UCLA Report on Impact of ICE Raids: “The Fear Is Everywhere”

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2025 //
8

A team of scholars at UCLA, led by Professor John Rogers of UCLA, conducted a national survey of high schools principals to gauge their response to ICE enforcement actions in their communities. The survey “draws on a nationally representative survey with more than 600 high school principals in summer 2025 to document the widespread effects of immigration enforcement actions in the first months of the Trump administration.” All of their schools have immigrant children, some undocumented. Many of those students stay home, increasing absenteeism. Students who show up for classes worry whether they will come home to an empty house because their parents were detained by ICE.

The principals they interviewed described their efforts to reassure the students, but admitted that “the fear is everywhere.“

A high school principal in New York said:

“Immigrant students are suffering the most. Chronic absenteeism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety are interfering with their opportunities for success. They and their families live in a culture of fear. In several cases, students and their families received email notice from DHS indicating that they had 15 days to self deport because they were from XXX and their visa was discontinued without cause. These were hardworking, contributing members of our community.”

A high school principal in Wisconsin said:

“You hear things. So when a kid says, ‘Yeah, I’m a little worried, and yeah, I don’t really want my mom and dad to go out and drive right now, because I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ or you’re sitting at a table with kids, and you’re just chatting about life in general, and one of the kids looks at the kid next to him and says, ‘Just make sure you have your ID with you.’ To pretend it’s not impacting our students would be not a truthful statement. Because it does.”

A high school in Massachusetts said:

“We have seen the negative impact of the increased ICE presence and negative rhetoric around immigrants. Hardworking families who have been in our community for years have been torn apart by a family member being taken from their home or on the street, ICE agents using intimidation tactics around the school. Staff getting involved in taking students home or supporting them while their family struggles. Students staying home for fear of coming to school. There is something just so fundamentally wrong about this—we continue to strive to make school a safe place where all students can thrive, but this task has become increasingly challenging.”

What can we do about this climate of fear? I don’t know. Trump’s Big Ugly Bill allocated $75 billion to ICE over the next four years, more than all of the other federal law enforcement agencies.

Categories Ethics, Immigration

Andy Spears: Florida “Lost” 30,000 Students Who Took Voucher Money

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2025 //
4

Andy Spears is a veteran education journalist who tracks policy and finances across the South, but most often in Tennessee, where he lives. He has recently been following waste, fraud, and abuse in voucher programs in Arizona and Florida, learning lessons that Tennessee could learn from.

Spears wrote on his Substack blog The Education Report that Arizona passed the $1 Billion mark in annual spending on vouchers, most of which pays tuition for students already enrolled in nonpublic schools, and some of which is collected by very rich kids. Voucher money is spent on all sorts of things, not just tuition, including vacations, diamonds, lingerie, home appliances, television sets, vacations, and gift cards.

Arizona State Attorney General Kris Mayes announced that she is opening a review of voucher spending, especially the State Department of Education’s policy of rubber-stamping expenses under $2,000.

Spears also reported on Florida’s slipshod accounting of voucher students:

Where are Florida kids in school? Are they being counted as voucher students on a private school’s roster while actually attending a public school? Is the money following the student, or is it making a stop in the bank account of a private operator with little accountability?
In this story about a private school that accepted voucher funds for 80 students it never saw or educated, there’s an even bigger revelation.

In this story about a private school that accepted voucher funds for 80 students it never saw or educated, there’s an even bigger revelation.

Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Crestview, said that at any given moment the state does not know where 30,000 students are in terms of school categories — traditional public or voucher-supported private or home schools — together worth $270 million in education support.

30,000 kids. $270 million. And a state audit says the Florida Department of Education doesn’t seem to know what’s going on.

State legislators last week reviewed a state audit that found the school choice scholarship program in Florida exhibited “a myriad of accountability problems.”

Oh, and that original story – also pretty alarming. Apparently, a school claimed 80 students who lived 130 miles away – students they’d never seen or educated.

According to the decision, during the 2023-2024 school year, Little Wings submitted invoices to Step Up for Students, an organization administering state vouchers, for students previously enrolled at Touched by an Angel school, 130 miles away in Lake City.

