Congress Slashed Funding for Public Schools. They Lied! Protest!

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2025 //
1

The Network for Public Education Action sent out the following alert. Please use the form to send a letter to your members of Congress.

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Dear Friend of Public Schools.

They said they wouldn’t cut Title I. They lied.

Majority House leaders just dropped their FY26 education bill, slashing $12.1 billion (15%) in K-12 funding for public education. It guts the very programs that keep our public schools running — while boosting charter start-up/expansion to $500,000,000.

What they’re cutting:

  • Title I: –27% slashed — funding that provides targeted education services like remedial reading to students with maximum impact in high-poverty schools in cities and rural communities.
  • English Language Acquisition Grants: Gone.
  • Title II-A (teacher training & support): Eliminated.
  • Full-Service Community Schools: Zeroed out.

SEND YOUR EMAIL NOW

And their justification?

“Despite outsized investment, America’s public schools continue to fail children and families.”
That’s what they think of your neighborhood school.

Why this matters

Cuts of this magnitude will crowd classrooms, strip student supports, widen inequities, and push more schools into crisis — especially in rural and high-need communities.

Do these two things now

1) Email your Representative:

Use our action link to send a pre-written message in 15 seconds: Send your email now.

2) Call your Representative:

Find your member’s phone number here.
Below is a script you can use right now:
“Hello, I’m a constituent from [Representative’s name] district. I’m calling to urge the Representative to oppose the House education funding bill that cuts Title I by 27% and reduces K12 funding by 15%. These cuts will harm students and teachers in our district. Please vote NO and support full funding for public schools — not half-a-billion in funding  for charter expansion while our classrooms are being cut. Thank you.”

Now spread the word

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Thanks for all you do! You can share this email with this link: https://npeaction.org/act-now-k12-budget-slashed-by-the-house/

Carol Burris

Network for Public Education Action Executive Director

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Resistance

Former Directors of the CDC: RFK Jr. Endangers Public Health!

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2025 //
0

Nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control wrote a joint opinion piece for The New York Times. These are men and women devoted to public health who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. They agree that what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing to the Department of Health and Human Services is outrageous and dangerous.

They write:

We have each had the honor and privilege of serving as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, either in a permanent or an acting capacity, dating back to 1977. Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the C.D.C., the world’s pre-eminent public health agency. We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations — every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump — alongside thousands of dedicated staff members who shared our commitment to saving lives and improving health.

What the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.

Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused onunproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage. Firing Dr. Monarez — which led to the resignations of top C.D.C. officials — adds considerable fuel to this raging fire.

We are worried about the wide-ranging impact that all these decisions will have on America’s health security. Residents of rural communities and people with disabilities will have even more limited access to health care. Families with low incomes who rely most heavily on community health clinics and support from state and local health departments will have fewer resources available to them. Children risk losing access to lifesaving vaccines because of the cost.

This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.

To finish reading the article, open the link.

Categories Budget Cuts, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Ignorance, Insane, Medicine, Trump

Why is Trump Destroying the Foreign Service?

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2025 //
2

Politico posted an article about the demoralization of career foreign service officers. DOGE laid off many of the top diplomats, and everyone who remains is walking on eggshells, unsure if they will be next. It seems that Trump’s version of “America First” is actually “America Only,” and he doesn’t care about our relationships with other nations. In earlier times, he would have been called an isolationist.

Trump treats allies as enemies, but adores Putin, no matter how frequently Putin humiliates him (as he did at their meeting in Alaska, where Putin departed before a luncheon in his honor, as he did when Russian state media published nude photos of Melania before the 2024 election).

Foreign service officers are afraid of saying the wrong thing. They don’t feel free to express dissent or even to communicate, fearing that someone is watching and any disagreement will get them into trouble.

Naval Toosi reported:

President Donald Trump promised to reform American diplomacy. Insiders say he’s breaking it instead, to the point where he’s undermining his own global influence.

Eight months into Trump’s second term, more than half of U.S. ambassadorships, an unusually high amount, are vacant. Most top State Department roles are filled on an acting basis, often by people with little relevant experience. Many U.S. diplomats, especially those overseas, are largely cut out of policy talks while struggling to implement administration orders they say are confusing. Many also are too afraid to speak up because they could be fired or lose a promotion under new rules that measure their “fidelity.” They’ve already seen thousands of their colleagues pushed out and many offices dismantled.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, International, Stupid, Trump

Jennifer Berkshire: Is Public Education Over?

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2025 //
8

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the the danger that school choice and testing posed to public schools. Its title: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. I named a few of the billionaires funding the attacks on public schools, teachers, and unions–Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family–calling them “The Billionaire Boys Club.” Little did I know that they were the tip of the billionaire iceberg.

My hope in 2010 was that public school supporters would block the privatization of their schools. Public schools are as American as apple pie. I wanted the public to wake up, rally around their public schools, and repel the hedge fund managers and billionaires who were funding the privatization movement.

I was too optimistic.

The attacks escalated, fueled by the political power that money buys. The major media bought the corporate reform narrative hook, line, and sinker.

Neoliberal corporate reform brought us high-stakes standardized testing, A-F ratings for schools, charter schools, school closings, and rating teachers by the test scores of their students. And cheating scandals. All to get higher test scores, which never happened.

