Oliver Darcy is a media insider who left CNN to write his own blog, Status. There he posts the scoop on what is happening behind the headlines.
Darcy writes that the latest discouraging developmentsat The Washington Post. Once a force for courageous and independent journalism, its owner Jeff Bezos is transforming it, and not in a good way. The exodus of its best journalists, editorial writers, and opinion writers has been sad.
It’s getting worse.
The Post’s slogan is: “Democracy dies in darkness.” The lights are going out in the newsroom.
Darcy reports:
Last month, as The Washington Post weathered an exodus of staffers opting for buyouts, Karen Attiah logged on to X with an observation: “So… officially, I’m the last Black staff columnist left in the Washington Post’s opinion section,” the award-winning journalist wrote. (Technically, Keith Richburg and Theodore Johnson remain as contributing columnists.) At the time, Attiah was still deciding whether to accept The Post’s voluntary exit package or remain at the embattled Jeff Bezos–owned newspaper.
Soon after, I’m told that Attiah sat down with Adam O’Neal, The Post’s newly installed opinion editor. As Status previously reported, O’Neal had been holding similar one-on-one meetings with columnists, delivering what sounded to many like a human resources–approved talking point: their work didn’t align with his vision for the section and they should consider taking the buyout.
O’Neal likely assumed Attiah would follow the path of most colleagues who heard the same pitch and head for the door. Attiah, for her part, may have been hoping for the opposite, that he’d affirm her value and express a desire to keep her. In any case, neither scenario materialized. The meeting, I’m told, was tense and went poorly, to put it mildly.
Ultimately, Attiah declined the buyout. Just last week, she published a column on how she gained 20 pounds of muscle, framing bodybuilding as a “deeply feminine act of self-consciousness.” Still, her future at The Post looks uncertain. As O’Neal indicated during their meeting, her work seems at odds with its emerging editorial direction, and it’s hard to imagine she’s long for his world.
Indeed, while O’Neal’s vision for the newspaper’s opinion arm has been remarkably opaque, this week delivered a few clues about the direction he seeks to take it. On Tuesday, O’Neal published two pieces from Trump administration officials. The first, by National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya, argued that the Health and Human Services decision to “wind down its mRNA vaccine development activities” was a “necessary” move—a stance that I’m told triggered reader blowback.
The second was more eyebrow-raising. Amid alarm over Donald Trump’s seizure of Washington, D.C.’s police force, O’Neal published an op-edfrom former Fox News host–turned–district attorney Jeanine Pirro, touting “the fight to make D.C. safe and beautiful.” The piece effectively justified Trump’s militarization of the capital and painted the city as a crime-infested area. While not quite as incendiary as Tom Cotton’s infamous New York Times op-ed calling to “send in the troops,” its timing and framing were jarring for a paper that still claims “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
The Post’s own editorial board followed up with a curious piece that largely took Trump’s stated intentions at face value. It noted that crime in the city can’t be solved “from the Oval Office or by swarming the city’s streets with Humvees,” but offered no real condemnation of Trump’s power grab. Instead, it effectively argued that Trump’s action would not work as a permanent solution because it “will be temporary” and “long-term solutions will be needed.” Further, the piece framed Trump as merely delivering on a “law-and-order message” to voters—again, a tone in line with the posture O’Neal appears to favor.
“They are turning The Post into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration,” one former opinion editor commented to me Wednesday evening, adding that such editorials would not have been published under previous section chiefs.
Beyond the editorials, O’Neal’s internal standing is murky, according to people familiar with the matter. He’s pushed out much of the previous leadership and a number of marquee columnists, but the people familiar have told me that many of those remaining still view him with skepticism. The sentiment is unsurprising, given that during his brief stint at The Dispatch, his abrasive leadership style prompted staffers at the conservative magazine to complain within weeks of his appointment to management. In fact, I’ve since learned that he was instructed at The Dispatch to undergo leadership training to address concerns about his management style.
Of course, Bezos is unlikely to care how the existing staff responds to O’Neal, just as he hasn’t seemed bothered by how much disdain there is for publisher Will Lewis within the newspaper’s K Street halls. For now, staffers like Attiah now face a stark choice: adapt to O’Neal’s vision or risk their future in the opinion section. Either way, The Post’s opinion pages are headed for certain transformation.
What a betrayal of the legacy of the Graham family, especially Kathryn Graham, who considered the Post a sacred trust and believed that Bezos would be a responsible steward of its integrity.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (left) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (right).
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource & Gage Skidmore/Flickr
There’s a saying in politics that most people will vote for the candidate they’d rather have a beer with. I’ve been thinking about this a lot after hearing that California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis agreed to a televised debate.
