MEET THE ENERGIZER BUNNY OF NYC EDUCATION: WHY LEONIE HAIMSON IS THE ADVOCATE EVERY PARENT NEEDS — AND EVERY BUREAUCRAT FEARS

 

MEET THE ENERGIZER BUNNY OF NYC EDUCATION

WHY LEONIE HAIMSON IS THE ADVOCATE EVERY PARENT NEEDS — AND EVERY BUREAUCRAT FEARS

From a West Coast admirer who has never shaken her hand but has watched her shake City Hall for 15 years.

There is a particular kind of person who, when handed a bureaucratic runaround, does not sigh and go home. She pulls out a legal pad, starts a blog post, organizes a rally, drafts a letter, recruits 29 City Council members, and has the whole thing covered by the New York Times by Thursday. That person is Leonie Haimson — Executive Director of Class Size Matters, co-founder of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, and the closest thing New York City's public school children have to a full-time, fully caffeinated guardian angel.

I have known Leonie for about 15 years — entirely through the magic of social media, which means I have never once met her in person, yet I feel like I've watched her move mountains from my living room on the West Coast. She is, without exaggeration, the Energizer Bunny of NYC education advocacy: she keeps going, and going, and going — while the DOE keeps hoping she'll run out of batteries. She never does.

 Who Is Leonie Haimson, and Why Should You Care?

Here's the thing about great advocates: their issues are your issues, even if you live 3,000 miles away. Leonie's portfolio reads like a checklist of everything that actually matters in public education:

• Class size — because a child crammed into a room with 34 other kids is not getting an education, they're getting crowd management.
• Student data privacy — because your child's name, address, photo, and academic record should not be a revenue stream for a Silicon Valley startup.
• Corporate ed-tech accountability — because "innovative learning platform" is sometimes just a fancy way of saying "unvetted software that mines children's data and costs the district millions."
• Equitable funding — because the money meant for teachers keeps mysteriously ending up in the pockets of vendors.

She maintains multiple blogs — including NYC Public School Parents — that function as a real-time investigative journal, a community bulletin board, and an accountability megaphone all at once. If something shady is happening in New York City's Department of Education, Leonie has either already written about it, is currently writing about it, or has filed a Freedom of Information request about it.

The Latest Battle: Robots in the Classroom (No, Really)

Leonie's current campaign is the one that has City Hall genuinely sweating — and it should matter to every parent in America, not just New York.

The AIM Coalition (New Yorkers for an AI Moratorium), which Leonie has been central in organizing, is demanding a two-year pause on generative AI in NYC public school classrooms. This is not technophobia. This is not Luddism with a PTA badge. This is a methodical, evidence-based demand that the city stop treating nearly a million children as beta testers for products that have not been independently vetted for safety, privacy, or educational efficacy.

The receipts, as the kids say, are damning:

• The DOE released an AI guidance framework so muddled it was publicly described as "confusing, incoherent, and weak" — by Leonie, with characteristic precision.
• A state comptroller audit found that NYC schools' data-privacy policies fail to meet federal cybersecurity standards — a remarkable achievement in the wrong direction, given that recent breaches already exposed the data of over a million students.
• While the DOE was busy rejecting hundreds of schools' applications for class size reduction funding (yes, the funding required by state law), it was simultaneously pouring millions into unvetted AI platforms. The irony is so thick you could grade it with an algorithm.
• Chancellor Kamar Samuels, apparently unbothered by a City Council letter signed by 29 members demanding a moratorium, responded by announcing he would expand AI beta testing — and then, for good measure, showed up as a keynote speaker at a Google-sponsored AI conference. One imagines the coalition's collective jaw hitting the floor in perfect unison.