Now, Jennifer Berkshire asks on her blog The Education Wars whether it’s all over for public schools. Jennifer appreciates the importance of public schools as community builders and civic institutions that serve the common good.

Please read her smart take on the state of public education today:

I won’t lie. If you’re a member of Team Public Education, as I am, it has been a tough summer. And if you, like me, have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of school privatization, it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future we’ve been warning about has arrived. Five years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote a book called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: the Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School that culminated in a sort of “Black Mirror” chapter called “education a la carte.” In it, we described how the ultimate vision of school privatization advocates wasn’t simply to shift the nation’s youngsters into private schools, but to ‘unbundle’ education into a vast array of products for consumers to purchase on Amazon-like exchanges. Lest you think we were exaggerating, turn your attention to Florida, where, as Sue Woltanski documents, project unbundle has arrived with a vengence.

Florida, as usual, is slightly ahead of the curve. But the accelerating collapse of public schools in the state, chronicled in this recent New York Times story, pushed along by the now universal school voucher program, will soon be coming to a state near you. The NYT piece, by the way, was just one of many ‘are public schools over?’ stories to drop in recent weeks. The Washington Post version headed to peer in the window of the GOP vision for education. Spoiler: it entails replacing public schools with “a marketplace of school options.” Then, of course, there was the annual PDK survey of attitudes towards public education, which found both sinking approval of the nation’s schools (with the usual exception for local schools) and rising warmth towards the idea of private school vouchers. As legal scholar Derek Black put it, “The deep well of faith in public education has a disastrous leak.”

To understand what’s happening, I’m going to pause here to spend some time with yet another of the ‘are public schools through?’ stories, Chandler Fritz’s eye-opening new feature for Harper’s, “The Homemade Scholar.” Fritz, a teacher and writer who pens the “Arizona Room” newsletter, took a job at a private religious microschool in order to get a close up view of Arizona’s education marketplace, what he describes as “a new frontier in American education.” I recommend paying attention to this piece because 1) Fritz is a terrific writer and 2) he provides real insights into the appeal of vouchers, or as they’re billed in AZ, education savings accounts—something my own writing rarely reckons with. 

Fritz finds a grab bag of reasons that students and parents are drawn to this particular microschool, most of which will be familiar to you: a hunger for ‘customization,’ the desire for religious instruction, the appeal of a small setting, conservative backlash against public education. But there’s another reason we don’t hear as much about—the opposition to the standardized testing that shapes every aspect of what’s left of our public schools. Fritz’s piece is long (the audio version clocks in at nearly an hour), and infuriating in parts, but his observations regarding the attitudes of these ‘education consumers’ towards standardized tests get straight to the point: they hate them.

Bad math

A similar theme pops up in Dana Goldstein’s recent portrayal of the impact of vouchers on schools in Florida’s Orange County. While three quarters of the schools in the district earned an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ on the state’s school accountability report card, parents are eager to free their kids from the burden of taking the state tests, something Florida education watchdog Billy Townsend has been tartly observing for years. Now, I mention opposition to standardized testing here because, even in our deeply divided times, it is a cause that unites parents across virtually any line of division. If you don’t believe me, head down to Texas, where, in addition to re-gerrymandering the state’s electoral maps, legislators have also been pretending to address the popular revolt against the STAAR Test.

But there’s another reason to revisit the antipathy to testing. While you’ve been distracted by the relentless tide of bad and worse news, what’s left of the education reform movement has been busy reemerging, zombie style, seemingly without having learned a single thing about why it flopped in the first place. There are overt signs of the zombie’s return—like Democrats for Education Reform trying to rally the party around a vision of education ‘abundance,’ or Andrew Cuomo, flailing in the NYC mayoral race, now rebranding himself as the education reform candidate with a pledge to shut down failing schools and replace them with new ‘schools of promise.’ Then there’s the pundit-level narrative taking shape in which education reform was working just great until the teachers unions ruined everything and/or Democrats lost their nerve.

This version of events, encapsulated in this recent David Brooks column, goes like this:

School reform was an attempt to disrupt the caste system, to widen opportunity for the less privileged. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama angered core Democratic constituencies like teachers unions in order to expand opportunity down the income scale. But now Democrats have basically given up. Joe Biden didn’t devote much energy to education reform. Kamala Harris ran for president without anything like a robust education reform agenda.

Brooks goes on to cite Michael Petrilli on the ‘Southern surge,’ the rise in test scores in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee (but not Florida) that has education reformers so excited. Kelsey Piper, authoress at the brand new outlet the Argument, is excited too. In her back-and-forth with leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig over the question of whether giving parents cash benefits poor children, Piper comes down squarely on the side of fixing the schools.

I think school reform after school reform has served every conceivable interest group except students (who do not vote) and so have failed to meaningfully increase literacy and numeracy, even though we now have a road map for how to genuinely let every child thrive.

If you guessed that the ‘road map’ referred to here is Mississippi, you would be correct. Mississippi, by the way, is a national leader in child poverty levels, an honor that the state, which just eliminated its income tax, seems determined to hold on to.

