Dr. Jeremy Faust: RFK’s Farcical, Frightening Vaccine Committee’s First Meeting

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2025 //
2

Dr. Jeremy Faust is an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. He is also the editor-in-chief of MedPage Today and author of the Inside Medicine newsletter on Substack. 

This post appeared on his blog Inside Medicine. Dr. Faust demonstrates that RFK Jr. lied at his Senate hearings when he pledged not to inject his anti-vaccine views into national policy. As Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he is a danger to public health.

Dr. Faust writes:

Along with several colleagues, I watched large portions of this week’s CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) so that you didn’t have to. Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and I debriefed afterwards. Our conversation is above. 

Closed captions (㏄) and a transcript option (📄) can be found beneath the video playback control bar above. (Note: this session is free for everyone, thanks to recent upgrades that make this all possible. If you’d like to support this work, click here.)

Some adjectives came to mind while watching the meeting: Surreal. Embarrassing. Kafkaesque. In place of seventeen highly respected voting members, all fired by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, were seven new characters whose opinions ranged from unhinged (several of the members) to reasonable (mainly voiced by Dr. Cody Meissner).

Various members asked questions that revealed incomplete understandings of the legal process around these votes. One member wasn’t sure whether or not she had a conflict of interest. Random conspiracy theories got air time, while vetted scientific materials created by CDC scientists were literally removed from the meeting’s website, after having been posted earlier in the week. 

Indeed, we learned during the meeting that the CDC’s briefing document on the safety of thimerosal in vaccines was removed because Secretary Kennedy’s office (i.e., RFK Jr. himself) did not approve of it. That of course means that the error-ridden, cherry-picked data in another presentation on the topic by an outside speaker (a longtime RFK Jr. ally) was approved. It was a dystopian nightmare. 

The quasi-good news is that the committee voted in favor of flu shots for everyone ages 6 months and up (whew). They also voted to add a second RSV immunization option. Here are those recommendations (lightly adapted from CDC language): 

  • One dose of clesrovimab, a monoclonal antibody for infants whose mothers are not protected by maternal respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccination. Clesrovimab is one of two RSV monoclonal antibody products available (including for the Vaccines for Children Program). 
  • Routine annual influenza vaccination of all persons aged over six months who do not have contraindications.

The bad news is that the committee also voted to recommend that influenza vaccines that use thimerosal (a safe preservative in relevant concentrations) not be used. This won’t do anything to improve vaccine safety, but it did escalate pseudoscience to national policy. This is remarkable. In every previous ACIP vote, comprehensive data has been presented before a vote. In this case, one friend of RFK Jr. gave a talk (whose contents were not vetted or fact-checked by CDC scientists) before a national vote. It also may eventually be used as a rationale for denying vaccines to people around the world, because preservatives are needed to keep multi-dose vaccine vials from becoming contaminated, especially in settings where the chain of refrigeration may not be complete. Also, the CDC’s own experts were not permitted to speak on this, nor was their briefing document permitted to remain online. My heart goes out to the dedicated CDC scientists who had to sit through this. Here’s a screenshot I took during the meeting yesterday during Lyn Redwood’s (right) unvetted, highly problematic presentation on thimerosal. That poor CDC scientist (left) looks like a hostage. 

Nevertheless, the new voting members of the committee patted itself on the back for its “transparency” in an email sent to the media after the meeting. Here’s what it said (bold added by me for emphasis):

“Honesty, transparency and compassion with regard to public health. These are the three pillars that we, the new ACIP members, are guided by. Our central duty is to protect public health, and we understand that we must answer the call for reestablishing confidence in the scientific examination process. This committee strongly supports the use of vaccines, and other countermeasures, predicated on evidence-based medicine, including rigorous evaluation and expansive credible scientific data, for both safety and efficacy.”

I’m sorry but this is bullshit. The committee undermined vaccine confidence by scaring people about thimerosal. Also, the notion that the proceedings were transparent or expansive simply was not borne out by the facts. This committee specifically suppressed work by CDC scientists. It also failed to publish the language of national vaccine policy votes in advance, which is probably illegal. Claiming all of these virtues as though they were innovations while actually undermining them by turning away from the prior committee’s genuine commitment to those principles is what the kids call “gaslighting…”

Closing Thoughts.

The ACIP meeting was a bizarre spectacle. It was as bad as feared, if not worse. Reasonable science from CDC experts was presented side-by-side with debunked misinformation presented by RFK-allied anti-vaxxers. Other times, only one side (the unscientific side) was permitted to present. What we witnessed was a circus, masquerading as dignified proceedings. (Well, mostly.) The whole thing would be hilarious, but for the stakes. Lives are on the line. Scientific integrity is under attack. Transparency is now just a buzzword, a stand-in for a newly discovered opaqueness from this once-august committee, whilst it claims the opposite. 

