I mistakenly posted the opening of a piece I am writing about the return of measles. I intended to schedule it for tomorrow or the next day.
It is unfinished. Forget about it. Or, as we say in Brooklyn, “fuhgeddaboutit.”
When you see it, it will be the finished version.
~Diane
Veteran Educator Cassandra Mayes ran for the state legislature in Arkansas with no expectations about winning. As a Black woman in an overwhelmingly white district and as a Democrat in a solidly Republican district, she knew she was in an uphill race. She ran because she was compelled to give up her job due to budget cuts after the introduction of charters and then vouchers. She ran because she wants all schools–public, private, and home schools–to meet the same accountability standards. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was Trump’s press secretary in his first term, introduced the voucher program called “Arkansas LEARNS.” The story appeared in the Arkansas Times.
Mayes has had a distinguished career of nearly 30 years as a teacher of students with disabilities and an administrator of state programs.
The story begins:
Cassandra Mayes, a longtime educator and political newcomer, made history Tuesday as the first Black woman and first Democrat elected to represent House District 71, which includes Maumelle and surrounding communities.
Mayes says she was inspired to run after Arkansas LEARNS led to cuts in her contract as a district-level administrator for the Little Rock School District, forcing her to leave a career she loved to care for her ailing mother. Now she’s headed to the Capitol with plans to challenge LEARNS, starting with greater accountability for private schools receiving public money through vouchers.
Mayes faced an uphill battle in the Republican-held district, although her opponent, Stephen Bright, was dogged by allegations of domestic and child abuse that likely cost him the race.
In an interview with the Arkansas Times, Mayes describes how she refused to let the scandals surrounding her opponent derail her campaign, and how she plans to challenge Arkansas LEARNS in a newly emboldened Democratic minority.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mayes: Thank you so much. I’m still trying to process everything.
Mayes: I had been at the polls until about 7 o’clock, and I came home and got dressed, and I was going to kind of take my time before I went down to Mosaic Templars after the polls closed, and one of my team members had called me and said, “Cassandra, where are you?” I could tell in his voice that he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. I promised myself I would not check my phone or TV. And when I got to Mosaic Templars and was walking towards the war room, it was very quiet, and it concerned me. When I walked in, they said, “Cassandra, you did it.” I lost it. I cried. I knew we had a chance to flip the seat, but I just wasn’t sure because it had never been done before out here in Maumelle.
I lost it. I cried. I knew we had a chance to flip the seat, but I just wasn’t sure because it had never been done before out here in Maumelle. Cassandra Mayes
Mayes: I had personal experiences that brought me to this point. I did not grow up in a political family. Politics was close, but it wasn’t close enough for me to even have a desire. I saw it from afar, but what happened at the state level brought those experiences to me. One impacted my career that I worked very hard for and absolutely loved, and the other impacted the person that I loved the most, other than my child, and that was my mother. And those two issues collided at the same time. When my job was in jeopardy because of Arkansas LEARNS, and my mother entered a healthcare system that was not fair to her because of her pension as a retired educator, I knew that I could either talk about it and be angry or be a part of the solution.
Mayes: Yes, so when Arkansas LEARNS hit my employer [Little Rock School District], we were experiencing a decline in student enrollment prior to it hitting, and so when it hit, we had parents that were leaving the district, going to private charter-schools, and so the Education Freedom Accounts, the vouchers, basically were being utilized more. When you’re losing students, that impacts staffing and even facilities. So, my contract was substantially cut, going from a 12-month to a 10-and-a-half month employee, and the money loss basically equated to the money I was using to pay someone to stay home with my mother while I worked.
I had to make a financial decision for my family to leave a career that I absolutely loved, but to take care of someone I loved more. And it’s something that I should not have had to do. I should have been able to continue to work, but also have someone that I trusted to stay with my mom. But I couldn’t afford it, and she didn’t qualify for support.
Mayes: The first thing we need to do is have a courageous conversation of what’s going on statewide. In education, you’re taught in college that decisions you make regarding curriculum, even budgetary decisions at the school level, are data-driven, and under Arkansas LEARNS, we do not have data to support whether our schools and students are making progress because the assessment that is used is an assessment that was created for Arkansas and Arkansas only.