Proxy war

Such ‘if only the band would get back together’ takes somehow miss what a flop much of our recent version of education reform turned out to be. Here’s a partial list. The backlash to Common Core on the right didn’t just help to usher in Donald Trump but played a role in transforming the GOP from the party of big business (which was all in on pushing the Common Core standards) to one dominated by aggrieved populists. And the over selling of college tapped into a well of resentment so deep that the entire system of higher education is now threatened. Then there is the relentless push to narrow the purpose of school down to standardized testing and workforce prep, a bipartisan cause that, as I argue in a forthcoming essay in the Baffler, has now been abandoned by the right in favor of education that prizes ‘virtue’ over vocation, even as many Democrats continue to beat the ‘career readiness’ drum.

I’m not the only one to point this out, by the way. Teacher-turned-writer Nora De La Cour makes a compelling case that the appeal of so-called classical charter schools is due in part to the damage done to public education by neoliberal education reform. Students at these rapidly spreading classical schools encounter the ‘great books.’ Their public school peers get “decontextualized excerpts in corporate-produced test prep materials,” writes De La Cour.

Which brings me to the main point of this piece. (Finally!) Part of what’s so frustrating about our current moment is that by leaning into a deeply unpopular vision for public schools—test them, close them, make them compete—a certain brand of Democrat is essentially incentivizing parents to seek out test-free alternatives. Consider too that we’re in the midst of a fierce intraparty debate over what Democrats need to do to win. For the education reform wing of party, the answer to the question is to go hard at teachers unions and double down on school accountability, while also embracing school vouchers. 

While this vision is inherently contradictory, it’s also a loser with voters. There may be no single less appealing sales pitch than ‘we’re going to close your school.’ Just ask former Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who was so unpopular in the city’s minority neighborhoods after shuttering 50 schools that he couldn’t run for reelection. As voucher programs expand rapidly, we’re about to enter a new era of school closures. If you don’t believe me, just check out this statement from a CATO Institute spox in response to that WaPo story on Arizona:

It’s tough for some families when their school—public or private—closes. Kids miss their friends, teachers worry about their jobs, parents have to adjust their transportation plans. But stories bemoaning public schools losing enrollment due to school choice policies are missing the point. Should parents who want a different option for their children be forced to stay in their assigned school in order to prop it up? Of course not. Public schools had a virtual monopoly on enrollment for decades, but no school can serve the unique needs of all the children who happen to live near it. As we continue down the path of more educational freedom, some schools will rise to the challenge and others will close. We shouldn’t sacrifice children’s futures in an effort to save schools that aren’t meeting their needs.

Close readers will note the moving goal posts—that we’ve moved from school choice as a means of escaping ‘failing schools’ to escaping any kind of school. But the bottom line is that we’re just supposed to accept that ‘education freedom’ means that lots of schools will be closing. Or take the ‘back to the future’ sales pitch for microschools, in which parents “form pods in church basements, barns, and any space they can find. Teachers are launching microschools in their garages.” This vision of what proponents like to call ‘permissionless education’ is one many parents, indeed entire communities, will find difficult to make sense of. It also seems like a gimme for Democrats who are trying to differentiate themselves from the right’s hostility to public schools. 

I want to end on a hopeful note, because I’ve depressed us all enough by now, but also because there are some hopeful signs out there. While the education reform zombie may be reemerging, well funded as ever, a growing number of Democrats are showing us what it sounds like to run as an unabashed advocate for public schools. There’s Graham Platner, the challenger to Susan Collins in Maine, who calls out the endless attacks on public schools and teachers as “the tip of the assault on all things public.” Or how about Nathan Sage in Iowa, who puts the defense of public education at the center of his populist platform:

Public schools are the heart of our Democracy, and Republicans are tearing them down brick by brick, while treating our heroic public school teachers like dirt. They are underfunding our public schools and are diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to private schools and into the pockets of billionaires behind them.

To this list I could add Josh Cowen and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, or Catelin Drey in Iowa, who, if she pulls off a win in today’s special election to fill a state senate seat in a district that Trump carried by 11 points, will end the GOP’s supermajority in that chamber. Drey, by the way, is running as a pro-public-education-candidate and an outspoken opponent of Iowa’s controversial universal school voucher program. Plenty of influential Democrats will insist that that message is a loser. That the way for Democrats to win is to run against public schools—to talk about what failures they are, why we need to get tougher on them, and how maybe we don’t actually need them after all. I think they’re wrong, and that voters agree.

Drey did win in Iowa, decisively, proving that a pro-public education stand is a winning message. Drey won 55% of the vote in a district that Trump carried. Her victory broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Portfolio District, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

There Was No “Miracle” in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2025 //
7

This is the most important post you will read today or this week, maybe this month, if you care about the future of American public schools. It’s about the importance of honest research; it’s about debunking false narratives. It’s about the media printing inaccurate stories without the necessity of fact-checking. It’s about irresponsible journalism.

The Washington Post published an article loaded with inflated claims by a British journalist, Ian Birrell, about the “miracle” in New Orleans that followed the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Five years later, Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan boldly said that the hurricane was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” Birrell agrees with him.

In 2018, Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education allocated $10 million to fund the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University (REACH). In 2023, two of the nation’s leading advocates of choice–the Walton Foundation and the City Fund–gave REACH $1 million “to jointly support a three-year research project on the system-level effects of charter schools at the national level. The goal is to learn how charter schools improve student outcomes and better understand the role of policy in fueling these changes.”

After Katrina, the state converted New Orleans into an (almost) all-charter district. All of the district’s teachers were fired, and their union dissolved. Charter chains and TFA poured into the district as did funding by the federal government and major foundations. About one-third of the students never returned after the hurricane.