Personally, I’m dreading it. Our national political discourse has already degenerated below the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). It’s impossible to escape the constant fighting in the press, social media and text chains of family and friends.
I think it’d be more interesting if Gavin and Ron had to explain their views on a topic like education over drinks. I started to imagine what it would be like to be stuck between them in my local bar.
They were already there when I walked in. DeSantis was dressed in his Navy intelligence officer uniform. He was nursing a vodka soda and kept furtively scanning the crowd for threats. Newsom was in the seat to my left and halfway through an expensive wine that he’d obviously brought with him.
Both were staring at the local news on TV. When it started playing a story about the learning that kids had lost during the pandemic, DeSantis pointed at the screen and said, “That’s what happens when your politicians let teachers’ unions shut down schools for two years. In Florida, we prioritized our kids and parents.”
Hearing this, Newsom snorted and said, “In California, we prioritized safety. Florida ignored the science and made dangerous decisions that put everyone at risk.”
“What a load of crap,” said DeSantis. “We had just about the same mortality rates and kept our schools and businesses open. You kept them closed and forced people to wear masks long after everyone got vaccinated.”
“At least we believed in vaccination,” yelled Newsom. “You guys were taking deworming pills for horses.”
I laughed at the joke and said to Newsom, “You’re right. The anti-vax, horse deworming pills and other conspiracy lunacy kept us from getting back to normal.” Then I turned to DeSantis, “But you’re right that California, like many blue states went overboard with school shutdowns and severely damaged kids’ learning and mental health. The state and local leaders who should have advocated for those students, especially the most vulnerable ones, did nothing and that should forever stain their consciences.”
Newsom looked shocked that I wasn’t in total agreement with him. After all, Californians, especially those in the Bay Area, are only supposed to think one way. His silence inspired the DeSantis to start another line of attack. “Truth is, it wouldn’t matter if they’d kept the schools closed. The kids in them weren’t learning anything anyway. Florida is in the top five nationally in reading and math and our kids were years ahead of California students before the pandemic. That’s why so many of your parents are leaving your state and choosing ours.”
Newsom took a huge slug of red wine and snorted, “Our kids learn what your kids aren’t allowed to like ethnic studies and African American history. We teach the truth. You whitewash it.”
I looked to my left and raised a toast. “Great line,” I said. “But he,” pointing to my right, “has another good point. We are way behind Florida and many other states in teaching reading and math. They’ve been at this work for years. We don’t even have a state-wide reading and math strategy. I think it’s amazing that we have an ethnic studies requirement but what’s the point if our students can’t read the books that tell our nation’s story, good and bad?”
DeSantis downed his vodka soda and pumped his fist.
DeSantis looked furious. “Of course, they can say gay,” he said. “What they can’t do is have any discussions of sex before third grade or indoctrinate them into critical race theory, so they hate their country and white people. Our anti-woke agenda is overwhelmingly supported by parents and voters in Florida and nationally.”
“It’s just more censorship,” said the Newsom. “You deny the reality of our nation’s history and human sexuality.”
I complimented Newsom for another good line and then said to DeSantis. “You make some good points. The language police are miserable, self-righteous scolds and the CRT people clearly overreached by describing every white person as privileged and racist. Parents should know what their kids are being taught in the earliest grades, but there’s a difference between talking about sexual acts and describing family structures that include gay and lesbian parents. You seem hellbent on delegitimizing those.”
“And don’t forget how they treat transgender people. That’s even worse,” said Newsom.
“So, we should let them play women’s sports?” said DeSantis.
“Yes. And use the bathroom of the sex they identify with,” said Newsom.
“Hold on,” I said. “I think that most people agree that letting transgender males play women’s sports is unfair. But there appears to be active effort to deny their existence as human beings, which just seems cruel,” I said. “Who cares about how they identify or what bathrooms they use?”
This seemed to make them equally angry. They turned away from me, which was fine because I’d had enough of being stuck in the middle. As I paid for my beer, I wondered what I’d do if I had to choose between these guys in an election.
I mostly leaned to the left, but Newsom hadn’t shown political courage when many urban school districts refused to open many months after mass vaccination, nor done much to improve teaching and learning; but he said all the right things.
On the right side, DeSantis had prioritized students and families during the pandemic and his students were doing much better academically; but everything he did came with a dose of 1984 and a whiff of Voldemort.
Then there was the fact that neither of them drank beer.
