When DeSantis first became governor of Florida, a legislator told him about this little bed of radicalism, and DeSantis admitted that he had never heard of it. But then he realized that attacking it and remodeling it would help build his resume for his bid for the Presidency.
New College was, like Hampshire College, a progressive institution where there were no grades and students could design their own courses. It attracted free-thinking students and professors, and this was intolerable to people like DeSantis. The fact that it was funded by the state made it vulnerable to political interference.
DeSantis decided that New College’s inclusion of gender studies and its welcoming of LGBT students was, in fact, a pretext for indoctrinating students into a Communist, socialist, anti-American way of thinking.
New College was woke, and the governor had to take control. He ousted the president and the board of trustees and replaced them with rightwing allies and political buddies. The new president of New College had no experience in higher education but had been Republican Speaker of the House in Florida.
One new board member, Chris Rufo, was an anti-woke crusader who wanted to turn New College into a model for how to take control of progressive colleges and turn them into rightwing colleges.
It’s a harrowing story. Set aside some time and watch it. The best part might be the new Dean at comedy night telling a story about exposing himself to a 7-year-old girl. He thought it was funny.
Early on in Trump’s second term, he rolled out executive orders demanding censorship of exhibits and signage at museums and national parks, as well as other institutions that received federal funds. He complained that federal funds should not support anything that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion, anything that he deemed “woke,” and anything that reflected badly in our history. On Friday two federal judges ruled against his administration’s censorship of historically accurate accounts.
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signs, films and other materials at national parks across the country to comply with a directive from President Trump.
The judge, Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, also ordered the Park Service to restore within three weeks any exhibits that it had dismantled or altered.
The ruling provides a temporary reprieve for the plaintiffs, a coalition of advocacy groups that sued over the executive order in February, while the litigation continues to unfold.
To comply with the president’s directive, the Park Service has taken down plaques about slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, a sign about climate change at Fort Sumter in South Carolina and a sign about Indigenous people at Acadia National Park in Maine.
Another federal judge has already ordered the Park Service not to make further changes to the slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site at Independence National Historical Park, as she considers a separate lawsuit filed by Philadelphia.
Judge Kelley, who was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., sharply rebuked the Trump administration for taking down materials. “Not only does this undermine the integrity of the national parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization,” she wrote.
Judge Kelley began her 63-page ruling by listing examples of national parks that help educate visitors about difficult periods of American history, as well as contributions made by people of color, gay and transgender figures, women and other marginalized groups.
“From the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry, to the genesis of the modern L.G.B.T.Q.+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument, to the retreating ice of Glacier National Park in Alaska, the national parks preserve the multifaceted and multilayered history of our nation, including the good, the bad and the ugly,” she wrote.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that removing the materials was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. They also accused the Park Service of exceeding its legal authority.
Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Park Service, suggested that the administration would appeal the ruling.
“This ruling is from a liberal activist judge,” Ms. Martin said in an email. “The department will look at our appeal options while we celebrate U.F.C. Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House this weekend in honor of our nation’s 250th with the greatest president in the history of our country — President Donald J. Trump.”
Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, one of the advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, applauded the ruling.
“National parks are not propaganda tools, nor should they be used for partisan purposes,” Ms. Thompson said in a statement. “They exist to preserve and interpret the full American story, not just the parts that make some politicians comfortable. This ruling is an important step to help ensure that remains the case.”
The Network for Public Education, which I co-founded with science teacher Anthony Cody in 2012-2013, supports the improvement of public schools and opposes privatization of public funding for schooling. Nearly 90% of children in the U.S. are enrolled in public schools. Their schools should be staffed by qualified teachers and fully funded. NPE works with state organizations that share our commitment to the principle: Public funds for public schools.
The following report was produced by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris and staff. Burris retired as a career teacher and award-winning high school principal.