The owner of the school that took voucher funds while not providing education to kids said she was not aware that is illegal.

Harris testified that during the 2023-2024 school year, her school received state scholarship funds for students that did not physically attend the school and that she did not know it was illegal to do so.

Florida’s school voucher scheme has private school operators billing for students who do not attend their school. It can’t keep track of as many as 30,000 students at a time. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are not properly tracked or accounted for

This is what proponents of “school choice” want – unlimited “choice” options, which means unlimited ways for unaccountable private operators to get their hands on loads of taxpayer cash.

Categories Arizona, Education Reform, Funding, Vouchers

Jeff Yass, the Billionaire Who Funds Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2025 //
7

Jeff Yass is one of the richest people in the world. He is the richest person in Pennsylvania. He is #25 or #27 on Bloomberg’s Billionaires’ Index, depending on which day you check. His net worth is about $65 billion. He co-founded the Susquehanna International Group, which is based in Pennsylvania. He is also a major investor in TikTok and is widely believed to have persuaded Trump not to ban it. In the last decade, he has given hundreds of millions to political campaigns, including the 2024 Trump campaign.

Yass was recently interviewed by The Washington Post, where he talked about his passion: Vouchers. The writers of the article were Laura Meckler, Beth Reinhard, and Clara Ence Morse.

Yass thinks the public should pay for students to go wherever their parents want them to go: to private schools, religious schools, charter schools, any kind of school, including public schools. He thinks all students should get vouchers, regardless of family income.

He believes the public schools are failing and that universal vouchers will turn American education into a great success.

Yass provided $6 million to Texas Governor Greg Abbott to run pro-voucher Republicans against moderate Republicans who supported public schools. Abbott ran a campaign of lies against the moderate Republicans, asserting that they opposed more funding for public schools and that they supported open borders.

With Yass’s money and Abbott’s lies, they managed to knock off enough moderate Republicans to finally pass a voucher bill. The voucher program is currently costing nearly $1 billion, and most of the voucher money pays the tuition of students previously enrolled in private and religious schools.

The strange part of Yass’s devotion to charter schools and vouchers for religious and private schools is that Jeff is a graduate of the New York City public schools. He graduated from Bayside High School in Queens. He then attended Binghamton University in New York, where he spent most of his time playing poker, betting on horse races, and honing a keen ability to calculate the odds and winning.

As a young man, he read Milton Friedan’s Capitalism and Freedom and became a Friedman devotee. He met Friedman several times; when he asked the great conservative economist which philanthropy he should support, Friedman said “school vouchers.”

Yass jumped in to support school choice. His ideological commitment to them is so strong that he ignores that show that most vouchers are taken by kids already enrolled in non-public schools. He thinks all students should get vouchers, including those whose families are wealthy.

Yass confidently told The Post that studies of voucher programs show “overwhelmingly” positive results. Several early studies of targeted voucher programs have indeed shown positive results on standardized tests, and some research shows positive impacts on other metrics such as college enrollment.

But most research over the past decade or so shows either no effect or a negative impact on test scores for larger-scale programs. Some charter schools struggle with low test scores just like traditional public schools do. That’s at least partly because educating children with many needs and few advantages is a challenging task

Yass maintains that these programs help children. But he also says he doesn’t really care what the studies say or how children perform on tests. He takes the libertarian point of view that all parents should be empowered to choose the school — public or private — that they want for their children, no matter what.

“If the mother or the parent wants the kid to go from one school to another, who the hell is anyone to tell them not to?” he told The Post. “I don’t care what the studies say.”

Yass has spent many millions in his home state of Pennsylvania, but thus far has failed to get sweeping voucher legislation passed.

He has a a starry-eyed and warped view of the U.S. economy.

In a 2021 conversation sponsored by the Adam Smith Society, part of a free-market think tank, he said that the U.S. is almost to the point where “no one” is hungry, cold or lacks basic health insurance.

“What’s the difference between a billionaire and a guy who’s making $100,000 a year? They’re both at home watching Netflix. And they’re both on their iPhones,” he said then. “The disparity between how rich people live and how poor people live in America has never been smaller.”

