Texas: Politicians Fight to Exclude Islamic Schools from New Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2026 //
2

Texas Governor Greg Abbott waged a multimillion dollar campaign to defeat moderate Republicans in the Hogse of Representatives so he could finally get the legislature to pass his voucher bill. He wanted to subsidize private Christian schools and was shocked when Islamic schools wanted their students to get vouchers.

Abbott falsely claimed that public schools were “indoctrinating” students, and he wanted the state to pay for students to go to religious schools, whose explicit purpose is indoctrination.

As usual, the overwhelming majority of voucher applicants had never attended a public school. Most were already enrolled in a religious or private school or were none-schooled.

Justin Miller of The Texas Observer writes:

What would’ve been school-choice proponents’ triumphant publicity tour after the application period closed on Texas’ shiny new voucher program, in mid-March, was instead consumed by catty finger-pointing between two top state officials over who’s to blame for the state seemingly botching its attempt to religiously discriminate against some program participants.

It’s the sort of comedic tragedy that has become all too common in the red empire of Texas: Pass a harmful new policy while prevaricating as to its actual intent, create a pretext to carry out the policy in a clearly discriminatory fashion, invite a costly lawsuit that will ultimately end with the state being forced to comply, muddy the waters over who’s to blame. 

While pushing the private-school voucher bill through the state House and Senate last year, Republican legislative hands repeatedly insisted, when presented with various theoretical scenarios, that this near-universal “Texas Education Freedom Accounts” program would be open to any and all types of private schools—of all creeds and persuasions. Religious freedom was to reign supreme. How dare thee even question the universality of this venerable program, Republican legislators inveighed. 

In predictable fashion, the Texas GOP—lately in the throes of another virulent anti-Muslim bender—hasn’t quite lived up to that promise. In the lead-up to the official voucher rollout, acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock—who is currently in charge of administering the program and was, at the time, trying to win a primary election to hold onto his appointed post—used the administrative process to effectively block certain Islamic schools from participating by alleging such potential applicants were affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a national civil rights group akin to the NAACP or LULAC, and the Egypt-based transnational organization the Muslim Brotherhood, each of which the state has deemed a “foreign terrorist organization.” (The rule also sought to block schools affiliated with the darned Chinese Communist Party.) The conflation of CAIR with the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s Hamas is a theory that’s long brewedin the right’s more feverish swamps. (CAIR is suing the State of Texas over this designation.) 

In response, a group of Islamic schools and Muslim families went to court over the discriminatory exclusion from the program: “The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit read. A federal judge ordered the state to extend its application deadline to allow for these schools to go through the process. 

The comptroller’s office has since said that it has accepted all eligible Islamic schools that applied to participate in the program—including Houston’s Quran Academy—but not before Hancock sent a letter critiquing Attorney General Ken Paxton’s handling of the court case and urging Paxton to strip Quran Academy, which the state unsubstantially claims has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, of its ability to operate in the state. In the letter, Hancock—fresh off being blown out in his primary bid to be the duly elected comptroller by ex-state Senator Don Huffines—effectively accused Paxton of being soft on terrorism. “Texas cannot be asleep at the wheel as radical Islam spreads,” Hancock wrote. 

Paxton, in the midst of a heated runoff battle with John Cornyn after coming in second in his own primary bid to ascend to the U.S. Senate, took exception to being scolded by the likes of a RINO such as Hancock (i.e., one of the two GOP senators who voted to convict Paxton in his impeachment proceedings in 2023). The still-AG issued a scorched-earth retort, calling the interim comptroller an incompetent never-Trump hack nursing a deep political grudge—and demanding Hancock be fired. (It’s not clear who, if anyone, would have the authority to fire him.) 

Paxton then said his office, whose duties include serving as legal counsel for state agencies, would no longer be defending the comptroller in the federal vouchers lawsuit, claiming Hancock’s letter undermined the state’s case and introduced “incendiary” accusations against Quran Academy that had not been entered into evidence in court. 

“Never before have I witnessed such a fundamentally unserious person be both an unbelievable embarrassment to the State and put his own interests above Texans,” Paxton wrote. “It would be easy to disregard Kelly Hancock’s letter as nothing more than hotheaded, politically-motivated behavior from someone desperately clinging to relevancy, but it’s far worse than that: His actions hurt my office’s ability to defend the Comptroller’s office in these critical cases.”

For vouchers, there have been some other PR snags as well. For instance, one religious school—Cypress Christian in the Houston area—that hosted a pro-voucher event during Governor Greg Abbott’s promotional tour last year, has itself opted not to participate in the program. 

Per the Houston Chronicle, the school’s leader told parents that the institution is “governed exclusively by biblical doctrine and scripture” and that enrolling in the voucher program would inherently result in “ongoing government entanglement.” Many other high-end private schools—where the annual tuition typically far exceeds the standard $10,000 voucher allotment—in the Houston area have also optedagainst participation. 

All the while, Abbott—who claims political ownership of both the school voucher program, having succeeded in ramming it through a humbled Texas House, and Kelly Hancock’s comptrollership, an ally whom he plucked from the state Senate to take over the statewide office and launch of the program—was radio silent. The governor, in late March, spent his allotted time at CPAC in Dallas, while Paxton and Hancock traded potshots, droning on about the urgent need to stop the “Talarico takeover of Texas,” referencing the Democrats’ Senate candidate. 

Meanwhile, how does the voucher program—which was sold as a tool to allow low-income families to get their kids out of the state’s failing woke indoctrination facilities, known as public schools, and into predominantly Christian private schools—appear to be sizing up with its mission? 