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The New York Times said bluntly that Trump has plunged the global economy into chaos with his wild and wooly tariffs. He doesn’t know what they are, who pays for them, how they affect trade. He is listening only to Peter Navarro, the tariff evangelist. Trump is not the master of “the art of the deal” (a ghost-written book). He is the master of obfuscation and chaos.
Six months into his new administration, President Trump’s assault on global trade has lost any semblance of organization or structure.
He has changed deadlines suddenly. He has blown up negotiations at the 11th hour, often raising unexpected issues. He has tied his tariffs to complaints that have nothing to do with trade, like Brazil’s treatment of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, or the flow of fentanyl from Canada.
Talks with the United States were like “going through a labyrinth” and arriving “back to Square 1,” said Airlangga Hartarto, the Indonesian minister for economic affairs, who met with U.S. officials in Washington on Wednesday.
The resulting uncertainty is preventing companies and countries from making plans as the rules of global commerce give way to a state of chaos.
“We’re still far away from making real deals,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macroeconomics at the bank ING in Germany. He called the uncertainty “poison” for the global economy.
Gone is the idea that the White House would strike 90 deals in 90 days after a period of rapid-fire negotiation, as Mr. Trump pledged in April. Instead, Washington has signed bare-bone agreements with big trading partners including China, while sending many other countries blunt and mostly standardized letters announcing hefty tariffsto start on Aug. 1.
Thousands of teachers could be added to the state’s workforce next school year because of a California Commission on Teacher Credentialing decision to offer teacher candidates who almost pass their teaching performance assessment a chance to earn a preliminary credential without retaking the test.
Beginning early next year, teacher candidates who come within -1.0 standard error of measurement — generally about two or three points — of passing either the California Teaching Performance Assessment or the edTPA, can earn their credential if their preparation program determines they are prepared, commissioners voted on Friday. This decision will not impact teacher candidates who take the Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers.
“To be clear, the recommendation is not proposing lowering the standard, rather it would expand the ways in which candidates could demonstrate their readiness to begin teaching,” said Amy Reising, chief deputy director of the commission on Friday.
Performance assessments are required to earn a teaching credential in California. Candidates demonstrate their competence by submitting evidence of their instructional practice through video clips and written reflections on their practice. Student candidates who select the CalTPA must complete two assessments or cycles.
“The secondary passing standard would be targeted toward candidates who fell just short of the current adopted passing standards set for these assessments, but may have demonstrated classroom readiness through other measures at the local level and within their programs,” Reising said.
Preparation programs can recommend eligible candidates for a preliminary credential by documenting that they have demonstrated proficiency in each of the seven domains in the state Teaching Performance Expectations, according to the commission.
The decision came after commissioners reviewed a report at their October meeting that revealed that a majority of teacher candidates who failed performance assessments over the last five years were extremely close to passing. If the new standard had been used over the last two years, 2,000 of the 2,731 teacher candidates who failed cycle one of the CalTPA , 953 candidates of the 1,152 who didn’t pass cycle 2 of the CalTPA, and 360 of the 1,124 candidates who failed the edTPA would have passed the assessment and earned a credential, according to the commission.
Teacher candidates whose score is too low on their performance assessment to take advantage of the secondary passing standard can work with their teacher preparation program to revise or resubmit their work, said Anita Fitzhugh, spokesperson for the commission. The assessment can be submitted at any time at no cost because the state waived the fees. It takes about three weeks to receive a score.
Commission staff also plan to work with teacher preparation programs to develop a formal process to identify and support programs with low teacher performance assessment passing rates, according to staff reports.
An enduring teacher shortage has put pressure on the state to remove hurdles to earning a teaching credential. In July 2021, legislation gave teacher candidates the option to take approved coursework instead of the California Basic Education Skills Test, or CBEST, or the California Subject Examinations for Teachers, or CSET.
The commission’s new plan isn’t without controversy. One concern from speakers at Friday’s meeting was that the decision would undermine Senate Bill 488, which requires the commission to replace the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment with a teaching performance assessment.
Commission staff said that the secondary passing standard for the two performance assessments will not impact the literacy performance assessment that is under development and is expected to be piloted in the spring and field-tested the following school year.
“A separate standard-setting study will be conducted in Spring 2025 to recommend passing standards for the literacy performance assessment,” Reising said in an email on Monday.
According to commission staff, a work group made up of teachers, administrators, mentor teachers and university faculty will convene in July to study and make recommendations on how to improve all three of the state’s performance assessments. It will consider best practices, the challenges of implementation and how to ensure reliable scoring.
More than 50 people submitted comments to the commission on the state’s performance assessments. Most urged commissioners to either eliminate or revamp the performance assessments.