Linda Darling-Hammond and her Stanford colleagues Frank Adamson and Channa Cook-Harvey studied the charterization of New Orleans in 2015. Unlike most other studies, they looked closely at student experiences as well as data. They concluded that the district was not only highly segregated by race and class, but was “one of the lowest-performing districts in one of the lowest-performing states in the nation,” not a model to be replicated.

Rutgers’ scholar Bruce Baker examined the advocates’ claims in 2019 and concluded that they overlooked or minimized two significant factors: one, demographic changes (a reduction in concentrated poverty), and two, a huge infusion of external funding.

But Birrell is not an education journalist so he seems not to have looked for views that countered the charter enthusiasts.

Gary Rubenstein, former member of TFA and career high school mathematics teacher, did the research that Birrell failed to do. He explained why there was no “miracle” in New Orleans:

It has been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina wiped out the New Orleans schools system causing it to be replaced with all charter schools. And it has been over 15 years since former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, based on what he considered early evidence of the success of those charter schools that Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” And it has been also about 15 years since educational researchers have been continuously debunking the New Orleans educational miracle.

So I was quite surprised to see that The Washington Post just published an opinion piece with the headline “‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution — Twenty years after the hurricane, taking stock of the miracle in New Orleans Schools.”

Reading this Op Ed was a strange experience for me. Supposedly based on recent research, it basically trotted out all the old bogus claims that I hadn’t heard anyone claim in at least ten years. Since it was The Washington Post, I figured it had to be Jay Matthews who has been known to write puff pieces (and books) about KIPP and Michelle Rhee. But these talking points were so antiquated that it would have been odd even for him to use them. No, this anachronistic Op Ed was not from any of the usual suspects but from a name I had never seen before: Ian Birrell.

Reading up on the biography of Ian Birrell, things made a bit more sense. Ian Birrell is a British journalist who has mainly written about international affairs. I’m sure he is a very competent journalist but this is his first foray into education reporting. So he heard about the New Orleans ‘miracle’ for the first time, got a totally biased ‘research’ report from Doug Harris supporting the miracle and, not knowing that there has been an ongoing battle over education reform in this country where the ‘reformers’ have all kinds of tricks for misrepresenting data to advance their agenda. So, thinking he has discovered something incredible, of course he wants to write something about it. But what he writes is completely naive since he doesn’t know the right questions to explore to get to the truth. It’s kind of like if I decided to become a nature reporter and wrote a thing about Big Foot based on just photoshopped images and unreliable first hand accounts.

The New Orleans Miracle is pretty easy to debunk if you know the right questions to ask.

So the first thing to look at is the Louisiana AP scores. Even though AP tests and the way they are sometimes misused, are not the only thing that matters in looking at a state’s education quality, colleges do look at AP scores so it is a bit of a measure of ‘college readiness.’  From the College Board website, it can be seen that Louisiana has the third worst AP passing rate in the country.

In the Washington Post Op Ed, Birrell describes the interventions after Katrina as follows: “They fired all 7,000 teachers, sidelined unions, invited ambitious experts to run the schools and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children.”

If he knew the full history of this he would know that the “ambitious experts to run the schools” included KIPP, the famous charter chain created by two Teach For America alums. So to measure the size of the miracle twenty years later, just check to see how the KIPP Booker T. Washington High School students are doing academically. For this I went to the recent US News & World Report data.

So the gold standard charter network in the miracle city of New Orleans has an 11% Math proficiency, a 21% Reading proficiency, and a 10% Science proficiency.

As far as AP scores at the top charter chain in the miracle city of New Orleans, the exam pass rate is just 2%.

But maybe you think I am cherry picking a KIPP school that was never mentioned in the Op Ed. In it Birrell writes about a specific ambitious expert “Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage 20 years ago was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me in a 2010 interview how, soon after the disaster, at age 26, he moved to the city from New York to set up a school, starting in a refurbished building with 120 pupils ages 11 to 15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests and won a national medal for its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents.” He explained how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.”

So I looked up Ben Kleban to see how his school was doing. It is a little confusing but it seems like the entire charter chain he created was shut down in 2018 except maybe one school which is called Walter L. Cohen High School. For them, there are no AP passing scores reported. For their test scores, they are a little better than KIPP for math and reading but lower on science.

So what evidence did Birrell see that convinced him that the New Orleans miracle was authentic? Doug Harris has some nice graphs that shows test scores in New Orleans scores now compared to test scores in New Orleans 20 years ago. But of course this is not the proper comparison to make. The way a scientific experiment works is that if you want to measure the impact of an effect, you try to take a group and split it in half and apply the impact to half of the subjects and make the rest the ‘control group.’ So in this situation, had they not made all the New Orleans schools into charter schools but instead randomly picked half the schools and made them charters and left the other half under local control, then you could compare the results of the two groups after 20 years and, as long as the groups continued to be randomly distributed, that could be a useful way to make a comparison.

But that is not what happened since unfortunately there is no control group to compare to. It is quite possible that the scores now are lower than they would have been had Katrina never happened and the New Orleans charter experiment had never happened. But even without anything to compare to, the data from that one gold standard KIPP is, in my opinion, pretty good evidence against the miracle. Just like the way you can check the temperature of a Thanksgiving turkey by putting a meat thermometer into one spot of the Turkey, looking at what is supposed to be the best charter school is a good measure of all the schools since the KIPP is surely better than the average school there.

