8-Year-Old Boy Starved and Beaten to Death. His Mother Allegedly Was Home-Schooling Him.

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2026 //
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This is one of the most horrifying stories of child abuse that I have ever read.

The parents of 8-year-old Isaiah Harrison thought he was too fat. The child was about 200 pounds. They kept him home from school, starved him, beat him, tortured him. When he died, they wrapped him in Saran Wrap and put his body in a freezer. At the time of his death, he weighed 65 pounds.

His mother claimed she was home-schooling him online. County officials and school officials failed to check on his condition.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

Pictures of Isaiah Harrison from 2024 show a bubbly, heavyset boy with a toothy smile and full cheeks.

Isaiah’s aunt, Charlene, said in court this week that her 8-year-old nephew was mischievous, often sneaking food in the middle of the night. He loved Domino’s pizza, video games and cats. Sometimes he would hide snacks in his family’s couch cushions…

By the time Isaiah’s remains were found inside a small freezer in his parents’ bedroom last October, he weighed just 65 pounds, according to L.A. County Deputy Medical Examiner Robin Parks. In 12 months, she estimated, he’d lost two-thirds of his body weight.

Prosecutors allege Isaiah’s rapid weight loss and mounting injuries happened over the course of a year inside a Lynwood apartment, when the boy was rarely seen in public and often kept chained to a piece of furniture, according to testimony delivered this week at a preliminary hearing on murder and torture charges against his parents and grandmother.

How he was able to waste away without anyone — including school officials or the county’s child welfare agency — raising alarms remains an unanswered question….

The boy’s parents — Destiny Harrison and Daniel Monzon, both 25 — and his grandmother Ana Carcamo-Zarceno, 46, were arrested after the boy’s body was found last year. They were held to answer on murder and torture charges Thursday after a four-day preliminary hearing in Compton, and face either life in prison or the death penalty if convicted at trial. They have pleaded not guilty…

Coroner’s records list Isaiah’s cause of death as a bacterial infection resulting from pneumonia, but other significant factors included blunt force trauma injuries and the impacts of long-term restraint. Monzon’s younger sister, who lived in the apartment, told a social worker that the defendants often restrained Isaiah with ropes and chains to prevent him from misbehaving or going into the kitchen for food, according to a videotaped interview played in court.
She said in the recording that it was Carcamo-Zarceno’s idea to withhold meals as a punishment, often denying food over Isaiah’s tearful pleas.
“Please, please I just want something, I’ll do anything,” the hungry 8-year-old boy would beg, according to his sister, whose identity The Times is withholding because she is a juvenile.
Often, his sister said, Isaiah was kept chained up overnight as punishment and left to urinate or defecate on himself. Rather than washing his clothes, Isaiah’s parents would throw them out whenever he soiled himself, according to his sister, who said eventually the boy was left to sleep naked while restrained.
Sheriff’s deputies later recovered a long rope and a black chain in the apartment, authorities have said. Isaiah’s sister testified that the boy was repeatedly punched, kicked and beat with hangers and wires….

The complaint accused L.A. County’s child protective services agency of failing to investigate the home “despite numerous alarming reports of abuse and cruelty.”
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Isaiah’s relatives, also alleges the Lynwood Unified School District failed to investigate his alleged repeated absence from the classroom. Claypool alleged that two family members had told the school that Isaiah was at home and not able to go to school.
“That should have been a massive red flag to Lynwood that something is not right with Isaiah and he might be in danger,” said Claypool, who argued the warnings should have launched an investigation under California law. “Is he going somewhere else? Is there a problem at home? Is he sick or ill? None of that was done here.”
Relatives said Destiny Harrison was home-schooling Isaiah with a computer program. The school district did not respond to a request for comment. An attorney for Lynwood Unified argued in a court filing that the lawsuit failed to specify who within the district had reasonable suspicion of child abuse and would be considered a mandated reporter under the law.

Categories California, Childhood, Evil, Health, Home Schooling, Parents

Jan Resseger: What Ohio’s New School Grades Tell Us: It’s Better to be Rich!

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2026 //
0

The fabulous cabaret singer Sophie Tucker, well known in the mid-20th century, said: “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better.”

If children have any say in the matter (they don’t), they should arrange to be born to a rich family. They would get regular medical care, nutritious meals, live in nice houses in safe neighborhoods. And their schools would get high ratings!

Jan Resseger writes about how schools in Ohio (and everywhere else) get high test scores:

Here is this morning’s post with new analysis added today from the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s data wonk, Rich Exner, on the meaning of Ohio’s 2026 School Report Cards.

Please do read Exner’s analysis published this afternoon.

Leading with a bar graph correlating the Census Bureau child poverty rate with Ohio school districts’ overall school report card rankings, Exner demonstrates that, once again in 2026, Ohio’s ratings of the state’s public school districts on the annual state report card correlate with school districts’ aggregate family income and other factors known to contribute to opportunity gaps.  The Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce (Ohio DEW) rates and ranks Ohio school districts based on standardized test scores along with several other factors the state now considers such as graduation rates and the amount of chronic absence among students.