It’s certainly succeeded in getting more applications than the $1 billion that the state has initially appropriated can cover, which is about 90,000 spots. Applications had been submitted for about 275,000 students as of late March. But just 25 percent of those—about 60,000—were for students currently enrolled in public schools, according to state comptroller data. (That, per the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, amounts to about 1 percent of the state’s 5.5 million public school students.)

To be clear, that means the vast majority of the students who are applying for vouchers are already enrolled in private schools, being homeschooled, or entering school for the first time. There were roughly 2,300 schools enrolled in the program so far—though those schools have full discretion in whether or not to accept a voucher recipient. Many of the enrolled schools are parochial Catholic schools or Christian academies. As the Texas Observer has previously reported, dozens of these enrolled schools have policies that restrict admission based on religion and even sexual identity. 

The application period closed on March 31, then the process moved on to the next phase in which the state—through its privately contracted voucher vendor—will determine who receives the limited number of vouchers, based on a convoluted, multistep process accounting for family income and other variables. 

By that point, it seems assured, some new brouhaha will be consuming the program. 

Categories Extremism, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

California Jury Acquits Man Who Threw a Tear Gas Canister Over the Heads of ICE Agents

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2026 //
0

Philosophy professor Jonathan Caravello, 38, was charged with assaulting federal agents while engaged in an anti-ICE demonstration at a cannabis farm in California. Demonstrators threw rocks at ICE agents. The federal agents rolled tear gas canisters at the demonstrators. Caravello picked up a tear gas canister and threw it back, over the heads of the ICE agents.

No federal agent was hit or harmed by the canister thrown by Caravello. If convicted, he faced up to 20 years in prison.

The jury deliberated for two hours and cleared him of all charges.

Huffington Post reported:

LOS ANGELES — A California philosophy lecturer accused of assaulting federal agents after removing a tear gas canister agents had thrown into a crowd of people protesting an immigration raid was found not guilty by a jury on Thursday.

Categories Accountability, Immigration

Corporate Reformers Want to Revive Testing, Tough Accountability, as in NCLB, Race to the Top

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2026 //
4

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat wrote about a convening of education “reformers” who agreed that it’s time to revive the “bipartisan” education coalition, exemplified by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Barnum writes:

These days there’s a new energy around an old idea: bipartisan school reform. 

Reviving this was the quaint but ascendant goal of a recent Washington D.C. event that I attended last month. The Bipartisan Policy Center convened a group of influential education leaders from both parties to sketch out a new agenda for school reform.  

“The moment is now,” said former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings during the opening panel. “We have not recovered from COVID fully. We really need to light the fire of urgency.” 

This was the sort of thinking that used to dominate Washington D.C. Presidents from both parties once insisted on a muscular federal role to hold schools and teachers accountable for raising test scores. These advocates have been on the outs politically for over a decade, but some see an opportunity to revive the old coalition. A flurry of reports, compacts, commissions, events, and essays have made the case that politicians of both parties need to come together to address the striking declines in student learning and center education as a national priority.  

Whatever you think about this mini-resurgence, it’s worth paying attention to. Bipartisan school reform upended schools once before (with a much debated legacy). Could it happen again? Maybe. In many ways the ground is ripe, but it’s not clear advocates have a clear constituency or reform agenda. 

Drawing from recent history, here are three reasons this particular brand of reform could return and three obstacles this effort faces. 

Why bipartisan reform could be revived: There really is a learning crisis.

Modern bipartisan school reform has its roots in a 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” which claimed (with disputed evidence) that the country’s schools were in dire shape. These days the data is clear: Test scores have been on an alarming trajectory for a decade. This has again led to widespread concerns among policymakers, academics, and journalists.  

The aspiring reformers are driving the mainstream media narrative about education.

Centrist education advocates and politicians, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have offered a clear theory to explain these recent learning declines. Emanuel argues that Democrats deserve blame for backing COVID-era school building closures, focusing on culture war issues, and downplaying the importance of test scores. He says Democrats should look to Republican-led states in the South, like Mississippi. 

A remarkable slew of articles have endorsed versions of this narrative. That includes several pieces in the New York Times. Not many other prominent Democrats are echoing Emanuel, but we can be sure they are reading the Times. Crucially, those Democrats more sympathetic to teachers unions and public education have not articulated a clear alternative theory to explain recent learning declines. 

Both parties may have political incentives for moving to the center on education.

The prior iteration of bipartisan reform came at a moment where both parties used education as a strategy to appeal to centrist independent voters. Bill Clinton promised to be a different type of liberal who would take a tough-minded approach to schools, while George W. Bush pitched himself as a “compassionate conservative” who would champion the education of disadvantaged children. 

Once again Democratic reformers say the party faces a similar political imperative. Emanuel and many others have claimed the party has lost its edge on education with voters. This isn’t true, according to the vast majority of recent surveys, but the talking point has nevertheless proven deeply influential at a moment when Democrats have been casting about for answers following Trump’s election in 2024.  

Republicans are not at this soul-searching stage — they’ve leaned into school choice and parents’ rights. But Trump is quite unpopularat the moment, and so is his effort to close the Education Department. Depending on the midterm results, it’s possible that the GOP will make efforts to tack away from Trump’s combative approach to education. 

Why bipartisan reform might not happen: Reformers don’t have a clear bumper sticker.

Although the centrist reformers are aligned on what’s gone wrong, their solutions are a bit less clear. This was apparent during a Bipartisan Policy Center panel on education, which I moderated. The group released a number of recommendations about improving schools. These ranged from broad goals (“reimagine the high school years”) to very specific policies (“require transparent, consistent annual reporting” on teacher pension plans). But there wasn’t an overarching idea or takeaway, as best I could tell. 