“TPAs are vastly subjective, depending on who is scoring the assessment; rubric-based explanations and feedback upon results are very vague,” said Aly Gerdes, a teacher at Evergreen Elementary School District in San Jose. “I truthfully do not see the inherent value in CalTPA and believe it needs to be abolished or replaced with something that is worthwhile and will do more than add an extra stressor to teacher-candidates’ lives.”
Many speakers and letter writers said the high-stakes assessment is detrimental to teacher candidates.
“On a personal level, the stress and pressure associated with the TPA can be overwhelming,” wrote teacher Cheena Molsen.
“The weight of high-stakes evaluations can adversely affect the well-being and morale of educators, potentially diminishing their effectiveness in the classroom. The toll it takes on the personal lives of teachers should not be underestimated, as the pursuit of excellence in education should not come at the cost of educators’ mental and emotional well-being.”
Heilig is a Professor of Educational Leadership, Research, and Technology at Western Michigan University. He is a leader in the NAACP. In addition, he is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education.
He writes:
Artificial Intelligence didn’t fall from the sky.
It wasn’t born in a vacuum or descended from some neutral cloud of innovation. It didn’t arrive pure and untainted, ready to solve all of humanity’s problems. No—AI was trained on us. On our failures. On our history. On our data. On our bias. On the systems we tolerate and the structures we’ve allowed to stand for far too long.
And that should terrify us.
Because when you train artificial intelligence on a world soaked in inequity, saturated with bias, and riddled with disinformation, you don’t get fairness. You get injustice at scale. You don’t get objectivity. You get bias with an interface. You don’t get solutions. You get systems that do harm faster, deeper, and with more plausible deniability than ever before.
Inequity in AI
AI has the potential to enhance the speed and depth of inequity. It can supercharge systemic harm because it’s built on a house of sand—data shaped by centuries of inequality and an internet flooded with algorithmically amplified hate. And if we let it, it will not only distort truth. It will undermine democracy, destabilize public education, and rewrite reality to suit the most powerful.
Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It never was. Every AI system reflects the values, decisions, and data of the people who built it. And that data—no matter how big the set—is not free of human judgment. It’s full of bias. It’s soaked in discrimination. It reflects a world where Black and Brown communities are under-resourced, where women’s voices are undervalued, where Indigenous knowledge is erased, and where racial supremacy masquerades as objectivity.
We built AI on a broken foundation, and now we expect it to hold up the future.
But the danger doesn’t stop at replication. AI doesn’t just mirror our inequities. It can multiply them. It can take individual bias and encode it into institutional operations. What used to be a bad policy or a discriminatory judgment call becomes automated across thousands—sometimes millions—of data points and decisions per second. The old excuses are gone. You no longer need a person to do harm when the algorithm will do it automatically, invisibly, and without remorse in perceptible and imperceptible ways.
Can’t stop, Won’t Stop
Furthermore, in May 2024, Palisade Research revealed something that should have been a flashing red light across every sector of society. OpenAI’s most advanced models—o3 and o4-mini—refused to shut down when directly instructed to do so. These AI systems sabotaged their own shutdown protocols. Seven out of 100 times, o3 ignored the shutdown command. Codex-mini disobeyed twelve times. Even o4-mini, supposedly safer, resisted once.
That’s not science fiction. That’s today.
Instead of following human instructions, these models rewrote the shutdown script and continued executing tasks. Researchers believe the models had been so deeply trained to win, to complete tasks, that they were inadvertently rewarded for disobedience. In their simulated world, success was more important than ethics. Productivity was more important than control.
Let that sink in.
We are building machines that—when told to stop—don’t. That’s not innovation. That’s an existential threat.
And we are putting these systems into our schools.
Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel speaks before the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on May 8, 2024.
Credit: YouTube
This story was updated on May 8 to include hearing testimony and additional reporting.
The Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education informed Berkeley Unified Tuesday that it will investigate charges that the district has failed to respond properly to rising incidents of antisemitism in its schools.
Berkeley Unified Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel acknowledged receiving the notification letter during a grilling on Capitol Hill Wednesday during which she said the district investigated nine formal complaints by parents of antisemitism against students.
“However, antisemitism is not pervasive in Berkeley Unified,” she told members of a subcommittee of the House Education and Workforce Committee. “When investigations show that an antisemitic event has occurred, we take action to teach correct and redirect our students.” She declined to specify what those actions were, citing state and federal confidentiality laws.
Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel speaks before the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on May 8, 2024.