Under LEARNS, people are asking the question: People are utilizing the vouchers for school choice, but are the students performing at a rate that supports the need to continue the voucher program? Because parents using school choice make those decisions allegedly on academic progress and lack thereof, and under LEARNS, we have no system in place that shows us where a third grader is performing in a public school, a charter school, a private school or home school. At this point, we have no data to show how kids are performing across all of those educational options, and that is something that we must change. I support any entity that receives public funds should be held to the same standard as a public school.
Mayes: We did pick up some seats we were not expecting to pick up, so that means we were able to break the [Republican] supermajority in our legislature. What that tells us is that there is a level of synergy across the state, where we have been challenged as newly-elected officials. It also told the Republicans that people are not happy, and that change has to take place, and it’s telling all of us that we’re going to have to come together and have some conversations, and we’re going to have to make decisions outside of our personal opinions and focus on the people of this state.
Last night told all of us a clear story that change was necessary. Change is here, and we’ve got to deal with it. And in order for us to change policies in place that will make people have a better quality of life, lower the cost of living, all of us are going to have to work together to come up with solutions.
Mayes: I’m humbled and feel blessed to have been entrusted with this position in an area that is around 69% white, and the African-American population makes up less than 20%. And to be the first, I realize that there is probably a level of expectation that surpasses those that have been before me. But I’m ready to take on the challenge.
Mayes: From a campaign perspective, we kept campaigning. It never really factored to me that I needed to do anything different, or I needed go in a different direction. I knew that people were counting on me to continue to run a campaign of integrity, a campaign of facts and truth, and that was my goal from Day One, and that’s what I continued to do. There were moments where I did receive messages that I felt were inappropriate and unnecessary, but I understand the climate that we’re in. People may not have understood or were angry about the outcome, but I knew that people were counting on me.
Mayes: I am going to have a small intimate gathering for my volunteers, who are really the real winners in this particular situation. They took a chance on me. They worked tirelessly. They deserve all of the praise. It’s a small group, but we’re small and mighty, and that’s how I want to celebrate. I want them to know how much they mean to me and how much they mean to this district. Because if it were not for them, we wouldn’t be here. This campaign is so much bigger than me, because now there are people that have felt as if they had had no voice that now have a voice at the table.
So, come January, I have a lot of work to do, but I’m ready to support my colleagues and to educate others about what’s really going on in the schools, how teachers are really feeling, and how students are really performing. I’m excited about the opportunity.
The Governor-Elect of Texas, Gina Hinojosa, has committed to rebuilding the state’s public schools. Integral to that promise is understanding how to fund the public schools so they can provide equal opportunity to all children.
Bruce Baker is one of the nation’s leading experts on school finance. He offers advice here.
Full report: Digging Out: Restoring Equal Educational Opportunity in Texas (PDF)
Dear Governor-elect Hinojosa,
Congratulations. You take office in January with an opportunity no Texas governor has had in a long time: the chance to start digging the state’s public schools out of a hole Texas has spent the better part of two decades digging.
I’ve been working on Texas school finance since 2004, first alongside the state’s own analysts on the Texas School Finance Project, and later as an expert witness in the 2012 school finance trial before Judge John Dietz. I’ve just completed a new report, Digging Out: Restoring Equal Educational Opportunity in Texas (PDF linked below), that pulls together what the data show today. I’ll summarize the main points here.
It’s easy to forget, but Texas was once ahead of most of the country on school funding. After Edgewood v. Kirby in 1989, and the “Robin Hood” equalization that followed in 1993, Texas ranked 6th in the nation in school funding effort, measured as spending relative to personal income. Its state and local revenue was progressive, meaning higher-poverty districts got more per pupil. And by 2000, Texas students outscored the national average in NAEP math.
Since the mid-2000s, the state has steadily backed away:
The map tells the story. In 2009, 73% of Texas students attended districts spending below the cost of national-average outcomes. By 2024, 98% did.
Texas school district spending as a share of the cost of national-average outcomes, 2009–2024. In 2009, 73% of students attended districts spending below cost; by 2024, 98% did. Source: NECM, 2026 data runs.
The children most affected are overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic. In 2024, 93% of children in majority Black and Hispanic districts attended districts that were both funded below cost and performing below the national average, compared with 45% of children elsewhere (87% versus 33% averaged over 2009–2024). Houston ISD spends about 46% of its estimated cost. Dallas spends 43%. Edgewood ISD, the district whose name is on the 1989 decision, spends 61%, while Alamo Heights, a few miles away, spends 114% of its cost.
Funding gaps (horizontal) and outcome gaps (vertical), Texas districts, 2009–2024. Blue = majority Black or Hispanic districts; bubble size = enrollment. Source: NECM, 2026 data runs; SEDA.