So I asked each participant on the panel what their bumper-sticker pitch for school reform would be. 

“Responsive systems and better information,” responded Andy Rotherham, the co-founder of Bellwether, an education consulting firm, and a former Clinton White House staffer. 

“Locals lead; feds fund, measure, and evaluate,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard education professor. 

“Education is the way out of your parents’ basement,” said Katie Jenner, the Indiana education secretary. 

This range of responses is in contrast with the relatively clear bumper stickers from the political right and the left. (“More choice, less wokeness, no U.S. Department of Education,” on the right. “More money,” on the left.) 

Without a snappy message for what bipartisan reformers want to do, I suspect advocates will struggle to coalesce policy elites or regular people around their ideas. 

There is little clear grassroots demand for this sort of reform. 

Indeed, the push to address learning declines has seemingly not broken through to voters. While Americans have an increasingly negative view of the quality of K-12 schools, very few rate education as a top issue. This is quite different than in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Remarkably, in the 2000 presidential campaign, voters sometimes ranked education as the top issue facing the country.  

And despite years of headlines about bad test scores, most parents still give their child’s school relatively high marks. 

Bipartisan reform may require presidential leadership

Starting with George H. W. Bush and continuing through Barack Obama there were four straight presidents who championed an overlapping agenda of school accountability and school choice. Each made education a central national issue. In a number of cases, these presidents brought along reluctant members of their own parties. The bipartisan coalition crucially depended on this presidential leadership. In turn, bipartisan school reform has collapsed under Trump and Biden since neither bought into this agenda.  

To succeed, the bipartisan reformers may need a like-minded president. That could, of course, be tough to get. Right now, Rahm Emanuel is polling at 0%-1%. The question for these aspiring reformers is whether they can find other presidential candidates to carry their mantle. 

My response: The bipartisan education reform coalition of Bush and Obama faded away because it s “reforms” failed. It treated test scores as the goal of education, and it turned schools into testing factories. Its philosophy of test and punish failed. Its demand for evaluating teachers by student test scores demoralized teachers and caused teachers to avoid low-performing schools. Merit pay failed, as it has for a century. Common Core was a disaster, ignoring the value of context and background knowledge. It welcomed charter schools, promising that they would be more innovative, get higher scores, and be more innovative than public schools. But charter schools opened and closed with regularity, some were for-profit scams, and some were founded by grifters.

Even Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute referred to the years from 2010-2020 as “the lost decade” for education.

Defenders of public schools have more to say than “more money.” They could also make bumper stickers about public schools that protect democracy, public schools that serve communities, not hedge fund managers; public schools designed to introduce children to friends from different backgrounds; public schools that teach critical thinking, not the indoctrination characteristic of religious schools.

Parents like their public schools because they know the teachers and appreciate the links between students, parents and schools. The bipartisan coalition of education reformers failed because they constantly derided public schools; their efforts to replace public schools with standardization failed.

The reformers look back to their glory days with nostalgia. Parents and students don’t.

Categories Education Reform

Iran Mocks U.S. in Searing Short Videos

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2026 //
11

While the U.S. has eliminated its agencies that speak to the world, like Voice of America, Iran has been producing videos mocking the United States, portraying its history as a long series of atrocities, and linking the current war to Jeffrey Epstein.Virginia Heffernan tells the story in The New Republic.

She writes:

There’s a new way to teach American history. It’s not woke. But it’s not patriotic, either. It’s not the 1619 Project or the 1776 project.

It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”

The strongest entries in the series are producedby an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iraniangovernment accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.) 

Scare up the extremely violent videos at your own risk, but here’s a plot summary. In an early one, Trump, panicked about his culpability in the Epstein affair, smashes a red button to strike Iran as a distraction. After Iran strikes back and slams shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu run scared from Iran’s strategic genius and godlike military might. In the next few videos, the U.S. Army loses personnel, planes, helicopters, and popular support; capital markets spiral. Coffins draped in American flags pile up. 

“One Vengeance for All” stands out from the rest because it contains more American history than breaking news. And what a way to see our once-promising nation. The Iranian History of the United States features no pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, or wars in Europe. Also absent: slavery, civil rights, feminism, and unions. 

Instead, you get 53 seconds of 600 years of American jingoism and genocide. The video opens on an AI caricature of an Indigenous man in a headdress looking to the heavens from the Western plains. Cut to a little boy carrying a dead infant amid smoldering rubble in Hiroshima. These are ghosts.

From there to Vietnam. A middle-aged woman carries a scythe, in a rice field, and again looks skyward. Then come slain Iranian leaders: Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. All ghosts. Now there’s a girl at a refugee camp in Gaza. We’re given to understand from her hopeful expression that help is coming, and that the help is the Iranian army, though it has no intention of “liberating” or “saving” the ghosts. Instead, with centuries of pent-up resentment in its arsenal, Iran will avenge their suffering with fire and fury.

About two-thirds of the way in, the narrative rounds on the American people, and finds Trump’s victims among us. A blond girl in a pink dress, no older than 6, is pictured in a tropical landscape. It’s Epstein Island. The island’s enigmatic blue-striped building, which some speculate is a reference to the Israeli flag, stands behind her. This girl is also a victim of American imperialism, courtesy of the Trump-Epstein class that merged capital and executive power; private-sector monopolies with political world domination. 

This girl’s Iranian counterpart appears in the next image, a young schoolgirl in a blue coat and white hijab, and she seals the connection. She’s abandoned in the deserted courtyard of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This is the schoolyard where around 170 people were murdered, elementary school students, when the school was bombed by U.S. forces back in February on the war’s first day. 

