ProPublica: Idaho Permits “Faith Healers” to Substitute for Medical Care for Children

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2026 //
5

Should states permit parents to trust “faith healers” for their children’s medical care? Should the state do so when the child is seriously ill? Should the state stand by idly when children tested by “faith healers” die?

That is what happens in Idaho. Under the protection of freedom of religion, parents may trust their sick children to “faith healers,” even at the cost of their lives.

Audrey Dutton writes about this quirk in the law, which was once widespread, but is now legal only in Idaho.

With the growth and political clout of old-time religions, this dangerous practice may spread to other states. When does freedom of religion become deadly?

Dutton writes:

In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children can’t be charged with child neglect or manslaughter. Supporters of this protection over the years have included lawmakers who voiced support for “traditional” Idaho values.

But from at least the 1880s through the early 1970s, it was illegal for parents in Idaho to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake, newspaper archives and historical documents show.

“Every parent of any child who willfully omits, without lawful excuse, to furnish necessary food, clothing, shelter, or medical attendance for such child, is guilty of a misdemeanor,” reads the 1887 edition of Idaho territory statutes, published before statehood.

The statutes included no mention of spiritual belief as a “lawful excuse.” Three years later, the state constitution explicitly put limits on Idaho’s freedom of religion. It would not excuse “acts of licentiousness,” polygamy or other practices “inconsistent with morality or the peace or safety of the state.”

It wasn’t long before the law came down on members of the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect that arrived in Idaho in 1899 and remains active in the state. From 2015 to 2025, the sect’s congregations in Idaho experienced 15 preventable deaths of children, according to ProPublica’s reporting.

Pearl Annis was a 13-year-old girl whose parents had moved from Oklahoma to Idaho’s Magic Valley in the spring of 1915 with at least one other Followers family. The Annises and their 13 children shared “a two-room shack,” a local newspaper reported. An officer and a doctor visited the home after neighbors voiced concern. They found Pearl in bed, fully dressed and on the cusp of death.

Her father, Lurid P. “Lewis” Annis, was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of refusing to provide medical attention. Pearl was taken to the hospital, according to the news story, and died there with what today would be described as septic shock from a bowel blockage. The newspaper, which didn’t appear to follow up on Annis’ criminal charge, called the Followers church “a religious cult” and Pearl’s death a consequence of “religious mania.”

News archives and historic records don’t say how many times Idaho acted on similar cases in the decades after.

But one legal battle over lifesaving care drew attention in the 1960s, as sickness made its way through a Followers family in a Boise suburb. The mother died in December 1965. Her 4-year-old daughter died the following June.

Days after the girl’s death, a judge ordered the state to take custody of her 10-year-old brother under Idaho’s child protection law. The boy was admitted to a local hospital with pneumonia, a complication of the measles. He spent days in critical condition but survived. The judge told the father that to regain custody, he would have to be willing to give the boy medical care as the law required.

A doctor testified that without the hospitalization, the child “almost certainly would have died,” a newspaper report said.

The father’s lawyer told the judge that his sect was rooted in “faith that God will heal the sick.” The law in the 1960s was clear, though: a parent had a duty to protect their child’s health, no exceptions. The judge told Samuel’s father: “The law governs conduct. Religion governs opinion.”

But the legal landscape was about to shift. It came with little public attention.

During a full-on rewrite of Idaho’s criminal code in 1971, the Legislature added a section that said the state could not bring endangerment charges against someone “who chooses for his child treatment by prayer or spiritual means alone.” Legislative records don’t make clear how the wording originated. The passage of another law one year later, affirming the “spiritual means” language and applying it to other crimes, has been credited to the Christian Science church, another Christian denomination with Idaho members.

(The Christian Science website says the church’s practice of “healing in the way Christ Jesus taught” is not “faith healing” and that members are free to choose any form of healthcare. The church also supported Oregon’s full removal of its faith-healing exemption in 2011.)

Faith-healing exemptions soon became widespread nationally. The trigger was the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, which set out to standardize the nation’s child welfare system by giving states grants to more effectively investigate reports of child abuse.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare interpreted the law as requiring states to have a faith-healing exemption to qualify for the grants — an interpretation that records from the time don’t explain.

Open the link and keep reading to learn how federal law changed to deal with “faith healing.”

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Religion, Safety, Separation of church and state

Freddy DeBoer: Whatever Happened to Raj Chetty and His Claims about Teachers?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2026 //
6

Back in 2011, Harvard Professor Raj Chetty and two esteemed colleagues (John Friedman at Brown University and Jonah Rockoff at Columbia University) published a dazzling study of teachers, asserting that the best teachers are those whose students get improved scores. Those students have a higher income ($250,000 over their lifetimes), and enjoy a multitude of benefits, all because of that one teacher who induced them to have higher scores. President Obama cited Chetty’s research in his 2012 State of the Union address to show how important it was to find the “best” teachers and fire the “worst’ teachers.

Chetty’s work supported the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top plan to encourage evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. States that evaluated teachers by their students’ scores were eligible to apply for a share of RTTT funding. Those who did not were not eligible.

Most states, eager for a share of the $5 billion prize, agreed to adopt what was called “value-added modeling” or “value-added measurement.” (VAM)

I posted dozens of times about the flaws of VAM, first of all, because the American Statistical Association said that teachers account for only 1-14% of score changes; most changes were attributable to home life and school system issues. Secondly, because the VAM concept is very unstable and is highly affected by student demographics. Only teachers of reading and math in grades 4-9 could even be assessed by the annual tests, which are mandated only in grades 3-8. Schools started attributing scores to teachers not in those subjects and not in those grades, tied to the work of other teachers in the school.

The Los Angeles Times engaged researchers to calculate VAM scores for the district’s teachers, and the newspaper published them alongside the names of teachers. It was humiliating for teachers, but Arne Duncan thought this disclosure was wonderful.