And outcomes have followed the money. Texas 8th graders went from 7.5 points above the national average in NAEP math in 2011, the year of the $5.4 billion cut, to 3 points below in 2024.
The research on this is no longer seriously in dispute. Increases in school funding improve student outcomes, and cuts make them worse. That holds whether the money goes to operations or facilities, and whether it comes from legislatures, courts, or local voters. And additional dollars have the biggest effect where states have historically underinvested and where child poverty is highest. That describes much of Texas.
The state launched its Education Freedom Accounts this year at $1 billion. About 43% of selected students came from public schools; most of the money is going to families who were already in private school or homeschooling. The Comptroller has already asked for roughly $2 billion for the next biennium, and the Legislative Budget Board projected costs of $4.8 billion by 2030.
By comparison, closing the gap between what Texas districts spend and what it would cost to reach just national-average outcomes runs on the order of $45 billion a year. The voucher program is pegged to average state and local funding, which this analysis finds falls below cost in nearly every district. The state shouldn’t be expanding a private alternative at a funding level it hasn’t shown is adequate for its public schools.
As a legislator, you filed HB 1246 in 2021 and HB 31 in 2023 to fund Texas schools on enrollment rather than average daily attendance. That proposal is right, and the evidence behind it goes back more than a decade. In my 2012 expert report in the school finance trial, I showed that attendance as a share of enrollment fell steadily from the lowest- to the highest-poverty fifth of Texas districts in every year from 2006 to 2011. Because Texas uses attendance both for the base count and for the students who generate need weights, that gap compounds through the whole formula. Sean Corcoran and I made the same point nationally that year in The Stealth Inequities of School Funding: funding on attendance works as an “unpoverty weight,” quietly moving money away from the districts that serve the most children in poverty.
Commissioner Morath put the cost of the switch at about $6 billion per biennium. That is real money, but it is a fraction of the gap documented here, and it would go to exactly the districts furthest below cost. It is also the one fix that does not need to wait for a new cost study.
Fixing this takes three steps, and the first can start right away.
In Morath (2016), the Texas Supreme Court called the system “Byzantine,” “undeniably imperfect, with immense room for improvement,” and left it to the Legislature to fix. The Legislature has acted twice since then, in 2019 and 2025, and neither time changed the basic pattern: the districts with the greatest needs remain the furthest from adequate funding.
Texas led once. It can lead again.
Respectfully,
Bruce D. Baker
University of Miami
Digging Out: Restoring Equal Educational Opportunity in Texas (Baker, November 2026)Download
Everyone knows that Texas turned blue in Election Day, but did you know that Arizona turned blue? Governor Katie Hobbs was re-elected Governor. And remarkably, Democrats won a majority of both houses of the Legislature!
For years, the rightwing Governor and likeminded Legislature expanded vouchers, despite the fact that the public endorsed a referendum against vouchers in 2019. The Koch brothers’ machine encouraged the Republican governor and Legislature to pursue privatization of the schools. There was no stopping the Republicans’ determination to defund public schools and to send public money to private schools, home schools, religious schools, with minimal accountability for how that money was spent.
Save Our Schools Arizona reported the details about the Democratic sweep in their state.
Save Our Schools Arizona reported:
We’ve always known this was possible. Alongside YOU – our volunteers, supporters, and coalition partners – we put in the work day after day for 10 years to achieve this goal. Despite defeat (after defeat after defeat), we all dusted ourselves off time and time again to protect the right of all Arizona students to have accessible, high quality, well resourced, inclusive public schools. Some days, it felt impossible to keep going – but we collectively picked each other up and kept going with a dream in our hearts that better was possible. This week, that dream was realized. Thank you.
👏 Now, we have a state legislature that will invest and prioritize children, educators, families, and public schools and put major ESA reforms – like those in the Protect Education Act – into law. Public education advocates now hold a 20-10 supermajority in the State Senate, and a robust 37-23 majority in the State House. It’s time to GET THINGS DONE FOR KIDS 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
👏 Voters statewide also rejected Prop 320 – a measure that would have imposed an arbitrary and impossible mandate of 60% “direct classroom spending,” with stiff penalties for districts who couldn’t meet the mark. Prop. 320 would have had disastrous impacts on public school budgets for special education, nurses, counselors, food services, transportation, literacy coaches, and so much more. We are so grateful to our coalition partners across the state who worked to defeat this devastating measure – teamwork made the dream work, and we are so grateful AZ voters saw through this deceptive ballot measure put on the ballot by anti-public school Goldwater Institute and pushed by former Gov. Ducey and newly rejected state Rep. Matt Gress.