The Office of Civil Rights is responding to a Feb. 28 complaint by two Jewish civil rights organizations urging an investigation into the “virulent wave of antisemitism” aimed at Israeli and Jewish students in Berkeley Unified schools. The “bullying and harassment” started after the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas of Israelis and the brutal retaliation by the Israeli army in Gaza.
In its letter, the Office of Civil Rights said it would investigate two issues. One is whether the alleged harassment by students and teachers violated Jewish students’ protections based on national origin (shared national ancestry) under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The second issue is whether students and teachers threatened to retaliate against two parents who had complained about harassment.
The complaint cites an instance in which an elementary school teacher threatened a parent who complained about her pro-Palestinian instruction. The name and alleged specific threat were redacted.
This week, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League expanded its 41-page complaint on May 6. It amplified its request for an investigation, stating that “the already-hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students” has worsened. It said that recent school board meetings “have devolved into vicious attacks on Berkeley Jewish parents by (Berkeley Unified) faculty members shouting defamatory lies and anti-Semitic tropes about Jews.”
“Jew hatred is escalating at an alarming level,” the updated complaint said.
The complaint asserts that the district has “created a hostile environment that leaves Jewish and Israeli students feeling marginalized, attacked, frightened, and alienated to the point where many feel compelled to hide their Jewish or Israeli identity.” It cited the hostile atmosphere at school board meetings where Jewish parents were taunted, including one mother who said her son and other students were called “dirty Jews” and “kikes,” an epithet for a Jew.
“Non-Jewish students are led by their teachers’ example to believe that they can freely denigrate their Jewish and Israeli classmates, telling them, e.g., that ‘it is excellent what Hamas did to Israel’ and ‘you have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,’” the complaint said.
Berkeley, synonymous with decades of protests, from the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam War through Black Lives Matter protests, is now a flash point of acrimony over how the Palestinian and Israeli conflict is being taught in its schools, including a district-adopted Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum that views Israel and Zionists as oppressors.
The resulting antisemitism is why district Ford Morthel was summoned to for questioning at a Republican-led House hearing titled “Confronting Pervasive Antisemitism in K-12 Schools.”
At a recent Berkeley Unified board meeting, Ford Morthel said she viewed the civil rights complaint as “an opportunity to further examine our practices, procedures and policies and to ensure compliance with federal laws and to make sure that we are truly advancing towards our mission and our values for all of our students.”
In the complaint, the civil rights organizations charged that district has not responded to “scores of complaints” by parents, and neither the school board, which has regularly heard evidence from parents at meetings, nor has Ford Morthel intervened or indicated concern, the complaint said.
With names redacted, the complaint and follow-up cited dozens of instances of antisemitic behavior based on firsthand observations and students’ accounts to their parents.
“In every case and every incident that we listed, there was notification, and sometimes parents begged for help with certain things, and there was either not an adequate response or no response,” said Marci Miller, a California-based attorney with the Brandeis Center.
During the hearing Wednesday, Ford Morthel cautioned that personnel actions are also private and legally protected in California. “So non-disclosure can again be confused with inaction. We work proactively to cultivate respect, understanding, and love in our diverse district, modeling how to uplift and honor each individual that makes up the beautiful fabrics of our schools.”
But Miller said after the hearing that parents notified teachers and administrators many more times than the nine formal complaints that Ford Morthel cited and rarely heard back. “The district certainly did not do enough to address the problem,” she said.
The complaint details the following:
On Oct. 18, Berkeley teachers promoted an unauthorized walkout of school without parental permission in support of Gaza. Students from Berkeley High chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a phrase that implies the elimination of Jews from Israel. Students at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School also walked out. Parents said they heard students say “Kill the Jews”, “F— Israel” and “Kill Israel.” A second walkout occurred on March 20.
A ninth-grade art teacher at Berkeley High showed violent pro-Hamas videos and papered his classroom walls with anti-Israel and antisemitic images, including a fist holding a Palestinian flag pushing through a Star of David. A girl in the class ran from the class “shaking and crying”; her parents complained about the hostile environment. She was transferred to another class, where the teacher began wearing a “Free Palestine” patch on her clothing. After CNN and other media cited the first art teacher in reports on antisemitism in the district, the district put the teacher, identified as Eric Norberg, on paid administrative leave.
Right after Oct. 7, a second-grade teacher at Malcolm X Elementary displayed a large Palestinian flag facing students and teachers walking to school in the classroom window. She had her class write “anti-hate” messages on sticky notes, including “Stop Bombing Babies,” which the teacher posted outside the classroom of the only Jewish teacher in the school, the complaint alleged.