Once again, I urge Senator Bill Cassidy—a physician now being routinely humiliated by his vote to confirm Secretary Kennedy based on false promises—to stand up against this attack on science.

Open the link to read the important material I omitted, in the form of downloads and videos.

Categories Education Reform

Stephen Dyer: Vouchers in Ohio Are a Disaster! I Told You So!

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2025 //
18

Stephen Dyer is a public policy expert, a specialist in school finance, and a former legislator in Ohio. He warned 11 years that vouchers would drive the state budget over a fiscal cliff. The court decision a few days ago proves that he was right on target.

Let this be a warning to all the other states that are adopting vouchers (without the consent of the governed, in every case).

He writes:

Proponents have claimed for years that Ohio and U.S. Supreme Court cases from the program’s infancy allows for explosive growth. Judge Jaiza Page warns, “Not so fast.” Just like I did 11 years ago.

Dyer wrote the following 11years ago:

“Overall, the state is sending nearly $144 million to private schools this year. In 2010-2011, that number was $78.85 million — nearly half the amount. Makes you wonder whether the case upholding Ohio’s Vouchers in 2002 would have the same outcome today. Also makes me want to kind of find out.” — Stephen Dyer on 10th Period blog, Jan. 25, 2014

Now he writes:

I guess we found out Tuesday, didn’t we?

To be clear, I had no idea that anyone would actually file a lawsuit against Ohio’s unconstitutional Voucher system when I wrote that on Blogspot 11 years ago (though I really did want someone to do that). But given the Ohio and U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on vouchers at the turn of the century, I did question whether the state’s explosive funding of vouchers actually was justified under those rulings.

Guess who else agreed with me? Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page. While I focused in 2014 on the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, Judge Page focused on the 1999 Ohio Supreme Court case Simmons-Harris v. Goff. 

Goff reached a similar conclusion as Zelman — that given the program’s then-small educational footprint, both in terms of kids and money — it did not interfere with Ohio’s overall ability to educate its public school students, so the program (which at the time only included Cleveland) was ok.

However, when Goff was decided, the Cleveland Voucher Program cost $5.7 million. The just-passed state budget allocated $2.5 billion over the biennium to the current program.

And that’s where voucher proponents got waaaay out over their skis. I realized this 11 years ago. But now, it’s even more obvious. The programs examined by the U.S. and Ohio Supreme Courts at the turn of the century look very different from the current budget hog Judge Page examined.

And she made that factual difference really clear in her ruling:

“As to the thorough and efficient challenge, the court ultimately held, “[w]e fail to see how the School Voucher Program, at the current funding level, undermines the state’s obligation to public education.” (Emphasis added.) Id. From this language, the Court concludes that the Goff court foresaw a renewed challenge to a larger scholarship or voucher program like EdChoice as an unconstitutional state supported system of private schools. Goff warned that a system that does not create but supports nonpublic schools in a way that jeopardizes the thoroughness and efficiency of the State’s system of public schools violates Article VI Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution.”

Added to this is this incredible fact that was brought out in the court case: 

Not a single penny of voucher money goes to a single parent or student. It goes directly to private, mostly religious schools.

Let me repeat that for those of you in the back:

Not a single penny of voucher money goes to a single parent or student. It goes directly to private, mostly religious schools.

That’s right. This whole money-following-the-kid/parental-choice narrative that voucher proponents are still spilling out is complete, utter Grade A Bullshit.

In 1999, the money did go to parents and kids. Page was quite concerned about this payment change because the Ohio Constitution bans state establishment of religious schools. And if state money flows directly to religious schools that rely heavily on taxpayer subsidies (she mentioned that some private schools have 75% or more of their kids on vouchers), that is establishment and unconstitutional.

“By bestowing participating private religious schools with complete control over prospective students’ participation, the “school choice” here is made by the private school, not “as the result of independent decisions of parents and students.””

It’s as if the original creators of the Voucher program carefully crafted the legislation to pass judicial muster. Then when they got a favorable ruling, the gloves came off.

Oh yeah. One more thing: Not a single penny of the nearly $9 billion we will have spent on vouchers since 1997 has ever been audited. So we have no idea how the money on this unconstitutional program has actually been spent.

But I digress.

Luckily for Ohio’s 1.5 million public school kids, Judge Page recognized the program’s current reality rather than voucher proponents’ fictional account.

Just as your friendly neighborhood blogger did 11 years ago.

Not to brag. 

Well, maybe a little!