👏 Voters elected lifelong educator Dr. Teresa Leyba Ruiz as Superintendent of Public Instruction – beating MAGA acolyte Kimberly Yee and replacing Supt. Tom Horne. Dr. Ruiz will be a champion for public school students and educators, and will work to stop the off-the-rails abuse of the ESA voucher program! We also hear some of her immediate priorities are to take down Horne’s “teacher snitch” line and take PragerU off the ADE website 👏👏👏 It’s a new day for public education!
👏 Arizona also voters elected pro-public education champions up and down the ballot, from Gov. Hobbs, Attorney General Mayes, Sec. of State Fontes, and newly elected Treasurer Nick Mansour, who has pledged to increase transparency of ESA voucher funds to help eliminate wasteful spending. Most of our #PublicSchoolProud school board candidates sailed to victory, and MAGA’s presence is greatly diminished across AZ school boards!
👏 Finally, voters passed ~75% local school funding measures (bonds and overrides) statewide – 37 out of 50 measures – though ballots are still being counted and could change the final number. We are crossing our fingers and toes for districts that are still awaiting final news, as the success of these measures means so very much for students, educators, and families 🤞
We are deeply disheartened by the passage of Prop. 318 😡which attacks trans youth, setting up deeply unfair and discriminatory rules for kids and sports teams. The measure seeks to convert teachers into the gender police and lays the ground for endless lawsuits against families and schools. At SOSAZ, we work to protect all children, and the state of AZ has failed some of our most precious children this week.
Public Education WINS: In AZ and across the country, candidates who boldly championed public education WON. They won BIG and in places they were told they couldn’t win. In Texas, James Talarico was elected Senator and Gina Hinojosa was elected governor – and both ran on an unabashedly pro-public education, anti-voucher platform. As Gov-elect Hinojosa said in her acceptance speech, “The days of treating our public schools like they’re for sale are over” 🔥🔥🔥
In Arizona, deep-pocketed privatizers have tried to discredit, defund, and dismantle our public schools – but the voters are on to them, and gone are the Republican lawmakers and candidates who went along with these attacks on our children and communities. There are many lessons to be learned there, but the primary one is this: Arizonans LOVE our public schools. They want teachers and staff to be paid their worth. They want kids to have accessible, high quality schools in their neighborhoods. And no amount of voucher lobby money or shady politics is going to reverse that. Let’s goooooooooooooooooooo, Arizona!!!
WE DID IT!!! Your contributions propelled us to victory, funding our community organizers, flyers, social media graphics and ads, ballot guides, and extensive outreach to voters.
Please fuel our grassroots work with a celebratory donation 👉
We are about to go into one of the busiest (and most productive!) seasons in our history, as we work with this newly formed pro-public education legislature and wide K-12 coalitions to pass meaningful legislation to benefit our kids, our educators, our schools, and the future of our state.
Sound easy? Not so fast…
Your support over the years has allowed us to educate the public on the out-of-control $1 billion ESA voucher program and its devastating impacts on public schools to the forefront of public discourse in Arizona — where it belongs. Vouchers are not only unaccountable, but are designed to wreak havoc on and ultimately shut down public education.
Now that we’ve helped to change the balance of power, it’s time to start leading with real policy, grassroots lobbying, and organizing communities to ensure every impacted voice is represented.
Our newsletters don’t write themselves! Support our work by becoming a paid subscriber to Save Our Schools Arizona’s Substack. A monthly or annual donation of any amount helps to keep the lights on at the Weekly Education Report so we can provide you with the latest news in education week after week.
Don’t forget to join us on social media. Pick your favorite(s) and join us for fun, engaging content! This is where we post important updates, key news articles, and informative graphics and videos you can’t get anywhere else.
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District 4 in Tennessee was held by Republican Scott DesJarlais for sixteen years. He prided himself on being a staunch conservative, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus.
Desjarlais was first elected to Congress in 2010 and had been considered unbeatable. His district was considered a safe Republican seat.
In 2024, he was challenged by Democrat Victoria Broderick, and he easily beat her, by a margin of 70%-26%.
Victoria Broderick says that when she heard he was running unopposed in 2026, she had to run against him again, despite the shellacking of 2024.