Government data shows that in 2024, there were 27 million uninsured Americans and in 2023, 18 million households were uncertain if they would have enough food. Wealth inequality has been rising for decades, with the richest families increasing their wealth at a faster rate than everyone else.

Despite Yass’s multi-million dollar contributions to candidates in Pennsylvania, his candidates have frequently lost. Yass has been singled out by protest groups who resent his efforts to buy elections and determine the future of the state.

Critics say his giving represents an absurd amount of influence for one person, who can press his political agenda simply because he is rich….

“Hey hey! Ho ho! Billionaires have got to go!” chanted about 50 protesters marching to Susquehanna’s front door. The group outside Yass’s office in late September wasn’t an unusual sight. All Eyes on Yass, a coalition of education, labor and civil rights groups, has worked to turn Yass into the state’s prime villain, creating an online “Yass tracker” that allows voters to look up whether their state elected officials have received money from Yass-funded PACs.

The protestors organized in response to Yass’s efforts to change the composition of the State Supreme Court.

In the last election, he supported three Republican candidates trying to defeat three Democratic judges on the State Supreme Court. All three of his candidates lost.

It was the 12th demonstration since 2022 organized by All Eyes on Yass. In a year when Musk’s role at the White House prompted intense criticism of billionaires in politics, this group stands out in its singular and persistent focus on Pennsylvania’s richest man.


“We’re here with a simple message: Billionaires like Jeff Yass can’t steal our elections,” said Raquel Jackson-Stone, 32, who works for a civil rights group called One Pennsylvania. “They don’t care about the same things we care about, like housing affordability and making our public schools better…”

Yass rarely if ever interacts with people he disagrees with on this subject. He volunteered to The Post that in business, he advises his employees to seek out alternative points of view. “I always say, ‘Go find the smartest person who disagrees with you,’” he said.

But he said he has never had a personal conversation with a public education advocate to try to understand their point of view. “I would love to do that,” he said….

In the interview with The Post, Yass stood by his comments. He said the divide in America is not about money but about how much satisfaction people get from their work. “That’s the inequality. Wealthy, educated people enjoy their jobs. Lower-income people don’t enjoy their jobs.”

His confidence feeds his opponents but also his conviction to keep spending. If the criticism bothers him, he doesn’t let it show. He sees no problem with one man using money made on Wall Street to press a personal agenda. And he compares his influence not against that of other individuals but to teachers unions and other large interest groups that represent thousands of people each.

As Yass sees it, he’s the one fighting for the underdog — a billionaire speaking up for those who don’t have billions.

“It’s David versus Goliath,” he said. “I represent David.”

So Jeff Yass has never talked to a public education advocate to test his views. I volunteer.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, School Choice, Texas, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: Winning with Racism and Culture Wars

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2025 //
23

Historian Heather Cox Richardson explains the GOP formula for winning elections. It is columns like this that have caused 3,000,000 people to subscribe to her Substack.

She writes:

When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.

Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.

When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” The article notes that most people care about and interact with the government through economic or affordability issues—prices, jobs, health care, social programs, and taxes—and that most laws are also about these issues. But, he points out, political rhetoric overwhelmingly focuses on issues like race, crime, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and guns: the so-called culture war.

Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”

“In other words,” Morris writes, “when cable news producers decide to cover an issue more, voters subsequently say it is more important to them, and that issue is more predictive of how they’ll vote. TV news coverage, and cable in particular, has the power to choose which issues are most ‘salient’ for upcoming elections.” He notes that “this effect is almost entirely, or maybe even entirely, driven by Fox News,” and that right-wing politicians benefit most from it. Democrats get their highest marks from voters on issues not covered by cable news.

Morris concludes that “more than the Republicans or Democrats, left or right, it’s the companies that abuse our attention for profit that are the real winners of American politics.”

This conclusion echoes a 2006 conversation a reporter for Financial Times held with Fox News Channel founder Rupert Murdoch and chief executive officer Roger Ailes. In that conversation, when asked if running the Fox News Channel was “like running a political campaign,” Ailes responded: “No more than running a Dairy Queen. You have a customer, you have to market it to help them get to your product, the product has to be good, you can’t drop too many on the floor or in the sprinkles or you’ll lose money. All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.”

Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. “Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised “town halls” geared to different audiences, in which he arranged the set, Nixon’s answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon’s makeup, and the crowd’s applause. “Let’s face it,” he said, “a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But, carefully managed, television could “make them forget all that.”

Ailes found his stride working for right-wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, and a short-lived television show hosted by right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996.

Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the “orchestra pit theory.” He explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

This is a theory Trump has always embraced, and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration—to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT—and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” Bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right-wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.

Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of “affordability” is a “Democrat con job.” In an interview yesterday with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former president Joe Biden’s having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.”

As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy—as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and his mental acuity—Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism, and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as “garbage,” to attack female reporters, and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the Walz home shouting the slur.

The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division CNN, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But, as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Bros. Discovery for itself.

David Ellison, son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co-founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen, and as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.

The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of CBS, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is CNN, which Netflix doesn’t particularly want but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that “Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”

During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right-wing politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans launched a new form of journalism. S.S. McClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and a partner started McClure’s Magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens’s exposé of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker’s exposé of workers’ violence during a coal strike.

Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city, and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled “The American Contempt of Law.” It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.

“Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?” McClure asked. “The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.”

“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”

—

Notes:

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/

Click to access rao-jmp.pdf

Categories Elections, Ethics, History

Carol Burris Interviews Me About My New Book

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2025 //
2

The Network for Public Education sponsored a conversation between me and Carol Burris about my new book: AN EDUCATION: HOW I CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT SCHOOLS AND ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE.

I think you will enjoy it!

https://vimeo.com/1137499967

https://share.google/OUhluBgNodmED08UF

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Personal, Privatization, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Steve Schmidt: The Hegseth Ethos

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2025 //
7

Steve Schmidt is a veteran political strategist who worked for Republicans, most recently for John McCain in 2008. When Trump was elected, Schmidt was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. In 2020, he registered as a Democrat. He currently writes a blog at Substack.

This one is brilliant. Pete Hegseth is the embodiment of the moral and spiritual and intellectual rot at the core of the Republican Party today.

Schmidt writes:

There is no “Secretary of War” or “War Department” in the United States of America under US law.

Each time a news organization uses Pete Hegseth’s concocted title, and submits to his “War Department” fantasy, it is an act of corruption.

It is a direct and specific choice that immolates journalistic ethics by embracing fantasy at the demand of power.

Journalism confronts power.

Journalism doesn’t obey it, heed it, submit to it, appease it, or accept the premise that make-believe is real if the leader believes it so, regardless of reality.

This was posted by a man in the chain of command for the release of nuclear weapons after the commission of a war crime on his orders, which was followed by evasions, deflections of responsibility, and an attempt to stab a US Navy admiral in the back:

[Diane’s note: This is juvenile and not funny.]

When General of the Army George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army Secretary of State and Defense died, President Harry Truman said the following in remembrance of his titanic life. He made an unfortunate reference to the traitorous Robert E. Lee, who was exceeded in every way by Ulysses Grant, a man who bested him, yet was smeared into oblivion over 100 years time by the the same type of white nationalists and Christian Taliban who slither around Mar-a-Lago. That is, until one day, the truth escaped its dungeon and a foremost savior of the Union was seen clearly again.

[Truman said:]

General Marshall was an honorable man, a truthful man, a man of ability.

Honor has no modifying adjectives — a man has it, or he hasn’t. General Marshall had it.

Truth has no qualifying words to be attached to it. A man either tells the truth, or he doesn’t. General Marshall was the exemplification of the man of truth.

Ability can be qualified. Some of us have little of it, some may have moderate ability, and some men have it to the extreme.

General Marshall was a man of the greatest ability.

He was the greatest general since Robert E. Lee.

He was the greatest administrator since Thomas Jefferson.

He was the man of honor, the man of truth, the man of greatest ability.

He was the greatest of the great in our time.

I sincerely hope that when it comes my time to cross the great river that General Marshall will place me on his staff, so that I may try to do for him what he did for me.

*******************

Perhaps one reason that Pete Hegseth fetishizes the “War Department” is that, when it existed, it commanded a segregated force. The Defense Department has always commanded a desegregated force.

