The Department of Education wants you to narc on all the ideologies and indoctrinaters out there in your local school district, because apparently the folks currently operating what's left of the department are unfamiliar with the internet.
The website has the nifty url enddei.ed.gov, and its text is short and... well, it's short. Under a big bold heading "Schools should be focused on learning," we get this copy:
The U.S. Department of Education is committed to ensuring all students have access to meaningful learning free of divisive ideologies and indoctrination. This submission form is an outlet for students, parents, teachers, and the broader community to report illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning. The Department of Education will utilize community submissions to identify potential areas for investigation.
The press release for this portal comes with a quote from Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, a group well-known for its interest in civil rights for all:
“For years, parents have been begging schools to focus on teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing, and math, instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies—but their concerns have been brushed off, mocked, or shut down entirely,” said Tiffany Justice, Co-Founder of Moms for Liberty. “Parents, now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools. This webpage demonstrates that President Trump’s Department of Education is putting power back in the hands of parents.”
It's all one more trip through the looking glass to that magical land where the only civil rights that are being damaged are put-upon conservative christianist white folks, where a four star general and an experienced naval officer are DEI hires, but a mediocre talk show host is a champion of merit.
But now this thing exists. Fill in your email, your school district name, the zip code, and your description of whatever "discriminatory practice" is making you feel bad. You can even attach a file, and do your part to stop whatever illegal discrimination against straight white males is going on in your neighborhood.
We have seen this movie before. Previous Lt. Governor and Current Failed Candidate Mark Robinson tried this stunt in North Carolina, and Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin tried it in Idaho. Oh yeah-- Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita tried it just last year. These are the kind of performative actions one can expect from middle aged people who are not familiar with how the collective wisdom of the internet works (Hey there, Boaty McBoatface). They ended poorly.
Who knows-- maybe the site will bring in all sorts of serious posts from people leaping to defend students from being taught Scary History or Naughty Books or Things That Make Certain People Clutch Their Pearls. Maybe it will have the desired effect of chilling classrooms and making teachers think twice before they commit crimes against the Cultural Revolution.
But what it deserves is to drown in reports that treat the anti-diversity initiative with all the respect it deserves. After all, witch hunts have historically always turned out well for this country.
I have put off trying to educate myself about cryptocurrency, but finally gave in, read a book, and golly bob howdy, if it isn't the same guys, the same grift, and the same bullshit as education privatization.
The book was Easy Money: Cryptocurrencym Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, written by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, and if McKenzie's name sounds vaguely familiar, that's because you used to watch The OC on which he played Ryan. But before he was an actor, McKenzie graduated from the University of Virginia magna cum laude with a degree in economics and foreign affairs. Silverman is a journalist who covers tech, crypto and politics.
The book is tied together by the narrative of McKenzie's growing interest and his concurrent growing sense that crypto was an emperor with no clothes, a burning building for which nobody was pulling the alarm. It's clear, compelling, and easy to understand even for those of us with no economics background.
It is also, if you've been deep in the education debates, oddly familiar, sometimes in ways that I found illuminating. Familiar themes include--
Techbro awesomeness
The techbros driving the movement are absolutely certain that they Know How It Is, that they possess all the wisdom and know-how to engineer a complete replacement for the system already in place. People who stick up for that system are just showing that they aren't as smart as the bros. See also: Bill Gates on education.
Ignorance of the past.
If you're smarter than everyone, you don't have to listen to anyone, including people who know the history of the field you want to disrupt. The techbros driving the movement are sure they are pioneering bold new uncharted territory. "Behold! I have invented a new piece of technology! I shall call it [drum roll] The Wheel!!"
But as the authors point out, the idea of launching a "decentralized" currency backed by nothing but charm and big brass balls has been tried in this country back in the mid-19th century. Spoiler alert: it did not work. See also: Mr. Lancaster's System by Adam Laats.
Frauds and scamsters
McKenzie and Silverman mention several times that having been scammed is seen as a regular and normal part of the crypto landscape. It is so pervasive that most of the folks they talked to freely talked about their own losses as if being scammed was a rite of passage. The underlying assumption-- that scammers and fraudsters are just part of the price of "freedom" and that it's up to the marketplace to do their homework and avoid getting fleeced. Fraud is how we know we're really free, I guess. See also: complaints that school choice must not be hampered by regulation or oversight.
Lies about Decentralization and Power
Crypto is supposed to do away with the idea of money controlled by some central authority-- "government money," if you will. The power will be decentralized, declare crypto stans. Except that it isn't so much decentralized as simply moved. And it's not moved to the people who will supposedly benefit, but to a new, small set of people. And unlike a government, these people do not have to answer to anyone. They do, however, use the power and money they accumulate to make sure that elected officials and legislators stay friendly.
But the notion that this disruption is somehow creating more freedom and opportunity for the ordinary citizen is a fiction. Instead, by removing a trusted third party, they create an unregulated marketplace where the real power is in the hands of a few rich folks, and the average person is a sheep ripe for shearing--and no recourse should such a shearing happen. Without a trusted third party in the mix, the rich and powerful are free to set rules that serve them. See also: the entire school voucher biz.
Some of the stories are just astounding, like the folks who lost millions of dollars because when market fluctuations became extreme and investors went to cash in, the exchange simply shut down so that they couldn't until the moment had passed. Yes, crypto shares certain folks' naive faith in tech.
McKenzie and Silverman travel through many of the halls of crypto-land and talk to many of the major players (some of whom are remarkably willing to reveal to talk). In the end, you have to conclude that however bad, scammy, and fraudulent you thought crypto might be, it is probably way worse than that. And many of its worst features echo the school privatization movement.
Crypto uses the language of known, trusted stuff-- it's "currency" and "coin"-- to get folks to offer trust to something that has no basis in anything other than its creators' will to make something out of thin air that can be used as a foundation for grift. Sure, there are some people involved in good faith, but the whole edifice is built on smoke and mirrors.
The NAEP results have been a big talking point, a way to trumpet the "failure" of the public school system. Will changes in US schools raise the scores?
“The U.S. Department of Education has decided not to fund the NAEP 2024-2025 Long-Term Trend Age 17 assessment,” Marcie Hickman, project director of the NAEP Support and Service Center, said in an email to state officials. “All field operations and activities will end today, February 19, 2025.”
I would have expected more squawking, but so far only The74 and Education Week have reported on this.
The test is federally mandated, which means President Musk shouldn't be able to legally cut it off, but we all know how much that means these days. Ed Week reports that "the decision appears to have been made without the approval of the National Assessment Governing Board," which seems about par for the course.
What has actually been canceled at this point is the test for 17-year-olds that was supposed to happen in the near future. Nobody seems to really know whether this cancellation will also affect all other future NAEP testing, but since Musk has gutted financing for the Institute of Education Sciences, the data wing of the education department, it sure doesn't look good.