Exner writes: “The 2026 Ohio school report cards released this week not only provided a snapshot of each school district, but they also once again drove home the point that wealthier districts usually do better, a cleveland.com analysis found. Perhaps the relationship is no clearer than in comparing districtwide child poverty rates from the Census Bureau to the overall star ratings issued by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Five-star districts, on average, have a child poverty rate of 6.1%, whereas schools scoring on the low-end with just two stars are nearly six times worse off for child poverty, at 35.1%, cleveland.com found.  The trend holds true at each step between, with child poverty averaging 8.5% for 4.5-star districts, 12.8% for four-star districts, 15.6% for 3.5-star districts, 23% for three-star districts and 30.1% for 2.5-star districts.”

Children’s test scores also correlate with related factors. For example, “Within the districts receiving two stars, just 15.6% of the adults age 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or above. In the five-star districts, the rate is more than three times as high, at 48.5%.”

Exner examines the correlation of a each school district’s aggregate child poverty rate and the percentage of adults with a B.A. or above with the state’s overall ratings, and with rankings in each of the subcategories the state considers: school achievement as measured by test scores; progress; gap closing; graduation rates; early literacy; and college, career workforce, and military readiness.  In each case he confirms the years-long trend correlating the state’s ratings of public schools with socioeconomic factors.

—– Here is the original post published this morning —–

What Ohio’s New School Report Cards Really Mean

Earlier this week, the Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce (Ohio DEW) released state report cards for each Ohio school district and every one of the state’s traditional public schools and charter schools. The Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock reports: “Overall, English and math scores inched up statewide. The rate of chronic absenteeism inched downward and remains far from the state’s goal.”

A follow-up from Plain Dealer reporter Rich Exner lists Ohio’s top scoring schools: “Solon was among three Cuyahoga County districts scoring in the top five, and among 10 from the Greater Cleveland area in the top 25 statewide… Following Solon at the top of the list, in order, were Marion schools from western Ohio’s Mercer County, Chagrin Falls, Mariemont from outside Cincinnati, and Rocky River.”  The three greater Cleveland districts in that list are Solon, Chagrin Falls and Rocky River, all upper-income suburbs.

Although Ohio DEW releases the school district report cards every fall with lots of hoopla as a kind of race with clear winners and losers, the causes of disparities in standardized test scores from school to school and district to district are far more complicated. Aggregate standardized test scores for any school or any school district are primarily shaped by one set of variables that are rarely named: family income and the overall income of the community.  The standardized test score ranking is, in reality, a measure of economic privilege.

For years now, Rich Exner, the Plain Dealer’s data wonk, has followed up the state’s release of the state report cards with a far more nuanced analysis.  In 2019, Exner presented a set of bar graphs demonstrating the following: “The latest set of Ohio school report cards not only provided a scorecard for each district statewide – they once again drove home the point that wealthier districts do better on such reports… To get an idea of how closely report card grades from the Ohio Department of Education follow demographic factors, cleveland.com (The Plain Dealer) compared those grades to U.S. Census Bureau community data for household income, child poverty and the education level of the adults.  In nearly every key report card category, the trends followed census data closely.” I include one of Exner’s 2019 bar graphs depicting the correlation of Ohio state school report card rankings with family income.

Again last year, in 2025, when Ohio released the state school report cards, Exner reported the same pattern. While he notes a tiny number of encouraging exceptions when impoverished school districts made impressive test score gains, Exner explains: “For probably as long as the state has been issuing school report cards, one trend has held true – wealthier districts score better. Take this year when the richest 14 districts in the state based on the income of their residents all scored the highest available overall grade – five stars – on the new report cards.”  And he explains further: “Income, of course, is not the only measure tied to the trends. Where incomes are higher, this often increases the likelihood that parents in the districts have college degrees, or the existence of two-parent households, with two incomes. And there are other factors that raise challenges for individual school districts.”

Decades of Research Confirm the Trend Exner Identifies

The late professor of education and former president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Division of Educational Psychology at the American Psychological Association (APA), David Berliner explained: “The big problems of American education are not in America’s schools… It’s neither this nations’ teachers nor its curriculum that impede the achievement of our children. The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are often families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education.”

In Ohio, Douglas Downey, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University describes academic research showing that evaluating public schools based on standardized test scores is unfair to educators and misleading to the public. In a 2019 book, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong, Downey explains: “It turns out that gaps in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children are largely formed prior to kindergarten entry and then do not grow appreciably when children are in school.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 9) “Much of the ‘action’ of inequality therefore occurs very early in life… In addition to the fact that achievement gaps are primarily formed in early childhood, there is another reason to believe that schools are not as responsible for inequality as many think. It turns out that when children are in school during the nine-month academic year, achievement gaps are rather stable. Indeed, sometimes we even observe that socioeconomic gaps grow more slowly during school periods than during summers.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 28)

In 2017, Katherine Michelmore of Syracuse University and Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan studied data from Michigan to identify the role of economic disadvantage in achievement gaps as measured by test scores: “We use administrative data from Michigan to develop a… detailed measure of economic disadvantage… Children who spend all of their school years eligible for subsidized meals have the lowest scores, whereas those who are never eligible have the highest. In eighth grade, the score gap between these two groups is nearly a standard deviation.” “Sixty percent of Michigan’s eighth graders were eligible for subsidized lunch at least once during their time in public schools. But just a quarter of these children (14% of all eighth graders) were economically disadvantaged in every year between kindergarten and eighth grade… Ninety percent of the test score gap we observe in eighth grade between the persistently disadvantaged and the never disadvantaged is present by third grade.”