I happened to be in Los Angeles on the day that a fifth grade teacher committed suicide after he received a poor VAM score. No one knows if that was the reason for his suicide, but it may have been. By all accounts, he was a good teacher in a tough school.

The New York Post did the same for New York City teachers. It listed names and scores. The teacher identified by the newspaper as the city’s “worst” teacher was hounded by Post reporters seeking an interview. It turned out that she taught classes of new immigrants, who moved in and then out of her class as they learned enough English to join regular classes. Her students in September were not the same students by June. The VAM scores for her were meaningless, as they were for other teachers. Teachers of the gifted saw few if any gains because their students were at the top year after year. Expert math teacher Gary Rubinstein noticed that some teachers had high scores in one subject, but not in the other. Should half the teacher get a bonus while the other half was fired?

Freddie deBoer, an independent writer who earned a doctorate in English and education assessment, re-evaluated Raj Chetty’s famous study.

It’s a long review, and I won’t post it all. Please open the link and read it.

He begins:

For a long time I’ve been getting some version of the comment, “What about Chetty!” in response to my perspective on education, as in Raj Chetty, the economist who for the past decade has made a lot of waves asserting that our education problems are straightforwardly the product of bad teachers and that replacing them will have implausibly large economic effects. I tend to try and work from a broader perspective than “this is why I think this guy is wrong,” but I get this request so often, here you go. This is why I think Raj Chetty is wrong.

Few empirical claims in modern education policy have traveled farther than Chetty et al’s findings on teacher “value-added.” In his famous 2014 American Economic Review papers, he and his coauthors reported that students assigned to better (excuse me, higher value-added) teachers were more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, save for retirement, and avoid teen pregnancy, and that replacing a teacher in the bottom five percent of the distribution with an average teacher would raise the present value of a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by roughly $250,000. Chetty’s research findings in this domain had been floating around for awhile at the time of publication, and President Obama cited the figure in his 2012 State of the Union address, and the judge who decided Vergara v. California leaned on it to strike down California’s teacher tenure laws. Take that, teachers! The findings are arresting, the dataset is impressive – 2.5 million children, linked to IRS tax records! – and the policy implications are clean: identify and remove bad (pardon me, low “value-added”) teachers, watch outcomes improve. It’s exactlythe kind of story our neoliberal policy establishment is desperate to tell, and was clearly catnip to the Obama administration, which was doggedly attached to a simplistic vision of delivery through better education, where the gutting of the uneducated labor market was ameliorated by turning every last child in the United States into a genius, scaling up the Stanford-to-Google pipeline until every American could pass through it.

Unfortunately, the Chetty story is ultimately another neoliberal just-so story, that is to say, a fable, a legend, a myth. The closer you look at what the “value-added” construct actually measures, how stable those measurements are, and how the Chetty results have fared under replication, the more reason there is to doubt both the magnitude of the claimed effects and, more fundamentally, whether “teacher quality” as the literature operationalizes it is a coherent, measurable attribute at all. (Spoiler: it is not.) Let us count the problems.

The construct itself puts the thumb on the scale. The first problem is conceptual. In the Chetty et al. studies, a teacher’s “value-added” is the residual variation in a student’s standardized test scores that remains after controlling for prior achievement and some demographic covariates. It’s not a measure of pedagogical skill, content knowledge, classroom climate, the cultivation of curiosity, or any other property normally meant by “good teaching.” It’s a statistical residual on a narrow set of assessments, usually math and reading tests in grades three through eight. That residual is then defined as quality. I want to be clear about this: any portion of variability in student outcomes that Chetty et al cannot or will not identify otherwise is assumed to be a product of teacher inputs. Since Chetty’s whole project is to argue that educational outcomes are the result of teacher quality, this is what we used to call begging the question – that is, he’s assuming the point he wants to prove, asserting the desired conclusion as a premise, by acting as though any uncaptured variation is necessary evidence of teaching quality. And it gets worse in the telling. When advocates and journalists and politicians summarize his work, the construct expands silently from “the part of test-score gains Chetty cannot otherwise explain” to “good teachers,” and the slippage is rarely flagged. But that’s the whole game, you guys.

Open the link and enjoy!

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Research, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, VAM (value-added modeling)

Jeff Bryant: Did the Big Teachers’ Protest Rally in 2011 Make a Difference?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2026 //
4

Jeff Bryant, prolific education journalist, writes in The Progressive about the efforts by educators to fight back against the failed and punitive policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It’s a valuable summary of the past 15 years. Teachers rallied. Teachers sounded alarms about the bipartisan attack is on teachers, teaching and public schools.

Did it make a difference?

Now, 15 years later, there are thousands of charters, and they are no better than the public schools, contrary to their promises. Now, most states have vouchers, and the public is funding religious schools, which was unthinkable in 2011.

But we can’t give up! At last, there are candidates running to fight for public schools. Gina Hinojosa is the most prominent of them. If she defeats Greg Abbott in Texas, expect major changes.

Jeff writes:

It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived…

At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.

I had read  multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances.

Teachers turned out to denounce high-stakes testing, NCLB, Race to the Top, budget cuts, privatization, and the attacks on their profession, funded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other billionaires.

….The estimated crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 roared in approval at an array of speakers that included the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a professor of education), Ravitch, best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, renowned educator Deborah Meier, and policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera. When the speeches were over and we marched to the White House, the line of people stretched for blocks and blocks…

The range of themes the speakers addressed included lack of pay and respect for teachers; the harms caused by poverty and privatization; the continuing racial discrimination and segregation in schools and glaring inequities in their funding; the unbearable class sizes teachers endure, and the injustices that result from using test scores to sanction schools and evaluate teachers.