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Bill Moyers, a Great American, Is Dead

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2025 //
18

Bill Moyers died yesterday at the age of 91. He was a remarkable man, who served as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s closest advisor and his press secretary, until he quit in 1966. He was a highly accomplished journalist and television star, who dealt with the most controversial issues of the day.

I was privileged to appear on his program.

The full interview is here.

He was one of the great men of the past half-century: Truly moral, ethical, deeply committed to a just world.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Media, Personal

The NY Times: DOGE Lied About Social Security

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2025 //
17

In a long and comprehensive article, three New York Times reporters document what happened when DOGE (or DOGS, as I prefer to say) arrived at the Social Security Administration to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Determined to prove that their services were needed, they misinterpreted data and spun outright lies about finding “millions” of dead people collecting Social Security checks.

The Times titled the article “The Bureaucrat and the Billionaire: Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security.” The bureaucrat in the title is Leland Dudek, who became the acting administrator of the giant Social Security Administration, even though he never previously oversaw more than a dozen employees. The billionaire, of course, is Elon Musk.

I wish I could give you a gift article but that option was not available to me as a subscriber.

The bottom line of the article is that the young wizards of DOGE came looking for “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and when they didn’t find it, they made it up. While rummaging through the huge agency, which sends out retirement checks to some 74 million senior citizens, they fired senior officers and thousands of other employees. These checks, by the way, are not government beneficence; people pay a percentage of their income into Social Security throughout their work life, which they collect monthly after they retire.

The DOGS sought access to the agency’s huge computer system, which contains sensitive personal data about those who receive those monthly checks. At first, the federal courts rejected their request but ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court decided that these 20-somethings were entitled to access the data. Privacy is dead. Yours and mine. Elon Musk has the data. What has he done with it, along with information about your taxes? No one knows or says. Musk referred to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.”

Here are a few of the high points:

Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.

Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.

That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

“The number is 40 percent,” insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Mr. Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Trump believed Mr. Musk, she said. “Do not contradict the president.”

Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found.

Their work has led to the departures of thousands of employees, thinning an already overstretched work force and setting off a wave of public anxiety over the state of an agency administering politically sacrosanct retirement benefits that Mr. Trump has vowed to protect.

Mr. Musk has left Washington amid a blowup with Mr. Trump, and some of his top aides at DOGE have also departed, leaving federal workers and the public to assess what Mr. Musk’s tornadolike path through Washington yielded. At Social Security, Mr. Musk’s efforts amount to a case study in what happened when his team of government novices ran a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts.

Musk’s senior aide was Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest aides and the architect of the ICE crackdown on immigrants. When Musk left, she left with him. Don’t ask me to explain how that works, because I don’t know. Did she move to Texas to join his sister-wives? Did she take her three children? Or did she stay in DC? I don’t know.

When he started the investigation of the SSA, Musk believed that he would find “massive fraud,” especially the millions of dead people that he believed were collecting Social Security. He didn’t believe the career bureaucrats who said that he was wrong, nor did he accept a secret DOGE memo concluding that the “massive fraud” didn’t exist. Trump’s presss secretary said on FOX News that “tens of millions” of dead people were collecting Social Security checks. Trump lowered the number in his March 4 address to Congress. He said that Social Security records reported “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149….And money is being paid to many of them.”

The Times reporters found:

One audit from 2015 found only 13 people older than 112 still receiving benefits. Other audits found payments being sent to an estimated 24,000 people who generally died more recently — a sign of Social Security needing tighter controls and monitoring — but not the millions Mr. Musk claimed.

DOGE did not find the waste, fraud, and abuse they searched for but they pursued something of perhaps even greater value to them: the personal data of everyone who had a Social Security card, which is almost every citizen except young children.

DOGE demanded that the SSA hire a “21-year-old former intern at Palantir, a data analysis and technology firm, and grant him access to the personal data of every Social Security cardholder despite the executives’ concerns that he lacked sufficient training to handle such sensitive information.”

Despite their objections, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the SSA to give the young man whatever he wanted.

DOGE used its power to advance Trump’s political goals. When Trump quarreled with Maine Governor Janet Mills over transgender athletes, DOGE staffers canceled contracts with the state of Maine.

But under pressure from Mr. Musk’s team, nearly half of the Social Security Administration’s 140 senior executives, and thousands of employees overall, have taken buyouts or retired. As many as 12 percent of staff members, out of a bureaucracy that numbered around 57,000 people, are expected to depart their jobs as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting plan.

To try to make up for the staffing shortfall, the agency has encouraged specialized professionals like lawyers, human resources staff and technologists to take reassignments in customer service jobs — often at higher pay than what the people they’re replacing had made. Workers have said they felt pressured to volunteer for reassignments, or else risk being fired later.