I thought I’d never have to debunk the New Orleans miracle again, but I guess I’m going to have to every five or ten years for each milestone anniversary of “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”

My view: Gary Rubenstein is a national treasure. The major editorial boards should check with him before they publish stories about a “miracle” school or “miracle” district.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Louisiana, New Orleans

The GOP Death March, Led by RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2025 //
13

Concerned about RFK Jr.’s assault on vaccines, I called my local CVS pharmacist a few days ago to schedule every vaccine for which I was eligible. I got the flu vaccine and the RSV vaccine.

I asked for the COVID-19 vaccine, but was told that the latest version would not be available until mid-October. I’m in the eligible group (over 65), but no vaccine yet. When I got home, I learned that the vaccine is not available in certain states, including New York. I worry that RFK Jr. may decide to cancel the vaccine altogether.

Wajahat Ali writes on his blog, The Left Hook, about RFK Jr.’s threat to public health:

In today’s Democracy-ish, Danielle and I spend the hour discussing the most dangerous horseman of Trump’s Apocalyptic cult: RFK Jr. 

Oh, you know, the scion of the Kennedy empire who was a heroin addict, suffered from brain worms, ate exotic animals, and was described as a predator by his own cousin.

That RFK Jr., who promotes reckless and dangerous anti-vaxx conspiracies, eugenics, and has no medical background or training. That’s the wealthy, mediocre, white man that Trump has elevated as the director of America’s Health and Human Services.

I mean, what could go wrong? 

Who needs vaccines during COVID or the rise of measles? Who needs Medicaid except 20% of Americans who depend on it for healthcare? Who needs the National Institute of Health or the CDC staffed by competent, qualified professionals who have spent their lives devoted to saving lives?

Not the United States, because we aren’t a bunch of woke, weak pansies who listen to so-called experts, damn it!

Welcome to Trump and MAGA’s pro-death march led, in part, by RFK Jr. and his broligarch friendswho are perfectly fine killing Americans to make a profit and advance their white supremacist agenda. 

We bring all the receipts. It’s depressing, but it’s worth hearing to ensure you stay informed, safe, and protected.

Here’s Danielle’s write-up at DAM DIGEST:

In the United States, public health has long depended on institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). For decades—through Republican and Democratic administrations alike—these agencies functioned under a shared goal: protecting Americans’ health through science, research, and expertise.

But in recent years, that foundation has begun to crack. The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), an outspoken anti-vaccine activist with no medical training, to lead HHS has brought that crisis into sharp focus. His presence in the nation’s top public health office signals a seismic shift—one where politics trumps science, conspiracy theories replace research, and ideology threatens lives.

The Erosion of Trust in Science

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than one million Americans died, while public health officials faced harassment, death threats, and relentless political attacks. Former CDC Director Anthony Fauci, who spent his career working to save lives, became a target of right-wing media and extremist groups.

Instead of rallying around experts, leaders like Donald Trump and his allies downplayed the severity of the pandemic, promoted misinformation about masks and vaccines, and openly mocked scientists. This politicization of science directly fueled vaccine hesitancy, prolonging the crisis and causing unnecessary deaths.

Now, five years after the peak of the pandemic, the United States faces a resurgence of diseases once thought to be under control—measles, polio, and other preventable illnesses—precisely because vaccination rates have dropped.

RFK Jr.: Conspiracies Over Credentials

RFK Jr.’s position is especially alarming given his history of promoting anti-vaccine propagandaand debunked eugenics myths. He has falsely claimed that autism and other health conditions are caused by vaccines and even suggested that COVID-19 was “targeted to spare Jews and Black people”—a statement widely condemned as antisemitic and racist.

Despite his lack of medical training, Kennedy insists he can “diagnose” children by sight, attributing health challenges to supposed “mitochondrial issues visible in their faces.” Licensed physicians, including those trained at Harvard and Mayo Clinic, have dismissed such claims as pseudoscience.

Yet under the Trump administration, this man now wields control over Medicare, Medicaid, the CDC, NIH, and national vaccine policy—institutions responsible for the health of over 330 million Americans.

The Resignations and Walkouts

The consequences are already unfolding. After Kennedy moved to push out CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez—a Trump appointee who nonetheless refused to abandon science—top scientists and health officials resigned in protest. Dr. Dimitri Daskalakis, a respected infectious disease expert, wrote in his resignation letter that serving under Kennedy was “untenable” because HHS leadership was no longer guided by science.

Soon after, CDC staff staged mass walkouts, warning the public that American lives are being endangered by unqualified leadership. These resignations leave critical gaps at the very moment the nation faces rising COVID variants, climate-driven disease risks, and growing vaccine hesitancy.

Cuts That Will Cost Lives

Beyond personnel, the Trump–Kennedy administration has overseen massive funding cuts:

  • $500 million slashed from vaccine research
  • $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, threatening to shutter rural hospitals and nursing homes
  • Reductions in NIH research funding
  • Cuts to foreign aid and peacekeeping operations, destabilizing global health security

These moves directly undermine America’s preparedness for the next pandemic. As climate change accelerates, experts warn that new infectious diseases are almost inevitable. Yet instead of strengthening systems, leaders are dismantling them.