What also animated the crowd, Anthony Cody tells The Progressive in a text message, was a sense of betrayal on education by the Democratic Party’s leadership. Cody, a fulltime classroom teacher at the time—he’s now retired—was one of the principal organizers of the march. “The great majority of teachers supported the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” he says. “[But] RTTT reinforced the worst elements of NCLB by encouraging states to link teacher pay and evaluations to standardized test scores.”

“A theme that ran through the rally was ‘how could a Democratic administration be so hostile to public schools?’ ” says Ravitch in an email to The Progressive.

“The speakers, me included, hated RTTT and saw it for what it was: encouragement for charters, high-stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, and other dreadful policies,” Ravitch continues. “We predicted [the policies] would fail, and they did.”

A particular target for invective at the rally was Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Ravitch recalls. “He regularly assailed public schools as failing. He attacked public school teachers. He constantly praised charter schools, and whenever national test scores came out, he gleefully pointed to results and made them sound worse than they were.”

“Duncan could have fit in a Republican cabinet,” Ravitch adds.

Fifteen years later, did that outpouring in July 2011 matter?…

The sad truth is that the grievances that motivated people to board buses and gather on the Mall on a hot July day in 2011 continue to dominate the K-12 school landscape today.

For instance, one of NPE’s reports that Cody references, published in 2026, found that states that have been the most aggressive about redirecting public funds for schools to private education operators have been the most neglectful of funding and supporting their public schools.

Although No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, it was replaced that year by the Every Student Succeeds Act that still enforces standardized testing. And the legacy of the funding cuts enacted during the Great Recession continues to harm schools.

“In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the United States lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools,” an analysis by the Education Law Center reported in 2021. Calling the time, from 2008 to 2018, a “lost decade,” the organization noted that while states’ economic activity as measured by gross domestic product increased by 17 percent, state and local revenues for public schools lagged, increasing by only 6 percent.

A 2025 Education Law Center report, “Making the Grade,” assessed states on how they fund public schools and found that not a single state earned an A grade on three crucial measures of funding: whether state and local revenues are adequate, whether funding is fairly distributed, and whether funding lags a state’s economic capacity.

In the meantime, the charter school industry continues to expand, with thirty-nine out of forty-three states experiencing growth in charters in 2025, according to charter industry data. And voucher programs also continue to grow, as fifteen states now operate twenty-three programs, and the Trump Administration is set to roll out a nationwide federal voucher program in 2027. As the right wing’s “long game” to end public education continues apace, prominent centrist Democrats call for a return to the education policies of the Bush and Obama years.

“Democrats [have] walked away from standards and accountability [for schools], and our kids are falling through the cracks,” former Chicago mayor and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is telling anyone who will listen. And Arne Duncan is back in the media spotlight, encouraging Democratic governors to embrace the Trump Administration’s voucher program. That the politics of education in 2026 seem so similar to those of 2011 is evidence that a left-right binary over education policy doesn’t really exist.

As I observed all those years ago on the cusp of the march in D.C., there was no middle ground in education debates. Factions on the right wanted to get rid of public schools. Business interests represented by testing companies, charter schools, and tech firms wanted to make money off schools. And a “reform” community led by wealthy foundations and technocrats wanted to mold public schools to their ideological, and often political, agendas.

As I wrote at the time, “Faced with this array of antagonists toward public education, where does the ‘middle ground’ lie? When people openly admit they want to get rid of you, where should the bargaining start? When people have shown you they are more apt to use you for their own profit, and then walk away when the ‘market changes,’ why should you trust them? And when people say they are willing to align with your cause but only when you say and do things how they want you to do them—even when your ideals inform you to do otherwise—why should you simply bend to their will?”

Those questions are still relevant today. They will remain so until a progressive left faction adopts a robust message on education and articulates it repeatedly in advocacy documents and political stump speeches.

“Our battle for public schools is steeper now than it was when the Save Our Schools rally was held,” Ravitch says. “It will be a battle for many years to come.”

But in 2011, for at least a day, it seemed that public school advocates had the power to, as Ravitch put it in her email, “push back and give people a modicum of hope.”

The battle continues, and it’s not over. America needs a strong public school system, not a hodge-podge of pop-up schools.

We need well-prepared teachers who can knowledgeably teach history, science, mathematics, literature, and foreign languages. We need well-funded schools and respected, well-paid professionals. We need equality of opportunity for all children, and we need excellence.

We need the strong public schools that built the Aunited States into a great nation. We need education for democracy, where children are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

We need an education system that produces engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, athletes, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, social workers, idealists, scholars, young people eager to use their hands, their brains, and their hearts to make our society better for everyone.

We are now in a period of disruption and dissolution. That way lies disaster. It is the road to elitism, segregation, indoctrination, and decay.

We need to raise our sights and build better public schools that offer a goood education for all children.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Extremism, Failure, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Supporting public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

Kennedy Center Begins Removing Iconic Sculpture “Blue”

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2026 //
3

Trump is clearly bitter that his name is not on the Kennedy Center facade. The tarp that covers the original name still hangs, hiding the humiliation of Trump’s name removal.

Last week he cut down 40 weeping willow trees on the Center grounds, which symbolized a grieving nation, grieving for the assassinated President Kennedy.

This week, the Kennedy Center is removing a piece of outdoor art called “Blue,” which was installed in 2019. The artist, Joel Shapiro, thought it was a permanent installation.

“Blue”

The New York Times reported:

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts began removing a major outdoor sculpture from the center’s grounds on Wednesday. The work, installed in 2019, was targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The Kennedy Center made no advance announcement of its plans to remove the towering, vivid blue metal sculpture of a stick-like human figure, called “Blue.”

On Wednesday morning, the limbs and torso of the figure were wrapped in protective material; an arm was the first to be removed.