She said:
FLASHBACK: “DesJarlais was going to run unopposed, I said over my dead body — he paid for 3 abortions for his wife and mistresses… you do you, but don’t take our rights away.”
Victoria Broderick appears to have won by 280 votes. Incredible. #TN4
You can see her statement on Twitter, posted by The Tennessee Holler.
https://x.com/TheTNHoller/status/1807867456540582184/video/1
According to DesJarlais’ Wikipedia profile, he has admitted to multiple affairs and multiple abortions.
A very satisfying election victory.
Heather Cox Richardson analyzes Trump’s reactions to the Democratic uprising against his administration and his inhumane policies. As she notes, Trump replaced his chief of staff Susie Wiles with her deputy Stephen Miller. Miller is the most vicious of Trump’s inner circle. He has consistently pushed 3,000 deportations per day, with the hope of reaching one million deportations yearly. His goal is an all-white America, which is ridiculous because we are a multiethnic, multiracial society. He is mean.
Richardson wrote:
On Tuesday, Americans rejected the Trump administration. It turns out most people hated the idea of a strongman who ignored the Constitution, undermined democracy, and tried to rewrite America’s history in order to impose a white, Christian nationalist regime that enriched him and his cronies at the expense of everyone else.
Voters made their position very clear. A majority of more than 12 million demanded an end to corruption, an end to Trump’s war on Iran, an end to costly tariffs, and an end to the masked agents kidnapping Black and Brown people off the streets.
By a margin of more than 13%, they voted for a country based on the rule of law in which everyone is held accountable for their actions and no one can break the law with impunity. They voted for the system of checks and balances established by the Framers of the Constitution. They voted for policies that supported the American people, making it possible for them to afford food and housing and healthcare rather than continuing to funnel money to billionaires.
They voted for the multicultural country Trump and his loyalists mocked. They elected Democratic Black candidates Keisha Lance Bottoms to govern Georgia, David Crowley to govern Wisconsin, Aaron Ford to govern Nevada, and Stacey Plaskett to govern the U.S. Virgin Islands. They elected Byron Donalds, a Black Republican, to govern Florida.
Voters elected Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed to be the nation’s first Muslim senator, and they reelected Representative Ilhan Omar, whom Trump has made a key target of his attacks, with an astonishing 76.5% of her district’s vote.
As Valerie Gonzalez, Mike Catalini, and Jonathan J. Cooper of the Associated Press reported, Hispanic voters shifted hard away from the Republican Party and swung back toward the Democrats in 2026, with 7 out of 10 Hispanic voters in Texas backing Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. In a rejection of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, for the first time since 2008, Democrats won every House district that touches the U.S.-Mexico border, and voters have sent fourteen new Hispanic Democrats to Congress.
Black voters, especially in the American South, turned out in unusually high numbers, and they voted for Democrats at higher rates than they did in 2024. Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported that about 80% of Black votes in congressional races across the country were for Democratic candidates.
The message was unmistakable.
Since his 2024 reelection, Trump and his allies have repeatedly insisted that his victory of about 2.3 million voters over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, earning him less than 50% of the vote, was a “mandate.” Compared to the margin of more than 12 million voters delivered on Tuesday, it was a fizzle. The Economist noted that Tuesday’s Democratic victory was “the biggest congressional landslide in 50 years.” Recognizing the direction of the tide, since the election, panicked Republicans have called for regrouping, ending the war on Iran, and addressing affordability.
Trump initially appeared dazed by the rebuke, but today he woke up and threw their rejection of his agenda back in Americans’ teeth.
Ousting his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, Trump replaced her with the architect of some of his administration’s most extreme policies: Stephen Miller.
Miller is a fervent white nationalist who appears to believe in the racist “great replacement theory,” the idea that Black and Brown immigrants to Europe and the United States are destroying “Western culture.”
Miller’s elevation to chief of staff doesn’t necessarily change much; he already was a powerful force in the White House. Miller drove the “Muslim ban” in Trump’s first term and, in his second, the administration’s arrest, incarceration, and deportation plans for undocumented immigrants. His push for masked agents to arrest 3,000 people a day led to the murders of U.S. citizens Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, as well as the shooting deaths of immigrants and their mistreatment and deaths in concentration camps.
Miller has been a key proponent of Trump’s seizing power through emergency declarations that he uses to ignore the law. Frustrated by opposition to his plan to hurt Black and Brown people, Miller pushed for Trump to crush the opposition by invoking the Insurrection Act.
