resourced, and in need of more help, not less.  It explicitly reverses course on closing opportunity and education gaps, which would help schools improve.” In Slide 8, we also learn that the budget adds a $225 per student Enrollment Growth Supplement for the fastest growing suburban school districts. While the supplement will help meet the costs of serving new students moving to these districts, it is important to remember that these are districts serving wealthier families.

In the brief itself, you can link to your own school district’s profile to see how your district fares under the new budget here.

The New Budget Reduces Ohio’s State Income Tax—Undermining the State’s Capacity to Raise Its Share of Public School Funding.

The Plain Dealer‘s Anna Staver explains: “Lawmakers eliminated the state’s top income tax bracket, collapsing Ohio’s tax structure from two rates to one. It’s the last step in a decade-long push for a flat tax —and this final move amounts to a $1.14 billion cut.”  Signal Ohio‘s Andrew Tobias adds: “That new top tax rate of 2.75% is lower than any surrounding state and lower than any time in the past five decades… About 96% of the $1.1 billion in annual lost revenue… will stay in the pockets of those earning $138,000 or more….” Policy Matters Ohio’s Slide 10 depicts the legislature’s new flat tax diverting a billion dollars of essential state revenue to wealthy individuals and away from the state’s social contract. The new budget exacerbates a long trend of tax slashing in Ohio. Last fall, Policy Matters Ohio’s Bailey Williams tracked two decades of Ohio tax cuts that have progressively reduced Ohio’s capacity to support the needs of the public and to support the system of common schools promised in the Ohio Constitution.

The New Budget Allows Private School Vouchers to Continue Eating Up School Revenue.

In his June 27th On the Money¹ school funding expert Howard Fleeter describes another primary drain on state revenue: private school tuition vouchers will continue to eat up an increasingly large chunk of the new state budget. Fleeter compares the legislature’s investment in public school funding to the legislature’s investment in private school vouchers. Fleeter calculates, “that state foundation funding for Ohio’s traditional school districts—spread across the state’s 609 local school districts—will increase by $281.9 million over the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 biennium compared to current funding levels.” He continues: “Voucher funding is slated to increase by $327.1 million over the FY26-27 biennium…. This increase is $45 million more than the increase slated for the traditional K-12 districts over the biennium, despite the fact that K-12 districts educate roughly 8 times as many students as do private schools.”

In the New Budget, Legislators Shift the Responsibility for Funding Public Schools More Heavily onto Local School Districts.

We continue to hear a lot from our legislators about the danger of rising property taxes, but ironically, by reducing the state’s investment in public education, the legislature itself has made it necessary for school districts to increase reliance on local property taxes or cut programs and teachers. Howard Fleeter concludes¹ that, in the current fiscal year (FY 2025) under the budget that passed two years ago, the state is paying 38.4% of public school funding in Ohio. In the new budget, in which the legislature has failed to update the cost data in the formula, has cut the state income tax, and has kept on letting an uncapped voucher program grow,“the average state share (of total public school funding) will drop to 35.0% in FY 26 and to 32.2% in FY 27….”

When a state violates the social contract by reneging on its responsibility to fund public schools, the funding burden falls more heavily and more inequitably on local school districts.

¹Howard Fleeter, “On The Money,” Hannah News Service, June 27, 2025, (available free in many public library research collections).

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio, Parents, Privatization

Charter School Director Indicted for Fraud and Embezzlement

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2025 //
7

The former director of the Madero Charter School in California was charged with fraud and embezzlement. The school was funded by the federal Charter Schools Program. The charges demonstrate the lack of accountability in state and federal charter school laws.

The Business Journal reported:

A former charter school director in Madera County has been indicted for allegedly embezzling funds from a program that was federally funded, acting U.S. Attorney Kimberly A. Sanchez announced Tuesday. 