The Kennedy Center confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that the sculpture was being deinstalled and that a foundation dedicated to the artist would determine its next location. It did not say the reason for the removal but noted that the deinstallation of artworks that had been donated or lent was common practice for conservation or preservation purposes.

A news release from around the debut of “Blue” describes it as a permanent sculpture for the grounds.

“We are deeply grateful to Joel Shapiro for the years ‘Blue’ has spent animating our campus and connecting visitors to his vision,” the statement said. “We are honored to have been stewards of his vibrant work and a part of his enduring legacy.”

Mr. Shapiro died in 2025. His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, who is president of his foundation, said in an interview that she thought her father would have been “alarmed” that the sculpture was being taken down from its intended location.

“In Joel’s mind, it was one of his greatest site-specific commissions, which celebrated joy, freedom and creativity,” she said.

Ms. Shapiro declined to discuss what she was told about the Kennedy Center’s reasoning for removing the sculpture. Her father had given it to the center as a gift, but she said that it was now owned by the foundation, and that she would like to see it installed at another public site.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Josef Palermo, who was laid off in March as the curator of visual arts and special programming at the Kennedy Center, wrote in an essay for The Atlantic that he had been instructed to remove works from the center’s permanent art collection, and told that Mr. Trump’s renovations would include new art.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Palermo recalled that “Blue” had been “targeted early on” and said he took issue with the lack of an announcement.

“The Kennedy Center,” he said, “is in effect holding these pieces in trust for the American people, and there should be a lot more transparency.”

The sculpture is on the grounds of the Reach, an addition to the Kennedy Center that opened in 2019. The sculpture was completed that same year by Mr. Shapiro, whose public art is found in cities around the world. One of his most prominent works is a tree-like bronze sculpture, called “Loss and Regeneration,” that is situated outside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

“Blue,” which is visible from the Potomac and roads traversing the Kennedy Center, has become a local landmark. In a video about the work that was posted by the Kennedy Center around the time of its debut, Mr. Shapiro said he designed it so the figure would appear in different positions depending on the vantage point of the viewer.

“It’s about action and risk and performance and energy,” he said of the work. “It’s a celebration of possibility.”

Of course, Trump had to remove a sculpture that celebrated “Joy, freedom, and creativity.” These are qualities that Trump has never experienced and does not appreciate.

Will it be replaced by a statue of Trump? Gold, of course.

Categories Art, Corruption, Creativity, Cruelty, Evil, Freedom, Joy, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The Plot to Disenfranchise Millions of Voters This Fall

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2026 //
3

Trump is obsessed with stopping mail-in Voting, although he votes by mail. He has spent his time in office sowing doubt in our elections, which are the basis of our democracy. The very fact that this crooked con man was returned to the Presidency makes me doubt the security of our elections.

Nonetheless, a whistleblower at the United States Postal Service leaked a complaint claiming that the USPS is planning to take measures that will throw the midterms into chaos, thus giving Trump a reason to discredit the expected Blue Wave, which will sweep away Republican majorities in the House and possibly the Senate. In brief, Trump intends to use the USPS to determine which votes count. Bear in mind that the Cinstututuin explicitly assigns responsibility to the states, not the federal government.

The actions Trump is taking to discredit the midterm elections are unprecedented. But then so was his demolition of the East Wing of the White House, so are his efforts to control the media, universities, and law firms. So are his efforts to overturn civil rights laws. So is his defunding of medical and scientific research. So are his attacks on freedom of the press. So are his efforts to control the curriculum of the nation’s schools.

Heather Cox Richardson explains:

Yesterday, by a vote of 5–4, the United States Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue to build his ballroom. The five right-wing justices concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had sued to stop the construction of the ballroom, did not have legal standing to sue and that national security considerations came down on the side of construction.

The majority said it was not resolving the issue of whether the project is legal.

It was Chief Justice John Roberts who covered that aspect of the controversy. He wrote in dissent that the project is “likely unlawful.” “The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote. He wrote that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

Nonetheless, as Josh Gerstein of Politico reported, the project will likely be completed before the question of its legality is resolved.

Trump’s behavior in his second term is a logical outcome of the theory of the “unitary executive.” Under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, those eager to stop Congress from passing legislation that benefited the American people at the expense of businessmen began to argue for the idea that because the president was the head of one of the three branches of the U.S. government, he could not be checked by either of the other two branches: the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts).

On July 1, 2024, the United States Supreme Court, stacked with Trump’s appointees, took this theory to a conclusion that overturned the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.

It decided that the president of the United States has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.

This permission structure appears to have convinced Trump he can do whatever he wishes, including rigging elections so he cannot lose.

Yesterday Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exposed what appears to be a plot to steal the 2026 midterm elections.

Blumenthal released a letter he had written to Postmaster General David Steiner calling attention to an official whistleblower report, which he attached to the letter.

It’s eye-popping.

The whistleblower warns that there are “potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” According to the whistleblower, the “process for the creation and implementation of an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” for delivering ballots to voters for the midterm election has been “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

The whistleblower says “the administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters. As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state—effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”

The complaint continues: “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.” But the rushed IT development of the new system means it “will almost certainly have significant operating problems when released to the public.” The whistleblower notes that multiple officials from the USPS have described the development process for the system as “a sh*t show.”

The whistleblower said that work on the “USPS election ballot mail IT project” began in June 2026 and has continued despite an injunction from a federal court ordering work on it to stop. Normally, it would take “nine months to a year or more” to roll out a project “of this complexity, magnitude, and importance.” Considering the rush and the consequences, the whistleblower wondered “whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”

The complaint says: “The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk. Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

Blumenthal noted that the USPS has a restrained role as a mail carrier. It has never before played a gatekeeping function and yet is now building an entirely new system to put itself “in a position to refuse to mail ballots that state election officials have determined should be sent out.” He called for Postmaster General Steiner to “to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”

Blumenthal demanded Steiner answer no later than Friday whether the USPS has stopped work on the project as ordered by the courts, as well as provide the names of those who worked on the project and the dates they were active. By September 8, he wants to see all records about the project.