No one knows at this juncture whether DOGE saved money by firing workers at the SSA. But the benefits to DOGE and Musk are enormous: they now have personal data on almost every American.

What will they do with it?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Data and Data Mining, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Lies, Musk, Elon

Dr. Leana Wen: Where to Find Accurate Vaccine Information After RFK Jr.’s Coup

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2025 //
2

Dr. Leana S. Wen is a regular contributor to The Washington Post. She is an emergency physician and former health director for the city of Baltimore. In this column, she provides a list of reliable sources for vaccine information.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been a critic of vaccines for many years. Yet Trump put him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, despite his lack of experience in science or medicine. At his confirmation hearings, Kennedy insisted that he would not attack vaccines or question their validity. Once confirmed, he reneged on that promise. Just a few days ago, he fired every member of the independent board of vaccine experts and replaced them with people he knew and liked.

Dr. Wen writes:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision this week to fire 17 independent experts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel — and replace them with people with limited expertise and questionable views — was not unexpected. In November, I warned that such a takeover and the subsequent replacement of experts with vaccine skeptics could be part of the now-Health and Human Services secretary’s playbook to undermine vaccine confidence.

Meanwhile, the CDC’s website has been changing. For instance, a new section on measles treatment includes vitamin A, one of Kennedy’s preferred “alternatives” to vaccines. And instead of recommending the coronavirus vaccine to everyone 6 months and older, the agency now says certain groups such as children and pregnant women “may” receive them.

Many readers say they no longer trust guidance from federal health agencies and have asked where else they can go for vaccine information now. I think they should still continue to consult government sites including the CDC, Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health, as most information featured there appears unaltered. This could change, especially if anti-vaccine voices gain additional influence.

Here are some additional resources I use to cross-reference information found on federal health websites:


• American Academy of Pediatrics: Pediatricians play a crucial role in guiding families to make science-based health decisions. The AAP has excellent information on its website, including entire sections on how scientists determined that vaccines are safe and effective. I especially love its infographics that help parents understand the seriousness of disease and the benefits of vaccination. The organization’s discussion guides for clinicians might also help laypeople who want to be better-equipped to speak with vaccine skeptics in their lives.


• American Medical Association: The AMA has recently been building up its vaccine reference materials for clinicians. Its resource site, while not the easiest to navigate, has accurate and practical information applicable to both health professionals and patients. I find their measles information especially useful.


• American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: ACOG offers superb guidance about vaccines in pregnancy. This includes a thorough analysis of the evidence behind the safety and efficacy of coronavirus shots. Other specialty societies offer similarly tailored tool kits for people with specific medical conditions. The American Society of Clinical Oncology, for instance, has immunization recommendations for cancer patients.


• National Foundation for Infectious Diseases: This organization hosts expert webinars and podcast episodes that I often consult for up-to-date information on treatment and prevention of infectious diseases. Its vaccine resources include well-researched and accessible articles from guest experts, such as this one on what the science says about autism and vaccines.


• The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center: Paul Offit of the University of Pennsylvania, one of my go-to trusted experts, oversees this website, which offers not only helpful vaccine information for the public but also real-time analysis of the federal government’s changes to vaccine recommendations. Several other academic institutions that I consult often include the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins University & Medicine.


• The University of Minnesota’s Vaccine Integrity Project: This is a new initiative started by Michael Osterholm, director of the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, with an all-star steering committee that is intended to strengthen vaccine confidence through cross-sector collaborations. CIDRAP itself is a terrific news aggregator that I rely on for summaries of the latest research.


• The Straight Shot by the Center for Science in the Public Interest: This is another new project that specifically focuses on changes to federal vaccine policy. Contributors include former top FDA and HHS officials who discuss implications of recent decisions. The analyses are very detailed and cover broader changes at the health agencies, such as how clinical trials will be affected by budget cuts and what is involved in Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative.


These are just some of the independent resources that patients and clinicians can continue to rely on. It’s a relief that they exist and that dedicated scientists and health professionals have stepped up their efforts to provide clear, credible guidance. But the fact that they have to do so points to the erosion of trust in the CDC and federal scientific leadership that was once considered the gold standard for health information. That trust will not be easily rebuilt.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science

Ohio: Judge Rules that EdChoice Vouchers Violate State Constitution

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2025 //
0

In 2022, school districts, parents, and public school advocates filed a lawsuit against the state’s EdChoice voucher program. Yesterday, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page ruled that vouchers for private schools violate the state constitution.