Before the US Army was desegregated a young Army Lieutenant named Jackie Robinson faced trumped up charges at a kangaroo court martial.
Here is Jackie Robinson’s legacy perfectly preserved for all time in the magnificent eulogy he received from Reverend Jesse Jackson, to whom I hope we can all send good wishes and prayers this holiday season, as he struggles through the ravages of the burdens handed him with dignity and grace: 

[Jackie Robinson’s eulogy by Reverend Jesse Jackson.]

Powerful men have a long tradition of sending powerless young men to die in unworthy causes in far away lands.

There should be an extremely low tolerance for such men in 2025 America, but they are not only tolerated, but indulged.  

The hypocrisy of the US Congress on the matter of Pete “Kill them all!” Hegseth is bottomless and dangerous. Their faithlessness to the American soldier, sailor, airmen and marine is obscene.

The man who jumped up on a table screaming, “Kill all Muslims!” was exactly who the Congress was warned about. Yet, the warnings were unheeded because the Congress cared more about pleasing Trump than the institutions of the US Army, Navy, and Marine Corps that predate the independence of the United States. They cared more about sating a stirred-up Fox News mob than a 19-year-old private.

Shameful doesn’t begin to describe it.

It is a dereliction of duty, and the most profound type of moral betrayal.

The 119th MAGA Congress is an abomination, led by a religious nutter and weakling who is neither bright, decent, funny, nor wise.

In other words, he is a perfect MAGA puppet who thinks he is a ventriloquist. In truth, the hand inserted into his most sacred space, the one he hides his bespectacled head within, is smeared with orange hand paint.

Faithless, treacherous and disloyal are the Hegseth ethos. They are a perfect mirror of the only reflection of equal rottenness in America: the crazed MAGA Congress, filled from bottom to top with corrupt loons, belligerent liars, sexual deviants, conspiracists, fraudsters, women beaters, and insider traders, who worship Trump together.

Pete Hegseth is the leader of a military that is unready and unprepared to fight a necessary war. He is a performance artist, a late-stage mid-tier Fox News star who is a herald of disaster to a population filled with indifference. It is about to find out the hard way how much damage a small group of evil men and women can do to a nation.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, History, Ignorance, Republicans, Scandals, Shame, Trump, Wall of Shame

New Hampshire: Vouchers Are Robin Hood in Reverse

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
2

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH keeps a close watch over the legislature in New Hampshire. He is particularly interested in the state’s relatively new voucher plan. It was sold, as usual, as a plan to help poor kids “escape failing schools.”

That wasn’t what happened.

Predictably, the legislature removed income limits and the program now subsidizes affluent families whose children never went to public school.

The program this year will cost $51.6 million. Almost $50 million goes to students already enrolled in private or religious schools.

Meanwhile, the funding for vouchers is drawn from the state’s Education Trust Fund, which was intended for public schools. That means the subsidy for nonpublic schools comes right out of the public schools’ budget, with no tax increases to compensate public schools. The vast majority of New Hampshire’s students are now subsidizing the nonpublic schools.

There is a new regime at the Department of Education that has released more than the most basic information about the Education Freedom Account program.

For the program’s first four years, the department released spreadsheets detailing the numbers of students, where they live and how much each student received in grants with a total cost of the program and the quarterly state distributions to cover those grants.

The money does not really go to the parents, its goes to the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which takes its cut and sends the rest in the child’s name to ClassWallet, a company that received early stage investments twice from the Chinese-based venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures.

A 2018 Defense Department report flagged the company as participating in China’s “technology transfer strategy,” a state initiative to acquire foreign innovation.

Several states that also use ClassWallet for voucher money distribution have raised concerns about data security and foreign influence like Arizona and Missouri, but not New Hampshire, although Gov. Kelly Ayotte issued Executive Order 2025-04 which would appear to prohibit doing  business with a company with investors like ClassWallet.

ClassWallet does not technically work for the state, but it was hired by a state contractor, Children’s Scholarship Fund of NH, which administers the EFA program.

How many parents of EFA students would want their education spending data potentially accessed by a foreign country like China?