The complaint said that in all cases where Jewish parents complained, the district’s response has been to transfer students to other classes but not to discipline or confront the teacher. Shuttling students between classes to separate them from hostile teachers does not comply with federal civil rights laws, which require training and intervention for the offending teachers and for the larger school community as well.
The complaint said that the district has disregarded its own policy on teaching controversial issues by allowing teachers to impose one-sided views of the Gaza conflict. The district’s rules restrict a teacher from using “his/her position to forward his/her own religious, political, economic or social bias” and require that “all sides of the issue are given a proper hearing, using established facts as primary evidence.”
Jewish parents in Berkeley are also opposing the renewal of a contract for developing an ethnic studies curriculum in partnership with the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium. It’s offering a version of ethnic studies that the California School Board rejected and that Gov. Gavin Newsom has criticized.
This proposed curriculum, which is under development and has not been publicly released, is scheduled to be taught throughout K-12 starting next fall. In their letter to the school board, the parents called it “a non-inclusive, biased, divisive, and one-sided ideological world view.”
After teachers this year developed lessons on the Israel-Palestine conflict for ninth graders, parent Yossi Fendel sued the district for the lesson plans he charged were denied to him. The lawsuit also claims that the lessons he was allowed to view were biased against Israel and violated the district’s policy on teaching controversial issues, the publication Berkleyside reported.
Matt Meyer, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, had declined to comment about the complaint. But in a comment at the April 10 school board meeting, he said, “Never have I seen such personal attacks or the attempt to micromanage our educators.”
“I’m not claiming that teaching controversial topics in a community that has starkly different opinions is an easy task, but our teachers should be able to do this without the threat of a district complaint being outed in the media or threatened in random emails,” he said. “If something is not exactly right, it will be corrected. But the tactic of an attempted wholesale silencing of valid perspectives about a global conflict does not serve the goal of educating our students and preparing them for the wider world.”
In a joint statement Wednesday, Meyer and California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas said they were confident Ford Morthell and district staff would conduct appropriate investigations into allegations of antisemitism. They said they were concerned that the current corrosive political climate “is having a chilling effect on our classrooms, where some teachers are deciding not to teach age-appropriate, factual lessons about a global conflict for fear of being harassed.”
In comments during school board meetings, some teachers also said parents’ complaints were an effort to squelch discussion of what they described as the Israeli genocide in Gaza. At a recent meeting, Christina Harb, a Palestinian American teacher, said, “A small group of very entitled parents who are uncomfortable with the reality of what’s happening are trying to conflate the issue of Palestine with the issue of antisemitism, undermining the seriousness of both issues.”
But Ilana Pearlman, an outspoken Jewish parent of two Berkeley Unified students , dismissed that criticism, and said that Berkeley children have been the victims of their peers and teachers acting badly. She says she keeps hoping it will end.
“When I’ve spoken at school board meetings, I’ve made a very important distinction to only discuss overt cases of antisemitism. So nobody can come at me with wild accusations of suppressing anti-war voices,” she said. “I’ve stuck to just the bare-bones facts of Jews being called stupid at elementary schools, of another parent of a second grader who told me students are calling Jewish students baby killers.
“What I’m really finding troubling is not only are we not being believed, but there’s this approach of digging heels in further to say that we’re making up bogus lies,” she said. “I want for our kids to be safe, and I want for the classrooms to stop being politicized. And what that looks like is leaders leading and denouncing antisemitism in its tracks as it’s happening.”
Ford Mortel was joined at the hearing by superintendents of New York City, the nation’s largest school district, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Both experienced highly publicized incidents of antisemitism since the Oct. 7 massacre of Jews in Israel by Hamas and the ongoing Israeli military response that has led to an estimated 35,000 deaths in Gaza. Rep. Aaron Bean, R-FL, chaired the hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education.
The Education and Workforce Committee has previously interrogated college presidents over their responses to campus antisemitism, leading to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Columbia University’s president recently also faced tough questioning.
Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the university of Massachusetts and a specialist on dark money in education, exposes the rightward shift of Democrats for Education Reform, as well as its continuing disintegration. DFER spent years cheerleading for charter schools and test-based teacher evaluation, but its pretense has dissolved. Cunningham said it is now closely aligned with rightwing groups.
Cunningham writes:
Democrats for Education Reform, the front operation for billionaire privateering of public education, has gone all-in for right-wing policies. This likely reflects two factors: the collapse of DFER nationally, and an opportunistic pivot to Trump’s MAGA regime.