The Constitution of Ohio says that the General Assembly is responsible for funding a thorough and efficient system of common schools. Common schools are public schools. It explicitly prohibits the use of public funds for religious schools. 

Judge Page issued the first ruling on the lawsuit, known as the Vouchers Hurt Ohio lawsuit, which challenged the constitutionality of vouchers. The plaintiffs were a group of dozens of public schools and the Coalition for Adequacy and Equity of School Funding. The state will appeal this ruling. For now, those who led the lawsuit are thrilled.

“We are pleased that the court affirmed what we have been saying all along,” William Phillis, executive director for the Coalition for Adequacy and Equity of School Funding, said. “The EdChoice private school voucher program, which has been diverting hundreds of millions of much needed tax dollars from public schools to private schools, is unconstitutional.” 

Phillis was behind another lawsuit over Ohio’s schools in the 1990s, which ruled Ohio’s system of funding schools did not adequately live up to the Constitutional requirements. The case, DeRolph v. Ohio, ruled the state’s reliance on property taxes and its funding system did not fulfil the Ohio Constitution’s requirement to create a “thorough and efficient system” of public schools.

Page said the state’s voucher program also fails to create a thorough and efficient system. She ruled the EdChoice program directly contributed to less funding for public schools, increased segregation in public schools as more white students participated in EdChoice, and unconstitutionally provided funds to religious schools without oversight.

Read the decision here.

Stephen Dyer, public school advocate and former legislator, writes on his blog Tenth Period that the decision exposes the lies that the voucher lobby has peddled for years.

Dyer writes:

There have been lots of stories and posts about the historic voucher decision made yesterday by Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page. But I want to take a step back with you, Dear Reader, and explain just how expertly the Judge laid bare the thing I’ve been spitting into the wind over for the past 15 or so years: Ohio school voucher advocates have been lying to you, the public and journalists for a generation. 

Let me point out a few of the most common lies told by voucher advocates.

  1. Ohio vouchers are scholarships. Ohio school choice advocates sometimes are too clever for themselves. Calling vouchers “scholarships” in law doesn’t make them “scholarships”. Yet that’s what these politicians insist we call them. Judge Page went right after this argument in her decision: “The idea that EdChoice establishes scholarships, not a system of schools, and that it funds students, not private schools, is mere semantics … Where EdChoice participating private schools are inexplicably receiving double the per pupil state funding than public schools, it is difficult to say that EdChoice is simply a scholarship that follows and/or benefits the student as opposed to a system that benefits private schools.”
  2. Vouchers are simply a matter of money following the student. This is the kind of EduSpeak bullshit I’ve railed against for years. As I’ve said in this space many times, when 85% of the K-12 students in your state only get 77% of the money spent on K-12 education in your state, money ain’t following the kids. It’s going to private schools. As Judge Page put it: “Where EdChoice participating private schools are inexplicably receiving double the per pupil state funding than public schools, it is difficult to say that EdChoice is simply a scholarship that follows and/or benefits the student as opposed to a system that benefits private schools.”
  3. Vouchers have no impact on public school students. This is obvious bullshit, yet proponents make the claim all the time, even well-thought of ones like the Fordham Institute (who actually argue it helps public school kids!). See, the problem is that when David Brennan started the Ohio Voucher program nearly 30 years ago, he thought he’d be so clever. See, he would (yes, I know legislators did this, but make no mistake about it, Brennan was calling the shots) put the program’s money into the same line item as school district funding. That way, the program could never be line item vetoed, and no matter how much more money the program needed, it would always get the amount it needed because the money would just come out of the state funding for kids in local school districts, who would then have to go for more and bigger property tax levies. But in this case, that cleverness bit voucher advocates in the ass. Because Judge Page can read a spreadsheet. As she put it: “The General Assembly … passed the (Fair School Funding Plan) to fulfill its constitutional directive and address Derolph. Yet, it has shirked that responsibility, by: at best, (1) claiming that the FSFP, a plan of its own creation, is too expensive; or, at worst (2) simply refusing to fund it. Instead, the General Assembly chose to expand their system of private school funding by about the same amount as Ohio’s public schools lost through the General Assembly’s failure to fully fund the FSFP.
  4. Vouchers are a Parental Rights issue.This line of bullshit emanates from the program’s origins — claiming that it would provide poor kids the opportunity to attend the same private schools rich kids do. However, the evidence is clear that’s simply not happening. In fact, it’s the schools — not the parents — that this unconstitutional system empowers. As Judge Page revealed for everyone to see: “Parents only choose which school they apply to. The ultimate decision to accept prospective students, and by doing so receive EdChoice funds, lies with the private school. (So) a private religious school has the discretion and ability to apply for and receive subsidies directly from the government, while at the same time discriminating against applicants on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, or other criteria.”