In 2011, Stanford University educational sociologist, Sean Reardon reported on growing residential segregation by income—which correlates with segregation by race. Reardon used a massive data set to document the consequences of widening economic inequality for children’s outcomes at school. Reardon showed that while in 1970, only 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods classified as affluent or poor, by 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods. By 2007, fewer families across America lived in mixed income communities. Reardon also demonstratedthat along with growing residential inequality and residential segregation by income is a simultaneous jump in an income-inequality school test score gap. The gap between the children with income in the top ten percent and the children with income in the bottom ten percent, was 30-40 percent wider among children born in 2001 than those born in 1975, and twice as large as the black-white test score gap.

Then in 2016, Reardon documented: “The socioeconomic profile of a district is a powerful predictor of the average test score performance of students in that district.” “The most and least socioeconomically advantaged districts have average performance levels more than four grade levels apart. Average test scores of black students are, on average, roughly two grade levels lower than those of white students in the same district; the Hispanic-white difference is roughly one-and-a-half grade levels. Achievement gaps are larger in districts where black and Hispanic students attend higher poverty schools than their white peers… and where large racial/ethnic gaps exist in parents’ educational attainment.  The size of the gaps has little or no association with average class size, a district’s per capita student spending or charter school enrollment.”

In 2022, Reardon commented on the factors that contribute to opportunity gaps: “We examine… test score gaps because they reflect… differences in access to educational opportunities. By ‘educational opportunities,’ we mean all experiences in a child’s life, from birth onward, that provide opportunities for her to learn, including experiences in children’s homes, child care settings, neighborhoods, peer groups, and their schools. This implies that test score gaps may result from unequal opportunities either in or out of school; they are not necessarily the result of differences in school quality, resources, or experience. Moreover, in saying that test score gaps reflect differences in opportunities, we also mean that they are not the result of innate group differences in cognitive skills or other genetic endowments… (D)ifferences in average scores should be understood as reflecting opportunity gaps….”

When standardized test scores are aggregated and compared from school district to school district, the disparities reflect economic inequality as well as economic segregation across U.S. school districts. Although in a smaller town a school district’s aggregate test scores may reflect the economic range of a diverse community, in any metropolitan area, some schools are filled with rich kids, while others are filled with poor kids.  And more important, test scores do not present any picture of what is happening in anybody’s schools. They don’t tell us anything about the richness of the curriculum or the extracurricular offerings for enrichment.  They don’t tell us anything about how teachers work with students or whether students come to love learning.

Categories Accountability, Health, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Medicine, Ohio, Standardized Testing

Is It 1950 Again? Provost at University of Texas-Austin Removes Majors in All Ethnic, Racial, and Gender Studies.

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2026 //
2

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a professor of educational leadership at Western Michigan University. As a writer and scholar in Texas, California, Kentucky, and now Michigan, he has concentrated on issues of equity, inclusion, and diversity.

He writes here about the current drive to turn back the clock on civil rights in Texas. To put it mildly, he eviscerates the decision by the Provost at the University of Texas in Austin to close down

He writes:

Is the provost at UT-Austin a right wing political operative?

The University of Texas at Austin is eliminating majors in African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Race, Indigeneity, and Migration. These are not abstract academic labels. They represent the histories, intellectual traditions, and lived experiences of communities that built Texas and continue to shape the nation.

The manner in which this happened is almost as disturbing as the decision itself. Faculty members reportedly were asked to design proposals to preserve the existing majors inside the provost-initiatives consolidated Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, but the Daily Texan reported that Office of the Provost rejected that proposal. According to Professor Danielle Pilar Clealand, interim chair, faculty then discovered that the majors had already been removed from the admissions application while they were still working to redesign and save them.

That is not shared governance. It is administrative maneuvering designed to make consultation meaningless.

Vasquez Heilig explains that Provost William Inboden was imported in 2025, along with several professors from the University of Florida’s Alexander Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, which was part of a rightwing effort to increase the conservative movement in higher education. Inboden was director of the Institute.

Vasquez Heilig points out:

I have not seen evidence of a formal numerical quota for conservative professors. But when public resources build institutions expressly promoted as ideological counterweights, while programs studying marginalized communities are dismantled, the result resembles an ideological preference whether administrators call it an official quota or not. Political favoritism that overwhelms qualifications does not become academic freedom simply because its supporters describe themselves as restoring balance

He has faced the pressure from the right at his own university and paid the price personally:

I have discussed before that when I served as provost at Western Michigan University, I faced pressure to close Gender and Women’s Studies. The Faculty Senate recommended against closure, and I agreed with the faculty despite intense internal pressure to do otherwise. I paid a political price, and I would make the same decision again.

I also advocated for Black student success and community-centered initiatives while several deans complained about and opposed those efforts. Those complaints had consequences for me, but leadership without risk is merely management. If leaders support marginalized communities only when nobody powerful objects, they do not truly support those communities.