Blumenthal told reporters: “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

The administration’s attack on elections is especially concerning considering the recent suggestions that Trump is spending most of his time on his legacy projects like the ballroom, leaving him largely unaware of what is going on in the administration. Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic reported yesterday that when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll went directly to Trump with his concerns about what Hegseth is doing to the Army, Trump was surprised to learn “how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth” and “expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.”

Driscoll resigned yesterday.

As for the plan to sabotage mail-in voting? Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration, which oversees the administration of federal elections, posted: “These whistleblower allegations are extraordinary. If Trump Administration officials knowingly built a system designed to prevent Americans from receiving their ballots, that is not election security. It is a betrayal of our Constitution and the American people.”

—

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/31/supreme-court-white-house-ballroom-john-roberts-dissent-01057685

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/driscoll-hegseth-military-resignation/688479/

Categories Cheating, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Fraud, Lies, Republicans, Scandal, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: Trump’s Plan to Subvert the 2026 Election and the Constitution

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2026 //
3

It’s a well-known fact that Donald Trump hates voting by mail, even though he votes by mail. He is trying to suppress the vote or at the very least persuade Americans that our elections are riddled with fraud and are decided by the votes of non-citizens. His efforts to produce evidence for these claims have turned out to be frauds, but nonetheless he will assert that Democratic wins were tainted.

If you are like me, you may be befuddled by the confluence of lawsuits, court cases, and the role of the United States Postal Service. As usual, Trump is sowing chaos, to keep us from understanding what he is up to.

The Constitution is clear: the states control elections. The President has no role in elections.

So what’s really going on?

Jamelle Bouie, my favorite columnist at The New York Times, explains Trump’s nefarious, evil plan to destroy our democracy:

So far, the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.

Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.

This would leave states that rely on mail-in voting scrambling to accommodate the new rules, leading to the kind of chaos that might keep voters from casting a ballot in the first place. And in states that reject the rules, the administration can tar the results as fraudulent. None of this would stop the public from electing a Democratic majority, but it could give that majority the taint of illegitimacy — and even tee up a situation where new members are challenged in the next session.

It is important to say that there is no way to know, at this point, if any of this will actually work in the end. But it clearly is the plan.

To wit, earlier this week the Supreme Court paused a lower court injunction on the proposed ballot rule, writing that it had not been formally issued yet by the U.S.P.S., so the states that sued could not demonstrate harm. Since then, the Postal Service has issued its rule and a Federal District Court has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking implementation. The administration has appealed this decision, and the Supreme Court is set to hear the case on the merits in a number of weeks, if not days.

From there, the court will have to decide whether it will follow the Constitution — which clearly leaves election administration to the states, unless Congress intervenes — or contrive again to contort the law and give the president a win, allowing him to pursue his irrational crusade against mail-in voting and giving him the tools — if not to sabotage the midterms outright — then to create chaos and disruption.

I would not put much faith in the Supreme Court, but we’ll see what happens.

The details of what is happening here are important — that’s why I laid them out — but it’s also important to step back and make a more fundamental point: the president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself. And this is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the American republic and supplant it with an authoritarian regime in which President Trump holds sovereign authority over the whole nation.

It is important to say, as well, that this is all out in the open, as plain as day.

Life under Trump during his second term is defined by the aggressive use of unaccountable executive power, from illegal taxes — in the form of tariffs — and wars to the military occupation of American cities and a roaming deportation force used to terrorize entire communities. Thousands of people have been kidnapped in the street and whisked away to squalid detention centers, where dozens have died. Many thousands more, including some American citizens, have been deported, sometimes to countries they’ve never seen or visited in their lives.

The president has wielded his power against colleges and universities in a concerted effort to destroy the nation’s capacity for scientific research and weaken any institution capable of generating independent knowledge.

The administration continues to assault the First Amendment: both the freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press. Not a single member of this White House appears to believe in the public’s First Amendment rights or in its right to choose its own political leadership.

The attitude of the president and his advisers is that the 2024 election was an enabling act for a constitutional revolution, in which rule by the people was replaced by the Führerprinzip.

That the intent is clear does not mean it is the reality on the ground. I believe Trump has failed to accomplish authoritarian consolidation. But he has ripped an enormously damaging Trump-size hole in the constitutional order, and a future president with autocratic designs will have every tool he needs to push the envelope even further.

That’s why, should Democrats capture a majority, they must make the reconstruction of the American political order their first priority. That includes an impeachment trial against President Trump, if only to emphasize the gravity of his conspiracy against the Constitution.

Americans hate the idea of looking back. But we have to if we want any hope of moving forward.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Fraud, Trump

Paul Krugman: The Plot to Steal Venezuela’s Oil

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2026 //
3

I spend some time every day reading the discussions on Twitter and BlueSky. Given the perilous state of America’s role in the world–our failed war on Iran, our abandonment of Ukraine, the absurd trade war with Canada, Trump’s insults to our European allies, his admiration for Russia and North Korea, the cost of fuel–I am curious about how his supporters defend him.

No matter what happens, his most loyal fans believe he is wise and all-knowing. When anyone complains about the cost of gasoline, which affects everyone, they have a new answer. Trump just made a deal to get billions of gallons of oil from Venezuela! In a matter of days or weeks, the price of oil will plummet, not only to $3 a gallon but maybe lower. Take that, libtards!

If only they would read what Paul Krugman wrote about that deal! But I know they won’t.

