Monthly Archives: October 2025

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Trump: A Special Kind of Cruel

Team Trump focuses on being mean on purpose. To inflict pain and cause compliance through fear.

The latest evidence for this is found in the Administration using the current government shutdown to weaken the Department of Education:

Sweeping layoffs announced Friday by the Trump administration landed another body blow to the U.S. Department of Education, this time gutting the office responsible for overseeing special education, according to multiple sources within the department.

The reduction-in-force, or RIF, affects the dozens of staff responsible for roughly $15 billion dollars in special education funding, and for making sure states provide special education services to the nation’s 7.5 million children with disabilities.

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Defending Public Schools: A Winning Strategy

Trump’s Federal Voucher Scheme

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Vouchers Destroy Local Schools

When we look at Arizona, we get a preview of what an ESA voucher scheme (like the one we have in Tennessee) does to local schools.

Instead of investing in local public schools to meet students’ needs and ward off school closures to ensure equal access to quality neighborhood schools, Republican state lawmakers voted to force through universal ESA vouchers, which are now draining a massive $1 billion a year to instead pay for private, for-profit models that pick and choose students.

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Trump Budget Puts Education Programs At Risk

Is the Future a School Without Teachers?

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The Fear is The Point

The latest edition of the Trump Presidency is about control – about achieving compliance with a radical view of how America should be and doing so by any means necessary.

The bottom line: It’s about fear. When children learn to fear the state, they learn that compliance minimizes pain.

Governing by fear is how dictators get and maintain a grip on power. You may dream of a better way, but you don’t actively seek it because you’ve learned: The state shuts down any unauthorized ideas.

As Anne Lutz Fernandez notes:

A new report on US immigration policy and mental health confirms what should be obvious: mass deportations are deeply harmful to children in migrant and mixed-status families. And when masked men grab a parent from the school car line or the corner coffee shop, all students in that school or neighborhood are subject to trauma and made to understand: The state can make people disappear. It is to be feared.

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Trump Promotes Student Hunger

An Extreme Agenda for Schools

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Fraudsters Love Vouchers

Will Arizona-style voucher fraud come to Tennessee?

Tennessee now has a big, universal school voucher scheme.

ESAs, they’re called.

And, in other states, similar programs have been susceptible to fraud.

If you don’t live in Arizona or have any kids going to school there, you can still get access to that state’s voucher funds.

A man from Florida gained access to the state’s ESA voucher funds by indicating he had children in school in the state. Of course, he didn’t – these ghost kids, though, netted him as much as 25,000.

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Kids Go Hungry in Trump’s America

An Extreme Agenda for Schools

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Learning Social Skills in a School Without Teachers

I’ve written a bit before about the coming age of schools without human teachers.

Peter Greene takes a deeper dive into AI-based schooling and comes away with a lot. Particularly this salient bit:

And how the hell are students supposed to feel about being required to get their grade by chatting with a bot? What would they learn beyond how to talk to the bots to get the best assessment? Why should any student make a good faith attempt to speak about their learning when no responsible human is making a good faith attempt to listen to them?

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Want an iPhone? There’s a School Voucher for That!

TN School Lose Big in Trump Budget

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Conservatives Push Back on Trump’s Voucher Scheme

The Big, Terrible Bill included lots not to like, including the creation of a federal school voucher program.

While conservatives tend to be proponents of state-level voucher schemes, some are raising concerns over the Trump scheme:

Though attractive on the surface, this generous credit effectively removes the burden of K-12 funding from the state and transfers it to private SGOs. This undermines states like North Carolina, who did the difficult work of reforming their education funding model to ensure dollars follow the student.

As we saw in the last administration, given enough leverage, the federal government will always try to turn funding into a cudgel to promote its social policy goals.

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Arizona Bankrolls Extreme Education Agenda

Trump Scheme Puts Key School Programs At Risk

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An Extreme Agenda

Donald Trump and his buddies at the Heritage Foundation are seeking to remake American public education in the image of Christian Nationalism.

The Trump administration has launched a partisan “patriotic” education coalition that includes US ED and more than 40 partner groups, all of which are closely aligned with the president’s MAGA movement — including Prager U, the Heritage Foundation, Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, America First Legal, Hillsdale College, ALEC, the Goldwater Institute, and more — to create civics programming for public schools across the nation. Many of these organizations are involved in efforts to stop teaching civil rights material, oust school board members who believe in teaching social justice, ban books, and whitewash history lessons. In the US ED press release, Turning Point USA claimed to be “more resolved than ever to advance God-centered, virtuous education for students… 

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Even Conservatives Don’t Like Federal School Vouchers

Are Democrats Getting the Message?