So much for all those fun conversations folks were going to have while parsing the test scores and arguing about what they meant for public schools in a post[sic] pandemic world.
Regular readers know that I have no deep love for Big Standardized Tests, but the whole School Criticism Industry has depended on these scores, and I don't know what the heck they're going to do with themselves without the data.
Perhaps the next phase will involve the Musk Method that has been used so expansively in the DOGE process. Never mind talking to experts, don't try to look at actual data, but just kind of eyeball things and make declarations based on how you personally feel about it, unhampered by any actually reality. Boy, those are going to be some fun times.
Like most folks, I can no longer complete the simplest written objective without some degenerate descendant of Clippy trying to butt in. Want to wish a friend a Happy Birthday on Facebook? There's already a draft completed. Did someone just email you? Here's a selection of replies you can send. Writing a document? Sure you don't want some help with that?
No, no, and no. In fact, now I'm going to craft a Happy Birthday wish that not only says "Happy Birthday," but also "I took the trouble to do more than just click on the pre-written wish."
Words matter, and how we use them matters. The deepest existential challenge of being human is that we are consciousness, ideas, feelings, memories and grasping comprehensions, all trapped in a singular isolated body with no way to directly communicate or share any of what we are to any of the other meat-trapped spirits in the world. Over millennia we have crafted art, music, movement and, most of all, language to try to bridge that unfathomable gulf between human beings.
So, yeah. Language is a big deal to me. It is how we are our best selves, how we are fully human in the world. It is how we access love and trust and the impossible beauty of connection with creation.
And like any powerful tool, it can be misused. A hammer can build a house or break a window. Language can be used to lie.
There are plenty of shades and shapes and definitions of lying (omission, commission, white, dark, etc) but for me, it comes down to this-- communicating things you don't believe are true in order to control somebody else's behavior. I like the wikipedia definition of bullshit-- "statements made by people concerned with the response of the audience rather than with truth and accuracy."
Our country is used to being awash in bullshit, from the casual lies of marketing to political lies-of-all-size. No, my congressperson did not personally send me an e-mail because they are alarmed and want to hear form me, and no, the US wasn't winning the Vietnam War, and no, Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. No, that's not what that famous person really looks like.
The explosion of technology has given us whole new gushing rivers of communication, and that turns out to mean bullshit with an intensity, frequency, and quantity unlike anything ever seen before. Use tech to collect tons of data that reveals where peoples' buttons are, then craft some techno-bullshit to push those buttons. It looks like communication, like human beings trying to bridge the gap between them, but it is not. It is something else, something morally empty. It's a lie.
It becomes most obvious when we consider that most modern form of lying-- trolling.
Trolling is anti-communication. It is a simple observation-- when I say or do X, people jump. Somebody throws up a white power ok symbol or, hell, an actual Nazi salute, and a host of people mistake this for an attempt to communicate. Is this guy really a fascist? Is he not really a fascist? The question is beside the point--he's a guy who has figured out that if he makes this symbol, a whole bunch of folks freak out and react and he has some by God power over them. He can make the puppets dance, and feel powerful inside his sad little isolated meat sack.
It's an exhilarating lesson-- your words don't have to mean anything exactly in order to get reactions out of people. Or they can mean many things. Or they can mean what you decide they mean. Language isn't a means of bridging the gap between yourself and others; it's a tool for manipulating those others. It's a weapon for exerting control. Once you let go of the idea that words are supposed to mean something, that language is supposed to be anchored within you on your own truth and intention, you are ride the Nihilism Express all the way to the Land of Do As You Please.
Generative AI, chatbots, Large Language Models make excellent tools for bullshit. Where most humans have to work to disconnect their language from anything in their actual consciousness, LLMs arrive fully unmoored from any such baggage, making them excellent tools for creating language-shaped sticks with which to poke other humans. Computers and technology have a useful place, but it's up to humans to decide where to find the limits.
Language disconnected from a human intent or consciousness is a morally empty exercise. I don't mean to suggest that everyone who disconnects in this way is evil or even terrible, but I do think they've lost the plot. For people who have lost that plot, who have drifted over to thinking that language is mostly a tool one uses to prod other humans in a particular direction, LLMs will seem like a perfectly natural next step. If you're not using language for personal, conscious, intentional expression, then why not outsource the job?
For those who think our human task is not to communicate with other humans, but to dominate and subjugate them, language generated by algorithm must seem like the ultimate refinement of language-as-tool. When Mike Johnson excitedly tells us that Elon has "cracked the code" and algorithms will crawl through the data and "transform the way the federal government works," these must be exciting times. "Data," he says Elon told him, "doesn't lie." But automated language does, and easily, at that.
Automated language production is by its nature disconnected from human intent and consciousness, and as such is not a means of communication, but a tool for other things, like various forms of bullshittery, manipulation, and trolling. Maybe there's a non-zero number of times that this is okay. Maybe. At a point in our history when bad actors have shown a willingness to reduce language to a tool for separating rather than connecting humans, quick and easy morally empty mimicry of human communication is worrisome.
The undermining starts early. On social media, a teacher opined that since her students have trouble coming up with ideas, she just has them ask ChatGPT for essay ideas, as if the actual thinking part of writing is a minor feature barely worth considering. The calls to incorporate AI into the classroom is loud and relentless, a cacophony of marketing bullshit marketing marketing bullshit.
Maybe some of it is Not So Bad, like the miles of AI-generated marketing bullshit that is replacing and outpacing old fashioned human-generated marketing bullshit. Maybe there are social conventions that merely require an exchange of language-adjacent artifacts. maybe some folks really want to be governed by AI instead of other humans.
But it's both scary and sad. Here we are, vibrating spirits in our isolated fleshy vessels, trying so hard to connect with other humans because it helps us understand the world and it helps us understand ourselves and it fulfills a basic human need to see and be seen. How shitty to grab one of those bridges of language and discover at the other end... nothing. Not a consciousness to be seen and heard, nothing but dead empty eyes staring not at you, but at nothing, and no connection to make at all. I can't help thinking it is a misuse of a fundamental human feature.
I often describe education as the process of becoming your best self, discovering what it means to be fully human in the world. It seems, to me, to be the most foundational human activity, and yet so much of what surrounds us seems designed to thwart it, from authoritarian mock versions of leaders to empty technological mock humans.
What to do? Be human. Search for your truth and then put it out into the world, aimed at other humans. Make real connections. When you see bullshit, point and laugh. Try to stay true; I know that's not always easy, but as I used to tell my students, life is too short to sign your name to a lie. This is not woo-woo fuzzy advice, but a down-in-the-dirt practical goal-- more practical than believing in magical algorithms that create the illusion of human interaction with no humanity attached.