NEW REPORT GIVES 17 STATES FAILING GRADES FOR ABANDONING PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Network for Public Education’s Most Comprehensive Report Card Finds Privatization and Disinvestment Go Hand in Hand
New York, New York
The Network for Public Education (NPE) released Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Public Schools (2026), an expansive state-by-state assessment of support for public education. The report evaluates all 50 states and the District of Columbia across four categories: Privatization, Protections for Homeschooled Students, School Funding, and Conditions for Teaching and Learning. It documents a troubling national pattern: the statehouses most aggressively redirecting public money toward private alternatives are the most neglectful of their public schools, teachers, and students. NPE’s analysis found a strong, statistically significant negative relationship between privatization and policies that support public schools (p < 0.0001).
Only two states — Nebraska and Vermont — earned an A. Seventeen states received an F, failing to meet even 40% of the points allocated across NPE’s 39 standards. Florida ranked last, scoring 14 out of 102 possible points, with Arizona close behind. “The data confirm what we have long suspected: privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand,” said Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author. “These are not states struggling with limited resources. They have made deliberate choices to abandon their public schools while directing billions in public dollars to private alternatives.”
The report draws on original research in addition to research from other organizations — including the Education Law Center, the Learning Policy Institute, and EdChoice — to deliver a comprehensive assessment of public education and privatization across 39 distinct factors. These include teacher-to-student ratios, teacher satisfaction, school funding levels, and the degree to which laws governing vouchers, charter schools, and homeschools protect both taxpayers and students.
Public Schooling in Americaalso provides a roadmap for reform, showing policymakers and advocates exactly where laws and policies must change to better serve students and rein in the serious, well-documented problems created by privatized alternatives.
“Public schools are the only institutions in American life obligated to welcome every child, regardless of circumstance,” NPE President Diane Ravitch added. “They build community and democracy. They are as American as apple pie.”
The Network for Public Education is a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to protecting, preserving, and strengthening public schools for every child in America.
Heather Cox Richardson covered some of the same ground as my previous post, but with more.
Before noon on Saturday, June 13, Charles M. Floca, whom Trump installed at the head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, certified to the court that “the Center and its Board have complied with the Court’s order.” They had, he wrote, “[r]emoved all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any other individual besides President Kennedy,” updated the website, removed references to Trump from letterhead, promotional materials, and so on, and “[w]ithdrawn any trademark application officially referring to the Kennedy Center as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center’…or any similar formulation.”
What they did not do was take down the tarp workers installed last night around the scaffolding they erected yesterday, hiding the portico wall. Through a crack between the tarp and the wall, photographers caught a few images of letters coming down shortly after 3:00 AM—Cliff Owen of the Associated Press got an iconic shot of a worker loosening the P from the wall—but so far the public has not seen the restored facade. The portico remained shrouded all day.
In a statement, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said that the center was “fully compliant with the court’s directive” and that the board was evaluating “legal options.” Tonight workers were back at the Kennedy Center, where they created passageways in the tarp to make the center’s doors accessible while keeping the wall where Trump had put his name covered.
Last night, while workers were putting up scaffolding at the Kennedy Center, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters held a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial in advance of the UFC cage matches to be held at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday. Trump sent the United States Army Herald Trumpets, the U.S. Army ensemble chiefly responsible for playing the entrance and exit fanfares for the President of the United States, to open the event.
The fighters walked from Lincoln’s statue down the steps of the memorial through the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon, a pathway formed between two groups made up of sixteen service members in dress uniforms. This is the U.S. military’s highest ceremonial formation, usually reserved for heads of state, foreign dignitaries, senior officials, and funerals for military heroes.
This morning the weigh-in for the UFC fights at the White House also took place at the Lincoln Memorial. Heavyweight fighter Josh Hokit seemed to pretend to throw up, dribbling colored liquid from his mouth. “So what? Maybe I was drinking last night,” Hokit told the media there. “Who wouldn’t be? I’ve got a giant man who wants to knock me out,” he said, referring to his scheduled opponent Derrick Lewis, whom Alex Pattle of Yahoo! Sports identifies as Trump’s favorite fighter. “He has the most knockouts in UFC history.”
Today stunt performer Travis Pastrana performed a backflip on his dirt bike over the UFC octagon fight arena on the South Lawn of the White House. Other riders performed stunts as well. They were filmed on their bikes, flying across the facade of the White House.