At once, a sisterhood of ghosts coalesces. From Epstein Island to southern Iran, schoolgirls pair with schoolgirls, the specters of abused children whose lives or spirits have been extinguished by sadistic American tyrants.

Trump is globally known for sex crimes and, like Hegseth, charges of sex crimes—and the Iranian videos depict the two men explicitly as rapists. In one video, the Lego Trump has doll-like girl figures on his bed and lap, and Hegseth is shown in military garb, repeatedly committing rape. Assaults on girls are the modus vivendi of these videos’ versions of Trump and Hegseth.

These sequences are not idle trolling. Rape is, of course, a crime against humanity. But rape is implicated more immediately in the brief for this war, which centers not on strategic goals but on the relentless use of violence against innocents to humiliate an entire people. 

As Jamelle Bouie put it recently, “Forcing others to submit through the indiscriminate use of force does not really sound like war. That does sound like something else. It sounds like rape.” He concluded that the ideology of Trump and Hegseth is “the ideology of the rapist.” 

After 9/11, President Bush used to tell Americans that our enemies resented “our way of life.” In his memorable “Why Do They Hate Us?” speech of September 20, 2001, Bush answered his own question, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” 

This may or may not have been true of the terrorists a quarter century ago. But it’s not at all true now of Iran, which the U.S. attacked without permission from the people or provocation from Iran. Iran hates the American government for its cruelty toward hundreds of millions of people across six centuries. It’s hard not to see the logic in it. 

In Trump, the ideology of the rapist was unmistakable a decade ago, when he crowed about the joy he takes in humiliating human beings by mauling their crotches. With this war, he’s trying, as usual, for highly aestheticized spectacles of humiliation, and he’s getting them—but not for Iran. For himself, and for the United States.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, History, Trump

Adam Kinzinger: Who Silenced America?

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2026 //
3

Adam Kinzinger is a war veteran and a former Congressman from Illinois who resigned after serving on the January 6 Commission, which other Republicans (except Liz Cheney) shunned.

In his blog, he explained how the Trump administration turned off America’s voice in the world, leaving the space for Iranian satire. You can’t beat humor, he says, with press briefings.

The question we should all be asking is why the Trump administration pulled the plug on America’s communications to the world. Who benefits when America goes silent?

He writes:

For years, people inside the national security community warned that America’s information infrastructure was one of its most under appreciated strategic assets. Not the bombs, not the bases, not the carrier groups — though those matter enormously — but the quieter architecture of influence: the broadcasters, the counter-disinformation centers, the public diplomacy programs. The “I” in the DIME model — Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic — is not decorative. It is load-bearing. Strip it out, and the structure becomes unstable.

We are now watching that instability play out in real time.

Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has methodically dismantled virtually every institutional instrument the United States had for competing in the global information space. Voice of America, which had been broadcasting in nearly 50 languages to an estimated 354 million people weekly, went silent for the first time in 83 years. The administration also terminated funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The Global Engagement Center — which I helped establish — lost its congressional authorization in December 2024 and was then formally shuttered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in April 2025, with its successor office eliminated as well. In February, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — the unit dedicated to investigating foreign disinformation and election interference — was dissolved by Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment was disbanded, the Woodrow Wilson Center was effectively shut down, and the US Institute of Peace was ordered dismantled — DOGE physically forced its way into the headquarters and removed board members. USAID, which administered approximately 60 percent of US foreign assistance, was gutted, with over 80 percent of its portfolio canceled. The Fulbright program took severe cuts. Language training programs at universities lost Defense Department funding.

The right-wing argument for all of this rests on a fundamental and willful confusion. The theory goes that these agencies were really instruments of domestic censorship — government apparatuses designed to suppress conservative American voices at home. Marco Rubio announced the GEC’s closure by declaring that it had been used to “actively silence and censor the voices of Americans.” For that claim, officials at the Global Engagement Center have offered denials, and there is no evidence to support it. A federal appeals court, in examining lawsuits targeting the GEC, found no evidence that its officials had coerced or influenced social media platforms to moderate content. The narrative that these agencies were turned against the American people was politically useful and factually hollow.

I say this not as an abstract critic but as someone who was involved in creating the Global Engagement Center. The mission was specific and outward-facing: recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation aimed at undermining American interests and those of our allies. The GEC was tracking Russian narratives around Ukraine, Chinese influence campaigns in Africa and Southeast Asia, and Iranian disinformation targeting American audiences. It was not reading your tweets. It was watching what the Kremlin, the IRGC, and the Chinese Communist Party were doing to shape perceptions overseas and at home — because those are not separate theaters anymore.

The people who tore this infrastructure down either do not understand the modern information environment or, more troublingly, are comfortable with the vacuum their decisions created. Chinese state media openly celebrated the closure of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin called it “truly gratifying.” When your adversaries are that publicly pleased by a policy decision, it is worth pausing to ask who it actually serves.

Those of us who worked in this space assumed we would have some lag time — that the consequences of these closures would take years to fully materialize. Institutions take time to wind down, adversaries take time to scale up, and global audiences don’t shift overnight. We were wrong about the timeline. The effects have arrived with startling speed, and we are seeing them most vividly in the current conflict with Iran.

Pro-Iran groups, almost certainly linked to the government in Tehran, have deployed AI to produce English-language propaganda targeting American audiences — slick, culturally fluent memes and videos racking up millions of views across social platforms. They have portrayed President Trump as old, out of step, and internationally isolated. They have weaponized the Epstein files, Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, and infighting within the MAGA coalition. One series of AI-generated videos presents Trump and Netanyahu as Lego minifigures. In one, an Iranian military commander raps over imagery of Trump falling into a target. After a ceasefire was announced, the account posted simply: “Iran won! Trump surrendered.”