As provost, I said no to closing Gender and Women’s Studies because the university did not belong to me or to the loudest administrators around the cabinet table. It belonged to the students, faculty, staff, alumni, and communities whose labor, knowledge, and trust gave the institution meaning.

We must be of the people because the people are the institution. Buildings, endowments, rankings, and administrative titles are empty without them.

Please open the link and learn how pressure from wealthy alumni is reshaping higher education in states like Texas.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Texas

Why Did Russian Oligarch Foot the Bill for Don Jr.’s Lavish Wedding?

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2026 //
6

You have heard the story by now. Donald Trump Jr. staged a lavish wedding on two small private islands in the Caribbean. Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch, paid for a substantial share of the costs. Why? Donnie says he’s a good friend but his brother Eric never heard of this friend.

Why would Don Jr., a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, rely upon his Russian buddy to pay a large chunk of the costs? Why couldn’t Donnie pay for his own wedding?

The invaluable Pro Publica had the story first.

Who is Umar Kremlev?

ProPublica explained:

In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.

He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin leans into a conversation with Umar Kremlev.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, with Umar Kremlev, during an event in Moscow in September 2022SPUTNIK/REUTERS

In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.

In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.

Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.

In a subsequent post, ProPublica explained how it covered the story.

When reporters asked Donald Trump Sr. about this story, he said that Donnie intended to pay the Russian oligarch back.

Don’t people always return their wedding gifts?

Categories Corruption, Ethics, Scandals

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Is Belligerent at the UN. The Secretary-General Has a Different Vision.

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2026 //
2

Trump humiliated himself and our country by his belligerent speech at the United Nations today. He offered a choice to Iran: either make a deal or I will annihilate you. Richardson points out that the animating vision of the UN is a world in which words replace wars, in which diplomacy replaces coercion. Trump doesn’t get it.

Instead, he displayed his idea of “the art of the deal”: do what I say or I will bludgeon you, destroy you, exterminate you.

There is one good thing about his nutty ban on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. All the other networks refuse to post videos of him

Speaking. That’s a relief for those of us who hate the sound of his whiny voice and know that most of the time he is either boasting or lying. personally, I hope this ban lasts a while longer. By the way, the Justice Departnebt said yesterday that Trump was justified in banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico as a matter of “national security.”

Richardson wrote:

In 1945, still reeling from World War II, representatives from 50 nations reached back to the U.S. Constitution when they wrote the Preamble to the United Nations charter. “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” were, they wrote, “DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.”

Central to that effort was the principle, stated in Article 2, that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

The U.N. General Assembly has been meeting in New York City since September 8, and today began its high-level General Debate, the annual meeting of the heads of state and heads of government that launches the General Assembly session. At the General Debate, all 193 U.N. member states are invited to address the General Assembly.

By tradition, Brazil speaks first because it was the first to volunteer to speak in 1955 when no other country would. Because the United States is the country that hosts the United Nations, it usually speaks second.

In his speech today, President Donald J. Trump, reading haltingly off a teleprompter, said: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”

Much of the Iranian delegation walked out.

Trump’s immediate switch to a talking point about the midterms suggests that his speech was aimed at U.S. voters more than the U.N. audience, but it should not be overlooked that he stood in front of world leaders and rejected the premise of the U.N.

Touting his own “Board of Peace” and continuing his fiction that he has solved multiple wars, he outlined a fantasy worldview of himself as a powerful dictator, a man of action who rejects the diplomacy at the heart of the U.N.

“I do not believe in letting problems fester,” he declared. “They only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world.”

Rejecting the principles on which the U.N. was founded, Trump instead embraced the idea that powerful countries will have spheres of influence, dominating their neighbors. This is the worldview advanced by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who seeks to have control over the decisions made by the countries around Russia, including Ukraine. In this worldview, as Trump sees it, the United States will control the western hemisphere.

“To the victor belong the spoils,” he told the U.N. in a perverse echo of the world the U.N. founders set out to change. “You’ve all heard that.”

Trump threatened Mexico and boasted of U.S. attacks on Venezuela that removed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez, who was willing to work with the Trump administration to allow the U.S. access to Venezuelan oil fields.

“Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.”

“My administration is also seeking a fundamental change in the situation in Cuba,” Trump said, “where the communist regime is under great pressure, the biggest pressure they’ve ever been under. It’s an absolutely failed state. It’s failing like never before and it will fall. Marco Rubio is handling a negotiation. He’s deep into negotiations with Cuba. Let’s see what happens.”

The Cuban delegation walked out.

In an echo of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump went full white nationalist, accusing the “U.N.’s top human rights officials” of wanting the U.S. “to open up our borders to gangs and criminals from [the] world’s most dangerous places…. It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries devoted to protecting cultural heritage. Yet with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history. There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation, and we want to remain a sovereign nation and so should you.”

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the former prime minister of Portugal, asked the nations of the world to hold fast to a different vision.

He warned that “we are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” whose “reach now extends across politics, economies, information flows, technological development, and the civic space on which societies depend.”

“At the very moment when humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of threats, our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain.”