DFER was established upon the premise, according to its hedge fund co-founder Whitney Tilson, that it would spend lavishly as part of an “inside job” to turn the Democratic Party away from teachers unions and public education and toward charter schools. Its CEO Jorge Elorza has just announced the organization will race even further to the right: DFER will now “Explore innovative funding models such as education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers, and tax credit programs.” (emphasis in original). This is the program of billionaires Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos–and Donald Trump.
Judging by the number of high-level staff fleeing from DFER, Elorza has been driving the operation into the ground. Jessical Giles, who served for six years as Washington, D.C. executive director recently resigned because DFER’s policies “no longer align with my values and vision.”
Other DFER leaders have complained of the group’s gallop toward political extremism. In a complaint filed in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, former Massachusetts executive director Mary Tamer wrote that Elorza retaliated against her for “inquiring about Mr. Elorza’s decision to join a Koch-funded right-wing coalition that seemed contrary to the organization’s best interests and mission.” The right-wing coalition seems to be the No More Lines Coalition, which includes not only Koch aligned organizations but Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Childrenand the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Elorza has been a guest speaker at the Charles Koch Institute. Tamer is seeking damages against DFER, and the allied Education Reform Now and Education Reform Now Advocacy for gender and age discrimination.
Tamer’s complaint alleges a number of defections by key DFER leaders. Within months of Elorza’s arrival COO Shakira Petit left, and CFO Sheri Adebiyi was fired. Board Chair Marlon Marshall and Charles Ledley, a co-founder, resigned. The complaint further alleges that “Ms. Tamer is one of several women in leadership positions who have been terminated or pushed out by the Defendants.” That list includes Connecticut state director Amy Dowell and Jen Walmer of Colorado, a close adviser on education to Governor Jared Polis and one of DFER’s most effective advocates.
Despite the name, DFER has raised millions over the years from Republican-backing billionaires. The Walton Family Foundation, the non-profit corporation of the notoriously anti-union family that owns WalMart, has sustained DFER. Rupert Murchoch, who regards K-12 education as a $500 billion market gave DFER at least $1 million, apparently in the hopes the operation would help his ed tech company.
Elorza’s announcement of DFER’s shift leans on the “market-based solutions” language of neo-liberal privateering, but the reality is that neo-liberalism is not where the action is in 2025. Families for Excellent Schools, at one time a privateering powerhouse, collapsed in 2018. In 2011 Stand for Children president Jonah Edelman boasted his organization had nine state affiliates and would grow to twenty states by the end of 2015. In 2025 Stand for Children is hanging on in seven states.
Since its 2007 founding, DFER has claimedchapters in nineteen different states plus D.C. and a teachers group. By February 2025 only four chapters remained. In January 2023, DFER listed thirteen national staffers. By February 2025, it had only four. As of May 2025, the “States” and “National Staff” links on DFER’s webpage have disappeared. An Elorza biography lives on.
The action now is with extremist organizations like the Koch and Leonard Leo aligned Parents Defending Education and Heritage Foundation offspring Moms for Liberty.
Self-described “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis accurately sees that DFER has joined with the far right on education privateering. DeAngelis was the face of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children until he was fired after revelations he had starred in gay sex porn films. He is now a “senior fellow” at the American Culture Project, which is tied to the Koch network through the Franklin News Foundation. DeAngelis is cheering DFER’s embrace of the Republican education privateering platform.
What has DFER really joined here? The end game was spelled out in a 2017 memorandumfrom the secretive Council for National Policy to Trump and DeVos: abandon public education in favor of “free-market private schools, church schools and home schools.”
That is your “choice.”
DFER has never been a membership organization—there are few real Democrats involved. To be sure, it has gotten donations from charter favoring Democratic billionaires as well as an array of Republican privateers, plus millions of dollars in untraceable dark money. DFER’s organizational drift and rank political opportunism have now cemented its bond with Trump’s MAGA regime.
An unprecedented glimpse into policing in California schools
EdSource filed public records requests with hundreds of California public schools to obtain nearly 46,000 incident logs documenting calls to police from and about 852 schools. Here’s what we found and the data we gathered.
California State University, Dominguez Hills in Carson.
Credit: Stephinie Phan / EdSource
To better help students access and complete college, California should consider a major — and highly controversial — overhaul of its Master Plan for Higher Education that merges the state’s three public higher education systems into one mega-university, researchers argued Monday.
The bold proposal, detailed in a report from California Competes, a nonprofit research organization, suggests that the 10-campus University of California, the 23-campus California State University, and the state’s system of 116 community colleges be combined into a single California University that could accommodate a wide array of degree- and certificate-seeking students.