The videos are, admittedly, sometimes funny. They are also deeply ironic. The regime producing them has imposed a near-total internet blackout on its own citizens. X and most major social platforms have been blocked inside Iran for years, accessible only via VPN — and most ordinary Iranians have barely had access to the internet at all since the outbreak of the conflict in February. The culture these videos depict Iranians defending — the references to American pop culture, the fluency in meme language, the appeal to human rights — is precisely the culture the Islamic Republic murders people for embracing inside its own borders. Women are killed for not wearing the hijab properly. Protesters are tortured and executed. This is the regime now winning the meme war.

Analysts say the sophistication of these videos — the bandwidth, the production quality, the cultural knowledge of the American internet — indicates these creators are officially or unofficially cooperating with the regime. It is state propaganda dressed in the aesthetic of organic content. And it is working in part because the US and Israel do not appear to be engaging in anything comparable for external audiences — the White House’s memes are aimed domestically, at Americans who already support the administration. Nobody is reaching the swing audiences in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Africa who are forming their views about this conflict in real time.

Ridicule and satire are especially potent in this environment because they are captivating and very difficult to counter. A factual rebuttal to a Lego animation almost inevitably looks plodding, humorless, and tonally mismatched. You can’t win a meme war by holding a press conference. You need infrastructure, institutional knowledge, cultural fluency, and the operational capacity to produce and distribute counter-narrative content at scale. We had that. We threw it away.

“This is how we lose big wars,” one former counter-disinformation researcher said after the GEC’s closure. That quote wasn’t hyperbole. In the DIME framework, information is not a supplementary element. It is a co-equal instrument of national power. You cannot substitute military and economic pressure for informational presence — especially when the adversary has studied your culture for decades and knows exactly how to reach your own population. Iran’s propaganda operation is the fruit of a decades-long government program to learn American politics and pop culture — the meme war didn’t emerge overnight. It was prepared. We were not.

There is a tendency in American political life to dismiss information operations as somehow soft, as less serious than real tools of statecraft. The same impulse that sees diplomacy as weakness and foreign assistance as waste. These are the instincts of people who have never had to fight for narrative control in a conflict, who have never watched a carefully crafted lie spread faster than the truth in a language we didn’t think to monitor. The DIME model exists because generations of national security professionals learned, often through painful experience, that you need all four instruments working together. Pull one out and the others become less effective, not equally effective.

We dismantled our informational infrastructure not because it was failing — VOA alone reached hundreds of millions of people in closed societies who had no other access to independent news — but because some people convinced themselves and others that it was a domestic censorship threat. The result is that the US has been all but crippled in its ability to compete in the global information arena, while Russia and China have moved to fill every gap.

The Lego videos are funny. The situation is not. A theocracy that blocks its own people’s access to the internet is currently running circles around the United States in the information space of an active conflict. That does not happen by accident. It happens because one side prepared and the other side burned down its own capacity and called it a victory for free speech.

We will be paying the cost of that decision for a very long time.

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Categories Education Reform

Arizona: State Supt. Intervenes to Save Failing Charter School owned by Multi-Millionaire

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2026 //
2

In Arizona, the state charter board did the right thing: it planned to close an online charter school with a long record of failure. But the owner of the charter school was a big Republican donor. And he was a multi-millionaire, who had been richly rewarded by his ownership of Primavera. He had a meeting of the minds with the State Superintendent of Schools, Tom Horne. Horne is a strong believer in choice. Suddenly, Primavera’s grades were recalculated and closure of the piggy bank was off the table.

Veteran reporter Craig Harris told the story for Channel 12:

PHOENIX — For more than a year, Arizona’s largest online charter school, Primavera, and its multi-millionaire owner, Damian Creamer, faced the very real possibility of being shut down. 

Plagued by poor academic performance and mounting scrutiny, the State Charter Board had already taken multiple steps toward revoking the school’s charter in 2025.

But in a surprising turn of events, Primavera has been given a lifeline — thanks to an intervention from Republican State Schools Chief Tom Horne.

The decision sparked frustration among board members who had spent months working toward closure.

Longtime board member James Swanson, reflecting the general mood of the 11-member board.

He said the board acted within its authority to hold Primavera accountable after students recorded “D” letter grades for three consecutive years ending in 2024.

Board Chairwoman Jessica Montierth echoed that sentiment after the 9-2 vote, noting the significant time and effort invested in the case. 

“Our authority is based on following through with policy and procedure, and that’s what we have done,” she said, adding that the outcome was difficult to accept given the circumstances.

The controversy surrounding Primavera intensified following a 12News investigation early last year. 

The 12News Investigates report in February 2025 revealed that the school’s owner, Creamer, had paid himself $24 million since 2017.

At the same time, the school consistently underperformed academically as the Charter Board gave Primavera its worst annual rating four times: Falls Far Below Standard. Two times, Primavera got the second-worst rating: Does Not Meet Standard. 

The free-wheeling at Primavera is a byproduct of Arizona’s loosely regulated charter school industry that allows owners to make as much money as possible for years with public funds. 

But in March 2025, the Charter Board formally voted to begin the process of shutting the school down after it received three consecutive annual “D” letter grades.

Creamer, who did not attend Tuesday’s meeting, previously attributed the low grades to administrative errors. 

He argued that Primavera should have been evaluated under alternative school standards rather than traditional ones. 

And he appealed directly to Horne, after having the support of Republican leaders who also lobbied the Charter Board on his behalf. 

“We’re so grateful for Tom Horne,” Creamer, a major GOP donor, said during a press conference in mid-March 2025. “For working with us so that we can correct this administrative error.”