There are two routes open, Guterres said. Either the world will fragment into “transactionalism,” “rising tensions and deepening mistrust,” “fractured markets and weakened institutions,” “shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations,” or it will move toward “networked multipolarity,” a “world built on interdependence—and sustained by a dense web of economic, political, social, and technological connections. A world in which multiple centres of influence coexist within a common framework of international law and shared rules.”

Against the backdrop of Russia’s debacle in Ukraine and the U.S. morass in Iran, Guterres noted that the world’s superpowers have learned that “their power isn’t so super. That their power has limits.”

He urged countries to hold fast to the principles of the United Nations: “The primacy of international law. Upholding human dignity. And the pursuit of justice in all its dimensions.”

“It comes down to this,” he said, “Will we act to ensure that power is governed by law or by force? By cooperation or coercion?”

Force must not “be the final arbiter of whose lives, rights, and future matter,” he said.

He called out the war in Iran and conflicts in the Middle East; Israel’s onslaught on the Palestinians in Gaza “with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General”; “violence, displacement and settlement expansion by Israel in the Occupied West Bank”; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in violation of the U.N. charter; the war on civilians in Sudan, with millions displaced; and escalating violence in Myanmar.

Guterres added that “[n]o discussion of inequality can ignore its most universal form: The inequality between men and women. Everywhere, women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion, and abuse. Around the world: Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds. And their freedoms treated as bargaining chips.

“This is an outrage—and a profound waste for humanity. Peace is more durable when women are at the table. Economies are more dynamic when women have equal opportunity. Societies are more resilient when girls can learn, lead, and live free from fear. And institutions are more effective when power is shared equally.”

“Equality is not a dream,” Guterres said. “It is a decision.”

“Excellencies,” he said, “The test before us is whether power will be exercised with the law—or beyond it.”

“In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago,” Guterres said, “the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together.

“The defiance of hope.”

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Gender, Injustice, International, Lies, Trump

On Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Disappointment in the Public Schools She Chose for Her Daughter

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2026 //
4

A decade ago, superstar journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the cover story of the New York Times Magazine about her decision to send her daughter to a local public school, which was segregated and enrolled a large proportion of low-income students, instead of choosing a high-performing public school, a charter school, or an elite private school.

Last Sunday, she wrote a long story in the same magazine admitting that she was wrong ten years ago. She admitted that she and her husband had made a mistake by pressing their views on their daughter.

Their child was disappointed by the low standards and expectations, the indifferent teachers, and the general disorganization of the school her mother chose. Eventually, her daughter was allowed to choose her high school, and she picked one with high standards and academic challenges. Her elementary and middle schools were segregated Black; her high-performing high school is largely white and probably Asian.

Jones quite rightly complains about the intensification of school segregation in the decades since the federal courts abandoned their commitment to desegregated schools. She is right. The nation turned its back on school integration, in large part because whites opposed it and left cities that tried to integrate their schools. They moved to the suburbs, many or most motivated by their desire to escape school integration.

Numerous studies have documented the positive effects of racial integration, but white parents move out. They leave to avoid the kind of schools that Hannah-Jones’ daughter didn’t like, and by leaving, create many more such schools.

Of the nearly one million students in the NYC school system about 16% are white, 42% are Hispanic, 19% are Black. Almost 19% are Asian. 2% are multiracial. About 1% are Native Americans.

This is a key, unmentioned fact in Jones’ compelling article: only 16% of the students in New York City’s public schools are white. Physically and logistically, it is hard to imagine how the schools can be integrated when there is such a small proportion of whites.

She quite rightly complains about the school system’s tolerance of incompetent administrators and inferior curriculum in many of the city’s segregated Black schools. Black students like her daughter can gain acceptance into high-performing integrated schools, but there is no obvious path to integration for the very large number of schools where the student body is Black and Hispanic and impoverished.

Peter Greene wrote a thoughtful column about Jones’s article and the reactions to it. The usual public school haters loved it. They overlooked the fact that when Hannah-Jones urged her daughter to make her own choice, her only condition was that she had to choose a public school. She did and it is an excellent school.

Please read Peter’s reflections.

Categories New York City, School Choice

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Vs. the First Amendment

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
9

Donald Trump has always hated the media except for those who treated him as a Sun-God. He has always said that he was treated unfairly because the press write things about him that he didn’t like, things that acknowledged his bankruptcies, his failed businesses, his womanizing.

From the time he launched his bid for the presidency, he has made clear his contempt for journalists. If they don’t praise him nonstop, they are “the enemy of the people.” Since his election, he has insulted journalists and the media. They are “Fake News,” they undermine the security of the nation by not praising him. He thinks he IS the nation, so he deserves adulation and exemption from criticism.

Heather Cox Richardson shows how he has again painted himself into a corner. He is already planning to appeal a judgment that will surely go against him, rendered by a judge he appointed in 2017.

She writes:

On September 18, while White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, Trump suddenly announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose deep unpopularity means he is likely eager to curry favor with Trump, promptly posted that the Defense Department fully supported Trump’s decision. He claimed that the same outlets, which recently have reported that Russia has been helping Iran target U.S. troops and that the Defense Department has not fully accounted for deaths of servicemembers or destruction of U.S. military bases, “endangered our troops with false stories, leaks, and trafficked in fiction and lies about the President, our Warriors, and their mission.”