On July 17, a federal grand jury returned a sealed indictment against Nicholas A. Retana, 67, from Madera. The indictment was unsealed on Monday and Retana was arraigned in federal court in Fresno.

According to court documents, Retana was the executive director and founder of a kindergarten through eighth grade charter school in Madera County until early 2020. 

While not named in the news release, Retana’s co-founded and led Ezequiel Tafoya Alvarado Academy from 2005 until 2019. 

An audit conducted for the Madera County Superintendent of Schools found evidence of corruption. The potential misuses of public funds totaled more than $1.06 million, according to the audit.

Prosecutors allege that during Retana’s time in that role, he used school funds to pay for personal expenses for himself, his family and associates. 

Among the alleged misuses of funds were the purchase of two new Ford F-150 trucks for his sons, who were employed by the school. He also allegedly paid a woman $12,000 who was described in court documents as a self-proclaimed sex worker turned relationship coach, with whom he had a personal relationship. 

The audit found that this person was paid for conducting life coaching workshops for eight graders despite not having any relevant licensure.

Retana is accused of mislabeling the expenses in school records and misrepresenting them when questioned. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. 

Categories Charter Schools, Fraud

Judd Legum: Elon Musk Company Sought Federal Designation as “Disadvantaged”

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2025 //
4

Judd Legum writes a terrific blog called Popular Information. He also has another blog called Musk Watch. He recently posted a story about one of Musk’s businesses, which applied for a federal grant designated for the economically disadvantaged.

Caleb Ecarma wrote:

On April 24, Elon Musk’s $9 billion neurotechnology company falsely self-certified as a “small disadvantaged business” (SDB) on a federal filing, a designation that qualifies the company for preferential treatment as part of a racial and ethnic diversity initiative.

The SDB designation can also only be legally claimed by companies owned by “economically disadvantaged individuals.”

Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces, registered with the government as an SDB while Musk leveraged his position at the White House to cut federal funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Excerpt from a Neuralink federal government filing, dated April 24, 2025.

The SDB designation is clearly defined by the Small Business Administration and in federal regulations. A SDB must be “unconditionally and directly” majority-owned (51%) by a member of a socially and economically disadvantaged group, meaning a demographic “subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias.”

Even if a business clears that hurdle, not all are eligible for the designation. To be considered an SDB, the company must also be majority-owned by an “economically disadvantaged individual.” According to the Code of Federal Regulations:

Economically disadvantaged individuals are socially disadvantaged individuals whose ability to compete in the free enterprise system has been impaired due to diminished capital and credit opportunities as compared to others in the same or similar line of business who are not socially disadvantaged.

Federal regulations state that individuals with a net worth exceeding $850,000, excluding the value of their primary residence, are not “economically disadvantaged individuals.”

Musk, the owner of Neuralink, has an estimated net worth of $404 billion. A South Africa-born white man raised in the Anglican Church, Musk is also not a part of any recognized disadvantaged ethnic or racial group.

As a private company, Neuralink’s exact ownership structure is opaque. But in a September 2018 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Neuralink lawyer Roel Campos wrote, “Neuralink is a private Delaware Corporation with its head offices at 3180 18th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, in which Mr. Musk has a majority ownership stake.” Neuralink has since reincorporated in Nevada. “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware,” Musk said in January 2024, a few days after Neuralink left the state of Delaware.

With the federal government awarding $50 billion to SDBs annually, carrying the SDB designation is a significant advantage for companies seeking government contracts. SDBs also receive increased visibility on federal databases, including the Small Business Administration’s Dynamic Small Business Search (DSBS). Neuralink currently appears on the DSBS as a “Self-Certified Small Disadvantaged Business.”Since 2017, Neuralink has made the SDB business claim in all 11 of its filings on SAM.gov, the federal government’s contracting database. Many of those filings were signed by Jared Birchall, Musk’s top fixer and Neuralink’s CEO. The SDB designation is also visible on the main page of the company’s SAM.gov profile. (Open the link to view the pdf. File.)