Horne twice that month said he wasn’t going to intervene. 

“My first priority for all public schools is academic success,” Horne said in March 2025. “It is important that charters and district schools alike are held accountable for the quality of education they provide. The Board’s action demonstrates that these are not just words, but actions. Primavera is being held accountable and losing its ability to operate because of poor academic results.”

Horne, however, later allowed Primavera to privately meet with his staff and present new records to his office.

The board accused Horne of taking the “unprecedented steps of retroactively reclassifying Primavera from a traditional school to an alternative school, reopening prior-year data, and allowing the submission of additional information.”

That was key because traditional charter schools are evaluated under higher academic measures, while alternative schools, which typically serve higher-risk or non-traditional student populations, are evaluated with different performance expectations.

It’s unclear when Horne, who is currently in a tight re-election campaign against Treasurer Kimberly Yee for the GOP nomination, made all of the changes. 

But Charter Board officials on Tuesday said Horne’s intervention resulted in the Department of Education indicating the school would have received three Alternative “C” grades instead of three “D” grades under the traditional model. 

The board, in a statement, said this “after-the-fact rewrite of Primavera’s academic performance fundamentally changed the facts underlying the Board’s case long after enforcement had begun, effectively removing the Board’s ability to proceed under its established authority.”

Remember, “it’s all about the kids! No child should be trapped in a failing charter school! Parents know best!”

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud

Federal Judge Dismisses Trump Lawsuit Against Wall Street Journal

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2026 //
0

Remember when The Wall Street Journal published a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th Birthday Book? Remember that it included an entry from Donald Trump? It was a poem inside the shape of a woman’s torso. Trump was outraged and he threatened to sue the WSJ $10 billion for defamation. He did. A federal judge threw out the case yesterday.

Happy birthday to Jeffrey Epstein (allegedly)

Steve Benen of MS NOW writes:

Last summer, after The Wall Street Journal reported on Donald Trump’s alleged 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the president responded with unsubtle threats. “President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly,” he wrote online, referring to himself in the third person for reasons unknown.

The Republican added soon after, “The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein. These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper.”

In mid-July, the president did, in fact, file the defamation suit, seeking a jury trial and a judgment of at least $10 billion. At least for now, it now appears he will get neither. The Journal reported:

A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles, based in Miami, Fla., ruled Trump hadn’t made a valid legal claim that he was defamed by an article about a letter to financier Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s name.

“Because President Trump has not plausibly alleged that defendants published the article with actual malice, both Counts must be dismissed,” the jurist wrote.

We’ll learn soon enough whether the president’s lawyers appeal and/or file an amended lawsuit, but as things stand, his highly dubious and historically unusual civil case is no more.

If it seems as if Trump has faced related failures before, it’s not your imagination. Indeed, one of the most striking things about his latest legal setback is the familiarity of the circumstances.

The Trump campaign’s 2020 case against CNN failed. Trump’s 2021 case against The New York Times failed. Trump’s 2023 case against Bob Woodward failed. The Trump campaign’s case against The Washington Post failed. Trump’s so-called class action lawsuit against social media giants also failed. (Last week, Trump filed a $15 billion civil suit against the New York Times, which was thrown out four days later, not because it lacked merit, but because a federal judge found that the president’s lawyers’ court filing was simply too ridiculous.)

Americans have never before had a president who sued independent news organizations or individual journalists for publishing reports the White House disapproved of, but we’ve also never before had a president lose so many civil cases while in office.

Let’s not miss the related larger lesson related to the importance of pushback. When the Republican filed a dubious case against ABC News, the network and its corporate parent agreed to a $16 million settlement. When he filed an even weaker case against CBS News, Paramount also struck a $16 million deal.

In the weeks and months that followed, Trump repeatedly pointed to these controversial settlement agreements as evidence of his targets’ guilt, even as those networks denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, news organizations that stood up for themselves and pushed back against the ridiculous attempts at intimidation have prevailed.

Let this be a lesson to the larger political world: The only way to lose in a fight against Trump is to pursue a course rooted in appeasement. It’s true when it comes to law firms; it’s true when it comes to higher education; and it’s true in his court fights against news organizations.

Categories Education Reform

ICE Detains Foreign-Born Doctor in Texas Who Was Legally Admitted to U.S.

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2026 //
13

The New York Times reported on an ICE detention in Texas that involved an outstanding doctor who entered the U.S. legally.

The Times reported:

Not the “Worst of the Worst”

A Venezuelan-born family physician who had been caring for Americans with chronic illnesses in an area facing a doctor shortage was detained by Border Patrol agents in Texas late Monday.

The doctor, Ezequiel Veliz, was featured in a New York Times article last weekend that detailed how a Trump administration policy had frozen visa extensions, work permits and green cards for citizens of 39 countries, forcing some foreign-born physicians out of U.S. hospitals.

Dr. Veliz treated people with diabetes, hypertension and other ailments, and was named resident of the year in 2025 at UT Health, Rio Grande Valley. He had entered the United States legally and was forced to withdraw from his position after losing his work permit because his immigration status ended. He had been trying to transition to a new visa, according to documents he submitted to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that The Times reviewed.

UT Health did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Dr. Veliz’s husband, Joseph Williams, an American citizen, said the pair were driving from the Rio Grande Valley to Houston on Highway 77 when they were flagged by Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint in Sarita.

Dr. Veliz told the agents that his husband was an American citizen and that he was a foreign physician in the process of obtaining a new visa. The officers did not seem to grasp that, Mr. Williams said, and ordered Dr. Veliz to get out of the vehicle.