The next day, reporters from those outlets attempting to enter the White House complex where the press facilities are located were denied entry, and Secret Service agents confiscated their press badges.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted an image of three full black trash bags, labeled “CNN,” “MSNBC,” and “Politico,” outside the White House.

This morning, after the weekend’s backlash, he posted: “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

There’s that “national security” claim again: the same justification he’s using for building his ballroom and now his triumphal arch. It is also, not coincidentally, the excuse President Richard M. Nixon floated for covering up the Watergate break-in in June 1972.

In any case, no one’s buying it. MAGA Republicans have tried to claim that President Joe Biden cancelled 400 press passes. In fact, in 2023 the Biden administration tightened the rules to get a “hard” press pass that allows repeated, unaccompanied access to the press area of the White House. To have one, a reporter had to renew it annually, be employed full-time as a reporter, have a Washington, D.C., area address, and have had recent access to the White House. With that change, the number of White House hard passes fell from 1,417 to 975 because many of those who held passes didn’t reapply. Those people could still get day passes. In any event, these changes regarded individual reporters, not entire media outlets.

The Biden White House did not identify the one journalist whose hard pass application was denied.

Today CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued Trump, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung, Secret Service director Sean Curran, and White House chief of staff Wiles for violating both the Fifth and the First Amendments. “This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the lawsuit says. It says Trump banned the outlets and the reporters to retaliate against the reporters for their past news coverage “because he deemed it ‘negative’ and chilling future reporting about him and his administration’s policies and actions.”

They are suing for the restoration of their press credentials for their coverage of the White House.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump to the bench in 2017, was assigned the case. Although Trump appointed Kelly, in 2018, the judge ruled that Trump’s revoking of journalist Jim Acosta’s hard press pass likely violated his due process rights. Trump groused that the news outlets “have drawn a great Judge, for them, a man who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta.” Apparently anticipating a loss, he has already vowed to appeal.

He ranted that journalists were demeaning the Oval Office by reporting negative stories about him. “Virtually every story about me, or anything having to do with me, is negative, wrong and, in many cases, DANGEROUS for our Country! No matter how GREAT my Achievements, they trivialize and demean,” he posted. “I have an obligation to fight for the Success and Safety of our Country. FAKE NEWS IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, and I will do whatever is necessary to make sure that the U.S.A. thrives.”

Podcaster Allison Gill noted that Judge Kelly ordered the government to respond to the lawsuit by tomorrow, and that he has set a hearing for Wednesday afternoon at 3:30.

Perhaps of even more concern to Trump is that the major news networks are refusing to cover him on television, starving him of media oxygen.

ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News take turns providing the television coverage of the president, and CNN was supposed to be in charge of the TV pool today. With CNN banned, the other networks refused to take its place, leaving television coverage of Trump suspended. A.J. Katz of The Wrap reported on their joint statement, in which they said: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.” 

This afternoon, Trump held an event at the White House, but without a press pool, there was no audio. It was just footage of Trump standing with a group of people and apparently talking.

The White House advertised “The White House App” on social media, claiming users could “[g]et real-time updates and live events streamed DIRECTLY to your phone. No noise. Just the news that matters most—straight from the Trump Administration. DOWNLOAD NOW,” it said.

Users were not kind. One commented: “I’d rather launch my phone into the sun than install a government propaganda app.” Others noted that the administration is eager to get its hands on user information, and only a fool would install what could be spyware on their phone.

Peter Alexander of MS NOW had his own response to Trump’s attacks on the press: “This is not normal. This is not business as usual,” he said.

“What’s happening right now is different. The latest threat against our cherished freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution. The media is not perfect. There’s a debate to be had about who you trust, where you should get your news.

“This is something bigger, though. Among the privileges, the duties of a free press, are to hold power to account, to ask the difficult questions, to document history as it happens. The president says fake news is reporting that is untrue. In fact, it’s reporting that he finds unflattering.

“And here’s the reality. A little more than seven weeks until the midterms, many of the facts are unflattering. Where to begin? Gas prices, now $4.48 a gallon on average, $1.50 more than where they were before the war with Iran began. Ask farmers about the price of diesel, now at a record high, nearly $6.50 a gallon.

“All of it due to a war the president started, a war he vowed would be done within weeks but is now in its seventh month. Eighteen American service members dead, if not more, and that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

“A trade war with Canada, an obsession with the Kennedy Center, if it’s not demolished like the East Wing, then there’s the grift, the self-dealing, a Russian oligarch paying for Trump’s son’s wedding party, billions of dollars made by the Trump family.

“Those are the facts. They may be unflattering, but they are not fake.

“I’ve been there since the beginning. Trump’s frustration, this fury, it didn’t happen overnight. On the campaign trail, I remember, before he even took office, he would yell at us in the bullpen in the back of those large rallies, riling up the MAGA crowd. Once elected, he would insult reporters to their face—I’ve been there—and he would call journalists the enemy of the people. As one of my former colleagues described it, Trump is trying to discredit the messenger, to create a vacuum where his version of reality fills that void. 

“But the answer from journalists is simple. To report more, with more sources, more digging, more facts.”