And Miller was central to the administration’s undermining of disability rights. Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News reported that after Trump complained about seeing homeless encampments in Washington, D.C., Miller argued for a plan to make it easier to round up mentally ill homeless people and institutionalize them. Making that happen required abandoning enforcement of the 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C., which established that disabled Americans have a right to live in their communities rather than being forced into institutions.
The Department of Justice went along with Miller’s plan and issued a memo saying that it would no longer enforce Olmstead. While the initial targets were unhoused people, Hixenbaugh notes, the administration quickly backed away from at least five disability rights cases designed to keep physically or mentally disabled children and adults out of institutions. Hixenbaugh points out that the administration’s refusal to enforce Olmstead is sending a message to the states that, with the dramatic cuts to Medicaid in the Republicans’ so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” they should “feel free to cut services that help disabled people remain at home,” forcing them into institutions.
As Phillips S. O’Brien wrote in Phillip’s Newsletter, Miller also supports Russia’s version of its war on Ukraine and has taken a strong and public stand against the embattled U.S. ally. O’Brien notes that Trump’s elevation of Miller now illustrates the president’s determination to get whatever he can for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin before the new Congress starts investigations and puts up roadblocks.
So, rather than moderating his behavior after voters’ dramatic rebuke, Trump is demonstrating by elevating Miller that he is hardening his position. He is surrounding himself with the most extreme of his advisors: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom he has supported in the face of calls for his impeachment; Natalie Harp, the smiling aide who appears glued to his side; and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025, who Trump boasted before the election would soon “be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion.” He noted: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ?”
Trump’s elevation of Miller was a deliberate declaration that he doesn’t care what the American people want. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has targeted because of her attempt to conduct oversight of a detention facility, was clear: “Stephen Miller is a white supremacist,” she said in a statement. “By promoting the person responsible for ICE detaining our neighbors and killing people in the streets, Donald Trump is doubling down on the cruelty and corruption that have defined his administration. The president is panicked after losing power in Congress and this is a signal about what he will prioritize in the final stretch of his presidency: grievance and cruelty.”
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) posted: “Donald Trump learned nothing from his historic defeat. Stephen Miller is the architect of the most barbaric, inhumane policies of this administration. Trump couldn’t have made a worse choice. Our Democratic majorities will fight him every step of the way.”
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries posted: “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands. His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.”
But Trump’s embrace of Miller was not aimed at Democrats alone. It is a shot across the bow of Republicans who might want to jump ship. When Meredith Lee Hill of Politico told one House Republican that Trump had tapped Miller to be his chief of staff, the lawmaker replied: “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.”
Trump is making it clear to Republicans that he intends to force the party to stay behind an even more extreme weapon of MAGA than the one voters rejected Tuesday, incinerating their hopes for 2028. Alex Isenstadt of Axios reported today that Trump has told advisors that he intends to keep raising money so he can continue to wield power over Republican candidates in 2028.
And in a sign that MAGA leaders are determined to keep Republicans in line, Philip Wegmann of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the White House sent a memo to more than 3,000 Republican-oriented groups, warning them: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.”
It all feels very desperate.
Tonight Trump appeared in a campaign hat at a NASA event at which he rambled from topic to topic, slurring his words and sounding tired. He said he had declared all of space “open for American settlement, American civilization, and American freedom.” He said that “[w]ithin two years, NASA will launch the first ever nuclear powered spacecraft to Mars,” before veering off to talk about his uncle, who was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Trump promised that “before the end of my term, the United States will return American astronauts to the surface of the Moon. So exciting. And soon thereafter the United States will establish a permanent presence on lunar soil.”
To a silent audience, Trump said: “By the way, I was not on the ballot, just in case you had any questions. Because if we were on the ballot we would’ve won.”
Stephen dyer is a former legislator in Ohio who has been consistently critical of state funding for charters and vouchers. In post after post, he has documented waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds, as well as the damage done to the state’s public schools.
In this post, written after the election, he predicts that the state’s voucher program was grievously wounded by the election results.
Please open the link to read it in full.
He writes:
Well that was something, wasn’t it? Tuesday, I mean?
I’ve taken a few days to write about it because I didn’t want to get too emotional when analyzing what this victory would mean for Ohio’s education policy landscape. And reduce my (happy for once!) use of 4-letter words.