There will be many more opportunities to go through this historic decision and pick out bits and pieces. But I thought it was important for everyone to recognize the major policy lies voucher advocates have pushed for 30 years were laid bare by this decision. 

Because at its core, Ohio’s unconstitutional voucher program benefits private, mostly religious schools at the expense of the 1.5 million Ohio kids who attend Ohio’s public schools. 

That’s the bottom line. 

And that’s been true since 1997.

Categories Education Reform, Extremism, Lies, Ohio, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson Questions Trump’s Mental Health After His Frenzied Tweets

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2025 //
17

Heather Cox Richardson relates Trump’s flurry of tweets yesterday, which indicate a heightened state of anxiety. It seemed as though he devoted an inordinate amount of time to posting on his social media site. He did board a helicopter at one point in the day and answered a reporter’s question, using the F word. What people say in private is their own business, but this may be the first time that an American President used that expletive in public, on camera, speaking to the American people. This is a man who seethes with undisguised rage.

Mary Trump would say that this rage is a consequence of slights from his childhood. Maybe she’s right.

Or was it because his grandiose claims of obliterating Iran’s nuclear stockpile turned out not to be true? Trump lies all the time, but this was a big boast on the international stage that turned out to be premature. He looks foolish. He hates that.

Richardson wrote:

At 6:02 last night, President Donald Trump announced on his social media account that Israel and Iran has agreed to “a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” that would lead to “an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR.” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that the announcement took some of Trump’s own senior advisors by surprise. Since then, Trump’s social media feed has been unusually active, posting claims that his approval rate is soaring, that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, that “for the first time ever [a] majority of Americans believe the United States is on the right track,” and that “Trump was right about everything.”

“THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!” Trump’s social media feed posted at 1:08 this morning. But within hours, Israel had struck Iran again. At 6:50, Trump’s social media feed posted: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” At 7:28 it posted: ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”

After Israel struck, Iran retaliated. This morning, Trump accused both countries of violating the ceasefire agreement—although, to be sure, there has been no published confirmation that any such agreement exists. Sounding angry, Trump told reporters: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing.”

At 11:17 the account posted: “Both Israel and Iran wanted to stop the War, equally! It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!” It also attacked Democrats, especially women of color, at length, saying they were stupid and “can’t stand the concept of our Country being successful again.”

The account also said: “Now that we have made PEACE abroad, we must finish the job here at home by passing “THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” and getting the Bill to my desk, ASAP. It will be a Historic Present for THE GREAT PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, as we begin the Celebration of our Country’s 250th Birthday. We are finally entering our Golden Age, which will bring unprecedented Safety, Security, and Prosperity for ALL of our Citizens.”

In fact, Trump’s victory lap seems designed to be the finale to a triumphant storyline that can convince his loyalists he has scored an enormous victory before reality sets in. According to a new CNN poll, Americans disapprove of the U.S. military strikes against Iran by a margin of 56% to 44%.

Further, Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that according to early assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the damage caused by the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the strikes did not destroy the main parts of the Iran’s nuclear program and probably set it back by only a few months. The DIA is the intelligence arm of the Pentagon.

The White House called the DIA assessment “flat out wrong.”

Later today, the New York Times confirmed CNN’s reporting.

Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky suggested today that the Obama administration had the right approach when it negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s nuclear program. Paul said: “I’m arguing that the intervention, the military intervention, may not have been successful, as people are saying, and also that there may not be a military answer to this, that ultimately the answer to the end of the nuclear program is going to involve diplomacy.”

A video on Trump’s social media feed posted at 7:15 tonight recalled Senator John McCain’s 2007 call to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Trump’s version used McCain’s “bomb Iran” chorus but was longer and had visual imagery of planes dropping bombs. In Trump’s version, the soundtrack to the video used the melody of Barbara Ann to say things like: “went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the ayatollah gonna put you in a box,” and “old Uncle Sam, getting pretty hot, gonna turn Iran into a parking lot.”

It is a truism that, like other authoritarians, Trump tries only to appeal to his supporters, but I confess this video, from the president of the United States, left me aghast. It seems to me long past time to question the 79-year-old president’s mental health.

Tonight, Trump’s social media feed posted: “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”

Categories Accountability, International, Lies, Trump

Florida: Rare Public Protest Kills GOP Plan to Cut Funding for AP CLASSES

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2025 //
2

Scott Maxwell, opinion columnist for The Orlando Sentinel, wrote about the unusual public protest against the Legislature’s plan to cut funding for AP classes in public schools. For years, Republicans who run the state have inflicted blow after blow on the public schools, preferring to divert billions of public dollars to private and religious schools. But not this time. This time, the public organized fought back and blocked the latest effort to inflict damage on the state’s public schools.