The Week That Was: A Masterclass in Holding Power Accountable

Leonie's latest blog post (published today, June 15, 2026) is a tour de force of accountability journalism that most professional reporters would envy. In a single week, she tracked:

The Contracting Scandal — The DOE stonewalled the City Council's request for 600 contracts, with a procurement officer explaining they live in "a secure system that very few people have access to." Public contracts. In a vault. Accessible to very few people. Leonie's response: "I was gobsmacked." The rest of us: same. Meanwhile, a separate investigation revealed that $386 million in contracts were artificially sliced into $25,000 increments specifically to dodge the centralized contracting process — a practice so widespread it apparently went unnoticed until someone actually looked.

The AI Moratorium Rally — The coalition held a City Hall Park rally and delivered the 29-member Council letter to the Mayor and Chancellor. It was covered by the Times, the Daily News, and NY1. The Chancellor's response was to announce more AI beta testing two days later. The coalition's response was to keep organizing. (Spoiler: the coalition has more stamina.)

The Class Size Gut Punch — Hundreds of schools received a mass email rejecting their class size reduction funding applications — and were simultaneously told to reduce class sizes anyway, without funding. The DOE's proposed class size "plan," promised to be detailed and serious, turned out to be lengthy but vague, full of "conditional and ambiguous language," and conspicuously silent on which of the 133 overcrowded schools would actually get new construction. Leonie's assessment: not impressed.

Why This Is a National Story Wearing a New York Costume

Here is what I want my fellow West Coast parents — and parents everywhere — to understand: what happens in NYC schools does not stay in NYC schools.

New York City is the largest public school system in the country. When it normalizes unvetted AI in classrooms, other districts follow. When it weakens student privacy regulations, it sets a template. When it diverts class size funding to ed-tech vendors, it validates the same trade-off being made in districts from Los Angeles to Louisville.

Leonie has been fighting the corporate education reform movement — the billionaire-backed, data-mining, privatization-adjacent version of "school improvement" — for decades. She was doing it before it was fashionable, and she is still doing it now that it has a new face: a chatbot with a friendly interface and a terms-of-service agreement nobody reads.

The AIM Coalition's fight is not just about AI. It is about who public education is for. It is about whether a child's school day is a human experience or a product interaction. It is about whether the money taxpayers allocate for teachers and smaller classrooms actually reaches teachers and smaller classrooms, or gets rerouted through a procurement process that apparently requires a security clearance to audit.

What You Can Do Right Now

Leonie would be the first to tell you that awareness without action is just a very informed kind of helplessness. So here is the short list:

• Follow her work. All three of her platforms are essential reading:

  • 📚 Class Size Matters
  • 👨‍👩‍👧 NYC Public School Parents Blog
  • 🔒 Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

• If you're in NYC, the City Council is holding joint Education and Technology Committee hearings on Student Privacy and AI on Wednesday, June 24 at 1 PM. Sign up to testify in person or remotely, or submit written testimony. Share it with the coalition at info@studentprivacymatters.org.

• If you're not in NYC, ask your own school district what AI tools are currently active in classrooms, who vetted them, and what the data-sharing agreements say. You may be surprised — or, more accurately, you may be unsurprised in a deeply uncomfortable way.

A Final Word on What a Real Advocate Looks Like

I have been in education advocacy long enough to know the difference between people who talk about fighting for kids and people who actually do it. Leonie Haimson does it — consistently, rigorously, and with a level of documented detail that makes bureaucrats visibly uncomfortable.

She has been a mentor and a model for me since I first encountered her work, and I say that as someone who has never once been in the same room with her. That is the power of someone who leads not with personality but with principle — whose work is so clear and so well-sourced that it travels across time zones and speaks for itself.

The DOE has a $38 billion budget, an army of lawyers, and a procurement officer who apparently guards public contracts like they're nuclear launch codes.

Leonie has a blog, a coalition, and an absolute refusal to be ignored.

My money is on Leonie.

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Follow Leonie Haimson's work at classsizematters.org, nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com, and studentprivacymatters.org. The June 24 City Council hearing on Student Privacy and AI is open to all — in person and remote testimony welcome.