That information is not what was released late last month by the Department of Education, but is easily found with a Google Search, which ironically also brings up that Sinovation Ventures was co-founded by former China Google President Kai-Fu Lee.

The information released last month provides far greater detail than released under former DOE Commissioner Frank Edelblut, who kept the program’s details out of the public’s eye, such as where the money went and if the children’s foundation was carefully vetting income levels and other requirements to access additional grant money.

A small sample compliance report by the now long gone DOE overseer of the EFA program, indicated it was not following guidelines.

The 100 applications sampled for the report over the first two years of the program had a 25 percent error rate that resulted in a rebate to the state for only those applications improperly approved not for 25 percent of the program’s costs.

One of the biggest criticisms of the program is that very few of the students using the state’s money are actually leaving public schools to join the program. Instead the vast majority of the students using EFAs were already in religious or private schools or homeschooled when their parents applied to participate in the state-funded program that draws its funding from the Education Trust Fund, which also pays for the bulk of state aid to public schools, no matter how meager compared to every other state in the country.

This year the program is projected to cost $51.6 million and will cost an additional $61.9 million next year, totaling $113.5 million for biennium, which makes it $26.7 million over budget.

And if you read the fine print of the data released last month, only $1.68 million on the low end, to $4.42 million on the high end for this school year, and $2.52 million if you use the four-year average is going to kids who were not in public schools when they joined the program out of the $51.6 million for this school year.

The data from the DOE notes that for the current school year only 343 students left public schools to join the program whose enrollment is now 10,510 students, which is nearly double what it was last year before the Republican-controlled legislature removed any earnings cap for the program.

That 3.26 percent of the students is the low end of the estimate above, and if you use the number of new students this year compared to last school year, which is 4,745, the new students from public schools is 7 percent and the high figure.

If you add the kids leaving public schools for the last four years, the number is 1,162 which compared to enrollment over those four years of 23,937 and the number is the four-year average.

That means state taxpayer money going to support students who were not in public schools when they joined the EFA program for this school year would be between $49.92 million and $47.18 million.

That is money the state was not paying to educate these kids because they were in religious or private schools or homeschooled and not supported by state dollars.

In essence that is a new education cost for the state, but no new taxes, or fees or anything was created to pay for it.

Instead, it is money drawn from the Education Trust Fund which was established after the Claremont education decisions to support public education.

As Rayno writes: For those receiving the money on the upper end of the income scale, the little less than $5,000 grant average is a subsidy that allows another ski trip to Aspen or Tahoe this winter.

So when lawmakers say the state doesn’t have the money to increase its share of public education costs, it really means “we do not want to increase the state’s share, but we are OK subsidizing religious and private schools and homeschooling.”

For those receiving the money on the upper end of the income scale, the little less than $5,000 grant average is a subsidy that allows another ski trip to Aspen or Tahoe this winter.

But the above figures are probably a little generous because they do not account for the kids who joined the EFA program from public schools and then returned to public schools either before or after one year.

Data released by the department indicates that last school year, 101 of the former public school students who switched to the EFA program, re-enrolled in public schools.

For the 2023-2024 school year, 75 EFA students returned to public schools, and for the 2022-2023 school year, 38 re-enrolled in public schools.

But those are not the only ones leaving the EFA program every year.

It also does not include EFA students who either graduated or completed their course of instruction that school year or left for unexplained reasons.

For the 2024-2025 school year, 151 EFA students left the EFA program because they graduated or completed their course of study along with the 101 who returned to public schools, and the 887 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the program that school year was 1,139 or 21 percent of the total EFA enrollment for the year. 

For the 2023-2024 school year, 108 students either graduated or completed their course of study, with the 75 who returned to public schools, and 525 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the EFA program that school year were 708, or 19 percent of the total EFA enrollment.

For the 2022-2023 school year, 76 students graduated or completed their course of studies, along with the 38 who re-enrolled in public schools and the 344 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the program was 458 students or 15 percent of the enrollment that year.

Total students leaving over the three-year period was 2,305 from a total three-year enrollment of 12,557 or 18.4 percent.

What would we say about a dropout rate of nearly 20 percent if it were a public school? 