The Bigger Picture: A Pro-Death Movement

This moment cannot be seen in isolation. It reflects a broader “pro-death” political movement that prizes ideology over evidence, power over public health, and partisan gain over human life. Whether it was Trump pushing “herd immunity” at the expense of vulnerable Americans, or Kennedy advancing conspiracy theories that endanger children, the pattern is clear: science is under attack.

The result? Americans are less safe, less protected, and less prepared for the crises ahead.

Why This Matters Now

The rise of unqualified, conspiracy-driven figures like RFK Jr. at the helm of America’s most critical health institutions is not just political theater—it is a direct threat to public safety. The decisions made today about vaccines, research funding, and disease response will determine whether millions live or die in the years ahead.

Public trust in science and medicine must be restored. That means demanding qualified leaders, protecting the integrity of institutions like the CDC and NIH, and pushing back against those who seek to weaponize public health for political gain.

Because as history has shown—from pandemics to polio eradication—science saves lives. Conspiracies cost them.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Lies, Medicine, Trump

Hegseth and Trump: Bring Back the Confederacy!

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2025 //
8

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Trump have embarked on a project to honor the Confederacy. Hegseth plans to restore the Confederate statues that were removed from their pedestals, although some may have been melted down.

The latest? Hegseth is bringing back the grand portrait of General Robert E. Lee in his Confederate gray uniform to West Point; it was installed in 1972.

The funniest line in the article below is the statement by the Army’s communication director, who said: “Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.” Considering Trump censorship of words and images at the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, and in all other federally-funded institutions, that statement is ridiculous.

Perhaps even funnier is the renaming of military bases for obscure soldiers who had the same last name as Confederate generals.

The New York Times reported:

The Pentagon is restoring a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee, which includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse in the background, to the West Point library three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed, officials said.

The 20-foot-tall painting, which hung at the United States Military Academy for 70 years, was taken down in response to a 2020 law that stripped the names of Confederate leaders from military bases.

That legislation also created a commission to come up with new base names. In 2022, the commission ordered West Point to take down all displays that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.” A few weeks later, the portrait of General Lee with his slave in the background was placed in storage.

It was not clear how West Point could return General Lee’s portrait to the library without violating the law, which emerged from the protests that followed George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers in 2020.

“At West Point, the United States Military Academy is prepared to restore historical names, artifacts, and assets to their original form and place,” said Rebecca Hodson, the Army’s communications director. “Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it — we don’t erase it.”

Both President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been outspoken in their desire to restore Confederate names and monuments that were removed over the last five years. Mr. Hegseth recently called for returning a memorial to the Confederacy that was removed from Arlington National Cemetery at the recommendation of Congress. In a social media post this month, Mr. Hegseth said the Arlington statue “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings.”

Earlier this summer, Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth restored the names of Confederate generals to the Army’s bases, but with a twist seemingly designed to avoid running afoul of the 2020 law. Mr. Hegseth and his staff found obscure soldiers who served honorably and shared a last name with the Confederate generals.

Rather than simply reinstate the name of General Lee to an Army base in Virginia, the Pentagon honored Pvt. Fitz Lee, a Black soldier who fought in the Spanish-American War. In the case of Fort Bragg, named for Braxton Bragg, an incompetent Confederate general, Mr. Hegseth celebrated Pvt. Roland L. Bragg, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II.

The naming commission’s initial order to remove General Lee’s portrait was complicated by the general’s long history with the Army and the academy. General Lee graduated near the top of his West Point class and served as the academy’s superintendent from 1852 to 1855. His name and likeness were all over the campus.

The commission decided that portraits of General Lee in his blue Army uniform should remain. But the divisive painting of General Lee in his Confederate gray uniform was hauled away. The commission also recommended that West Point’s Lee Barracks, Lee Road, Lee Gate, Lee Housing Area and Lee Area Child Development Center all be renamed.

Categories Censorship, Ethics, History

Trump Celebrates Labor Day by Terminating Unions at More Federal Agencies

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2025 //
2

Happy Labor Day!

This is a day to thank working people for their contributions to our society. It’s a day to thank unions for providing a path to the middle class to help those who need pensions, decent wages, and job security.

Trump is celebrating Labor Day by banning unions at several federal agencies.

Government Executive reports:

President Trump on Thursday signed a new executive order targeting unions at more than half a dozen agencies, again under the auspices of national security.

The edict, which was published within minutes of Trump’s proclamation marking Monday’s Labor Day holiday, appends a March edict that seeks to outlaw collective bargaining for two-thirds of the federal workforce, citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act allowing the president to exclude agencies from federal labor law if the law “cannot be applied to that agency or subdivision in a manner consistent with national security requirements.”

Thursday’s order would ban collective bargaining at the International Trade Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office within the Commerce Department; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service and the National Weather Service; as well as NASA and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It states that all these agencies “have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work.”

Matt Biggs, national president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, whose union represents a portion of NASA’s workforce along with the American Federation of Government Employees, suggested that the administration’s targeting of NASA—IFPTE’s largest union—was in retaliation for its own lawsuit challenging the Spring iteration of the executive order, filed last month.

“It’s not surprising, sadly,” Biggs said. “What is surprising is that on the eve of Labor Day weekend, when workers are to be celebrated, the Trump administration has doubled down on being the most anti-labor, anti-worker administration in U.S. history. We will continue to fight in the courts, on the Hill and at the grassroots levels against this.”