Maxwell writes:

Chalk one up for the Floridians who are willing to stand up and make themselves heard.
Tallahassee politicians were forced last week to abandon their plans to gut funding for AP classes in public schools after they ran into something they rarely encounter in this state — a wall of public opposition.

GOP lawmakers have been pulling the rug out from under public education for the better part of two decades, driving away teachers, injecting political wars into classrooms and diverting public money to private schools. But their plan to cut funding to AP, IB and dual enrollment programs was a bridge too far.

Why? Because this plan to sabotage public schools would’ve impacted a population beyond the marginalized families that these insulated politicians are usually happy to short-change. Legislators were trying to undercut the college prospects of kids who go to high school in Windermere and Winter Park — the children of parents who normally write campaign checks.

And everyone banded together to object.
“I was getting emails from people asking: ‘What do I do? How do I help? Who do I email?’” said Orange County School Board member Stephanie Vanos. “And before long, we started hearing legislators saying: ‘Please make the parents stop emailing us. Please, just make it stop.’”

My thanks to those of you who did not relent, because this idea was as bone-headed as it was backwards.

Basically, Republican lawmakers in both chambers wanted to cut funding allocated for AP (Advanced Placement), IB (International Baccalaureate), AICE (Advanced International Certificate of Education) and even dual enrollment programs at places like Valencia College for students who want to get ahead.

One of the most nonsensical parts about this attack was that it targeted a program that awarded funding based on students who passed these courses. In other words, one that only paid for successful results.

The politicians were also targeting one of the few things Florida really does well in public schools. While Florida’s scores for the SAT and other tests have plummeted in recent years, Florida’s AP test scores have historically been quite good. The College Board ranked Florida in the Top 5 for passage rate in 2021, largely because of this successful and aggressive funding model.

So Republican lawmakers were attacking something that was both successful and popular, affecting more than 110,000 students.
There was no valid reason for this funding cut, other than trying to make public schools less attractive.

See, AP classes are one of the advantages public schools have over many private schools, especially the fly-by-night voucher ones that hire uncertified teachers and can’t even think about offering classes like AP calculus, Chinese and 3-D art and design.

“These are the programs that are among the most popular in our high schools,” Vanos said. “Families come back to our high schools specifically for these programs.”

So parents and supporters of public education banded together and spoke up.

I sensed a revolt brewing as soon as I published a column on the topic a few weeks ago entitled: “Cutting AP classes would dumb down Florida schools.”

House Republicans had just advanced their defunding plan by a vote of 22-6 in a subcommittee, and I urged anyone who thought this was a rotten idea to let their lawmakers know. Boy, did they.

One reader said she and her sister, a retired teacher, were gathering as many others as possible to get “riled up to action.”

Another said she sent Gov. Ron DeSantis an email that asked him a simple question: “Are you TRYING to drive us out of the Republican Party?”
Conservatives objected alongside liberals.

Seniors alongside teens. I heard from everyone from fired-up retirees in Osceola County to a genuinely perplexed Eagle Scout in Maitland.
Even Florida TV stations that usually pay more attention to car crashes than legislative subcommittees carried stories about Floridians who were up in arms.

Local elected officials noticed the widespread discontent and decided to weigh in as well. Jacksonville’s large and heavily Republican city council voted 16-1 to tell GOP lawmakers to back off their plan to sabotage AP classes.

The pressure ultimately worked. When leaders from both chambers went behind closed doors last week to hash out their final budget proposal, they ditched this latest attack on public schools in quiet, unceremonial fashion.

Imagine for a moment if Floridians used their voices more often.

Not just to protect public education, but to support other issues that the vast majority of Floridians on both sides of the aisle support.
We might not live in a state where more than 20,000 families grappling with special needs are stuck on a years-long waiting list for services.

Or a state that has allowed so much pollution to kill so many manatees that two rounds of federal judges had to step in to tell the state it had to stop allowing the slaughter of the state’s official marine mammal.

It’s often said that we get the government we deserve. But we also get the government we demand.

In this case, Floridians demanded that the politicians take their stinkin’ hands off a successful educational program that has helped countless students get a head start in college, careers and life.