The deal that Trump made will take years, even decades, to have any effect on the price of oil. American firms have to invest billions to develop the infrastructure needed to pump oil from the ground. And in the meanwhile, the Venezuelan government must be willing to honor the deal, which is deeply unpopular in that country. There are many “ifs” in the deal, and it will have no impact on the price of oil in the near future.

Krugman wrote:

The United States has an ugly reputation in Latin America — a reputation that, I’m sorry to say, is mostly well deserved. Our government has a long track record of supporting dictators, assisting in the overthrow of democratic governments, and sometimes even sending in the Marines, often on behalf of American corporations trying to pillage other nations’ natural resources.

Excluding the Trump II presidency, we have, I think, behaved better in the recent past. And this was largely due to the role of enlightened self-interest.

The fact is that old-fashioned, extractive imperialism doesn’t pay. In fact, it hasn’t paid for well over a century. In the modern world nations grow rich through innovation and productivity, not conquest. In 1909 Norman Angell’s book The Great Illusion argued that even victorious wars cost far more than they can possibly yield in tribute, documenting his case with what was already extensive historical evidence. His argument has even more force now.

Let me give you a recent historical example. Portugal was the last European nation to maintain a large overseas empire. As late as 1973 Lisbon still ruled vast African territories — some of them rich in natural resources — with many times the home country’s population. It was also the poorest nation in Western Europe, its resources drained by the endless wars it fought in an attempt to keep its colonies subjugated.

Finally, in 1974, junior officers in the Portuguese military, fed up with the fighting and dying, rose up in the Carnation Revolution and overthrew the fascist government. A newly democratic Portugal quickly abandoned its empire, eventually joining the European Union — and while it’s still poorer than some of its peers, it is far closer than before to the standard of living in, say, France.

In short, at this point only someone deeply ignorant of both the realities of modern economies and of the lessons of history can believe that there are big payoffs to seizing other nations’ natural resources. In other words:

For those who need a refresher, in January U.S. forces raided Venezuela and kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the nation’s brutal, corrupt dictator. Maduro surely deserved his fate. But the Trump administration made no move to help Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Instead, it made a deal with former members of the Maduro cabal,effectively installing a new regime that may well be even more brutal and corrupt than its predecessor. (There’s widespread suspicion that the kidnapping of Maduro was in part an inside job, engineered by his fellow cabalistas.)

In return, Trump got an agreement — details are scarce — that apparently will allow U.S. oil companies to extract and sell large quantities of Venezuelan oil but only if they put tens of billions of dollars into investments in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure.

So the Venezuela venture had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. It seems safe to say that it had nothing to do with crime or terrorism, which were the other excuses the administration offered. What happened in Venezuela was simply an old-fashioned, 19th-century-style resource grab, a sort of Caribbean version of the Belgian Congo.

In one stroke, Trump has just validated everything the Latin American left has ever said about U.S. imperialism. And we’ll be paying for that, diplomatically and strategically, for decades to come.

Now, it’s highly unlikely that this deal will hold. By all accounts, just about every faction in Venezuelan politics except the current ruling clique hates the deal. Since it will take years, maybe even decades, to realize the putative benefits of oil-company investments in Venezuela, how likely is it that whoever is running that country in the future will want to honor Trump’s terms? What are the odds that Venezuela will eventually expropriate U.S. oil-company investments? Or do we imagine a future in which the U.S. military maintains a permanent occupation of Venezuela, using force to prop up a puppet government the nation’s citizens hate?

Even if the deal holds, oil experts are extremely doubtful that Venezuela can significantly increase its oil production soon, if ever. It would take years to rebuild the oil infrastructure even if corporations are willing to sink in the necessary billions of dollars. There are also issues with the quality of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela appears on paper to have huge oil reserves. But much of these reserves are what I called a “black, sticky fantasy,” created by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, when he reclassified oil in the OrinocoBasin that will be difficult if not impossible to recover as “proved” reserves.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Trump really does manage to seize 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. That sounds like a big number. Is it?

Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets. But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expertput it, “it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.”

So the profit margin on Venezuelan oil will be at most a small fraction of its market price. Surely $20 a barrel would be a highly generous estimate. So let’s go with that, in which case Trump’s deal might be worth $20*65 billion barrels = $1.3 trillion, a sum extracted over many years.

How big a deal would that be for the United States? Since this would be a many-year process if it happens at all, you want to compare it with U.S. wealth, not GDP (which is only the value created in a single year.) And total U.S. wealth is about $167 trillion.

So the chart at the top of this post shows how Trump’s triumphant Venezuela deal stacks up for the U.S. economy. Even if we make the most favorable assumptions — above all the assumption that the Venezuelan regime, unlike the Trump administration, can be trusted to honor its promises — the value of this deal to the United States is, to a first approximation … nothing.

Oh, and what about Trump’s claim that this will “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans”? Since any significant rise in Venezuelan production would take a long time, even crude oil prices won’t show any effects from this deal for years at best. And in any case the prices of gasoline and diesel — which are what people actually burn — have become increasingly disconnected from the price of crude.

So Trump’s Venezuela deal will do nothing for ordinary Americans, while solidifying our reputation for rapacious, short-sighted imperialism.

Thank you for wasting your attention on this matter.

Categories Economy, Ethics, History, International, Lies, Scandals, Trump

The Billionaires Who Are Trying to Buy Our Elections

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2026 //
2

The New York Times published a deeply disturbing article about the e billionaires who are pumping huge sums into the 2026 midterm elections and about dark money vehicles some use to hide their influence.

I am giving you free access to the articles: no pay walls.

This one shows who they are: “Meet the Megadonors.” Most are Republicans, tech entrepreneurs, and crypto kings.

This one focuses on the dark money that is pouring into state elections to support issues and candidates.

It wasn’t always like this.

In 2002, Senator John McCain of Arizona (R) and Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin (D) sponsored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly called the McCain–Feingold Act.