Categories Education Reform

Tom Ultican: Billionaire Fads Are Undermining Schools

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2026 //
3

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, says that all the bright and shiny fads have actually harmed students and teachers. I have not posted the entirety of his commentary. To finish reading it, open this link.

He writes:

Trump’s billionaire education leader, Linda McMahon, claimed on Fox News, “We’re doing terribly, I mean, our education system’s failed our kids.” Like a typical oligarch, she bolstered her point by mischaracterizing NAEP assessment levels stating, “only about 30% of high school and eighth graders can read proficiently or do math proficiently.” Maybe that sounds bad, but the reality is those numbers indicate that 30% of students are achieving at a high B or low A grade-level which sounds pretty good to me.

McMahon was promoting her nonpartisan “History Rocks!” tour. The sponsors of the tour are certainly not nonpartisan. They include America 250 Civics Education Coalition, led by pro-Trump America First Policy Institute which is composed of right-wing organizations such as Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation.

However, even though standardized testing is a terrible method for evaluating schools and students, it is notable that the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results have been falling since 2013.

The NAEP data plotted above is for all tested US students in 8th grade and 4th grade reading. Around 2013, results started dropping. Data for math also shows this same trend. Because education has so many variables, establishing a solid cause and effect relationship for this decline is impossible.

Based on my personal experience in the classroom and my years of observing education outcomes, I have developed a theory that at least partially explains the decline.

Education Technology

In the 1990s, I worked in Silicon Valley researching friction problems associated with computer equipment. Part of my assignment was to develop software that ran testing devices, gathered massive data sets and loaded them into a Microsoft data base which created reports that I shared with customers. Once the testing was setup and started, everything from then on was automated. I loved pushing technology and making it do things no one else had.

In 1999, I got tired of Silicon Valley. That is when I returned to San Diego and sought a teaching credential. At the time, I imagined being able to use my technology expertise in future classrooms. I had become genuinely excited about education technology (edtech).

I wish I could say my expectations were met but I cannot.

I discovered that instead of edtech driving exploration, it was aimed at controlling and replacing teachers.

As part of the master of education program at UCSD, we were sent to local schools to work with students. I went to a local high school to work with struggling math students in a recovery class. Students were assigned to work on computer presented math problems which were then graded by the computer.

As the education technology critic Audre Watters has observed:

“Just because it’s a worksheet on an iPad doesn’t mean it’s transformational or exciting. It’s still a worksheet.”

In retrospect, this experience was an early effort to replace teachers with computer screens. Instead of working on making edtech an exciting addition to education, the effort was pointed toward putting kids at screens instead learning from teachers. The technology industry was promising to reduce the need for costly teachers.

Physics Lab Class

This picture shows an example of using technology to engage students in authentic learning. Two photogates affixed to the ramp were accurate to + or – 0.001 seconds. Here the students were adjusting the ramp to achieve constant velocity when a marble rolled down the ramp. The photogates provided data including the time for test object to roll through the gate and the time between gates. Since students new the diameter of the test ball and the distance between the gates, they were able to calculate three velocities. Once the three velocities were all equal, they changed to a test ball with identical geometry but significantly less mass. They were then able to observe that the mass of the ball did not change the velocity which accords with Galileo Galilei’s 1589 experiment testing mass and gravity.

Unfortunately, only small companies were working to develop engaging technology for learning. Larger companies were developing school management systems that gathered large data sets on all students and teachers. Or they were creating schemes where teachers created lessons on their platforms which then claimed ownership of the lessons.

The school district I was in bought every student an I-pad and then three years later replaced those I-pads with laptop computers. Because these devices were such a classroom distraction, teachers often required students to put them in their backpacks and store them under their desks.

It was worse than a waste of money. It was undermining learning.

 In my AP physics classes, students were not working through the assigned problems. They discovered that almost all physics problems had a worked-out example on line. I was getting the most beautiful work I had ever seen but the students were clueless when tested.

It seems fair to identify edtech as a possible cause for declining test scores. Artificial intelligence will likely make — not working or thinking — an even bigger problem.

Science of Reading

The Orwellian labeled science of reading (SoR) is not based on sound science. In 1997, congress passed legislation calling for a reading study. Establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort from the beginning. It was a massive undertaking, conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers over 18-months. NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains, ignoring 10 other important domains. They did not review everything and there was no new research. Their report is the basis for SoR.

To finish reading the post, open this link.

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Literacy, Technology

John Thompson: What Is the Best Way to Improve Oklahoma’s Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2026 //
4

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, considers ideas about how to improve Oklahoma’s schools, but insists that one overlooked cause of lower academic progress, was the torrent of misguided mandates written in Washington, D.C., such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Thompson writes:

Despite our disagreements on some policies and research methodologies, I have respect for Adam Tyner, the executive director of the Oklahoma Center for Education Policy  He earned a doctorate in Political Science, and was the National Research Director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.Tyner is the author of The Fall to 48th: Documenting Oklahoma’s Educational Decline, which draws upon NAEP scores, and cites Diane Ravitch as to their reliablity. While I agree that Oklahoma schools can come back, I’m troubled by the title of his NonDoc piece, “The ‘Southern Surge’ suggests Oklahoma’s education system can bounce back.” 

Being a retired inner-city teacher, I am pleased by Tyner’s rejection of cheap, quick, and simple solutions. But, as a historian, I would focus on different NAEP test scores, and the way that No Child Left Behind (NCLB); Race to the Top (RttT); and budget cuts undermined teaching and learning.