Imagine if we all did that more often.
“Advocacy works,” Vanos said. “It’s all about people power.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Curriculum, DeSantis, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Funding, Ignorance, Parents, Students

The Philosopher Crackpot Who Hates Democracy and Influences Powerful Tech Bros

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2025 //
6

If you haven’t heard of Curtis Yarvin, you should learn about him now. Yarvin does not believe in democracy. He believes in a society commanded by a king or autocrat. He was a prodigy as a child and now considers himself to be a political genius. Powerful men in the tech industry and politics pay him court and admire him, men like the billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Vice-President JD Vance.

Curtis Yarvin, advisor to Peter Thiel, Donald Trump

This article in The New Yorker by Ava Kolman paints a biographical portrait of Yarvin, summarizes his major ideas and describes his international standing as a philosopher of far-right leaders of the tech industry.

Kolman writes about Yarvin’s extensive range of contacts among the Trump administration and his influence on them, as well as his contact with royalists in other countries..

Kolman begins:

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called rage—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

Does anything on his wish-list sound familiar to you?

It should. Trump has loaded up his administration with people who imbibe Yarvin.

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (doge), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

“There are figures who channel a Zeitgeist—Nietzsche calls them timely men—and Curtis is definitely a timely man,” a State Department official who has been reading Yarvin since the Moldbug era told me. Back in 2011, Yarvin said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch. (The other was Chris Christie.) In 2022, he recommended that Trump, if reëlected, appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch. On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you’re going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd,” he said.

Yatvin’s ideas are quirky, inhumane, and extreme, to say the least:

On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco’s underclasses into biodiesel to power the city’s buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

Yarvin’s call for an American strongman is often treated as an eccentric provocation. In fact, he considers it the only answer to a world in which most people are unfit for democracy….

Yarvin’s influence on Trump’s inner circle is noticeable:

Last month, an anonymous doge adviser told the Washington Post that it was “an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin.” Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff, recently quote-tweeted him. Vance has called for the U.S. to retrench from Europe, a longtime Yarvin desideratum. Last spring, Yarvin proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning it into a luxury resort. “Did I hear someone say ‘beachfront?’ ” he wrote on Substack. “The new Gaza—developed, of course, by Jared Kushner—is the LA of the Mediterranean, an entirely new charter city on humanity’s oldest ocean, sublime real estate with an absolutely perfect, Apple-quality government.” This February, during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump surprised his advisers when he made a nearly identical proposal, describing his redeveloped Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump, who doesn’t like to read, is unlikely to have read Yarvin’s philosophical treatises about the proper functioning of a modern society–without benefit of a popular vote–but certainly Trump’s view of the unlimited, imperial powers of the Presidency are similar to those of Yarvin.

Read the article if you can access it. Make yourself aware of the man who wields an outsize influence on Trump right now.

To learn more about Yarvin’s influence among rightwing billionaires, read:

https://theconversation.com/an-antidemocratic-philosophy-called-neoreaction-is-creeping-into-gop-politics-182581

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Gender, History, Politics, Racism, Trump, Tyranny

Trump Strips Protection from 58 Million Acres of Wilderness

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2025 //
32

Henry David Thoreau wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau understood that as humans we need to be nourished by contact with or immersion in the natural world. Environmentalists understand this. They fight the inexorable march of what we call progress, which clear-cuts forest and paves over what once were boundless plains. Today, most of us get into a car and drive for hours to connect to wilderness. And we find solace in those encounters.

Most presidents take pride in the number of acres of wilderness that they have saved for future generations and the number of national monuments they designated to preserve unique natural formations. Not Trump. Trump has been openly hostile to environmental protection and to any measures that reduce the risks of climate change.

Yesterday the administration announced that it was opening up 58 million acres for commercial development.

Lisa Friedman wrote in The New York Times:

The Trump administration said on Monday that it would open up 58 million acres of back country in national forests to road construction and development, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to repeal the 2001 “roadless rule” that had preserved the wild nature of nearly a third of the land in national forests in the United States. Ms. Rollins said the regulation was outdated.

“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common-sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule,” Ms. Rollins said in a statement. She said the repeal “opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests.”

Environmental groups said the plan could destroy some of America’s untouched landscapes and promised to challenge it in court.

The unspoiled land in question includes Tongass National Forest in Alaska, North America’s largest temperate rainforest; Reddish Knob in the Shenandoah Mountains, one of the highest points in Virginia; and millions of acres of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho.

“Most Americans value these pristine backcountry areas for their sense of wildness, for the clean water they provide, for the fishing and hunting and wildlife habitat,” said Chris Wood, the chief executive of Trout Unlimited, an environmental group.

Businesses are eager to chop down the timber. There’s profit in those untouched forests, maybe even tracts for homes. The word “pristine” in not in their vocabulary.

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Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Alabama, Albuquerque, Cruelty, Deregulation, Disruption, Environment, Extremism
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