Its central purpose was to reduce the influence of large, unregulated political contributions.

It banned national political parties from raising or spending unlimited “soft money.” It restricted corporations and labor unions from financing certain broadcast political advertisements immediately before elections.it I ncreased disclosure requirements, and it raised some limits on direct contributions to candidates. 

McCain-Feingold passed the Senate 60-40 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush.

The Supreme Court initially upheld most of it.

In 2003, McConnell v. FEC, the Supreme Court upheld the central provisions—including the restrictions on soft money and electioneering communications. 

Then the Court gradually dismantled important parts.

In 2007, in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, the Supreme Court restricted the government’s ability to regulate certain issue advertisements.

In 2008, the Supreme Court (in Davis v. FEC) struck down the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment,” which raised the limits of campaign funding for individuals running against a wealthy, self-financing candidate. That attempt to level the financial playing field was eliminated by the Court.

And then came the big decision that ripped the teeth out of campaign finance reform: Citizens United.

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that corporations and unions have First Amendment protection to spend unlimited amounts independently to influence elections. This invalidated a major part of McCain–Feingold. 

Citizens United, together with subsequent cases, helped produce the modern system of unlimited independent expenditures and Super PACs.

We are now in the era of Citizens United, the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that negated most limits on political spending.

Why did the U.S. Supreme Court swerve sharply against campaign finance reform?

John Roberts was appointed to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 2005 by President George W. Bush. He formed a 5-4 majority with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito,

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Elections, Politics

Scott Dworkin: Drag Queen Beats Texas and Gov. Abbott

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2026 //
2

Scott Dworkin has a terrific blog on Substack, where he often has news that you can’t find anywhere else. The following is one of those wonderful stories:

The Drag Queen Who Beat the Texas Government

The state of Texas spent three years trying to turn drag performer Brigitte Bandit into a criminal. Senate Bill 12 threatened any bar that booked performers like Bandit with a $10,000 fine, with performers possibly facing a year in jail.

In March of 2023 Bandit testified against that bill inside the state’s Capitol, wearing a dress that listed names of children killed in the Uvalde mass shooting. Lawmakers were arguing about drag queens, she said later, while kids were being killed in Texas schools.

After her testimony, Bandit sued—along with other Pride groups and businesses—Ken Paxton, three cities, and three district attorneys. A few months later, the whole thing went to trial in a Houston federal courtroom. For three years, Texas had said this law was about protecting children. Now it had to prove a child had been harmed.

It couldn’t. Attorney General Ken Paxton called an expert witness, a doctor brought in to talk about what explicit material does to kids. Under oath, that doctor said he had never seen anyone seriously hurt by a drag show. Not one of the seven government offices that were sued over this law offered any other evidence.

That December, Bandit was sent a package from Nashville, Tennessee—a gift from the one and only Dolly Parton. It was a custom guitar covered in rhinestones, signed by Dolly to Brigitte.

Texas appealed and won, and this spring the ban came back to life. Bandit was right back where she started.

But on Tuesday, Judge David Hittner struck the law down again and barred Paxton from enforcing it. A judge put on the bench by Ronald Reagan.

This Saturday night in Austin, Bandit brings out the guitar.

This story appeared last week, so Brigitte Bandit has already performed.

A few words about Reagan-appointed Judge David Hittner, as reported by The Texas Tribune.

In his ruling striking down the 2023 law for the second time, Judge Hittner said that the ban was overly broad and clearly unconstitutional:

The ruling described SB 12 as overly broad in its definitions of performance and nudity, stating that provocative cosplay at conventions, swimming athletes or Dolly Parton and Elvis impersonators could potentially be penalized under the law.

“The vast majority of the law’s numerous applications violate the First Amendment because all the performances that it has an actual impact on are constitutionally protected and are targeted for prohibition based on content and viewpoint,” Hittner wrote…

“Finally, for those who find such activities as described in this case offensive, the solution is relatively simple … just don’t go,” he wrote.

It’s reassuring to know that Texas has some rational Republican justices. Hurrah for Judge David Hittner!

SB 12 as adopted in law contains no language explicitly referencing drag performances, however a previous version while in the Legislature specifically included references to drag. Hittner noted in today’s ruling that opponents of drag performances are not obligated to attend them.

If you don’t like drag shows, just don’t go.

If you don’t like certain books, don’t read them.

If you object to abortions, don’t have one.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Evil, Extremism, Texas

Corey DeAngelis: Are Public Schools Unconstitutional?

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2026 //
14

Corey DeAngelis hates public schools. He has spent his professional life attacking and demeaning them. I tried to identify the source of his contempt for these great engines of democracy, but was unsuccessful.

Corey graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio, then received a Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Educational Reform. This is a program funded by the Walton Foundation, dedicated to the proposition that public schools are illegitimate and the government should give every family vouchers to escape them. Gene Glass, one of the giants of education research, described this program as one of the strangest in academia, because of its decided slant towards school choice.

Corey attended public schools in San Antonio. When he started high school, he applied and was accepted to a public magnet school on the campus of his zoned high school.

DeAngelis attended Communications Arts High School (CommArts), a magnet school operated by Northside ISD. It was founded in 1995 and was located inside the William Howard Taft High School campus. CommArts had high admissions standards, small classes, and an enrollment of about 500. Taft accepted all students and enrolled about 2,800 students.

Having enjoyed the privileges and perks of an elite public school, Corey must have been contemptuous of the large public school he avoided.

Taft was not a failing school. It accepted everyone, so of course its student body included all kinds of youth, including students who were low-performing, students with disabilities, students who were rebellious. The magnet school Corey attended screened out students who did not have high test scores or high grades and were not highly motivated. 100% of its students graduated from high school.

His life experience might have made him a supporter of public school choice, but he somehow evolved into a far-right hater of public schools who is certain that students would be better off if they received a voucher for religious schools, private schools, homeschooling, or anything else.