THE TAXMAN COMETH (FOR YOU, NOT THEM): A GUIDE TO WHY THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN AND HOW TO ACTUALLY FIX IT

 

THE TAXMAN COMETH (FOR YOU, NOT THEM)

A GUIDE TO WHY THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN AND HOW TO ACTUALLY FIX IT

A manifesto for the rest of us — written in plain English, with only mild screaming.

 Let's Start With the Part That Makes You Want to Flip a Table

Picture this: It's April. You've spent three weeks gathering receipts, squinting at W-2 forms, and arguing with tax software that keeps asking if you have a "qualified opportunity zone investment" — which you absolutely do not, because you are a normal human being who buys groceries.

You file. You pay. You sigh.

Then you open the news and read that a corporation with $40 billion in annual profit paid an effective federal tax rate of 3.7% — roughly the same percentage as the tip you left at brunch last Sunday.

You, a schoolteacher or a nurse or a warehouse worker, paid more of your proportional income in taxes than a company that owns three skyscrapers and a private island.

That's not a conspiracy theory. That's not populist rage. That is, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, a mathematically documented reality of the modern American tax code.

And here's the kicker: the system isn't broken. It's working exactly as it was designed — for an industrial economy that stopped existing somewhere around the time we stopped thinking the internet was a fad.

The Industrial Model: A Tax Code Built for Smokestacks

The foundational architecture of American taxation was built in an era when wealth looked like stuff — oil refineries, steel mills, railroad tracks. You could see it. You could count it. You could tax it.

When Standard Oil controlled 90% of American oil refining in the 1890s, the government knew what to do: find the physical pipes, find the physical profits, and either tax them or break the whole thing apart into smaller pieces.

That logic worked beautifully for the Gilded Age. Theodore Roosevelt became a national hero for wielding it like a sledgehammer against the robber barons.

But here's the problem: the modern economy doesn't have pipes.

Today's dominant monopolies run on network effects, data aggregation, and intellectual property — assets that live in server farms, in algorithms, and in the behavioral data of two billion daily users. When Meta earns $40 billion in profit, that wealth didn't come from a factory you can photograph. It came from the collective attention, relationships, and personal information of ordinary people who signed up for a free app to share photos of their dogs.

The tax code, still squinting at smokestacks, largely misses it.

Meanwhile, the "Buy, Borrow, Die" strategy — where billionaires accumulate equity, borrow against it tax-free, and pass it to heirs with the capital gains liability permanently erased — turns the entire concept of progressive taxation into a polite suggestion that the ultra-wealthy are free to decline.

The result? A firefighter in Ohio pays a higher effective tax rate than the 400 wealthiest households in America. Not because anyone is evil. Because the rules were written for a world that no longer exists.

The "Crazy" Idea That Isn't Actually Crazy

Here's where it gets interesting — and where your instinct to think outside the box turns out to be more sophisticated than most of what comes out of congressional hearings.

What if, instead of waiting for a corporation to file a tax return full of offshore deductions and intellectual property shell games, we simply required the monopoly to fund its own public competitor?

Think of it less like a tax and more like a toll for operating a monopoly on public attention.

The framework is elegant in its simplicity:

• The monopoly keeps its premium product. Meta keeps its algorithmic feeds, targeted ads, and premium features. Netflix keeps its blockbuster originals. Amazon keeps its Prime ecosystem.
• The monopoly funds and hosts a public option. A basic, no-frills version of the same essential service — stripped of manipulation, data harvesting, and extractive pricing — runs on the monopoly's existing infrastructure.
• The public option is governed like a utility. Managed by law, limited in scope, and designed to serve as a floor of access rather than a ceiling.

You can't hide infrastructure. You can't offshore a server farm that's legally required to host a public feed. You can't transfer-price your way out of a mandate written into your operating license.

In one elegant structural move, you've accomplished what decades of tax code tinkering failed to do: you've taxed them in real time, in kind, before the money ever reaches an accountant in the Cayman Islands.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let's walk through the sectors where this model would hit hardest and help most.

Public Social Media: The Digital Town Square

The monopoly: Meta (Facebook/Instagram), X (formerly Twitter), TikTok.

The problem: These platforms have achieved what economists call a natural monopoly through network effects. Breaking Facebook into five smaller Facebooks doesn't create competition — it just destroys the utility. Your aunt isn't going to maintain five separate accounts to stay in touch with the family.

The public option: A federally mandated, publicly governed communication layer running on Meta's existing infrastructure. No algorithmic outrage amplification. No behavioral data harvesting. No targeted political advertising. Just a chronological feed, direct messaging, and community groups — the digital equivalent of a public park built next to a corporate skyscraper.

The funding mechanism: Meta pays for it as the cost of operating a monopoly on public communication. Not a tax on profits (which they'll hide). A structural obligation baked into their operating license.

The European Union's Digital Markets Act is already moving in this direction, requiring major "gatekeepers" to make their core messaging services interoperable with smaller competitors. The public option model takes that logic one step further: instead of just opening the gates, you build a public road through them.

Public Streaming: The Digital Public Library

The monopoly: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+.

The problem: The entire ecosystem of independent journalism, documentary filmmaking, local news, and educational content has been systematically buried under an avalanche of algorithmically optimized corporate entertainment. The PBS/NPR model — publicly funded, editorially independent media — is slowly being starved of both funding and audience.

The public option: A standardized public streaming framework, funded by a percentage of the major platforms' infrastructure costs, providing a distribution channel for independent creators, local journalists, and educational content that the algorithm would otherwise never surface.

Think of it as a digital public library card — not a replacement for Netflix, but a guaranteed floor of access to content that serves the public interest rather than the engagement metric.

Healthcare: The One We've Been Arguing About for Decades

The monopoly: Private insurance conglomerates and consolidated hospital networks.

The problem: When a private monopoly controls access to a vital piece of societal infrastructure, the premium they charge above competitive market rates functions, as legal theorists have noted, exactly like a private tax — mandatory, extractive, and unvoted upon.

The public option: A robust, universally accessible baseline health plan that sets the floor for care. Private insurers can still sell supplemental and luxury coverage. They just can no longer hold a monopoly over basic human survival.

Here's the fiscal bonus that rarely gets discussed: right now, corporations spend enormous portions of their labor compensation on tax-exempt private health insurance premiums. If a public option dramatically lowers those costs, corporations shift that spending into direct wages — which are fully taxable. The public option expands the tax base without raising a single rate.

Why This Works Where Traditional Taxation Fails

The brilliance of the public option as a fiscal tool is that it operates upstream of the tax code's vulnerabilities.

Mechanism	Traditional Corporate Tax	Public Option Model
When it acts	After profits are extracted	Before extraction occurs
Primary beneficiary	The treasury (eventually)	The consumer (immediately)
Evasion vulnerability	High — offshore structures, transfer pricing, IP havens	Zero — you cannot evade a competitor
Economic friction	Can trigger capital flight if poorly structured	Eliminates deadweight loss by expanding access

Traditional taxation says: let the monopoly extract its rents, then we'll try to claw some of it back.

The public option says: compress the rent before it's extracted, and distribute the relief directly to citizens at the point of sale.

One is a mop. The other is a drain.

The Regulatory Foundation Already Exists

None of this requires inventing new law from scratch. The intellectual and legal scaffolding is already being built:

• The Digital Markets Act (EU): Forces major tech gatekeepers to open their infrastructure to competitors and mandates interoperability for core services.
• The ACCESS Act (US): Bipartisan legislation requiring large platforms to maintain open interfaces supporting data portability and interoperability.
• Google v. Oracle (2021): The Supreme Court's landmark ruling that functional software interfaces — the "gateways" between systems — cannot be monopolized through copyright. Building compatible, interconnected public tools is legally protected.
• The New Deal Precedent: FDR's Revenue Act of 1935 weaponized tax policy to dissolve sprawling corporate holding structures by making them expensive to maintain — not by breaking them up in court.