Trump has his own answer. The White House YouTube channel announced this afternoon that at 7:00 tonight it will launch “TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station.”

The comment feature on the channel is turned off.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Why You Should Attend the NPE Conference This Weekend!

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
4

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, explains why this NPE conference will be stellar.

She writes:

A community governs its public schools. Neighbors elect a board, set a budget, and decide what their children learn. That is exactly what privatization threatens, and it is what NPE’s national conference is built to defend. Over two days, September 26–27, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe near Houston, more than 40 sessions take on the fight from every angle. Here’s a taste of what’s on the schedule.

Vouchers and charters. In “Beating Vouchers in Court,” Derek Black, Jessica Levin, Fred Jones Jr., and Sharon Krengel will walk through recent wins in Montana, Utah, and Ohio, where voucher programs were declared unconstitutional. They will also review the live challenges in Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida, and Missouri. In “A View from the Trenches,” two Florida school board members and an Arizona teacher offer a candid account of what universal ESA vouchers have already done to how public education is funded and governed. And a session on the federal tax-credit voucher scheme, set to launch in January 2027, lays out what advocates in opt-in and opt-out states can do right now. 

In “Taxation Without Representation — Using a Conservative Argument to Combat Charter Schools,” Gregory Walace, Alison Chaplar, Betsy Flanagan, Daniel Marcano Jr., and Jennifer Simões will show how that framing sparked a grassroots movement, moved public opinion, and helped drive proposed legislation. “What’s Next for Charter Schools? A Review of Charter Strategies Across State Lines,” Patti Everitt, Gregory Walace, Carol Burris, and Dave DeMatthews lead an interactive look at how charters keep expanding in key states with few guardrails and little public engagement, which national initiatives fund that growth, and the research and messaging advocates can share across state lines to push back.

Takeovers are where democracy gets stolen outright. Houston high schoolers will describe how they organized against the HISD takeover. Parents from Houston (CVPE) and Fort Worth (FORT) share how they are fighting to win their voice back. An Indianapolis panel will dissect the sharpest trick of all — an elected board left in place, but stripped of control over buildings, transportation, and property taxes. “The Struggle to Govern Ourselves” will confront the research showing takeovers overwhelmingly target majority-Black districts, while organizers from New Orleans share hard-won lessons from years on the front lines. And in “The People’s Board,” presenters will take on Student Outcomes Focused Governance, the corporate model quietly sidelining elected members in board after board.

Follow the money. Maurice Cunningham, Mercedes Schneider, Mike DeGuire and David Armiak teach their best techniques for tracing dark-money networks back to the billionaires and foundations bankrolling privatization in two sessions. Other sessions map the private firms profiteering off vouchers and spotlight Wisconsin’s campaign to get voucher and charter costs printed right on taxpayers’ bills. 

The money grabs keep getting more creative. Texas advocates expose SB 1882 “partnership” charters as a fast-track privatization grift. Another panel takes on corporate tax breaks — energy-hungry data centers now the worst offenders — draining billions from schools. And with 17 states cutting or capping property taxes in 2024–25, national and state experts lay out how to defend the local revenue public schools depend on.

Faith, nationalism, and the classroom. Sessions on building school–congregation partnerships and mobilizing faith leaders in hostile states sit alongside a hard look at Christian Nationalism and its playbook for defunding and reshaping public education.

The newest battlegrounds. Randi Weingarten joins experts to debate AI’s role in classrooms — cognition, privacy, mental health, and the environment. A separate panel takes on ed-tech overreach and the lawsuits challenging how it commercializes student data. And student organizers from SEAT share how they’ve carried the fight to school boards, the legislature, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

The skill builder sessions are the reason you will leave with more than notes. Charles Siler, a former Goldwater Institute lobbyist who helped build the privatization playbook before turning on it, joins Manny Garcia to teach what messaging actually moves people. Rachel Coyle and Susan Spicka show how to win over hostile legislators. Others cover new-media strategy, gathering community input at scale, and getting real press traction beyond the press release. 

The keynotes anchor it all: Diane Ravitch and Texas AFT’s Zeph Capo open Saturday; Southern Education Foundation CEO Raymond Pierce speaks at lunch; investigative journalist Katherine Stewart headlines Sunday brunch; and Howard University’s Dean Emerita Leslie Fenwick closes us out.

You’ll meet the students, parents, teachers, clergy, researchers, and organizers who are actually winning in courtrooms, at statehouses, and on ballots. Privatizers have the money. We have the people, the passion and the plan. Register now here, book your room here in the hotel block, and join us in Conroe, Texas, right outside Houston.

I can’t promise that hotel rooms are still open but Carol will help you if you made a terrible mistake and forgot to sign up.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Childhood, Closing schools, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Failure, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Parent Groups, Privatization, Religion, School Choice

FCC Allows Increased Foreign Ownership of U.S. Major Media

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
1

Until now, the Federal Communications Commission has limited foreign ownership of American media to 25 percent. But the Trump-controlled FCC just increased that number to help out Trump’s billionaire friends, the Ellison family. The Ellison recently bought CBS. They are now trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN.

This kind of media consolidation is worrisome, as it portends a narrowing of perspectives.