On the eve of his 80th birthday, the president posted an image of the Obama Presidential Center as a garbage can surrounded by a homeless encampment. Then he posted an image of himself leaving his trial in Manhattan Criminal Court in 2024, when a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts, under the caption “Only Trump.” Then he posted an image from 2018 of himself walking with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Then he posted a picture of himself speaking at a lectern in front of Air Force One while he was campaigning for reelection in August 2020.
Then he posted an AI image of himself on a ship looking out at battleships from different eras, including a wooden sailing vessel, flying the American flag, with fighter jets in formation overhead; the back of his jacket is emblazoned with “COMMANDER IN CHIEF,” and the caption reads: “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.”
Then he posted an image of himself on the cover of Fortune magazine from December 8, 1986. And then he posted a black and white image of himself as a younger man in the same era, looking pensive, seated in a chair on an ice rink, with the caption: “Years ago after saving the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park—Long before I fixed The Reflecting Pool, and everything else in Washington, D.C. including, most importantly, CRIME! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Tomorrow night, the fighters will enter the ring from the Oval Office. The fight will be carried live on Paramount Plus, for a fee of $8.99 and up.
Friday night I was glued to the CSPAN livestream of the work to remove the name of Donald J. Trump from the Kennedy Center. It never belonged there.
I began to fantasize Trump inserting himself into the Lincoln Memorial, with a sculpture of him seated next to Lincoln, in the newly renamed Trump Lincoln Memorial. Why not slap his name on the Washington Monument? Who would stop him? What else can he name for himself?
So to see his name removed, letter by letter, was a historic event, as well as a profound humiliation for Trump. But I didn’t get to see it because it didn’t happen until 3 am, which I thought happened not only because of a rain delay but because of purposeful, deliberate slow-walking to make sure few people saw it.
Since the Kennedy Center opened, it has had a bipartisan board. It was not political. It attracted leading artists. It was, as intended, a great cultural institution for artists. It was an honor to perform there. Until Trump.
Until Trump dismissed the members of the board appointed by Biden and replaced them with Trump toadies. Trump named himself to the board, and the new board elected Trump as its president, a position never before held by the President. Trump is petty, wracked by envy, a hunger for respect, and a passion for retribution.
As the Kennedy Center turned political, wholly owned by Trump, artists began canceling their performances. The biggest blow was the cancellation of Hamilton, which was sure to be sold out.
He fired the professional arts administrator who led the Kennedy Center and replaced her with a Trump loyalist, Richard Grennell, Ambassador to Germany in Trump’s first term, lacking any relevant experience.
In short order, other nonpolitical administrators left or were fired.
Ticket sales plummeted.
The Washington National Opera left the Kennedy Center and continues to perform at different venues around D.C.
The National Symphony Orchestra decided to stay.
Faced with a financial and artistic backlash, the board decided that the building needed major renovations and announced that the Center would close for two years. Grennell laid off staff in anticipation of the long closure. The National Symphony Orchestra was looking for alternate venues to stay alive during the two-year hiatus.
Meanwhile the Washington National Opera–which left in January 2026–was deadlocked with the Center, because the Center refused to give the Opera the $17 million that was its endowment, made up of gifts given specifically to the Opera. The Center said the Opera ran a deficit, so the Center claimed the Opera’s endowment as payment. The Opera sued the Center on June 11.
So…I wanted to see Trump’s name come down. It was history. The removal crew started before noon. They began erecting an elaborate scaffold, laboriously. This was odd because when Trump’s name went up, the workers were elevated by scissor lifts and quickly attached his name. The rise of the scaffolding was delayed by a heavy rain. When the rain ended, the erection of the scaffold was sluggish, at best. It went on for hours. The workers kept piecing the scaffolding together. Occasionally they would all climb down and nothing was happening.
At midnight, I gave up and went to bed. The next morning, I googled to see the renewed facade, the one without Trump’s name. I couldn’t find it anywhere, in any format.