Tuesday night was a kind of wipeout for Ohio Republicans we haven’t seen since I won my state house seat in 2006. And Tuesday’s shift followed a very similar pattern to the one I was part of — break the Republican supermajority in the year ending in a 6 and set up the next general assembly cycle for the year that ends in 8 for making the majority a real possibility.
But one thing we didn’t have in 2006 was EdChoice — at least not in its current form. Then-Speaker Jon Husted (yeah, THAT Jon Husted — the one with the ass) created the program in the 2005 budget, so by the 2006 election, it had only been in place a year.
The other thing we didn’t have in 2006 was a Texas (yes, THAT Texas) Republican massacre that was driven in large part by rural backlash to private school tuition subsidies. Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa actually made undoing Texas’ $1 billion voucher program her No. 1 topic in her victory speech, even over data centers.
How does this matter for Ohio?
Let me explain.
The Ohio Supreme Court, which is now 5-2 Republican, not the 7-0 Republican sweep the pro-voucher people were so cocky about encountering after the 10th District Court of Appeals found EdChoice unconstitutional last month, is much less friendly to the idea of simply using politics to rubber stamp EdChoice.
While there are still more Republicans than Democrats on the Ohio Supreme Court, now the plaintiffs only have to convince 2 of the 5 remaining Republicans to kill a program that Tuesday cost Texas Republicans every statewide office and the statehouse.
Now the legal arguments of the case match the politics: EdChoice is unconstitutional and horrible politics.
In addition, Ohio’s new Democratic Attorney General John Kulewicz will still have to be on the case because as the Attorney General, he is obligated to defend the Department of Education. But he swears an oath to uphold the Ohio Constitution. Think he might be a little more concerned about the EdChoice program’s clear violation of the Constitution’s no religious sect can control education money provision than the current AG was?
My guess is he will.
So EdChoice advocates have gone from thinking they had the Supreme Court in the bag to uphold their outrageously expensive and unaccountable taxpayer private school giveaway to now questioning whether the advocate for their side — the Ohio Attorney General — will even fight that hard for it. All in a political environment that saw Texas turn midnight blue because of a program similar to EdChoice.
Think they’re sweating this a little?
They are.
Here’s how their primary X fighters are taking the results. Not well…..
So they are already talking about legislative compromises to throttle the program. And they’ve already given up on the AG supporting the program, throwing the future arguments on the anti-public school, out-of-state advocates trying to turn Ohio into their little pet ideological project.
Here’s the bottom line: At this point, I think the Acton Administration could take the EdChoice program out of the school funding line item where it currently resides, put it in its own line item, and zero out that line item, killing the program. Then, it could take that taxpayer money and, instead of giving it to unaccountable private schools, fully fund special education or poverty funding in the Fair School Funding Plan, which would reduce the need for local property taxes.
I don’t think they’d get nearly the pushback everyone expects.
Would a greatly weakened Speaker Huffman, if he’s even Speaker next year, hold up a budget that will lower costs for Ohioans so he can keep sending billions of those same Ohioans’ tax dollars to unaccountable, mostly religious private schools in the wake of the Texas devastation and losing Ohio’s supermajority?
When we know that we’ve had to spend $35,000+ for every additional private school student that EdChoice created — paying more state per pupil funding than all but 8 of Ohio’s 1003 Public School Districts, Charter Schools and Joint Vocational Districts spend in local, state, and federal per pupil funding combined?
Dare him.
There’s precedent, you know.
In 2009, Gov. Ted Strickland did this exact thing — zero out EdChoice. And as Chair of the Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee on House Finance, I inserted it back into the budget so we could establish the Evidence Based Model of school funding — the Fair School Funding Plan’s antecedent.
Next year, we don’t have to sell anything to get a new, constitutional public school funding formula the way I had to do. We have it in place. All we need is the money. EdChoice is costing about $1 billion a year. That would go a long way toward funding the needs of Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students.
Would Huffman put his majority at risk to keep giving billions to private schools with zero public accountability? After what happened to Texas Republicans when they did that? After what happened to his Caucus Tuesday?
After the prospects for the EdChoice lawsuit to succeed at the Ohio Supreme Court — according to EdChoice advocates themselves — have become far better?
Look, I don’t want to give anyone false hope here. There’s no guarantee that EdChoice is done. Public education advocates have to keep fighting and reminding everyone of just how insane, out of control and unaccountable this program has become. Just as we’ve been doing for years now.
Open the link to finish the post.