There is no indication that Neuralink has received federal funds, although it may have bid on federal contracts. Based on its SAM.gov filings, the company may have also requested grants, loans, or other financial assistance from the federal government while certifying itself as an SDB.

In three SAM.gov filings, Neuralink responded “Yes” to the question, “Does Neuralink Corp. wish to apply for a Federal financial assistance project or program, or is Neuralink Corp. currently the recipient of funding under any Federal financial assistance project or program?” Those filings were all submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic, in September 2020, May 2021, and August 2021.

Birchall and other Neuralink executives who signed the SDB self-certification forms attested to the following:

I understand that I may be subject to criminal prosecution under Section 1001, Title 18 of the United States Code or civil liability under the False Claims Act if I misrepresent NEURALINK CORPORATION in any of these representations or certifications to the Government.

Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.

The Department of Justice has prosecuted government contractors for submitting false self-certification claims or misrepresenting the status of their companies on federal databases. In 2023, one contractor received a 15-month prison sentence and was ordered to pay $72,000 in restitution after he fraudulently self-certified his company as a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. Last year, another company was fined nearly $4 million for misrepresenting itself as a women-owned small business on its SAM.gov profile.

Neuralink’s misrepresentation is particularly notable, given Musk’s past condemnations of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs aimed at helping members of historically disadvantaged groups. “DEI is just another word for racism,” Musk said in January of this year. “Shame on anyone who uses it,” he added. Musk has also described DEI as “actually illegal.”

While leading the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration’s austerity program, Musk claimed that he was ferreting out and terminating federal DEI initiatives. DOGE, under Musk’s guidance, focused on purging federal DEI grants and contracts for minority owned businesses, including legitimate SDBs.

In May, after Neuralink secured $600 million in fresh funding, the company had a $9 billion before-cash valuation, according to Semafor.

Categories Ethics, Fraud, Funding, Musk, Elon

Trump’s “One Big Ugly Budget Bill” Increases Taxes on Some Colleges, Eliminates It on Others

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2025 //
3

In 2017, Trump imposed a tax of 1.4 % on the endowments of colleges and universities that had large endowments relative to the number of students enrolled. Institutions of higher education, like churches, foundations, and other non-profits, have never been taxed. Typically, endowment income is used for scholarships and operating expenses, so this tax cut the money available to help low-income students who were admitted to excellent colleges.

In 2025, the Trump administration proposed making the tax even higher, inflicting more pain.

But the GOP got twisted in knots over their wish to exclude rightwing Hillsdale College. At first, they thought they could exempt it by exempting religious institutions. But Hillsdale isn’t really a religious college, and the Senate Parliamentarian quashed that idea.

They they decided they could keep Hillsdale tax-free by exempting all colleges with fewer than 3,000 students. That worked.

But it also exempted a number of liberal arts colleges that had previously paid the 1.4 % tax.

I’m happy to report that my Alma mater Wellesley College is again tax-exempt, as all colleges and universities should be.

What will the GOP tax next? Churches, synagogues, mosques? Foundations? Museums and other cultural institutions? The March of Dimes? The ASPCA? Other charities?

To see the list of lucky colleges that will no longer be taxed and those that will see a tax increase, open the link.

Forbes reported:

Strange things happen when details of a massive tax and budget bill, like the one President Donald Trump signed…, are tweaked behind closed doors. Among them: A couple dozen of the nation’s wealthiest small private colleges will be getting a tax cut next year, even as bigger rich universities, including Princeton, MIT, Yale and Harvard, will be slammed with higher taxes.

It all began as an effort by House Republicans to dramatically raise the excise tax imposed on the earnings of college endowments, and particularly the endowments of wealthy “woke” schools like Harvard University that they (and President Donald Trump) have targeted.