This is not the widely successful program its advocates tout on the floor of the House and Senate and does not save school districts the amount of money Edelblut used to claim because more than 90 percent of the students in the program were not in public schools, but he counted them as savings to school districts.

This program is not serving the children of low-income parents who want an alternative to public schools, but those parents who can already afford to pay for their children to attend those alternatives without the state’s taxpayers’ help.

That is not government helping the most vulnerable, it is Robin Hood in reverse, a system New Hampshire knows very well.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Hoax, New Hampshire, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

The 74: More Religious Charter Schools Apply for Public $$

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
4

You knew that when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a request from Oklahoma to approve a religious charter school, there would be more requests in the pipeline. Oklahoma was rejected by a 4-4 vote only because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, because of her friendship with one of the lawyers for the online Catholic school.

Recently, as I reported, Oklahoma returned with a proposal for an online Jewish charter school, a Ben Gamla charter. The entire state of Oklahoma has a population of only 9,000 Jews. They are not requesting a Jewish school, but an entrepreneur connected to a Florida for-profit charter chain is.

Religious charter schools are a big problem for the national charter lobby. They say that charter schools are “public” schools. The advocates for religious charter schools say they are not public schools. They are specifically religious schools.

The 74 reported the latest proposal:

When the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked this year in a case over whether charter schools can be religious, experts said it wouldn’t take long for the question to re-emerge in another lawsuit.

They were right.

In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is on the school’s side. He issued an opinion last month that the state’s ban on religious charter schools likely violates the First Amendment. 

“Tennessee’s public charter schools are not government entities for constitutional purposes and may assert free exercise rights,” he wrote to Rep. Michele Carringer, the Knoxville Republican who requested the opinion. 

The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school. Peter Deutsch, the former Democratic congressman who founded the Ben Gamla charter schools, began working on the idea long before the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School even went to court. The 4-4 tie in May means that an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the school from receiving state funds still stands. 

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation runs a network of Hebrew language charter schools in Florida. Now it wants to open a virtual religious charter school in Oklahoma. (Ben Gamla)

“The prior decision shows that there’s an open question here that needs to be resolved,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm representing the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation. “We hope the court will get it right this time. We hope the federal courts get it right without having to go to the Supreme Court.”

Idaho also confronted the issue earlier this year. The state’s first charter, Brabeion Academy, initially promoted the school as Christian. But it was approved in August as a nonreligious school and will open as such next fall. Related‘A Day to Exhale’: Supreme Court Deadlocks on Religious Charter Schools — For Now

Deutsch, Skrmetti and other supporters of faith-based charter schools base their argument on three earlier Supreme Court rulings allowing public funds to support sectarian schools. They say that excluding religious organizations from operating faith-based charter schools is discrimination and violates the Constitution. But leaders of the charter sector and public school advocates argue that classifying charter schools as private would threaten funding and civil rights protections for 3.7 million students nationwide…

To Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, the debate is settled, for now. In November, he said his office would “oppose any attempts to undermine the rule of law.” 

Americans United, which advocates for maintaining church-state separation, has also issued a warning over the new school. The organization represented parents and advocates in a separate case over the school. 

“Religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO, said in a press release….

The demand for a Jewish charter school would be much higher in Florida, which has an estimated Jewish population of nearly 762,000, compared with about 9,000 in Oklahoma. 

Please open the link to continue reading the article.

Categories Charter Schools, Ethics, For-Profit, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Virtual Charter Schools

Trump Did the Same Trick with His Florida Mortgages of Which He Accuses Letitia James, Adam Schiff, and Lisa Cook

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
9

ProPublica posted a bombshell story about Trump’s history of mortgages. It is a must-read.

In a late-night tweet that probably was supposed to be a private text message, Trump urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue criminal charges against his political enemies–James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff–for various alleged crimes.

New York State Attorney General James was accused of mortgage fraud, of getting a mortgage on a home used as an investment property while claiming it would be her secondary residence, in order to lower the cost of borrowing. Trump wants Senator Schiff and Congressman Eric Swalwell prosecuted on the same charge of mortgage fraud; charges have not yet been brought against them.