This is a terrific article by Peggy Noonan that appeared in The Wall Street Journal. It is a gift article so you don’t need to be a subscriber to read it.
Why did the Democrats win a sweeping victory?
It was prices. It was the Iran war. It was blatant corruption.
But it was something more:
In election coverage on the Free Press, Meghan McCain noted that when you see Mar-a-Lago in the media, it’s always like they’re having nonstop parties out of “The Great Gatsby.” All the reveling, it’s fancy and rich and careless, and in a time, outside the club, of want and anxiety.
It’s all stilettos and tuxes and gowns and pricey surgery and shiny tuxedo loafers in there, and in the White House. On Halloween night, three days before the epochal election, the festivities were huge and jungle-themed. Yahoo News called it “a camp, spandex-and-glitter-filled affair” with a caviar bar. Some guests dressed “in elaborate or barely-there costumes.” The Washington Post pool report had people dressed as leopards and snakes and in “tiger-print dinner jackets….”
This administration’s soul is seen in its social life, and it is the opposite of populism—it is more like a low-class, high-tack oligarchy dominated by patricians who feel no obligation to even fake a little class.
Ultimately, she writes, Trump views his rabid supporters with contempt. Maybe some sensed it.
In 2010, the Tea Party movement enabled rightwing Republicans to win both houses of the North Carolina state legislature, called the General Assembly. For a time Republicans held a supermajority and could do whatever they wanted. They used their power to limit the authority of the governor when he was a Democrat. And they did terrible damage to the state’s public schools and teachers.
North Carolina was once considered the most progressive Southern state, but Republicans forfeited that claim. Teachers’ salaries fell behind other states, public school funding stalled, while the legislature approved charter schools (including for-profit charter chains) and vouchers.
In the November 3 election, the blue wave swept North Carolina. Democrats gained control of the House, and Republicans retained a majority of the Senate by only one vote.
The Carolina Public Press reported:
With most of the vote counted by late Tuesday night, it appeared as though Democratic candidates flipped 25 Republican seats. However, some races remain too close to count. Democrats also maintained every one of their incumbent legislative seats.
Democrats’ state House win will restore power to Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s veto. During the 2025-2026 legislative session, House Republicans were one seat shy of a supermajority, but were able to secure enough swing Democrats’ votes to override key governor vetoes on DEI policy, immigration issues, energy legislation and more.
One of the members of the House who was defeated was Tricia Cotham. She served in the House as a Democrat from 2007-2017. As a Democrat, she supported abortion rights and opposed vouchers. She gained a certain notoriety when she campaigned and won as a Democrat in 2022, but then switched to the Republican Party in 2023, giving it a supermajority and the votes it needed to restrict abortion and enact vouchers, immune to a gubernatorial veto. She was given a safe red district by her new party, but that district went blue on Tuesday.
It’s important to remember that there is a brutal ground and air war in Ukraine, which started with a Russian invasion in February 2022. The Ukrainians target their missiles and drones at military targets; the Russians target schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, shopping centers–making no distinction between military and civilian targets.
A few days ago, the Russians directed their fire at a Ukrainian humanitarian aid center.
CNN reported on the devastating results of the Russian attack:
Dozens of people were killed when Russia dropped at least nine bombs on a school building in southeastern Ukraine where they had taken shelter, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday, describing it as “one of the deadliest attacks of this war.”
At least 40 people have been confirmed dead and more than 30 are still unaccounted for after the attack on the building in Komyshuvakha in the Zaporizhzhia region, which local governor Mykhailo Semikin said was being used as a shelter and a humanitarian aid distribution center.
The attack on Monday caused such large scale damage that recovery efforts are still underway two days later.
Semikin said the victims were in a newly-built, EU-funded reinforced basement designed to withstand most strikes, but the massive force of the bombs caused the concrete structure to collapse and a fire broke out.
The scale of the damage is complicating the recovery works. Local authorities said that only some of the bodies recovered from the rubble as of Wednesday midday had been identified and that further identification will likely require DNA testing….
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine highlighted that the attack took place just as civilians from the area had gathered to receive humanitarian aid.
“The timing and location of the humanitarian distribution was well publicized,” said Danielle Bell, the head of the mission.
“Either the Russian armed forces knew that there was a humanitarian distribution taking place, or they failed to take the most basic steps to find out what was happening in this village they were planning to attack. In either case, this attack seems to have violated the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.”
The Russians laugh at humanitarian aid centers. Their goal is conquest and pillage.