But as it turns out, while Harvard’s tax bill will likely more than double, some smaller schools with famously left-leaning student bodies (e.g. Swarthmore College and Amherst College) are getting tax relief. That’s because schools with fewer than 3,000 full-time equivalent tuition-paying students will be exempt from the revamped endowment tax beginning next year. It currently applies to private schools with more than 500 full-time equivalent tuition-paying students and endowments worth more than $500,000 per student.

Using the latest available federal data from fiscal year 2023, Forbes identified at least 26 wealthy colleges that are likely subject to the endowment tax now, but will be exempt next year based on their size. Along with top liberal arts schools like Williams College, Wellesley College, Amherst and Swarthmore, the list includes the California Institute of Technology, a STEM powerhouse, and the Julliard School, the New York city institution known for its music, dance and drama training. Grinnell College in Iowa, which enrolled 1,790 students in 2023, will save around $2.4 million in tax each year as a result of the change, President Anne Harris said in an email to Forbes.

Here’s what happened. As passed by the House in late May, the One Big Beautiful Bill (its Trumpian name) increased the current 1.4% excise tax on college endowments’ investment earnings to as high as 21% for the richest institutions—those with endowments worth more than $2 million a student. (While these schools are all non-profits and traditionally tax exempt, the 1.4% tax on investment earnings was introduced by Trump’s big 2017 tax bill. According to Internal Revenue Service data, 56 schools paid a total of $381 million in endowment tax in calendar 2023.)

Along with raising the rate, the House voted to exempt from the tax both religiously-affiliated schools (think the University of Notre Dame) and those that don’t take federal student financial aid. (The religious exemption was structured in a way that Harvard, founded by the Puritans to train ministers, wouldn’t qualify.) The House also sought to penalize schools like Columbia University, with heavy international student enrollments, by excluding students who aren’t U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents from the per capita calculations.

Then the bill went to the Senate, where the Finance Committee settled on more modest–albeit still stiff–rate hikes. Schools with endowments of $500,000 to $750,000 per capita would still pay at a 1.4% rate, while those with endowments above $750,000 and up to $2 million would pay 4%. Those with endowments worth more than $2 million per student would pay an 8% tax on their earnings, not the 21% passed by the House.

Enter Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who makes decisions on the Senate’s Byrd rule, which requires parts of a budget reconciliation bill like this one to have a primary purpose related to the budget—not other types of policy. The Byrd rule was put in place because reconciliation isn’t subject to filibuster. “You can’t get into a lot of prescriptive activity” in a budget reconciliation bill, explains Dean Zerbe, a national managing director for Alliantgroup, who worked on college endowment issues back when he was tax counsel for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “Like, ‘you’ve got to hop on one foot,’ or ‘you’ve got to make tuition affordable,’ or ‘you’ve got to do better in terms of admission.’”

The Parliamentarian ruled that those three House provisions—exempting religious-affiliated schools, exempting schools that don’t take federal aid, and excluding foreign students from the per capita calculation—didn’t pass the Byrd test.

At that point, Republican senators settled on the 3,000-student threshold in large part to specifically exempt one school from the tax: Hillsdale College, an ultra-conservative, Christian liberal arts college in Hillsdale, Michigan and a GOP darling. It enrolled 1,794 students in 2023, had an endowment worth $584,000 per-student, and notably accepts no federal money, including student aid. (So both the religious exemption and the one for schools taking no federal student aid would have presumably shielded Hillsdale from the endowment tax—before the Parliamentarian gave them the thumbs down.)

There was also a broader group of small schools pushing for the exemption, notes Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. “They made an argument that I think got some positive reception among Republican senators of saying that essentially, while their endowments may be big relative to the fact that they have small student bodies … their endowments weren’t big.” A school like Amherst, he adds, “might have a big endowment for a small school, but they don’t have a big endowment relative to the Ivies and the more heavily resourced [universities].”