I read that the workers began removing his name at 3 am, but their work was hidden by white tarps. No one could photograph them doing it. Presumably, Trump couldn’t bear the humiliation. The front of the building remained covered the next day.
What a baby! What a self-centered, narcissistic baby!
The hero of this saga is Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio. She was an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center by virtue of her role in Congress. Trump couldn’t fire her. The board tried to exclude her. At the meeting where they voted to approve the name change, they muted her mic so she could not participate.
It was Representative Beatty who sued to have Trump’s name stripped from the Center. The federal judge who decided the case ruled that Congress named the Center, and only Congress could change the name.
The crisis of the Kennedy Center is far from over. The board is still packed with allies of Trump. Its staff, what’s left of it, is led by Trump partisans. Because the board wanted to close it for two years, there has been no programming for next year.
Trump has proved once again that he is the master of chaos. As the adage goes, whatever Trump touches, dies.
The Kennedy Center must not die. Congress must intervene to restore the nonpartisan nature of the Kennedy Center.
Earlier today, a federal appeals court rejected an appeal by the Trump-selected board of the Kennedy Center to delay the removal of his name from the structure that houses the Center. They said in an unsigned decision that the board should comply with the decision of Federal Judge Christopher Cooper to remove Trump’s name by midnight tonight.
Construction crews began erecting scaffolding this morning but had to stop work because of a heavy rain. They resumed work and are still erecting the scaffold to reach Trump’s name.
Many media outlets are live-streaming the work in front of the building.
Jim Acosta is live-streaming the event along with hundreds of people who have come to witness the event.
Acosta has his own show and is also on Substack, YouTube, and BlueSky.
C-SPAN is also live-streaming the event, as are other cable networks and stations.
Almost midnight, and work on the scaffold continues. Odd the way they built the scaffold up til now. The left side doesn’t reach the letters THE DO.
Federal Judge Christopher Cooper turned down a request by the current administration of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to delay his previous order to remove Trump’s name from the building and all other signage.
Soon after his inauguration, Trump replaced the bipartisan board of the Kennedy Center with his allies, who promptly selected Trump as chairman of the board. The only non-Trump Democrat appointee who remained was ex-officio member Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio). The other board members tried to prevent her from participating in votes, but she persisted and filed the lawsuit to take Trump’s name down.
Trump has nearly destroyed the Kennedy Center since he took control. He replaced key administrators with his lackeys. The shake-up alienated audiences and performers. Artists canceled their performances, and ticket sales plummeted.
The board addressed the crisis by deciding to close the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations, possibly total demolition. The federal judge blocked that decision.
The dilemma now is that the Kennedy Center sits mostly empty now, with nothing lined up for the next season, when the board expected that the Center would be closed for renovation.
The Washington Post reported:
A federal judge Friday denied the Kennedy Center’s last-ditch motion to delay removing President Donald Trump’s name from the performing arts venue, as crews erected scaffolding next to the building less than 12 hours before the court-ordered deadline to do so.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the Kennedy Center’s lawyers failed to demonstrate they were likely to win their appeal or that the center would suffer “irreparable harm” if Trump’s name were removed….
In February 2025, Trump purged the center’s board of trustees and replaced them with political allies who then elected him board chair. In December, those loyalists voted to rename the venue, and a day later, crews added Trump’s name to the exterior.
Trump claimed that the board’s vote to do so was a surprise, but he had joked about naming the center after himself for months. Within hours his name was on the website, and the next morning the building’s sign read: “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Justice Department lawyers representing Trump later acknowledged that, given the speed with which the signage was installed, it had been “prepared and/or purchased prior to the Board’s vote the day before.”
“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And the scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.
“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.
This web page, which invites users to look up the number of immigrants supposedly arrested on charges of criminal activity in American cities and towns, belongs to a subgenre of Trumpian gestures that are menacing and sophomoric at the same time. “Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile,” is how Ernesto Verdeja, a genocide-prevention expert at the University of Notre Dame, described it to me. These gestures are hard to write about: The ugliness is undisguised, so what is there to say? And yet, these statements, step by preposterous step, change the world we live in.