Okay, George Washington's birthday was yesterday (or actually the 11th by the old calendar), but it seems like a good time to remember the guy who, for all his faults, argued that he should not be crowned king and not allowed to serve more than two terms as President. Just saying. George would be 293 today.
Here's your list for the week. Remember, you can be an amplifier. Share posts. Subscribe to folks-- even if it's a free subscription, you increase their digital footprint.
Hillbilly Elegy, besides being poverty porn, has plenty of naughty words and even recognizes that LGBTQ persons exist. Cue the Department of Defense purge.
Jennifer Berkshire must have calluses from beating this drum so hard, but she's right-- look at conditions on the ground and you find that even the people who love Trump don't love his ideas about education.
Steve Nuzum reports on education debates in the South Carolina House, which include the usual unsubstantiated slander of teachers--but also people on the far right who oppose the universal voucher bill.
Jeff Bryant takes a look at continued upward fail that is Penny Schwin's career. Seasoned reformster or common grifter, Schwinn shows what kind of ideas are running Dear Leader's education policy.
It is a mistake to call Audrey Watters simply the ed tech Cassandra. She has an outstanding ability to connect the dots between many different pieces of history, technology, and culture. Her posts are also full of excellent links, like this one, that mulls on how well the inhumanity of AI fits the inhumanity of the political moment.
Jan Resseger provides an excellent digest of observations from Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing for the Secretary of Education post. No good news here, but forewarned and all that.
Yes, this is from Robert Pondiscio, a long time part of the AEI/Fordham axis of reforminess. He and I disagree on some stuff, and agree on some other stuff, and one part of the other stuff is the idea that content knowledge matters when it comes to reading (and learning).
Stars and Stripes has been covering the effects of federal anti-diversity measures on Department of Defense schools. John Vandiver takes a look at Stuttgart, where nobody is sure what the rules are, but some students are pretty sure they're being erased.
The Southern Poverty Law Center looks at some teachers who are navigating the new racist restrictions on education. Can you teach Black history and keep your job?
You know what's not great for education? Treating Those Peoples' Children as interlopers who are out to replace proper white folks. And yet here's The Boston Globe, a major newspaper, pushing the Great Replacement Theory. Maurice Cunningham has the story.
The current administration's rush to privatize everything is, of course, pretty familiar to folks in the education world. Conor Lynch at Truthdig explains what's up here. For instance, the federal workforce actually hasn't increased since the 1950s. The number of private subcontracts on the other hand...
Troy Farah's Salon piece can get a little harsh for my tastes, but it does include this Douglas Rushkoff quote--
they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
Word came this morning that Paul Zolbrod passed away yesterday. May his memory be a blessing.
Dr. Zolbrod first taught me when I was a freshman at Allegheny College. It was one of those survey course that English majors, even English majors at a liberal arts school, must take--the first half of a survey of British Literature.
That was fifty-ish years ago. I dug out some musty folders of old college papers this morning, and it is amazing how many of my professors I have forgotten, past even the point of look-at-the-name-and-oh-now-I-remember. But I never forgot Dr. Zolbrod. He was one of the teachers who shaped my entire career.
Dr. Zolbrod had several rare gifts as a teacher. There was the more typical gift of helping you see why the material was interesting and compelling. He challenged you to really think through stuff, which was a welcome new challenge. College was the first time I understood that there were two basic flavors of literature teachers-- those who would listen to any interpretation as long as you could back it up with evidence and reason, and those who knew the One True Interpretation and expected you to spit that back. Dr. Zolbrod was the former, and sitting in his class solidified for me which kind I wanted to be.
Dr. Zolbrod was no pushover when it came to grading papers, but somehow, when I left his office after talking about the crappy paper I'd just gotten back, I felt good about myself. I could see where I'd missed the boat, but I also could see the strengths that I was going to carry into the next one.
As Facebook has filled up with tributes to him, I see multiple versions of what I wrote-- He could see possibilities in you that you could not see in yourself. It was so energizing and empowering. It would have been easy for him to make me feel stupid; instead, he made me feel smart and capable and I promised myself that I would try to do that for the students I hoped to teach some day.
Dr. Zolbrod gave us a choice-- write a final paper, or go teach a unit about one of the works in the middle school down the hill from the college. I jumped on that opportunity, and later he set me up with the chance to teach several weeks' worth of Beowulf to gifted third graders. It was exciting to get a taste of the work, and he made that happen.
He retired from Allegheny in 1996 and moved to New Mexico where he kept teaching and focused on the work he had been doing for years with the Navajo Creation Story. He had started out in Pittsburgh, served in the military, looked at the student radicalism of the 60s, published a variety of works, and really never stopped displaying curiosity and engagement with life (here's a remarkable interview he gave when he turned 90). As his daughter wrote,
He looked so closely at what was around him , whether it was the sun rising over the mesa, the woods on a morning walk on Rogers Ferry, the arches of the churches in Tuscany, the weave of the Navajo rugs he studied. And he paid such careful attention to the people he interacted with, especially to working people, with whom he closely identified. And of course, he read so deeply, and listened so intently to oral recountings and to music. He was so engaged with history of places, including Crawford County, where my brother and I grew up, and with ideas, and the way they intersected. He wanted to capture all of it. The soundtrack of my childhood was the clackety clack of his manual typewriter coming from his basement office.
I connected with him, like many of his former students, on Facebook, where he shared personal recollections as well as thoughts and insights about the world unfolding. It was miraculous to me that he remembered me, had followed some of my teaching career, and read some of my writing about education.
Dr. Zolbrod is one of a handful of people who were an inspiration and a model for me as a teacher; I was a better teacher because of him. The world is a better place because he was in it. Condolences to his family. May his memory continue to be a blessing.
At this point, we have more than a few examples of how President Musk's DOGEry is most certainly not about reducing federal waste and fraud. But if you would like a very clear, specific example, let's take a look at the latest decree about charter schools.
The federal Charter School Program has been shelling out grants to launch and expand charter schools since 1994. Analysis of the program by the Network for Public Education shows that one out of every four taxpayer dollars handed out by CSP has been wasted on fraud and/or failure. That means of the roughly 4 Billion-with-a-B dollars handed out by the feds, roughly 1 Billion-with-a-B dollars have gone to charters that closed swiftly, or never even opened in the first place.
The Biden administration (with no small amount of prodding) eventually put some additional rules in place for CSP-- crazy stuff like "find out whether there's any need or desire for the charter school before you open it up"-- and that was followed by howls of outrage from folks in the charter biz. The rules were modest and sensible, but still could have saved a bit of taxpayer money from a program that was wasting a huge pile of money.
So, the current administration could have said, "Cool! You got some fraud and waste spotted and targeted before we even got here. Excellent. Thanks for the help in fighting federal fraud and waste."
That is not what happened.
Instead, yesterday the Department of Education issued an edict saying that the "unnecessary conditions and overly bureaucratic requests for information" would be stopped and that CPS would start handing out money more easily.
It is certainly within the scope of an administration to "adjust" the rules for CSP-- they've been doing that for thirty years. There's just an extra level of irony from an administration whose signature claim is that they are going to protect taxpayer dollars from being wasted, As far as charter schools go, the Trusk administration declares Christmas every day. Take all the taxpayer dollars you want! Some waste is bad, but other waste is fully approved.
Here at the Institute, we love Dolly Parton's Imagination Library very much. It is one of the best, most effective philanthropic and educational programs in the country. And Governor Mike Braun of Indiana has decided the children of his state can just do without it.
This program started with the simplest idea in the world-- putting books in the homes of small children. It began, once again, in her home county, and her proposal was simple-- sign your newborn child up, and once a month from birth through Kindergarten, the child will receive a book. On the program's website, Parton writes
When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.
The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County (Parton's home), and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. In February of 2018, the Imagination Library presented its 100 millionth book to the Library of Congress. There are currently more than 3.1 million children registered under the program, and the foundation has gifted over 270 million books.
Indiana came late to the party, with the Previous Governor Holcomb announcing a statewide expansion in 2023, committing $6 million over two years. Is that a bunch of money? Sure, but it got every child age 0-5 and under a brand new book of their own every single month. And now that budget item stands at $0.00.
Let me tell you first hand that these books have an impact. The Board of Directors got a book every month, and it was always a point of excitement. The books were well curated, an awesome collection of old classics and modern books, beautiful and diverse (so of course politicians occasionally tried to push the culture panic button). Even the very last book felt like a personal message to the young readers in my house.
Neither Braun nor the lawmakers who actually drafted the proposed budget have explained their reasoning behind zeroing out the state contribution, nor have they responded to requests for comment. Braun made some noises about "efficiencies" and the budget. Meanwhile, the United Way and other charitable groups may scrape up the money needed.
Braun ran last fall on culture panic and parental rights (for some), along with a call to increase academic standards and prepare students for success. You know what helps with academic success? Exposing children to reading early and often-- so early and often that they think of reading as a natural and normal and desirable part of life.
I am stumped. Dolly Parton and her people say, "Look, we'll carry half the cost and all of the legwork for putting books in the hands of every pre-school kid in your state every month from ages 0-5" and your reaction to that is "No, thanks"??!! Sorry, Indiana-- apparently your leaders are not all that interested in either children or reading. They can pass a snazzy "science of reading" law, but they can't get behind the idea of giving children actual books to read.
“We are hopeful that Governor Braun and the Indiana Legislature will continue this vital investment by restoring the state’s funding match for local Imagination Library programs,“ Parton’s rep said in a statement.
”The beauty of the Imagination Library is that it unites us all—regardless of politics—because every child deserves the chance to dream big and succeed."
The arrival of those books each month, addressed directly to the child, delivers two messages to that child-- reading is important, and you are important. Indiana's governor and lawmakers would apparently like to deliver another message entirely.
Paul Cottle is a professor of physics at Florida State University (who looks, swear to God, a lot like pulp hero Doc Savage). Cottle blogs at Bridge To Tomorrow where, in a recent post, he looks at how Florida has set some priorities that are bad news for education.
Cottle sees real trouble in the state's math scores, particularly because math is necessary for careers like engineering and analytical business careers, and even degrees like construction management and nursing. (Sure enough-- Florida ranks at the absolute bottom of the barrel for the percentage of nursing school grads who pass their professional exam, with grads of private programs worst of all).
Cottle thinks back to a moment that captures the policy shift that has marked a significant chunk of the school choice crowd:
A conversation I had about a dozen years ago with a staff member at one of Tallahassee’s right-leaning think tanks provided a possible answer. I had asked for the meeting to discuss the ways that Florida might provide more of its high school students access to careers in engineering, science and health fields. I started the meeting by summarizing my concerns about what was happening in the state’s classrooms and suggesting some fixes. The staff member waved all of that off and responded with a question that I remember as, “How can we use this situation to strengthen the argument for school choice?” Prior to that meeting, I had adopted the point of view that school choice should primarily be a tool for providing high quality instruction to students who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it. That is, school choice was a means to the end of improving instruction. But the think tanker’s argument was something completely different: School choice WAS the end, not the means. Instructional quality was at best incidental to the whole effort.
Yes, you might be old enough to remember when the argument for choice was that it would improve education. Access to better school for students "trapped" in "failing" public schools. Competition would make everyone better.
Then, as Cottle discovered, it turned out that all that mattered was choice; specifically, policy mechanisms for directing public money to private school operators.
Cottle also wants to point out another factor. Florida used to run a huge budget surplus, but now it's running a deficit. Cottle and others are trying to raise an alarm about math instruction and the need to improve math instruction, particularly by recruiting and retaining high quality teachers. But the "still-growing budget for school choice vouchers is surely competing for money with ideas for initiatives to improve student learning, and the voucher budget is winning."
A state that only has so much money to go around (or less) may have to decide between pumping up vouchers or trying to improve education, and in Florida, Cottle concludes, "Florida’s leaders have bet the entire education funding farm on school choice."
The "rescue" narrative was always a lie, proposing as it did that choice would "rescue" only a small number of students, leaving the rest to cool heels in their "failing" public school. Nor do the voucher schools do a better job of educating. Nor does competition raise all boats.
Florida, always out ahead of the privatizing agenda for schools, has reached the point at which there's no longer any pretense that "choice" is about education and that, in fact, a better education for students in the state is part of the cost of school choice. As Cottle summarizes:
If a universal school choice voucher program somehow improves student learning in math and other subjects, well that is lovely. But at this point school choice is the primary goal, not improving student learning. So we should not be surprised if future Florida SAT and NAEP results continue to be disappointing.
One of the most transparent falsehoods of the choice movement has been the assumption that a state can run multiple school systems for the same money it spent on just one. And when money gets tight, states have to decide whether they want to focus on improving education for all students, or for financing their web of privatized education. It's not hard to predict which was Florida would go, but perhaps other states can be better.
We talk a fair amount about improving instruction in the classroom and providing students with high quality instruction. For a long time, reformsters focused on the notion that we could identify bad teachers and fire our way to excellence. I know one quick trick that can improve the quality of teaching without new trainings and without finding a magical tree that grows super teachers. My trick can be performed with the teaching force that we have right now.
Ready? Here it is.
Put better administration in place.
The job of school and district administrators is to provide the environment, support, and resources need in order to do their best possible work. That's it. That's the whole job.
But talk to many teachers and you can become rapidly discouraged by the vast number of school and district administrators who have lost the plot. There are a wide variety of bad administrators out there-- power-hungry, in over their head, focused on the wrong targets, etc-- and their ways of being bad are likewise varied-- shmoozy liars, blustering bullies, disconnected and disengaged-- but the bad administrators all have the effect of making their schools worse than they could be. The difference between a good teaching job and a bad one is very often the boss you have to work for.
Lack of useful support for dealing with student behavior? Administration. No chance to build and improve instructional content and strategies? Administration. Blocked on your pursuit of professional growth? Administration. Too much work and too little time? Administration. Feeling isolated and unrecognized (or even punished) for your professional achievements? Administration. Facing challenges and have no place to get help? Administration. Just plain tired of a daily flow of petty bullshit? Administration.
Can teachers deal with all of their professional issues on their own, using their own initiative and resources? Sure, and many teachers do, because they know they have to, and any teacher should be able to put on her big girl pants and Do The Work-- but why shouldn't they do it with administration support rather than in spite of administrative interference? Why should they have to fight upstream just to do the work?
Identifying problem administrators is actually pretty simple. Just ask staff one question--
Do you trust your administrators?
It is not a radical concept; renowned business leader W. Edwards Deming wrote extensively about the importance of creating an atmosphere of trust for running an effective organization. If you want to see those ideas applied specifically to schools, check out Andrea Gabor's After the Education Wars.
Does your administration foster trust? Can a teacher believe that they will get the support and resources they need to do the best job they can? Can a teacher be certain that administration will deal with them honestly, with integrity, and holding to the words they say?
Trust does not require admins to be warm and fuzzy or mushy. It does not mean that admins won't call a Come To Jesus meeting with teachers who need it. It does not mean that the admins need to be masters of every aspect of teaching. It doesn't even mean that all of the staff needs to like them.
It does mean that they prioritize the work of teaching (it is amazing how many administrators think the main work of the district is what happens in their offices). It does mean that they are straight and honest and not given to bullshitting their staff. It does mean they have processes in place for finding, implementing, and supporting the best in instructional materials. It does mean that they find are always working to improve the environment, support, and resources for excellent teaching in the building.
The beauty of this is that it scales up really quickly. When one teacher gets better, that's one better teacher. When an administrator gets better, every teacher in the building improves.
Are there bad teachers that may be hard to bring along? Sure, but I always go back to the Deming comment about deadwood. If there is deadwood in your organization, there are only two explanations-- either it was dead when you hired it, or once you hired it, you killed it. Either way, deadwood is a sign of a management problem.
Look, there's no question principal and superintendent jobs are rough-- long hours and, in some districts, a terrible power-to-responsibility ratio. Promoting from within can seem attractive, except in some districts (like my old one) moving from teacher at Assistant Principal can actually involve a pay cut.
So the fix is not necessarily simple, but in terms of upgrades that can have a far-reaching effect on an entire system or building, improving your administration team yields plenty of broad improvement. Before you start trying to play whack-a-mole with a bunch of individual teachers, try looking at the bigger picture.
"We're just taking a stand against discrimination based on race and creed," say the MAGAvites. "You know-- like Black History Month and LGBTQ pride events and handicapped ramps and recognition for Women in STEM and other stuff that discriminates against straight white guys."
We are seeing very quickly how this plays out-- the federal directive doesn't have to be blunt and direct, because these debates will be waged on the local level.
We've already seen it play out in the Department of Defense schools, where officials are scrambling to remove any trace of diversity from libraries and classrooms. Because the VD letter combines threats with vagueness, it's up to local authorities to decide how far they should go to avoid retribution from feds.
But that same vague threat means local MAGA are free to jump in with both feet. Here's a post lifted from a Moms for Liberty Facebook group in El Paso County in Colorado, and if the VD letter leaves room for interpretation, this guy is crystal clear:
The post says "Remember, if you see any DEI in D38 they can be reported and lose funding. This is how we make sure it never appears in this school district. There better not be anyone promoting 'Black History Month'. Or any LGBTQ nonsense. We finally have a way to make sure it is gone forever, Students should keep their cameras handy to catch them in the act."
No mystery there. Look for anti-diversity activists in your neighborhood to feel emboldened to try to stamp out any diversity, equity or inclusion measures in your area, arguing that they can now be punished by the federal government. It's going to get ugly, and it's going to be hashed out on the local level as the Party of Local Control and its MAGA ground troops try to tell your local schools what they are not allowed to recognize or celebrate.
Well, yes. And that tells us something about his education goals.
Disclaimer up front: I'm not a fan of school ratings based on scores on the Big Standardized Test. If I had my way, those scores would be a teeny tiny part of how we di8scuss school quality. But I don't always get to have my way, and policy makers want to toss such scores around-- especially when privateers want to "prove" that public schools are "failing."
And so we are subjected to a whole lot of chicken littling about how the latest NAEP scores show that it's time for vouchers and charters and microschools. "Stop doing wokey things, and get back to basics so scores will go up!" is the cry.
If that's your measure, then surely we should be talking about the top-ranked United States schools-- the schools run by the Department of Defense.
Year after year, they come in at the top of the educational mountain, even in those ugly moments right after the pandemic, they were coming in 15 to 23 percentage points higher than the national average. In 2024, they were still out in front by similar margins.
So, if education-minded politicians are really worried about NAEP scores, they should be looking at what the DOD does and calling for that to be replicated, right? Well, of course not.
Instead, the Trump administration has decreed that the Secretary of Defense must "submit a plan to the President for how military families can use Department of Defense funds to send their children to the school of their choice." Now, given the apparent excellence of DOD schools, one might think that military families will mostly use their vouchers to stay right where they are, but MAGA is working on that.
The irony of this "wokiness" purge, as Jennifer Berkshire has pointed out, is that DOD schools achieve their tops-in-US results by actually being extra woke themselves.
The secrets are not very mysterious. The Department pays teachers very well, and it fully funds its schools, both of which help retain top educators, providing both high quality instruction and institutional stability. The families that the schools serve all have secure housing and healthcare; students come to school with basic needs met and no threat of disruptive hardship hanging over them. Imagine if that were a public policy goal for the whole country.
The military base schools are also among the integrated schools in the US system, both in terms of race and socioeconomic status. And a strong central administrative structure works to insure that all schools get the same level of resources, rather than segregating resources between wealthy and poor schools.
In short, the Department of Defense gets its education results by doing all the woke diversity equity and integration stuff (along with adequate funding) that the MAGA crowd is determined to stamp out.
The attack on the DOD schools is a clear statement of Trumpian priorities-- the administration has literally been given a choice between supporting schools that get the kind of results they want or pursing a culture panic and privatization agenda at the expense of those results. They are choosing panic and privateering, and military families will pay the price.
If only a reporter would ask the question-- if the DOD schools are getting the results you want, why are you stripping them of the tools they use to get those results? But as the zone is flooded, this is just one small story. But it matters. The administration is able to impose on DOD schools they policies they want to impose on all schools, and they are showing that panic and privateering are the real priorities-- not education. Buckle up.
On Valentine's Day, the Department of Education sent out a "Dear Colleague" letter on the subject of discrimination, a strongly-worded reminder that when the Musktrump administration says they want to "send education back the states," they mean "the states that don't do things that they object to," and what they object to most of all is the giant wave of discrimination against white guys.
"Discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is illegal and morally reprehensible," is the lead line from Craig Trainor, Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. Trainor was a special council for the House Committee on the Judiciary under Jim Jordan, and Senior Litigation Counsel with the America First Policy Institute under former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Of Counsel with The Fairness Center. And it's possible that his opening sentence might not mean what you think it means, as witnessed by the next paragraph:
In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families. These institutions’ embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia. For example, colleges, universities, and K-12 schools have routinely used race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming. In a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history, many American schools and universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories and other facilities.
Trainor is only clearing his throat. "Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students" with the "false premise" that the US is built upon systemic and structural racism. "Discriminatory practices" have been justified "under the banner of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion.'" In DEI is used to discriminate against white guys, and that's just going too far.
Trainor spends a paragraph on the Students for Fair Admissions, the 2023 case that struck down affirmative action college admissions. The court determined that such action is only justified when remediating a specific case of discrimination or avoiding an imminent threat (like a prison race riot). "Nebulous concepts" like diversity and racial balancing are not an excuse.
Trainor would like to take this decision and run with it--and run really far. To Trainor it's simple-- "if an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person's race, that educational institution violates the law."
Using any kind of information, from personal essays to extracurricular activities to try to figure out the student's race and act on that conclusion is illegal. "Relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race" is illegal. And this definition is also mind-blowingly broad--
It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.
Because, I guess, diversity is illegal.
And he's just seeing the threats everywhere, transposing old talking points about CRT into the newest Big Scary Thing.
DEI programs, for example, frequently preference certain racial groups and teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not.
"Frequently"? I'm thinking "never" might be the correct term here.
The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.
The remainder of the letter is the Vague Threats portion. If your educational institution is caught doing Bad Things, "appropriate measures" will be taken. That means a loss of federal funding.
The loss of federal funding threat takes us back to the central problem of Musktrump policy-- if, as Project 2025 promised, the major hunks of federal funding are first turned into no-strings-attached block grants for the states to use as they wish (cough--vouchers--cough) and then zeroed out in a decade, then the feds will have no way to deny any school federal funding.
The proper response to all of this is for schools to stay the course and let the Department come after them. But some districts will fold quickly, and we will continue to see stories like the one out of Fort Campbell schools where Black History Month is off and librarians are scrambling to get books that say much of anything about race are yanked off the shelves. Some districts are going to fold because they're scared, and some administrators will fold because they have permission to be just as racist as they want to be.
The administration’s outrageous “Dear Colleague” letter seeks to declare it a civil rights violation for educational institutions to engage in any diversity-related programming or to promote any diversity-related ideas – potentially including everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration. This declaration has no basis in law and is an affront to the freedom of speech and ideas in educational settings. It represents yet another twisting of civil rights law in an effort to demand ideological conformity by schools and universities and to do away with critical inquiry about race and identity.
Or even to just allow students to know the various points of view exist.
I get the average person's discomfort with DEI programs, particularly those whose experience is with the many poorly conceived terribly run DEI programs out there. Too many organizations ran a DEI something-or-other because they had heard it was the flavor of the month, ort a necessary CYA checklist to work through.
But the BLM/CRT/DEI manufactured panics have thrived on harvesting racism. roles, whether in corporations or movies or narratives, were always supposed to be white guys by default, and you were only supposed to change that default white guy to something else if there was a good reason for it, and just "because this would work better and be a better reflection of actual society if it wasn't all white guys" did not strike a lot of white guys as a good enough reason. And certainly, "Well, let's just start with the idea that the default is a blank to fill in with any version of human expression and experience" felt like something was being taken away from Default White Guys.
Likewise, the whole idea that there were some parties that white guys couldn't automatically get into--that stung, too. Of course, there were always barriers for white guys to get into lady parties, but we dealt with that by making those women-dominated spaces as less valid, less important-- what kind of girly man would want to get in there anyway. But when various other cultural subgroups started in--that stung, too (best captured by complaints about not being "allowed" to use the N word). Why isn't the Super Bowl Halftime show for us? Everything ought to be for us white guys.
None of which is to say that sorting out and dealing with the legacy of hundreds of years of racial issues in this country is a simple fix with a single answer and that we won't continue to have disagreements between reasonable people and a full range of responses including responses that are extreme in either direction.
But this disingenuous MAGA baloney is not part of an attempt to sort out the issues. It's zero sum thinking (if that group is getting something, it must have to be taken away from my group). It's a twisted catch-22; we shouldn't celebrate things like the Civil Rights Movement just because they were important to Black People (but only Black people needed the movement). It's an act that reveals all the talk of local control and small government to be a lie, because this is the work of greatr big hamfisted government. It's a grotesque editing of history to excise all the stories in which we were not the heroes-- and to choke off the very nature of history, which is a conversation and not a single answer set in stone. It's not an attempt to seek understanding, but to force a single understanding on others. And in too many cases, it's a five-year-olds taunt--"See, you made me stop saying things I liked to say, so I'm going to pretend to use the same rules to stop you from saying what you want to say. Neener neener! I know you are, but what am I?" And in its haste to settle some scores with a broad brush, it's also swiping away at LGBTQ persons, women, persons with disabilities, every kind of minority group they can imagine.
DEI at its root, done right, is simply a call to be decent. To set aside assumptions that merit comes in only certain external packaging, and to recognize that if your organization looks radically different from the country as a whole, you're missing something. It's a willingness to hear all the threads of history, and really listen without interrupting to say, "Well, but MY story--"
With all due respect to Alicia Keys, DEI is not a gift. Yes, "the more voices, the more powerful the sound" is dead on. But that's not a gift-- it's the bare minimum that we owe each others as fellow humans on this planet. It's the bare minimum required to keep our country strong.
The MAGA pretzel version of freedom means "I am free to promote the ideas I want to promote, and I am free to silence those that I wish to suppress." So we get the new notion of religious freedom, which simultaneously means that your religious school should be able to exercise its freedom to discriminate against people it chooses to target, but it also be free from regulation of its discriminatory behavior. When Aryan Academy isn't given public tax dollars to fund its discrimination against students it wants to reject, that's discrimination, but when they discriminate against those students, that's freedom. (all of which is exactly the sort of thing you can expect from Musktrump's Federal Department of Religious Bias).
In the new Department of Education, "discrimination" means "any time the white (or Asian) straight male kids don't get something that other kids get." And the resolution is to the problem is to take away that something from the other kids.
A "dear colleague" letter carries no particular weight. They are used to show folks which way the federal wind is blowing and thereby serve as a threat. Sowing fear is of course a major technique of this crowd, a design for getting as much prior compliance as they can with enough vagueness to scare the folks out there doing the actual work. The correct response is to throw sand in the machines and make these thugs work for every inch of compliance they get.
Easy for me to say, I know, but here's the thing-- these folks are never satisfied. The idea that you can buy peace with compliance is a fool's game, and "Now that we've done what they want, they'll leave us alone" is a naive delusion. The wholesale erasure of Verboten Words from websites, the elimination of books that so much as mention forbidden topics-- it's just book burning for the digital age. And there will never come a point when they sit back and say, "Okay, that's enough." And they will always keep coming for the schools.
Adrian Bott coined his way into internet immortality, with the assistance of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, which just had another banner election. It has spawned an actual play, and, most usefully, a whole subreddit where you can catch many tales of those whose faces have been eaten.
As a federal employee on the chopping block I 100% regret my vote.
I voted for a Conservative who would com in, maybe fire a few of the weaker feds who made the job harder for the rest of us, and get rid of some excess spending...
Letting a f%$#king Autistic South African maniac slash any agency he wants and laugh about it, without congressional involvement... O sure as shit didn't vote for that.
Or Wall Street bankers who privately admit the disruption is greater than expected
"With hindsight we did not appreciate the nature of what the administration was going to be like," the banker says. "I do believe they are hurting their stated objectives of peace and prosperity."
There's a guy at USDA who voted for Trump three times and still believes that if he pleads with Trump, Dear Leader will not allow "the Doge" to take his job away. Just like this person:
We voted for border security. We didn't vote for my husband to lose his government career and benefits for which he has worked so hard.
Stories not yet in from MAGA voters upset that their kid's 504 plan is being axed, or school employees who are suddenly facing cuts from the loss of federal funding and Department of Education support.
It's a mystery-- no Leopards Eating People's Faces Party (and there have been many) has ever been as transparent about their intentions as MAGA has been. And yet somehow, some folks are really surprised at all the face eating.
I'm writing this post to save a couple of these Leopard items where I can find them, and none so much as this. Of course someone made a song to go with it. Franchesca Ramsey has done some great versions of her song, and has just released an expanded version. Short but peppy. Enjoy.
Is there any holiday more special that Cheap Chocolate Day, celebrated on February 15 and all days thereafter until stock is sold out? Right up there with Half Price Candy Day on November 1. Celebrate it with someone you love.
I had no intention of this weekly digest being a chronicle of medical adventures, but this week I managed to twist my slightly cranky knee into an ER visit, from which I returned with some lovely parting gifts of a brace, crutches, and some drugs (well, not gifts exactly). So it has been a slow week for my work here, and I promise even more typos than usual.
As I always do when I encounter the medical system, I try to imagine how awful it must be to try to navigate it without decent insurance or a good support network, and the sheer hardworking decency of the people on the ground. I have met grumpy doctors and disconnected bureaucrats in my years, but never once a bad nurse. It's hard to understand how such a great nation can be so bad at providing health care, except that it's not, especially at this moment when our tendency to wield self-sufficiency as its ugly flip side, the side that says I shouldn't have to worry about taking care of anyone else.
At any rate, here's the reading list for the week.
I have not always agreed with Chad Aldeman, but he has the wonky credentials to really break down what smells funny about the DOGE attack on the research wing of the Department of Education.
In Pennsylvania, we need more cyber charters like we need another famous groundhog, and once again, a lawmaker is trying to do something about it. Bethany Rodgers has the story for GoErie.
Students First has done a lousy job of managing voucher money in two states already, so clearly it should expand operations. Linda Jacobson has the story in The74.
Jan Resseger continues to follow political shenanigans in Ohio, where privateers insist that there just isn't money for public schools, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty for vouchers. Kind of like when your kids say they're too full to finish supper, but have plenty of room for ice cream.
Nobody is providing better ongoing coverage of a district's reaction to a school shooting than TC Weber, and while his district may not be yours, you will recognize much of what goes on (right down to the adults really wishing that the student board representatives would shut up and sit down).
Privateers so badly want computer tutoring to be a thing because it would be so cheap and let them shut schools for the poors and put a lot of teachers out of work. Thomas Ultican describes yet another attempt to try to make it all happen.
Linda McMahon has her confirmation hearing this week, and let's be honest-- the Congress that okayed Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is not going to blink twice at McMahon, who at least does a passable imitation of a real grownup. For that matter, she's more qualified than Betsy DeVos was (she's had actual jobs, including jobs leading other people) and she's less inclined to say the kind of stunningly dumb things that made DeVos a late night tv punchline.
She opens with thank you's to friends and families and for Trump's faith in her to lead a department that "was a special focus of his campaign." Yes, "focus" is probably a nicer word than "target." I keep thinking it would be something to one day see one of these nominees bring the same rhetoric they use outside the hearing room into the hearing room. But no, this has to be an all-baloney zone (a balozone).
Now she will recap Trump's bold, baloney-filled promises. "He p[ledged to make American education the best in the world," like he has the faintest idea how to do that or what it would look like and has any reason to say that other than one more way to claim that American education is failing. He's going to "return education to the states where it belongs," as if it were not already there, and "free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice" much like Kennedy wants to free Americans from disease prevention and the administration wants to free white guys from requirements to show merit. McMahon's preferred privatization is not about freeing students; it's about freeing Americans (particularly wealthy ones) from being responsible for educating Those Peoples' Children. Just remove the promise of a decent education for all American children, and call it freedom.
More butt-kissing, citing November as proof that Americans "overwhelmingly support the President's vision." November was no such thing. Trump's margin was small, and in the few states that got the chance to vote on vouchers (something voucher supporters try to avoid at all costs), the same people who supported Trump rejected his educational vision. But she is ready to enact his vision.
"Education is THE issue that determines our national success" and therefor we should spend as little on it as possible. No, just kidding. It "prepares American workers to win the future," which is a jam-packed phrase. The future is something one wins? Education is only for producing workers?
Now she gets to her qualifications. Sort of. "I've been passionate about education since my earliest college days when I studied to earn a teaching certificate." That would be the mid-to-late sixties. Her passion continued through her business career (she reportedly married Vince McMahon in college and dumped her own career hopes to help him). She will even bring up her brief time on the Connecticut State Board of Education. Also, she was a university trustee and her chairwomanship of the American First Policy Institute, and she just kept being passionate about education through all of that. No mention of how she felt about that passion not being invoplved in the first Trump administration.
She's a "mother and a grandmother" and she also "joined millions of American parents who want better schools for our kids and grandkids." Joined them in what? Being passionate, I guess.
Here's my thing about people who are passionate about education-- if it's a thing you're passionate about, it's really easy to become directly involved. Somewhere near you is a public school, and I feel confident that not one of them has a motto like "That's okay, thanks. We don't need anything right now." Passion that does not convert into actual action is empty posturing. If a suitor told you they were passionately in love with you, but couldn't see you for the next few weeks because they had, you know, errands to run and work stuff to take care of and on weekends they're just tired--that's not a courtship that you would find very compelling.
But sure, Passionate about education.
Then the narrative. American education used to be great, but now it's a "system in decline." with low test scores (by students who in many cases started their education under President Donald Trump). Also, two thirds of public colleges are "beset by violent crime on campuses every year." I'm honestly not sure where that number comes from (and pretty soon it will be exactly the kind of number that we will have no valid way to search) and I'm pretty sure it's made up. Also, student suicide rates are up over last two decades; that's correct (and again, I'm not sure how we'll know once the CDC is fully silenced).
She goes straight from "suicide rates are up" to "we can do better by teaching students basic reading and mathematics." Also, we can do better for college freshmen facing "censorship or anti-Semitism" (freshmen facing other kinds of bias or hate speech are just SOL). And we can do better for "parents and grandchildren who worry their children and grandchildren are no longer taught American values and true history." I have an idea for this one-- we could reduce their worry by reducing the number of inflammatory lies they are told about what's taught in school. But I'll bet that's not what she wants to propose.
"In many cases," she says, not indicating which cases she has in mind, "our wounds are caused by the consolidation of power in our federal education establishment. So what's the remedy?"
Yes, it's the Trumuskian Big Government pretzel with bullshit icing.
"Fund education freedom, not government-run system." Vouchers and charters are government run systems, of course, but they are systems that absolve us all of any collective obligation to make sure that every child has the chance to get a decent education.
"Listen to parents, not politicians." But only some parents. Not the gay ones or the ones with trans kids or the ones with brown skins who are poisoning our blood. Also note that in this formulation, we don't have to listen to taxpayers who don't actually have children in school. Nor will we mention the school board members elected by those taxpayers.
"Build up careers, not college debt" by which they mean if you can't afford go to college without borrowing a bunch of money, don't go.
"Empower states, not special interests." Unless the state or local system makes choices we don't like here in DC, in which case we are going to punish them.
"Invest in teachers, not Washington bureaucrats," except when we are the Washington bureaucrats. Also, teachers are a well-known special interest group out to screw us all, so maybe we'll just hold off on this one.
Now for the "if confirmed as secretary" part where we get to the list of empty promises and action items. She'll work with Congress "to reorient the Department toward helping educators, not controlling them," which is a pretty hilarious promise coming from the administration that has an ever-lengthening list of things educators are not allowed to do or say.
Now we get one of her best non-sequiturs:
My experience as a business owner and leader of the small Business Administration as a public servant in the state of Connecticut, and more than a decade of service as a college trustee has taught me to put parents, teachers, and students, not bureaucracy first.
Yes, the World Wrestling Federation is famous for how it put parents and students and teachers first, likewise the Small Business Administration.
"Outstanding teachers are tired of political ideology in their curriculum and red tape on their desks." Which is why we are creating a bunch of policies and an actual curriculum telling them to put the correct political ideology in their curriculum, or else we'll cut off their funding. But those tired teachers are apparently why "school choice is a growing movement." Because it's a way to escape micro-managing by those stupid bureaucrats and their demands that schools not discriminate or use public funds to finance religious indoctrination or meet certain minimum standards for educational quality.
We should boost career education, especially in STEM. Fair enough. Post-secondary pathways! Career-aligned programs. Internships, "For American companies need high skill employees." More jobs in fields like tech and health-care for non-degree persons. Colleges should be transparent about courses of study that are aligned to workforce demand. None of this silly liberal arts stuff. More meat widgets, please!
"The United States is the world leader by far in emerging technologies like AI and blockchain" is not quite the boast the DOGE intern who inserted it into her speech thinks it is. "We need to invest in American students who want to become tech pioneers." Invest how?
Now pay attention to this next DOGE-approved point--
We should encourage innovative new institutions, develop smart accountability systems and tear down barriers to entry so that students have real choice and universities are not saddling future families with insurmountable debt.
Khan Academy. And remember The Ledger-- training from anywhere and your credentials stored on the blockchain, so that corporations can pick out meat widgets just like shopping at Amazon.
"We must protect all students from discrimination and harassment," she declares. Got an example? Jewish students discriminated against. Trans students in girls sports and bathrooms--no, she's not protecting them, she's protecting everyone else from them. She doesn't bring up DEI here, but it's the same model-- that stuff discriminates against white kids, and that's the discrimination we have to stop. MAGA feels picked on, and by God it's going to stop, because that's the only discrimination that is real or which matters.
Also, she wants to protect the "right of parents to direct the moral education of their children." And the federal government is going to protect that right by deciding what the correct moral education is and silencing anyone who disagrees with them. The Trumuskian Big Government Pretzel-- freeing us from a micromanaging federal government by micromanaging harder than any administration ever has before.
The question period offers more of the same, and I'm not going to wade through all of that here, and honestly, there's little to learn from any of it. She will distribute funds that Congress has authorized and appropriated, and she may want to check with her bosses on that, because that ship has already sailed, and anyway, she thinks President Musk is doing fine. She supports the idea that various ed funding streams can be shifted to other departments, because despite her passion for education, you don't need any interest in or knowledge of education to manage programs like IDEA or Title I.
She dodged the No Right Answer questions. Do Black history courses or student clubs for particular ethnicities or Martin Luther King Day celebrations violate the Trump order on "radical indoctrination"? Of course it does, but she's too smart to say so out loud in this hearing, so she takes a pass on that one, and refusing to pay even lip service to what should be an easy "No, those things are important and shouldn't be wiped out" sends a clear, chilling, and unsurprising message to schools across the country.
So we're going to get what we've known we were going to get-- someone whose agenda is to cut and slash the department, someone who is not knowledgeable about education (just, you know, passionate), someone with a childish faith in market competition, and someone who is fully on board with the right wing goal of getting the government completely out of the education biz. Someone who is not bothered by the conflicting goals of "send education back to the states" and "tell state and local systems what they are not allowed to say or do."
If you want to use up energy opposing her nomination, knock yourself out. There's no universe in which Trump and Musk nominate someone who isn't committed to privatizing education and gutting the federal department. She's going to be awful, and we'll all need to pay attention and watch to see exactly which fumes are given off by this particular dumpster fire.
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