House Republicans, under intense pressure to meet Trump’s July 4th deadline, ended up accepting the final Senate product in full. That meant exempting the smaller schools, including the “woke” ones, while levying a rate of up to 8% on the endowments of bigger schools. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation estimates colleges will now pay an extra $761 million in tax over 10 years, compared to the extra $6.7 billion they would have paid under the House version with its higher 21% rate and broader reach.

Based on data from 2023, Forbes estimates that at least 10 universities will have their endowment earnings taxed at an 8% or 4% rate in 2026, while five will continue to pay the 1.4% rate.

Update: Smith College, which likely would have been subject to the 4% tax given its 2023 stats—an endowment worth $2.47 billion, which worked out to $780,000 for each of its 3,192 students—contacted Forbes on July 8 to note that its full-time tuition-paying student enrollment is now below 3,000. The school currently pays a 1.4% tax on its endowment (worth $2.6 billion as of June 30, 2024). Starting in January, Smith will likely be exempt from an endowment tax. Smith declined to say how much tax it has been paying.

Three schools—Princeton University, Yale University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—will likely be required to pay an 8% excise tax on their endowment earnings. Another seven, including Harvard, Stanford University, Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University, will likely pay a 4% tax. The remaining five schools—Emory University, Duke University, Washington University in St Louis, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University—would pay the same 1.4% endowment tax rate they’re paying now, based on fiscal 2023 numbers.

One school that will likely pay 4% is the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic-affiliated school which would have been exempt from the tax were it not for the Byrd rule. “We are deeply disappointed by the removal of language protecting religious institutions of higher education from the endowment tax before passage of the final bill,” Notre Dame wrote in a statement to Forbes. “Any expansion of the endowment tax threatens to undermine the ability of a broad range of faith-based institutions to serve their religious purpose. We are proud to have stood with a coalition of these institutions against that threat, and we are encouraged by the strong support for a religious exemption received from both chambers.”

Fansmith, for his part, won’t call the exemption of the small schools a win. “We think the tax is a bad idea and it’s bad policy, and no schools should be paying it. But, by the standard that fewer schools are paying, it’s better, but it’s still not good,” he says. “It’s not really about revenue,” adds Fansmith. “It’s really about punishing these schools that right now a segment of the Republican party doesn’t like.” The schools make the argument that it’s students who are being punished, since around half of endowment spending pays for student scholarships.

Meanwhile, Zerbe warns the now exempt schools shouldn’t take that status for granted. “Once revenue raisers are in play and out there, they come back again and again,” he says. “It would be a disaster for [colleges] to think somehow this was a win for them. This was a billion dollar hit on them and there’s more to come later.”

Categories Ethics, Funding, Higher Education

Parents Are the Most Important Element in Student Learning

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
18

Way back in 2014, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was selling the idea that teachers should be rewarded or punished based on their students’ test scores. That idea, baked into Race to the Top, was a dismal failure. Teachers who taught the neediest kids got low ratings, and teachers in the most advantaged schools got the highest ratings. Bill Gates was similarly infatuated with the idea, and he handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to districts and charter chains to test it. Rigorous evaluation showed it to be demoralizing to teachers with no impact on test scores.

What we should have learned from the experience of Race to the Top is that carrots and sticks applied to teachers do not help students and do not improve education.

It’s parents and home life that have the largest effect on student learning. So said the American Statistical Association in 2014, making a futile attempt to persuade Secretary Duncan that he was on the wrong track.

Susan E. Mayer and Ariel Kalil explain why policymakers should focus on parents and help them become better parents. [Let me add, however, that I disagree with their comments about reading and math proficiency. As I have written many times before, NAEP proficiency is not grade level; it is a high bar, and it’s unlikely that most students would ever score the equivalent of an A.]

They write:

American schoolchildren are performing abysmally in tests of basic skills. Only 36% of fourth-grade students were deemed proficient in national math tests and only 33% were deemed proficient in reading as of 2022, the latest year for which such data is available.