Corey doesn’t care that some religious schools teach racism, have no certified teachers, and are unaccountable for meeting any state standards. He doesn’t care that some homeschoolers are poorly educated. He doesn’t care that a sizable number of students attend for-profit charters that care more about profits than learning.

In this article, which appeared in The Washington Post, he argues that public schools are unconstitutional, despite having been treasured by most Americans for two centuries, and despite the Founding Fathers having included provision for them in the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 (also called the Land Ordinance of 1785), which set aside land specifically for a public school in every town in the newly created states.

The Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785 established the federal township survey system: each township was divided into 36 one-square-mile sections, and Section 16 (640 acres) was reserved “for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.”

The specific provision of land for public schools should end any doubt about their constitutionality, unless you think that today’s far-right zealots know more about the Constitution than the men who wrote it.

As a graduate of Houston public schools, none of them selective, I strongly reject the claim that public schools are inherently evil. Unlike Corey, I will always be grateful to the public schools that educated me: Montrose Elementary School (six years, including kindergarten); Sutton Elementary School (one year); Albert Sidney Johnson Junior High School (three years); and San Jacinto High School (4 years). They gave me a solid foundation in every subject; i became friends with a wide variety of students; I had some spectacular teachers; and I was able to gain admission to an elite women’s college.

Think about it. Ninety percent of Americans went to public schools, and most graduated from public schools. These are the very people who turned the United States into a successful nation. If you spit on public schools, you are spitting on the engine of American success. That’s crazy.

DeAngelis writes:

In 2021, Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger argued that the U.S. public school system violates the First Amendment. “Education,” he wrote, “consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.” Forcing families to accept government messaging — or pay a steep price to escape it — amounts to unconstitutional pressure.

A lawsuit filed in Nebraska on Aug. 13 brings that argument into court — and could open a path toward universal school choice.

Justin Jacobsen and Timothy and Joanna Menter, parents in the Lincoln Public Schools district, are suing state and local officials in Lancaster County District Court. Represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, they are challenging Nebraska’s combination of compulsory education and public-school-only funding.

Nebraska law requires parents to enroll children in a “public, private, denominational or parochial school” or to home-school them. Noncompliance is a Class 3 misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine.

Yet the state offers educational benefits — roughly $19,000 per student statewide in 2024-25, and about $17,400 in Lincoln — only to families that enroll their children in public schools, thus accepting the government’s preferred viewpoints. Nebraska ranks near the bottom nationally on school-choice indexes and provides no scholarships, tax credits or charter schools. (Gov. Jim Pillen has opted Nebraska into the new federal tax credit scholarship program, effective Jan. 1, 2027).

Families that opt out of the public system shoulder the full cost of their children’s education themselves. Average private school tuition in Nebraska runs about $7,800 a year. The resulting penalty, over a K-12 career, exceeds $100,000.

The Menters now home-school their school-age children after pulling the two oldest out of Lincoln Public Schools. The Jacobsen family home-schools one child, sends the two youngest to a private religious school and has another trying public high school. It would send all four to private schools if it could direct its tax dollars to the education providers of its choice.

Both families withdrew most of their children because remaining in public schools meant adopting educational speech they reject. The Menters’ elementary school displayed a classroom door sticker promoting alternative sexuality and transgender ideologies and pressed climate-change views the parents found fear-based. The Jacobsens’ school taught transgender ideology; the children were also exposed to divisive narratives suggesting certain races were victims and others were oppressors because of their skin color.

The parents’ complaint rests on three theories. First, the combination of a criminal education mandate and funding limited to government viewpoints directly abridges parents’ free-speech rights under the First Amendment. Education is inherently speech, and parents hold the primary right to speak or to choose who speaks on their behalf. Second, the same facts violate the Nebraska Constitution’s free speech clause, which state courts treat as mirroring the federal guarantee. Third, the arrangement creates an unconstitutional condition: that is, the state may not condition a valuable public benefit on the surrender of a constitutional right.

This combination of a compulsory mandate and exclusive public school funding is viewpoint discrimination, not a neutral funding decision. Nebraska mandates educational speech, then funds only the government’s perspective and withholds support from any other. That arrangement fails strict scrutiny. The state has no compelling interest in government-run education specifically, as opposed to education generally, and less-restrictive alternatives exist. The government could still fund education with taxpayer dollars, for example, while allowing the money to follow the child to the school or program that aligns with the family’s values.

The lawsuit does not ask the court to invent a new system or order the legislature to adopt any particular program. It seeks only a declaration that the current structure is unconstitutional as applied to these plaintiffs, an injunction against continuing the unconstitutional conditions, and prospective damages from the city of Lincoln and Lancaster County equal to the per-pupil value of local benefits directed to Lincoln Public Schools, continuing until the violation ends or each child graduates from high school, earns a GED or turns 19. The plaintiffs do not challenge the content of any specific curriculum — the claim is structural, concerning funding and compulsion.

Universal school choice resolves the constitutional problem while preserving public support for education. Nebraska can keep its compulsory-education laws and continue to provide education with taxpayer funding. The difference is that families, not the state, would direct that money to the schools or programs that best align with their values — public, private, religious or home-based. Funding would follow the child rather than force every family to be indoctrinated in a single government viewpoint.

This approach respects free speech. Parents who prefer the public system’s messaging can remain there. Parents who do not can exit without financial penalty. Every child still receives an education funded by the public, and no family is compelled to underwrite or accept speech it rejects for its own children. Force gives way to freedom.

The Nebraska case makes plain that the status quo cannot stand. Universal school choice is the path that honors both education and the Constitution.

Corey DeAngelis is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Americans for Fair Treatment. He also worked for Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. He is known as an evangelist for vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Privatization, School Choice
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