To his credit, Tyner linked to Matt Barnum’s analysis of both the potential benefits and harms of the “Southern Surge,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.” Barnum acknowledged the gains in 4th grade test scores by states that drew upon the “Science of Reading.” But, he concluded:

Eighth graders’ results “have been less impressive for these Southern exemplars.” Alabama’s eighth grade reading scores have been falling and are among the lowest in the country. Louisiana’s eight grade reading scores remain at the 2002 level. And, Mississippi’s eighth grade reading scores are about the same as they were in 1998.

I believe that Tyner’s history of the last three decades should be read in conjunction of his recent commentary in the Oklahoman. 
He starts it with Phonics instruction being “a first step towards teaching literacy.” But, he adds, “Background knowledge is key to reading comprehension.”

Tyner then explains:

To become a strong reader in middle school and beyond, students need a firm foundation of core knowledge, and that comes not just from practicing reading, but from developing a broad vocabulary and an understanding of a large range of topics — from geography and history to literature and science.

He then critiques many Oklahoma schools for efforts to improve comprehension by mainly:

Having students practice so-called “comprehension skills and strategies,” such as finding the main idea in a passage and making inferences. These Chromebook-based exercises often resemble test prep. Although some of this practice is fine, hours spent on it crowd out history, geography, science and literature.

This is very consistent with a scholarly paper by the SRI, Report: Beyond the Surface: Leveraging High-Quality Instructional Materials for Robust Reading Comprehension Learning brief, funded by Tulsa’s Schusterman Family Foundation. As reported by the 74, Katrina Woodworth, the director at SRI’s Center for Education Research & Improvement, explained. “The point is to both teach reading and to build students’ knowledge base so that they have more scaffolding for future learning of both content and meaning.” But even the most promising Science of Reading programs they studied, may be “unintentionally encouraging teachers to focus on surface-level goals.”

One of the lead authors, Dan Reynolds, asked, “Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”

Reynolds said the “Surface-level” instruction they discovered, “weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage.” 

And, getting back to Tyner, he wrote that an “important caveat to the undeniable successes of Mississippi and Louisiana in raising fourth-grade reading is that those states have seen little improvement in eighth-grade reading.”

While I very much agree with his position on the harm done by the failure to focus on background information, educators didn’t voluntarily undermine the teaching of history, the arts, and critical thinking. After all, the SRI study finds hope in the evidence that students and teachers prefer deep reading instruction.

But, I wish he had explained how the decline of holistic instruction was the predictable result of the NCLB’s and RttT’s test-driven mandates. During that time, for example, I served on a team assembled by our outstanding State Superintendent Sandy Garrett, in order to minimize the harm we knew was coming with NCLB.

Due to the demand that schools meet impossible testing goals, schools were forced to cut back on social studies, history, science, and the arts, as well as critical thinking. They inflicted the worst harm on schools serving the poorest children of color. Being a history teacher in extremely high-challenge high schools, I was horrified by the hundreds of stories I was told by students who said they were “robbed of an education.”

And those experiences explain why I’m worried by Tyner’s call for “deliberate efforts to improve instruction and accountability.” I would communicate with many thousands of teachers, and students, and I can’t remember anyone who lived through those “reforms” and didn’t see test-driven, accountability-driven instruction as a failure.

Moreover, while Tyner calls for solid funding of the infrastructure necessary to implement the Southern Strategy, he is less clear about the harms that retaining students can have. Given the lies perpetrated by rightwingers who claimed Oklahoma failed to improve reading because Joy Hofmeister quickly ended retentions, I wish he would be more explicit in fact-checking them.  

A history of 21st century education in Oklahoma should also explicitly include the reasons why Oklahoma backed off from passing four End of Instruction tests. Rep. Joe Eddins explained in 2005, “Based on test data, the House of Representatives staff estimates 89,000 failed tests each year.”

So, Oklahomans focused on win-win policies, and NAEP 8th grade test scores, stopped declining in 2005, and went up from 2009 to 2013.  (2013 was the year when national 8th grade reading and math scores also peaked.) 

I taught in an alternative school, in 2012, when new End-of-Instruction tests were being piloted. I resigned after being required to give the vast majority of my students’ worksheets, and focus on tutoring a few students who had a chance of passing the test, and graduate. Fortunately, under the leadership of Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, that law was repealed in 2016.

A history of what went wrong in Oklahoma schools should also address the budget cuts that killed those successes.

As the Oklahoma Policy Institute reported in 2016:

Oklahoma’s per pupil funding of the state aid formula for public schools has fallen 26.9 percent after inflation between FY 2008 and FY 2017. These continue to be the deepest cuts in the nation, and Oklahoma’s lead is growing. On a percentage basis, we’ve cut nearly twice as much as the next worst state, Alabama.

Moreover, Mississippi’s cuts ( -9.2) were about a third of Oklahoma’s, and Florida’s and Louisiana’s cuts were a little less than 20% and about 10%. Tennessee increased its funding by 9.8%.

After Nearly a Decade, School Investments Still Way Down in Some StatesPublic investment in K-12 schools — crucial for communities to thrive and the U.S. economy to offer broad opport…

Although I would have written a different history on Oklahoma education’s decline, I do believe we can rebuild our education systems.

But, I would have liked to read more of Tyner’s thoughts about the damage teachers witnessed by accountability-driven reforms that were imposed on Oklahoma schools, and huge funding cuts. My main response to his history, however, is that this is the time to be more blunt in terms of what it would  really take to achieve equitable levels of reading for comprehension.  

Given the lack of evidence that the “Southern Surge” is improving reading comprehension, providing long-term benefits, and doing more good than harm, we should find a more holistic way to reverse the harm inflicted on our schools by top-down mandates of the last quarter of a century. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, NAEP, Oklahoma
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