Those numbers are even worse than before the pandemic – 5 percentage points lower in math from 2019 and 2 percentage points lower in reading. And the drop in reading and math proficiency after the pandemic has happened to both economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. Students across the board need help.

There is a tendency to blame schools – and by extension, teachers – for students’ poor performance. The temptation to focus solely on schools, however, is misguided. Parents are the ones who must build the foundation for children’s learning. Yet parenting has long been viewed as a private behavior for which women are presumed to possess unique instincts, leaving parents with little evidence-based guidance on how to develop their children’s skills.

Meanwhile, the political right often favors more accountability for teachers, more charter schools and more vouchers for private schools. The political left often favors more teacher training, reducing class sizes, more equitable distribution of school resources and patience as students recover from the pandemic-related dip in scores.

But it’s parents and family background that make the biggest difference. This is evident because the gap in children’s math and reading test scores is already large at the start of kindergarten, in line with their socioeconomic status, and does not narrow as children progress through schooling.

Many people think that the solution, therefore, is to improve parents’ socioeconomic status, which will in turn improve children’s skills. But the reason that low-income parents parent their children differently than high-income parents is not a causal result of the low income itself. Improving parents’ household income would be laudable for many reasons, but experimental evidence shows that giving parents cash payments after they have a child neither changes parental investments nor changes the child’s skills. [Note from Diane: I disagree. Making cash payments is not the same as improving family socioeconomic status; investing in good jobs, housing, and long-term improvements in SES would make a huge difference.]

Instead, we need to support parents in directly changing what they do. Our experimental research on specific parent behaviors that boost child skills points to the importance of reading and talking to children. Analysis we conducted of the American Time Use Survey shows that on average, however, only 21% of mothers of children ages 3 to 6 report spending daily time reading with their child, only 30% report any daily time playing games with them, and only 11% report daily time dedicated to “listening or talking with” their child.

Worse, many parents are misinformed about how to prepare their young children for school. According to a survey we conducted with 2,000 parents in Chicago, about 25% more parents thought it was essential that children know the alphabet before starting school than thought it was important to spark children’s curiosity.

But this is misguided. Children will eventually learn the alphabet and how to count to 50. Especially for parents with less than a four-year college degree, language interactions with young children – parental storytelling, reading books and asking questions about them – along with math interactions such as playing with shape blocks and reading books about numbers are correlated more strongly with growth in children’s language and math skills than activities such as teaching the alphabet and counting or practicing letter sounds and how to calculate simple sums.

We do a disservice to parents by not redirecting their attention from rote skills, such as memorizing letters, sounds and numbers, to more open-ended inquiry. But researchers are limited as well. We need many more resources devoted to improving high-quality research on understanding precisely what types of parent engagement build the child skills necessary for success in later life. We also need much more research on how to boost parents’ capacity for child skill-building.

But first we must acknowledge that mothers, fathers and other caregivers play a crucial role in building children’s skills. Second, we have to acknowledge that as a nation, we have an interest in what parents do. Children are not just the property of their parents. They are the nation’s future.

Their schooling can only build upon the foundation that parents provide. The United States spends more on education per pupil and less on supporting parents than almost any other wealthy country. The government needs to expand its vision of what it means to support childhood development and invest in helping parents create nurturing learning environments at home in the years before formal schooling begins.

We should signal the value children have for the nation by making work compatible with raising children through family leave, providing access to health care for all children and caretakers and offering free access for children to libraries and museums where they can build a love of learning.

We should also explore new solutions, such as providing digital libraries and utilizing technology in innovative ways to support parents in helping their children learn. Evidence from our recent research shows that this can increase parental reading, boost child language development and close the socioeconomic gap in children’s language skill.

Susan E. Mayer is a professor and a dean emeritus at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. 

Ariel Kalil is the Daniel Levin Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. They are the directors of the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the University of Chicago.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Literacy, Parents, Race to the Top, Research
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