Categories Trump, Unions

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker: “Leave Chicago Alone”

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2025 //
8

Governor JB Pritzker gave a lesson in bold resistance when he gave a clear, bold message to Trump: Stay away from Chicago. We don’t want you, we don’t need you. If you have to send troops anywhere, send them to red states, where the crime rate is higher than blue states.

Categories Chicago, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, History, Illinois, Resistance, Trump

Amos Schocken: A Two-State Solution Is the Only Path to Peace in the Middle East

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2025 //
29

Amos Schocken is the publisher of Haaretz, an Israeli publication founded by his grandfather, who was a publisher and founder of a chain of department stores in Germany who left for Palestine in 1934. His father edited Haaretz for 50 years and served in the Knesset.

He wrote the following editorial, which was titled “A Palestinian State Would Rescue Israel. It Would Not Be a Reward for Hamas.”

He began:

The Netanyahu government is already perpetrating a Nakba against the Palestinians of the West Bank, and is planning to inflict another on the Palestinians of Gaza. It’s time to end the disaster that the settlement movement has inflicted on Israel, end the war and establish a Palestinian state.

It’s now clear what plan Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir are following: A Nakba for all the Gaza Strip’s Palestinian residents. The Netanyahu government seeks to throw all the Palestinians out of their homes and pack them into a section of southern Gaza in inhumane conditions. It’s also looking for countries willing to take them in.

The government is already perpetrating a Nakba against the Palestinian residents of the occupied territory in the West Bank, via the settlers and the army. They’re throwing Palestinians out of their homes, perhaps with the goal of concentrating them all in Area A, the part of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords assigned to full Palestinian control.

The flip side of these Nakbas is annexing the territory and building Israeli settlements in all the areas cleared of Palestinians. This violates international law and the United Nations Charter, which states that territory may not be acquired through war, even a victorious war. It’s hard to see how, once the government’s plan is implemented, it will be possible to live in Israel.

Normal life in Israel can only exist if the 100-year war with the Palestinians ends. And today, it’s accepted around the world, including in the Arab world, that this war should end with the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The New York Declaration – the concluding statement of last month’s conference at UN headquarters in New York, led by France and Saudi Arabia with many other countries taking part – is the basis for ending the conflict.

The declaration states that the participants “agreed to take collective action to end the war in Gaza, to achieve a just, peaceful and lasting settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the effective implementation of the two-state solution, and to build a better future for Palestinians, Israelis and all peoples of the region.

It adds: “Recent developments have highlighted, once again, and more than ever, the terrifying human toll and the grave implications for regional and international peace and security of the persistence of the Middle East conflict. Absent decisive measures towards the two-state solution and robust international guarantees, the conflict will deepen and regional peace will remain elusive.”

Turkey’s representative at the conference said that given Israel’s conduct over decades, Palestinian militant organizations will not give up their arms without the establishment of an independent, sovereign, contiguous Palestinian state in the 1967 boundaries with East Jerusalem as its capital, or pursuant to the provisions of a peace treaty.

The final statement was approved by France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Norway, Qatar, Senegal, Spain, Britain, the European Union and the Arab League.

The declaration calls for an immediate end to Israel’s war in Gaza and backs the efforts by Egypt, Qatar and the United States to mediate a cease-fire deal between the parties. It stresses the need for a cease-fire, the return of all the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. After the cease-fire, a temporary committee will be set up to run Gaza under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.

The declaration says Gaza is an integral part of the Palestinian state and must be united with the West Bank. It adds that governance, law enforcement and security throughout this state will rest exclusively with the Palestinian Authority, backed by international support. It welcomes the PA’s call for “one state, one government, one law, one gun” and pledges to support this.

The declaration also adopts the conference participants’ proposals for full cooperation with the cases against Israel being conducted at international courts.

Israel’s leaders claim that recognizing a Palestinian state would reward Hamas for its attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. But this wouldn’t be a reward for Hamas, because Hamas is like Smotrich but in reverse: It opposes the existence of a Jewish state in the region.

If anything, a Palestinian state would be a reward for Israel, which would be freed of the brutal apartheid regime over the Palestinians that Israeli governments, always serving the interests of the Gush Emunim settlement movement, have carried out in the occupied territories for 58 years now. Palestinian terror is the result of the situation that Israeli settlements created in the territories. And despite an occupying power’s obligation to enable residents of occupied territory to live normal lives, Israel has done the opposite, heaping abuse on the Palestinians.

Fourteen years ago, in November 2011, I published an op-ed in Haaretz, “The Necessary Elimination of Israeli Democracy.” I quoted a speech to the Knesset by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in January 1993.

“Our assessment is that Iran today has the appropriate manpower and sufficient resources to acquire nuclear arms within 10 years,” Rabin said. “Together with others in the international community, we are monitoring Iran’s nuclear activity. They are not concealing the fact that the possibility that Iran will possess nuclear weapons is worrisome, and this is one of the reasons that we must take advantage of the window of opportunity and advance toward peace.”

With a state, security cooperation with the PA will only grow stronger, and there will be no reason for terrorism. 

I said that Israel had adopted a political strategy whose implementation began with the Oslo Accords. This included ending the preferences given the settlement movement and improving the treatment of Israel’s Arab citizens. And if things had developed differently, I wrote, the Iran situation might look different today. But this strategy clashed with a stronger ideology – that of Gush Emunim.