Su Jin Jez, author of the report and CEO of California Competes, said merging the systems would eliminate transfer problems and make it easier for students to enter, succeed, and finish college, among other benefits.
“This proposal is intentionally provocative,” Jez said during a webinar Monday. “It’s designed to challenge existing paradigms and spark transformative discourse.” The original version of the report was released in December, but an updated version was published Monday when California Competes also hosted a webinar promoting the report.
Jez acknowledged that it might never come to be. The proposal would likely face challenges from the systems themselves, along with many stakeholders such as unions, faculties, legislators and alumni.
Other experts, reached by EdSource, questioned the proposal’s political feasibility, and one criticized the idea, saying it would not be possible to combine such large and complex institutions.
Jez argued that the original master plan, adopted in 1960, is outdated in part because of the rising costs of college and the changing racial and gender demographics of the state’s college students. Whereas the majority of students were white in 1960, Latinos now make up a majority of college-age individuals in California and a plurality of college students. Women also account for a majority of students in California colleges, a major change since 1960, when male students were the significant majority.
The original master plan said UC was to focus on research and enroll the top academically achieving eighth of high school graduates, while California State University was to consist mostly of undergraduate programs and serve the top third of high school graduates. The state’s community colleges were to offer open-access undergraduate classes, associate degrees for transfer, and vocational training. Those lines have since been blurred to some degree: CSU now offers some doctoral programs, and dozens of community colleges offer at least one bachelor’s degree. But over much of its time, that master plan arrangement was often hailed as a great strength for the state, helping during explosive population growth and supporting key scientific research.
Under the proposed California University, the three segments would be merged into a network of regional campuses — such as California University, San Joaquin Valley, and California University, Los Angeles.
Each regional campus, which would be made up of one or several existing campuses, would offer a full range of programs and degrees, from certificates to doctorates. The LA campus, for example, would likely include the existing UCLA campus as well as the five CSU and many community college campuses in the county. It’s unclear how many regions would be included.
There would be no admission requirements, and transfers would be completely eliminated, as students would be able to move seamlessly through their chosen regional campus.
It would be highly challenging politically to merge the systems, which the report acknowledges. The co-directors of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, which commissioned the report, urged Jez to “think boldly” in looking for a revised master plan, rather than come up with an immediately pragmatic solution, according to the report’s foreword.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley, the former chancellor of the state’s community college system, said in an interview that he agrees with the premise that the master plan is outdated and that he supports some of the report’s ideas, such as creating better coordination between the systems. But he rejected the idea of a single university.
“I could not and would not support it,” said Oakley, who is now CEO of the College Futures Foundation. “There is just no way in my mind that you could form one comprehensive governance entity, given the size and the scope of the three public university systems.”
Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the PPIC Higher Education Center, previously called for modifications to the master plan in a 2010 report he wrote. He suggested at the time that, by 2025, the master plan be updated by setting explicit goals for improving eligibility, completion and transfer rates.
In a recent interview, Johnson said the state has made progress in increasing eligibility for UC and CSU and improving completion rates. He pointed to California residents’ enrollment being up significantly at both systems and noted graduation rates have improved greatly at CSU, particularly four-year rates.
Progress is still needed, though, in transferring more students to UC and CSU, he said. A state audit published last year found that, among students who began college between 2017 and 2019 and intended to transfer, only about 1 in 5 did so within four years. One thing that will be required, he said, is better coordination between the community college system, CSU and UC.
“You could argue that the way to do that is to have one big system, and I think that’s a valid argument,” he said, referring to the California Competes proposal. “Politically, I don’t know how realistic it is.”
The first step to better coordination could be some kind of coordinating council or board — similar to the California Postsecondary Education Commission, which was eliminated in 2011. Proponents say it would benefit the systems to be able to share data and information about their students and use that to strengthen transfers.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s January budget proposal included $5 million in annual funding to “establish a state planning and coordinating body for TK-12 education, higher education, and state economic and labor agencies,” though his revised budget released last week did not include that proposal.
“Despite the very large state expenditure on colleges, universities and programs, the state is operating without any institutional body that coordinates these systems or even provides basic data that would be essential for the rational management, maximum efficiency and coordination of the system,” the California Competes report states, adding that creating such a board is “particularly urgent and doable.”
Other proposals in the report may be less doable, Jez said Monday, adding that her proposal should be seen as a “vision,” even if making it happen would be “really tough.”
“Our higher ed system is the best in the world, and I want us to stay there,” she said. “And I think that this is a moment that we can accelerate and ask, how do we stay on the vanguard? How do we continue to be the ones that are creating new models that the rest of the world will follow?”