Letitia James denies the charges. A grand jury indicted her but the case was tossed out by a judge because of errors made by Trump’s inexperienced, hand-picked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan. Halligan was an insurance lawyer who had never prosecuted a case before. Trump had previously engaged her to review the holdings of the Smithsonian and identify exhibits that disparaged America or promoted DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

Attorney General Bondi plans to reindict James.

Now, ProPublica carefully documents, Trump did exactly the same mortgage gambit that he calls criminal.

He bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985. In 1993, he purchased two neighboring homes. He took out a mortgage on both houses and declared at the time that each house would be his primary residence.

But he never lived in either house. They were advertised for rent or leasing, by the week or by the month.

“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”

Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms, like lower interest rates, than mortgages for a second home or an investment rental property. Legal experts said that having more than one primary-residence mortgage can sometimes be legitimate, like when someone has to move for a new job, and other times can be caused by clerical error. Determining ill intent on the part of the borrower is key to proving fraud, and the experts said lenders have significant discretion in what loans they offer clients. (In this case, Trump used the same lender to buy the two Florida homes.) 

But in recent months, the Trump administration has asserted that merely having two primary-residence mortgages is evidence of criminality. 

Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director who has led the charge, said earlier this year: “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.”

Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud.

In response to questions, a White House spokesperson told ProPublica: “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.”

The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” and said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law…”

Each of the mortgage documents signed by Trump contain the standard occupancy requirement — that he must make the property his principal residence within 60 days and live there for at least a year, unless the lender agreed otherwise or there were extenuating circumstances.

But ProPublica could not find evidence Trump ever lived in either of the properties. Legal documents and federal election records from the period give his address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. (Trump would officially change his permanent residence to Florida only decades later, in 2019.) A Vanity Fair profile published in March 1994 describes Trump spending time in Manhattan and at Mar-a-Lago itself.

Trump is no longer at risk for mortgage fraud because the statute of limitations has rendered the issue moot.

Democrats suspect that the claims about mortgage fraud were based on confidential information acquired by Bill Pulte, who was appointed by Trump to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte denies it. Pulte, a wealthy private equity investor, contributed generously to Trump’s campaign.

ProPublica points out that Trump tried to fire Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook on a charge of mortgage fraud, so he could appoint his own choice and gain control of the Board. Cook denied the charges and sued in federal court, where the matter is still pending.

In September, ProPublica reported that three of Trump’s Cabinet members have called multiple homes their primary residences in mortgage agreements. Bloomberg also reported that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent did something similar. (The Cabinet members have all denied wrongdoing.)

Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency head, has denied his investigations are politically motivated. “If it’s a Republican who’s committing mortgage fraud, we’re going to look at it,” he has said. “If it’s a Democrat, we’re going to look at it.”

Thus far, Pulte has not made any publicly known criminal referrals against Republicans. He did not respond to questions from ProPublica about Trump’s Florida mortgages.

After reading this article, I wondered about Trump’s financing of Mar-a-Lago. It cost $7-10 million. He paid $300,000. He got a mortgage from Chase Manhattan for $8.5 million. At the time, his residence was New York City.

Did he claim Mar-a-Lago as his primary residence?

Categories Accountability, Fraud, Hypocrisy, Justice, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson on Pearl Harbor and Its Message for Today

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2025 //
12

Yesterday, December 7, was the 84th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said it was a day that will live in infamy. After the passage of so much time, Heather Cox Richardson sees that Pearl Harbor shines a light on our current political morass.

She writes:

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.

In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.

Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America, and on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.

The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.

Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.

The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were Black American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Indigenous Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.

The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.

Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?

Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.

But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.

President Donald J. Trump and his cronies have abandoned the principles of democracy and openly embraced the hierarchical society the U.S. fought against in World War II. They have fired women, Black Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans from positions in the government and the military and erased them from official histories. They have seized, incarcerated and deported immigrants— or rendered them to third countries to be tortured— and have sent federal agents and federal troops into Democratic-led cities to terrorize the people living there.

They have traded the rule of law for the rule of Trump, weaponizing the Department of Justice against those they perceive as enemies, pardoning loyalists convicted of crimes, and now, executing those they declare are members of drug cartels without evidence, charges, or trials. They have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations.

Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?

When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.

We hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the radical right will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.

Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, History
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »