The Network for Public Education will hold its annual conference in Conroe, Texas–right outside Houston, on September 26-27.
We have a stellar line-up of speakers, panels, and workshops.
Join me and hundreds of others who fight to protect and improve our public schools.
Greg Olear writes delightful posts, in which he calls of his vast knowledge and research to say something that no one else has said or will say. This post explains why Jared and Ivanka want Sazan Island, a few miles off the coast of Albania.
They think they discovered it, and they want to turn it into a super-deluxe resort where people like themselves can find the quiet and luxury that they seek.
The people of Albania don’t like the idea of turning Albanian property and nature reserve over to these Americans, and the protests grow louder and larger every day.
Olear points out that the Kushner’s already own an estate on a secluded island in Florida. Why another one?
And that brings him to the fascinating story of Sarawak, which was gifted to a British adventurer named James C. Brooke, who became the Rajah of Sarawak. It’s a great story:
Brooke was certainly well-off, but hardly the scion of a British robber baron. Nor did he work at some cushy desk job. He was a professional soldier and seafarer. He was enterprising. He was bold. And he was opportunistic. Adventuring in the East Indies, he found himself doing mercenary work for the Sultan of Brunei—putting down uprisings and blowing up pirate ships and saving the Sultan’s uncle from assassination attempts. As gifted as he was at taking out pirates, Brooke was positively elite—Epstein-like, one might even say—at currying favor with the rich and powerful.
From the Sultan, Brooke received the governorship of Sarawak, the Malaysian slice of northern Borneo. In 1841, he was given sovereign power over the region, as well as a new title: Rajah of Sarawak. It’s kind of nuts, in hindsight. An upper-middle-class Englishman, a white guy, became head of state of a new nation in the East Indies! And it wasn’t some bogus title, either. Brooke cannily allied himself with Britain, so while he enjoyed absolute power, he also had the world’s most powerful navy to protect him when he needed it—the best of both worlds. He issued currency, putting his portrait on the coins and banknotes. He established a hereditary monarchy, the White Rajahs of Sarawak, that only ended because the Japanese overran Borneo in the Second World War.
It’s a neat trick to tie Sarawak to Sazan Island., and Olear does it.
Read it to see how he pulls all these threads together.
Public health experts are worried about the Trump administration’s plans to downsize global aid programs that have saved millions of lives. One such program is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The program was initiated in 2003 during the administration of President George W. Bush. It is widely credited with saving 26 million lives. Some thought it unlikely that Trump would slash a program that has been effective and that was launched by another Republican president.
But the program will be dramatically cut, from $2 billion to $150 million yearly. The cutbacks will occur under the auspices of Trump’s America First priority. Rationale: If people die in other countries, it’s not our problem.
This article appeared in Medpage Today and was written by Rachel Robertson::
A major change to how the popular President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program operates took effect on June 1, which experts warn will result in a massive decline in the U.S.’s public health presence abroad.
Historically, the U.S. State Department brokered Congress-appropriated dollars for PEPFAR programs and CDC would receive approximately $2 billion in PEPFAR funds annually for the agency’s programs around the world. But under the new plan, foreign nations will choose à la carte what services they want to buy from CDC, though countries that receive more than $125 million in U.S. aid will have to purchase a minimum package.
The new guidance is part of the Trump Administration’s “America First Global Health Strategy” and was first brought to light opens in a new tab or window by Emily Bass, an AIDS activist who has written a book about PEPFAR, last month on her Substack. In a document detailingopens in a new tab or window the government’s strategy, the State Department claims that this “America First” approach will disrupt a “culture of dependency” in how U.S. global health programs currently operate. But slipped in there is that foreign health assistance from the U.S. could also leverage access to other countries’ resources, like key minerals.
Tom Frieden, MD, MPH, who served as CDC director from 2009 to 2017 and is now president and CEO of the nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives, told MedPage Today that “the underlying concept is a good one, with countries deciding what services they want partnership on and with which partners. But the reality is that you cannot order off a menu if the restaurant is closed, and this approach would end CDC’s ability to support partner countries and protect Americans.”
Frieden noted that under this State Department plan, the funding that CDC receives from PEPFAR could plummet to $150 million, or 7% of the fiscal year 2025 level, which is not nearly enough to continue the agency’s global operations.
Frieden and seven other former CDC directors published an op-ed in STAT opens in a new tab or window last week urging the State Department to reform PEPFAR instead of “dismantling it.” They cautioned that the government’s plans could result in at least 18 CDC global outposts closing by year’s end, since most are sustained with PEPFAR funding, and up to 85% of the agency’s global presence being pulled back in the next 2 years.
“Without a transition plan and a manageable timeline, the result will not be a more effective PEPFAR — it will be the rapid dismantling of America’s overseas public health capability and the relationships that have taken years to build,” they wrote.
At the Harvard commencement, a new graduate gave a remarkable speech about the importance of talking in a civil manner to those with whom you disagree.
Noah Eckstein began his speech to his fellow graduates and faculty with the familiar opening to a joke: “A Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew walk into a bar…”
Everyone waited for the story and the punchline, but it was not what they expected. Eckstein explained that one grandparent was Christian and the other was Muslim. They had a daughter who was raised as a Christian. She married a Jew. They had a child, and that is me, a proud Jew.
He described how his family disagrees without hatred, how they have taught him to respect that other people have other views.
One of his central messages: “Listen before you speak.”
This is a message for our times.
A few years ago, I read a book called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. And happier. Less anger, less resentment, less envy. More unity. More of a sense of “we,” not us vs. them.
We are now at the other extreme. Some people are paid sums they can never spend in 100 lifetimes.
This is unhealthy.
Jeff Sommer of The New York Times reported on the 10 richest people in America.
Even among the nation’s best-paid corporate chiefs, Elon Musk stands alone. His compensation last year was a mind-boggling $132.3 billion. That’s not just 2.5 million times what the typical Tesla employee made; it’s 153 times the compensation of the second-highest paid chief executive.
Dylan Field, who heads Figma, an online design platform, was runner-up to Mr. Musk in the rankings. But in terms of wealth created, he was way behind. His pay, $864.4 million, was a mere rounding error for Mr. Musk.
These astonishing figures come from the latest annual survey of the highest-paid chief executives conducted for The New York Times by the research firm Equilar. The study found that seven other chief executives of public companies had paydays last year of at least $100 million, more than ever before.
Median pay for the 100 highest-paid chief executives in publicly traded companies reached $39.4 million — a new peak, and a leap of 35.8 percent in just one year.
As an editor and as a columnist, I’ve been involved in these Equilar surveys since they started in 2007. They have always shown that chief executives in the United States are exceedingly well paid. But lately, the trend is starker.
Right after Mr. Field in the latest rankings was Shankh Mitra of Welltower, a real estate investment trust that focuses on health care, with compensation of $821 million. Welltower shareholders last month disapproved of that pay package in a rare negative vote. One critic called it an “egregiously management-friendly” transfer of wealth from shareholders. But the “say on pay” vote was nonbinding. A vast majority of such measures are approved at public companies every year.
In the 1950s, the gap between the pay of a typical employee and a CEO was 1-20. For every dollar a typical employee earned, a chief executive made twenty. This era was characterized by much narrower income disparity compared to recent decades. (Forbes)
The New York Times reported that doctors and hospitals are reporting a surge in diseases that had been eliminated by vaccines, like whooping cough. As the number of people who decline vaccinations increases, the diseases that would have protected them are increasing in number.
Thanks, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for putting the lives of many people at risk!
Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial infections that can cause pneumonia or meningitis.
The concern among doctors comes on the heels of a resurgence of measles nationwide, fueled by distrust in vaccines that grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump have amplified. Public health experts have long seen measles as a harbinger: Because it is so exceptionally contagious, it can be the first disease to spike as vaccination rates broadly decline, and a sign of more to come.
For some of these diseases, national data show clear and substantial increases in recent years; for others, the increases are small, or there are anecdotal indications from doctors on the ground of increases that public statistics don’t currently confirm.
While most children recover, these diseases aren’t benign. Many children endure extended hospitalizations. Some infections can be fatal.
Dr. Meghan Hofto, a pediatric hospitalist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is one of the doctors who said she is seeing more illnesses that she used to encounter only rarely. This year, she and her colleagues have treated more children than usual with persistent diarrhea. A child with a run-of-the-mill stomach virus might need a day or so of IV fluids, but these patients were being hospitalized for three or four days.
The culprit: Rotavirus, which once caused tens of thousands of hospitalizations a year in the United States but was largely swept away by vaccines introduced 20 years ago. These vaccines were so effective that Dr. Hofto could recall treating only four or five children with rotavirus in the past decade. Now, she said she had treated about that many already this year, and none of them were vaccinated.
Dr. Jessica Kirk, a pediatric hospitalist in Fairhope, Ala., recently treated an unvaccinated toddler who was hospitalized with pneumonia from two simultaneous infections, Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae. Routine childhood vaccines can protect against both S. pneumoniae and a common form of H. influenzae, but vaccinations against both illnesses have declined in recent years.
The child that Dr. Kirk treated for both infections needed antibiotics and oxygen to get through the illness.
Some of these conditions can lead to serious complications. H. influenzae and S. pneumoniae infections can cause sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia. Dr. Hofto said she had treated 4- to 6-week-old infants with whooping cough, or pertussis, who seemed fine at times but then stopped breathing after a coughing fit. “It’s hard to know when they’re safe to go home,” she said.
Many children with whooping cough don’t have anti-vaccine parents, she said. They are just too young to have been vaccinated yet, and the disease has been circulating more in recent years as overall vaccination rates have declined. There were more than 28,000 cases reported last year, compared with around 7,000 in 2023.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an emailed statement, “We reject the premise that providing Americans with transparent information about the benefits and risks of medical products undermines public health.”
Even when the worst doesn’t happen, emergency room doctors are having to subject some unvaccinated children with high fevers to more invasive testing, including spinal taps, to rule out life-threatening infections that vaccinated children are protected from. Infections like H. influenzae and S. pneumoniae can be hard to recognize because they can resemble less serious illnesses before rapidly leading to complications. And because near-universal vaccination prevented them for so long, many doctors have little experience diagnosing them.
Peter Greene notes that a few Democratic governors are warming to the Trump federal voucher program. Will it hurt or help the state’s public schools? Greene has the answer.
He writes:
Discussion has heated up about the federal voucher program and, specifically, whether blue states should opt in, and whether such opt-inning is inevitable. Colorado’s Jarid Polis and New York’s Kathy Hochul appear to be primed to take Trump Education Dollars. Folks are looking at Pennsylvania’s voucher-curious governor Josh Shapiro (I suggested he not, but that may not be enough to keep it from happening).
The temptation centers around two issues.
First, people from the state are probably going to take the tax credit that goes with contributing to the voucher program. Shouldn’t governors, the argument goes, make sure that money from their own state doesn’t end up going to some other state. It’s an odd argument, because without the tax credit, those dollars would have gone to DC and on to Lord Knows Where anyway, so it’s not like non-participating states are losing anything
Second is the assertion that some of this voucher money can be used to fund public schools and not just private ones. Consider, for instance, this slide show from a presentation by Marguerite Roza of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Roza spent fifteen years at University of Washington’s Center for Privatizing
Reimagining Public Education (taking one year off to work with the Gates Foundation) and took the Edunomics director’s job in 2012. Edunomics folks have thrown their weight behind some bad reformy ideas like the Super Sardinemaster teaching model (fire all the bad teachers and jam all the students into class with the good ones).
In her slide show, Roza gets one thing exactly right– the Treasury Department hasn’t yet issued the exact rules for the federal vouchers (Education Freedom Tax Credits), so there’s a whole lot we don’t yet know.
What seems clear is that the mechanics of the federal vouchers (like all other vouchers) make it hard for public schools to get a piece of the funding stream. The donors hand money to the Scholarship Granting Organization, and the SGO hands the money to a famnily– not the school.
So the missing link is the means of having the families hand their money to a public school.
They aren’t going to hand it over in the form of tuition, because it’s a free public school. Roza suggests there are three “scenarios” under which the public school could get its hands on some of that money.
Scenario 1: Homeschool or private school students who purchase add-ons from the district. I’m not clear what that might involve; at least in Pennsylvania, most of those students are entitled to get extras from their district for free, including everything from advanced classes to extracurriculars like band and theater and sports. In this state, I’m pretty sure the public school couldn’t charge an other-schooled student for anything that district students get for free.
Scenario 2: Disrtict students who sign up for “extras” like tutoring, summer programs, etc. Students could even choose “priced electives/clubs, e.g.financial literacy, robotics, possibly APs and VocEd, etc.” I don’t even know where to start with this. If some of these “extras” are being provided by third parties, klike a tutoring service, then the district doesn’t get a penny. But if we are talking about a district that offers some parts of its academic program only for those who will pay for it, that’s a crazypants model, a model that takes the “public” right out of public education.
Especially given some of her examples: “Below grade-level students can opt in to extended yearservices, small group supports, homework help, etc.” Are you behind in school? Maybe in danger of not graduating on time? Well, for just a few dollars more, you can get the rest of the education that we promised you!
But that’s really just the warm-up for
Scenario 3: Every district studentparticipates in a bundled set of“enhanced” services.
This is absolute dystopian bullshit, a literal use of the “subscription to unlock what ought to be regular features” model from the world of software. This image is taken straight from the slide:
“”Go get us some of that free federal money,” declares Imaginary School District, “or your kid will only have access to Public Education Basic, with none of the benefits of our Plus or Premium plans.” Look at Roza’s hypothetical list. AP classes? Full day K? Orientations!! Mental health!!! What the hell school district charges for that stuff? Surely she also meant to include lunches on her list.
This is like airline pricing (“You can buy a ticket to fly on our plane, but if you would like to bring luggage or sit down or breathe our air, that will be extra!”)
In her presentation, Roza suggested that this is all just a neat way to replace fund raisers. She also suggests that districts could require families to fill out a scholarship form as part of registration. She also recommends you do some arm-twisting of friends and relatives to make their contribution to the SGO that serves your kids. Which would seem to suggest a funding system that re-enforces the already-existing gap between wealthy and non-wealthy districts. Do you have lots of folks who can donate to your district’s SGO? No? Well, it’s Public Education Basic for you.
This sure seems like a recipe for creating a multi-tier school system, where options that ought to be part of the program become upsells. It’s a proposal to lower the floor for what constitutes a minimal free public education down into the basement, with steps out of that basement on a strictly pay-to-play basis. But there’s another downside.
This is also a recipe for putting local schools at the mercy of federal operators, because now a major revenue stream will flow through DC. That means federal leverage over local policy (“Get rid of those Naughty Books or you are cut off from federal voucher funds”). There is a certain genius in the federal vouchers in that should MAGA be swept out of office, the revenue flowing through this program will create pressure from even blue states to keep this right wing policy in place.
The federal voucher program does not support school choice; it’s a private school subsidy wrapped in a tax shelter. It’s not meant to help public schools, and it won’t, unless they are willing to bend themselves into a twisted fun-house mirror version of what a public school system is meant to be.
Historian Adam Laats points out that this kind of public subsidy for private schools has a history of failure, And a zillion people have pointed out that this voucher, like all voucher’s, is about the school’s choice, not school choice (because your right to choose is not nearly as sacred as school operators’ right to discriminate against any children for any reason).
And maybe that’s part of the point of these various attempts to sell the idea that this will be a subsidy for public schools as well as private schools. Except, of course, if the federal government really wanted to subsidize public schools, they could just do it or, at the very least, stop trying to slash the meager amount of funding that they do provide, instead of sending the money to public schools via this long, twisty path. Honestly, this whole “federal vouchers will benefit public schools” argument is the kind of convoluted baloney that only a thinky tank wizard or a government bureaucrat could love. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t mean it won’t work.
Did you see the Tony awards last night? It was a great show, celebrating Broadway, celebrating the young people who sing and dance and act, and the creative talent of all ages and kinds that create magic onstage.
It was joyful!
Watch this song from a new rendition of Cats, called The Jellicle Cats. What talent!
For years, I have thought about the contrast between The Oscars and the Tony awards. I watch both, and every year I find the Oscars slow, sometimes tedious, and the musical numbers are usually dull.
Why?
The answer is obvious. The people who do the musical numbers at the Oscars were assembled to perform, they rehearse and rehearse, and they put on a good show. But never as good as the Tony awards.
Why?
Because the musical numbers at the Tony awards are performed by singers and dancers who have performed those numbers hundreds of times, eight shows a week.
What a difference!
I loved the Tony awards 2026.
We continue to see stories about American military attacks on small boats in the Caribbean or the Pacific. We read that our planes destroyed a boat carrying drugs and drug dealers. How do we know whether the boat was carrying drugs? No evidence is presented. How do we know that the men killed were drug dealers, not fishermen? We don’t. We have to trust Pete Hegseth.
Dominic Preziosi, editor of Commonweal, says that without evidence, the attacks on small craft might be “simply murder.” Commonweal is a liberal Catholic journal that is thoughtful and definitely worth reading.
He writes:
Now that his appeals have been denied, former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte faces trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. Duterte is charged with killing alleged drug addicts and dealers during his terms as mayor of Davao City and as president from 2016 to 2022—about six thousand people, though some estimates put the total closer to thirty thousand. Duterte dispatched police death squads to carry out his campaign of extrajudicial executions, which was condemned at the time by rights groups around the world and by Catholic leaders in the Philippines, who called it a “reign of terror.” Duterte once bragged of having stabbed someone to death, and while president said he would “be happy to slaughter” three million drug addicts in the country if he could.
Donald Trump was an early admirer of Duterte. In April 2017, three months into his first term, Trump called Duterte to praise him for his murderous crackdown. “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” he enthused. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing.” Just a month before that, the U.S. State Department had criticized Duterte in its annual human-rights report, citing “apparent governmental disregard for human rights and due process.”
There are unmistakable echoes of Duterte’s “unbelievable job” in the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which was launched last September under the pretext of protecting the “American homeland” from drug cartels and so-called narcoterrorists. In fifty-eight attacks by drone and aircraft—the most recent on May 26—nearly two hundred people have been killed. In at least one instance, U.S. forces returned to kill survivors clinging to the wreckage of a vessel already struck. The U.S. military has also used aircraft painted like a civilian plane to carry out some of the attacks. Both of these would qualify as war crimes. Wary of being linked to human-rights violations, allies like Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have stopped sharing intelligence that they think could be misused by the United States to target vessels. Shortly after the attacks began, Arizona senator Mark Kelly and several other Democratic lawmakers—all of whom served in the military or intelligence community—issued a joint statement reminding service members that they do not have to obey illegal orders.
In none of the boat strikes has the military seized drugs or produced evidence that those it killed were involved in the drug trade. Many of the victims appear to have been fishermen or other laborers. This hasn’t stopped Trump from demonizing those killed or members of his administration from releasing celebratory video clips of vessels being destroyed from high above. Vice President J. D. Vance has cracked that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world.” In defending the campaign, called “Operation Southern Spear,” Hegseth uses bizarre theocratic rhetoric, warning that “Christian nations, under God” cannot be led astray by “radical narco-communists.”