With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”
Who are they? Elon musk? Peter Thiel? Dangerous immigrants!
No President in our history has ever sued the federal government that he leads. But Donald Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion because an IRS contractor released his tax returns during his first term in office. The public and the media learned that in some years, he paid no taxes and in one year, his tax payment was a total of $750.
He was insulted and “damaged” by the leak of his tax returns, but every other president since Richard Nixon in 1973 has released his tax returns (Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, released a summary of his returns).
Right before the case went to trial, Trump and Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. Attorney General, reached a deal and withdrew the lawsuit. Even before the trial got started, Federal Judge Kathlyn Williams, who would hear the case, wondered whether there were any real adversaries or was Trump suing himself.
Although other presidents released their tax returns to show they had no conflicts of interest, Trump broke this tradition. During his first term in office, he repeatedly said that he would release his returns when the IRS finished auditing them. A decade later, his taxes were never released. This must be the longest audit in history. By now, the public understands that he will never release his tax returns.
The deal was that Trump would “settle” for the establishment of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to pay to people who claimed to have been wrongly prosecuted by the Justice Department. Trump would chair the board of the fund and have the power to remove other board members. In short, Trump would control a slush fund for his allies, not only the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, but other friends such Mike Lindell (the My Pillow Guy), Roger Stone, John Eastman, Rudy Guiliani, and others who joined Trump in claiming that the 2020 was “rigged.” Even rioters who had struck and injured police officers would be eligible.
In a separate agreement, Blanche signed a document declaring that the IRS would not audit Trump nor members of his family nor his companies. Presently, Trump owes the IRS over $100 million because of a disputed deduction. That debt would go away. What was unclear in this agreement was whether this audit exemption applied not only to the past and present but also the future.
The uproar against this deal was bipartisan. Republican members of Congress spoke out against the slush fund. During the upcoming election, they could not defend federal payouts to insurrectionists, especially those who attacked law officers.
At hearings, Todd Blanche said the slush fund was dead (insurrectionists can still sue the Justice Department and win compensation). Trump has never said so.
But one part of the deal was left intact: the agreement that Trump and family would not be audited by the IRS.
This deal outrages me. Why should the Trump family and their business ventures be shielded from tax audits? Why not me? Why not you? Why not everyone who pays taxes?
“Maybe he doesn’t want the American people … to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes…”
Trump has a long and well-documented history of tax avoidance.
In the first presidential debate of 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Trump–at Hofstra University on September 16, 2026–Clinton said:
Trump immediately replied:
“That makes me smart.”
He added that if he had paid more taxes, the money would have been “squandered” by the government.
I remember thinking when he said that, “If everyone dodged their taxes or used every loophole, how would the U.S. fund its military or pay for Medicare or function in any way?”
This is not a man who should be exempt from IRS audits, nor should Eric, Don Jr. or the rest of the rapacious family and their corporate entities.
When Todd Blanche testified to Congress in defense of the agreement to protect the Trump family from IRS audits, Democrats expressed outrage:
Senator Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon said:
“It’s the ultimate case of an ultrawealthy individual living under one set of rules while everybody else lives under another,” Wyden said, adding about Trump: “I take it as an admission of his own guilt when it comes to tax cheating.”
Rep. Ron Wyden (D), Oregon
Bessent “owes the committee an explanation of what the Treasury knows about the dirty settlement,” noting the Treasury Department’s role as both “defendant and a negotiator” in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.
“This is an abuse of the IRS that goes way beyond anything that I have any familiarity with…
“Trump has set the new high water mark for public corruption… everybody in 🇺🇸 is subject to IRS audit except the Trumps. I take it as an admission of his own guilt when it comes to tax cheating. Trumps have stuffed every dollar they can into their pockets.”
A tweet: Why does a president need immunity from committing TAX FRAUD unless he is and has been committing tax fraud?
I hope that someone is planning to take legal action. This deal is unethical, dishonest, and just plain wrong.
But lawyer Elie Honig wrote that Trump is likely to keep his audit exemption because no one is injured by his deal and no one has standing to sue.
Diane Ravitch's blog 