Oliver Darcy reports in Status, a blog that covers the media:

FCC Clears Ellison’s Foreign Cash: Brendan Carr’s FCC has cleared the way for foreign investors to own nearly half of Paramount s equity as David Ellison moves to finance his proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The agency on Thursday approved Paramount’s request to exceed the 25% foreign-ownership threshold, paving the way for investors from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi to collectively hold 38.5% of the company, with total foreign ownership reaching 49.5%. While the approval from the Trump administration removes another regulatory hurdle for Ellison’s acquisition of Warners, it still remains on hold after a dozen states led by California and the Writers Guild, sued to block the merger. 

▶ Anna Gomez, the sole Democrat on the FCC commission, slammed the agency’s approval. “The FCC just let some of the most repressive governments in the world indirectly control nearly all of a combined Paramount-Warner Bros,” she said. “An investment this large in one of America’s biggest media companies doesn’t just buy equity, it secures influence over what gets said and what gets made.”

Categories Competition, Democracy, Media

Arizona: Vouchers Are Working Well for Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2026 //
0

Gene Glass, one of the nation’s most eminent education researchers, sent me the following perspective on how vouchers are subsidizing religious schools in Arizona.

But first a short primer on why Americans have honored “separation of church and state” until recently.

Until recently, every state and the federal government abided by the principle that public money should not be spent on religious schools or religious education. The term “separation of church and state” was first used by Thomas Jefferson. Like other Founding Fathers, he abhorred the idea that the state should pay the tuition of students at religious schools. Students had the right to attend religious school. But not at public expense.

Today’s advocates of school choice claim that the Founding Fathers had no views about public schools, but they are wrong.

In 1785, the Founding Fathers wrote the Land Ordinance, which described the layout of towns that would be built as the new nation expanded westward. Every new town would have 36 lots, each a square mile. Lot number 16 was designated for a public school, centrally located so it could serve all children. The Land Ordinance of 1785 said: “There shall be reserved the Lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within said township.”

Later, the Founding Fathers added lot 36 as a school land, with the understanding that it could be sold off to produce income for the public school.

They certainly showed no preference for public support of private or religious schools.

Today’s voucher movement, as many scholars have documented, had its origins in the resistance to the Brown V. Board of Education decision of 1954. Most whites in the South did not want their children to attend schools with Black children; several Sourhern legislatures passed voucher laws to allow white children to escape desegregation, but federal courts knocked out all those laws.

Vouchers experienced a resurgence in recent decades. But every time they went to a state referendum, they have always lost, usually by large margins. The public doesn’t want to pay the tuition for children at religious schools or at private schools that exclude students because of their race or disability or other characteristic.

Despite the fact that the public opposes vouchers, state after state has adopted them, typically because state legislators want to satisfy religious activists.

Professor Glass sent the following description of what is happening in Arizona. Bear in mind that voters in Arizona overwhelmingly defeated a voucher proposal in 2018. The Republican governor and legislature ignored the vote.

Professor Glass wrote:

Thanks to reporting by 12News, we’re finally getting a clearer picture of which schools are raking in the voucher money.

For those of you who haven’t followed the voucher program closely, a word to the wise: It has been a colossal pain to get information about the program, especially after the Legislature opened it up to every student in the state in 2022.

Sure, state officials bend over backwards to give parents information about how to use the program, as they should. But if you’re a run-of-the-mill taxpayer (or news reporter) who wants to know how your $1.15 billion is being spent, well, you’re out of luck.

Fortunately, Craig Harris at 12News took it upon himself to open up that black box. He and his colleagues have battled with state officials for several years now (and borne the brunt of the outrage from the pro-voucher crowd).

As part of that transparency battle, 12News successfully sued the Arizona Department of Education to get records on 2 million transactions in the Empowerment Scholarship Account (AKA, voucher) program.

The 12News reporters then shared a list of 190 private schools in Arizona that are raking in the voucher money, which is how we’re able to shed some light on how the game is playing out in Southern Arizona.

As we went through the list, one thing became glaringly apparent: Christian schools are dominating the voucher game.

Just look at the Southern Arizona schools that brought in the most voucher money since 2022:

  1. Salpointe Catholic High School: $15.2 million
  2. Pusch Ridge Christian Academy: $8.8 million
  3. Yuma Lutheran School: $7.9 million
  4. Desert Christian School: $7.1 million
  5. Yuma Catholic High School: $6.3 million
  6. Saints Peter and Paul Catholic School:$5.9 million
  7. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton School: $5.9 million
  8. Lourdes Catholic School: $5.4 million
  9. Southwestern Christian School: $5.3 million
  10. Calvary Chapel Christian School: $5.2 million (they also have campuses outside Southern Arizona)

Every single one is affiliated with a Christian denomination.

It’s the same pattern throughout the state. Christian schools got the lion’s share of the voucher money, while only two secular private schools brought in enough voucher money to crack the top 50.

Just going by the names of the schools, we counted 52 “Christian” schools, 37 “Catholic” schools, 15 “Lutheran” schools, four “Baptist” schools and three “Adventist” schools, plus a smattering of “parish,” “Bible” and “chapel” schools.

______________
Gene V Glass

Emeritus Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University

Editor, Education Review edrev.asu.edu

Categories Arizona, History, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state
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