Trump, meanwhile, spouts nonsense about the targeting program’s effectiveness. He has claimed that the strikes have prevented twenty-five thousand cocaine-related deaths in one year, though experts say that there have not been that many such deaths over the past fifty years in total. He has baselessly declared that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” since the killing spree began. He has failed (repeatedly) to distinguish between cocaine and fentanyl—which has taken a deadly toll on Americans, but which enters the country via land routes and is not transported by sea. Meanwhile, traditional interdiction—stopping suspicious vessels, confiscating drugs, arresting traffickers, all while refraining from indiscriminate killing—continues to be the most effective means of disrupting shipments.
But in many ways that is all beside the point. The strikes are wrong on legal, ethical, and moral grounds. The administration’s contention that the United States is at war with “narcoterrorists”—an argument that builds on the spurious reasoning of the Bush administration to justify its use of torture in the “global war on terror”—doesn’t permit it to launch lethal attacks on civilians. Even John Yoo, the former Bush official who devised that reasoning, has qualms about the Trump administration’s rationale for killing people in international waters. “Never before in the country’s history has the government asserted this type [of] power,” Seton Hall law school professor Jonathan Hafetz told The Guardian. “This is a clear example of unlawful killing by the United States.”
The Pentagon’s internal watchdog recently announced it will investigate the boat strikes, but that it will only evaluate “the joint process for targeted vessels”—how the military conducts the attacks, leaving aside the matter of their legality. While Duterte may have to answer for his crimes, no American official involved in killing civilians at sea—from Trump and Hegseth on down—will face trial in an international court, since the United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. The families of two Trinidadian fishermen killed by the United States have filed suit against the administration in a Massachusetts court, but it’s hard to know how their case will fare given that foreign nationals are not protected by federal law. Yet their charge seems beyond dispute: “[The attacks] were simply murder, ordered at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”
Dominic Preziosi is Commonweal’s editor.
Despite appearances, the most powerful person in the Trump administration is not Donald Trump: it’s Russell Vought, Director of Office of Management and Budget. He is the brains of this administration. Vought was at the Heritage Foundation and was one of the writers of project 2025. He controls the budget and makes the decisions about which government programs should live or die. Trump has impulses, whims, and passing fancies; Vought is methodical and determined to impose his rightwing views on the entire federal government. Every federal grant, Vought believes, should align with Trump’s anti-woke, anti-DEI agenda.
Tony Romm wrote about Vought’s strategy in The New York Times:
The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump.
While the administration says that its primary goal is to safeguard taxpayer money, its proposal amounts to a major escalation in its attempt to reimagine the nation’s spending, even as Congress and the courts continue to rebuke the president for abusing such powers.
Mr. Trump’s ambitions were made clear in a roughly 400-page blueprint that was released to little fanfare on Friday. If finalized, it would require all federal grants to be approved by the president’s political appointees, who must ensure that the money would “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.”
For the agencies that issue those awards and the nonprofit groups, local governments, universities and other entities that receive the money, the Trump administration would also impose a set of highly prescriptive and political criteria.
The government could not issue grants to projects or groups that “deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,” for example. Nor could it seek to fund initiatives that “promote anti-American values,” contribute to illegal immigration, advance diversity, equity and inclusion or assist in voter registration.
The rules would further limit the ability of grant recipients to engage in some “issue advocacy.” Those that are funded would be scrutinized for their compliance with “religious liberty laws” and their “memberships and affiliations” with outside groups. And they could face the outright termination of their grants if the Trump administration someday determines that their actions are not in the “public interest.”
The restrictions echo the string of executive orders that Mr. Trump signed shortly after returning to office, many of which have been challenged or blocked in court. This time, however, the White House has pursued its restrictions by proposing a regulation, which is expected to become final after the government solicits public comment. The result could be applied far more broadly, and perhaps in ways that are harder to fight legally or undo later, according to budget experts.
The consequences could fall hardest on health and science, a field in which Mr. Trump has pursued some of the steepest cuts in his second term.
In exchange for federal assistance, researchers would face limits on the subjects that they can explore, the foreign labs with which they may collaborate and even the conferences at which they can appear. Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, the chief executive of the American Public Health Association, a professional organization and advocacy group, said the policy could “devastate innovation, science and research” in the United States.
Diane Ravitch's blog 