That ideology saw the Six-Day War as a continuation of the War of Independence. It held that the borders acquired in the 1967 war are the right ones for Israel, and it imposed a hard-line policy on the Palestinians in the occupied territories based on depriving them of rights, installing apartheid and encouraging them to leave.

This is an ideology driven by religious rather than political concerns, and it assumes that the Land of Israel belongs exclusively to the Jews. Because of this, Israel’s Arab citizens are also exposed to discrimination and the risk of being stripped of their citizenship. This ideology has no problem with criminal acts because it rests on what it deems a higher law that lacks a connection to either Israeli or international law. That’s how it led to Rabin’s murder.

I said in that piece that since 1967, no group in Israel has had as much ideological power as Gush Emunim, which has also gained American support and influenced the legislation aimed at undermining the Supreme Court and human rights groups. I warned that this unstable, dangerous situation prevents Israel from realizing its full potential and could lead to the collapse of the peace agreement with Egypt, a third intifada and Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, just as Rabin warned.

Today, the time has come to finally end the disaster that Gush Emunim and the settlement movement have brought down on Israel by denying it the possibility of agreeing to a Palestinian state and requiring it to fight the Palestinians, who, just like the Jews, still want sovereignty, independence and responsibility for their own fate and national honor.

One argument made against establishing a Palestinian state is that it will threaten Israel’s security. For instance, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s previous UN ambassador, considers such a state an immediate existential threat to Israel. “Any area in the hills of Judea and Samaria that is handed over could be used tomorrow morning as a zero-distance base for launching missiles and ground invasions that would threaten the heart of the country,” he wrote in the Israel Hayom daily on June 29. 

But this is a ludicrous claim. The Palestinian state will be demilitarized, the existing security cooperation between the PA and Israel will only grow stronger, and when the Palestinians become citizens of their own country – and we have to assume that the connection with Israel will give them certain advantages – there will be no reason for terrorism, only for good relations.

If Netanyahu understood the blow that October 7 was to his policy, he would opt for a state led by the PA, which Hamas hates. 

Netanyahu has consistently opposed any involvement by the PA in resolving the situation in Gaza, contrary to the New York Declaration, which views such involvement favorably. He has two arguments. One is that the PA supports terror – a false claim, since Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said explicitly at his inauguration that he opposes violence and will pursue diplomacy only. The second argument is that the PA education system promotes hostility to Israel.

The PA is convenient for Israel’s government because if Israel were responsible for the 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, it would need an enormous budget. And Netanyahu’s complaints about the PA education system are utterly hypocritical.

First, he never sought a meeting with Abbas in an effort to fix the things he doesn’t like about the PA. And have you ever heard Netanyahu talk about the education of the “hilltop youth” or other settlers who abuse Palestinians in the service of the government’s interests? Haaretz has reported on their violent actions nonstop, but that doesn’t interest Netanyahu.

Or have you ever heard him urge his Knesset colleagues to do what should be obvious in any democracy? That is, leave prominent Arab Israeli lawmaker Ayman Odeh alone, because his presence in the Knesset is important to Israel. No, Netanyahu hasn’t done that either. So he has no grounds to complain about the Palestinians’ education.

How did we get here? The answer is clear: Netanyahu is spearheading a policy that is dangerous to Israel’s future and to its citizens, who are the victims of the ongoing Palestinian terror and are now loathed by many people around the world. His policy is also dangerous to the Jewish people, who are suffering from rising antisemitism due to the death and destruction in Gaza. The policy he has implemented throughout his terms as prime minister completely ignores the Palestinians’ aspirations for self-determination and political independence.

Netanyahu has supported the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers, who continue to do as they please with the country. No decent person would dare form a government with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, extremist settlers who hate Arabs. But Netanyahu’s government guidelines with them say that only Jews have rights throughout the Land of Israel. In this way, too, he invited the October 7 attack. Nor would any decent person facing charges in court dare assault the legal system the way he has.

Netanyahu shamelessly continues to postpone any discussion of postwar arrangements. If he were smart and understood that October 7 was a decisive blow to his policy of ignoring Palestinian interests, he would have decided on his own to establish a Palestinian state led by the PA – which Hamas hates – enshrined in suitable agreements. If he had decided on this quickly, it would have spared the lives of many Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.

In January 2024, I published an op-ed in Haaretz saying that Israel would win if it got all the hostages back – even in exchange for Palestinian prisoners – and agreed to then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s stance favoring the establishment of a Palestinian state. A month later, I reiterated this in an op-ed whose headline called for a return of the hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

In response to Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations in September 2024, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi held a press conference at the UN with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa. Safadi said that “all of us in the Arab world here, we want a peace in which Israel lives in peace and security … in the context of ending the occupation, withdrawing from Arab territory, allowing for the emergence of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 lines. … That’s our narrative.”

He continued: “After 30 years of efforts to convince people that peace is possible, this Israeli government killed it. … We want peace, and we have laid out a plan for peace. Ask any Israeli official, what is their plan for peace? You will get nothing because they are only thinking of the first step – we are going to go and destroy Gaza, inflame the West Bank, destroy Lebanon. … We have no partner for peace in Israel.”

The past 30 years have largely been Netanyahu’s watch. And he has brought disaster down on Israel.

Categories Education Reform
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