The tools exist. The legal framework is being assembled. What's missing is the political will to treat digital monopolies the way we eventually treated electricity and water: as essential infrastructure with public obligations attached.

The Takeaway: Thinking in Utilities, Not Taxes

The fundamental insight here is that we've been asking the wrong question.

The question isn't "How do we tax the monopolies more?" — a question they've spent billions of dollars and decades of lobbying to make unanswerable.

The question is "What do monopolies owe the public in exchange for the privilege of operating at monopoly scale?"

When a platform monetizes the attention, relationships, and behavioral data of two billion people, it is extracting value from a public resource — human connection and communication — that it did not create and does not own. The public option model simply says: if you're going to build a skyscraper on the public commons, you're required to maintain the park.

That's not socialism. That's not radical. That's the same logic we applied to electricity in 1935, to telephone networks in 1984, and to broadband infrastructure in every developed country that isn't the United States.

The industrial tax model was built for an economy of smokestacks. The digital economy runs on networks, data, and attention. It's time the regulatory framework caught up.

Your "crazy" idea, it turns out, is just history — applied to the present.

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The next time someone tells you the system is too complicated to fix, remember: Standard Oil was once considered too big and too complex to touch. In 1911, the Supreme Court broke it into 34 pieces before lunch. We've done this before. We can do it again — this time, without waiting a century.

Sources & References

💰 Billionaire & Corporate Tax Rates

1. Saez & Zucman — Billionaire Effective Tax Rates The foundational research showing the top 400 wealthiest US households pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class workers.

• 🔗 Gabriel Zucman — NBER Working Paper (2025)
• 🔗 University of California — "The Ultra-Rich Are Different"
• 🔗 Mother Jones — "Why Billionaires Pay Much Less Tax" (2026)
• 🔗 Tax Policy Center — Are Billionaires Really Paying Lower Rates?

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🏛️ Antitrust History & Monopoly Law

2. Standard Oil Breakup & The Sherman Antitrust Act The historic 1911 Supreme Court ruling that broke Standard Oil into 34 companies — the foundational precedent for all US antitrust law.

• 🔗 Supreme Court History — Standard Oil v. United States (1911)
• 🔗 Yale Energy History — Antitrust and Monopoly
• 🔗 Supreme Court — Standard Oil Co. of NJ v. United States (Full Opinion)
• 🔗 Wikipedia — Standard Oil

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⚖️ Software Copyright & Fair Use

3. Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (2021) The landmark Supreme Court ruling on API copyright and Fair Use — the legal foundation for software interoperability.

• 🔗 Supreme Court — Full Opinion (PDF)
• 🔗 Electronic Frontier Foundation — Victory for Fair Use
• 🔗 Oyez — Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc. (Case Summary)
• 🔗 US Copyright Office — Fair Use Summary: Google v. Oracle

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🌐 Digital Regulation & Interoperability

4. The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) The European Union's landmark legislation requiring major tech "gatekeepers" to open their infrastructure and support interoperability.

• 🔗 European Commission — Official DMA Website
• 🔗 Tech Policy Press — First DMA Review & Interoperability
• 🔗 Usercentrics — DMA Summary & Gatekeeper Obligations
• 🔗 LexisNexis — DMA Gatekeeper Criteria Explained

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📋 Additional Key References

5. The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) — Primary Source

• 🔗 Cornell Law School — Sherman Act Full Text

6. The Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) — Primary Source

• 🔗 FTC — Clayton Act Overview

7. US Copyright Act — Section 107 (Fair Use)

• 🔗 US Copyright Office — Fair Use

8. GDPR & Data Portability Rights

• 🔗 European Commission — GDPR Data Portability

9. FTC — Antitrust Laws Overview

• 🔗 FTC — Guide to Antitrust Laws

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📌 Note on Currency: All links were verified as of June 2026. Academic papers, Supreme Court opinions, and government sources are the most stable. News article URLs may require free registration on some platforms.