As the year winds down and the federal Department of Education continues to whittle away at public education, it's worth revisiting a ProPublica article by Megan O'Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards from back in October. Yes, I know that feels like a million years ago, but that, I think, is one of the troubling effects of living in the flooded zone of our moment-- things seem like they happened a million years ago and so surely they must be over. Except they aren't.
The piece highlighted how Linda McMahon has brought into the department many folks from the way-right-wing thinky tank advocacy world.
That includes Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation ed policy honcho who wrote Project 2025's education section-- which kicks off with a paean to Milton Friedman, granddaddy of school vouchers. The project's education priorities included erasing LGBTQ persons, turning federal money into stringless block grants, and most of all, vouchers for everyone. ProPublica analyzed hours of video and audio and discovered the same thing-- the Trump/McMahon department is focused on vouchers for everyone as a path out of public schools. They found one quote from Burke, speaking at an event for the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 2024
I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.
The department also picked up two folks from Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education. You may have missed that back on April 9, 2025, this astroturf activist anti-public ed group dropped "parents" from its name, which may be the one honest thing they've done since they grabbed a pile of dark money and started harassing public schools across the country under the pretense that they were a group of concerned parents and not a professional political operation.
The department also hired heavily from McMahon's own group-- America First Policy Institute-- which came close to being blunt about their goals in a 2023 paper titled “Biblical Foundations” in which they wrote that "the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That's the Friedman ideal-- no collective or societal responsibility to educate children and certainly no such responsibility exercised through government action. It's all on you, parents.
It was Justice who gave ProPublica the clearest, most direct quote. They asked her what percentage of children should be in public school:
I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.
So much of what these folks do is best understood through that lens. Even the attempts to inject their religion into public schools can be understood as just an attempt to turn public schools into private religious schools.
It's not about fairness or "rescuing" students from poor schools or the improving power of competition and not even about choice. It's about ending public education, about getting the government out of the business of overseeing and providing education, about ending the theft-by-taxation that forces some folks to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children, about ending a system that keeps True Believers from fully empowering their biased discrimination, and most especially about ending a system that tries to elevate people above their Proper Place in a society that doles out power and privilege only to those who Really Deserve it. And right now these folks are in the halls of power in the United States Department of Education.
There's been a recent uptick in reformster nostalgia, a wistfulness among Ye Reformy Olde Garde for a rosy past when there was a bipartisan consensus surrounding swell reform ideas like the free market and testing and the free market and No Child Left Behind and school choice and testing (e.g. Arne Duncan op-ed).
Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) has been substacking and gathering an assortment of all the old players to comment of education issues, running the gamut from A to B on various education policy debate topics, and in connection with that had a conversation over at Ed Week with Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) under the headline "Can School Reform Be Bipartisan Again?" Which is a question that certainly makes some assumptions, but let's take a look at what's going on.
Petrilli's stated motivation is fine. For one, he notices that substack is emerging as a way for people to scratch their writing and reading itch without having to slog through a variety of social media (some of which have become extra sloggy), and he joins a large club there (I know because I attend all the meetings myself). He also misses "the early days of Twitter and blogging, when we had robust debates about policy, tactics, and direction." Also understandable, and he explains what happened:
Unfortunately, as social media became a cesspool and the reform movement fractured along ideological lines, those conversations became full of vitriol and then largely went silent.
Sure. The ed reform coalition has always been complicated. The spine back in the day was a combo of free marketeers. social engineers, and tech/data overlords. Then Trump was elected, and then the culture wars were launched. Point to the moment when Jay Greene left academic reformsterdom and went to the Heritage Foundation and started writing pieces like "Time for the School Choice Movement to Embrace the Culture War."
It's not just that the ed reform movement became infected with Culture Panic. It's that the Culture Panic crowd is, almost without exception, a bunch of very unserious people.
Over the past decade-plus, I've come to understand that the reformster tent is large and contains many different ideas and motivations. The reformster crowd includes folks who have some core beliefs and values that I believe are fundamentally flawed and the way to conclusions that I deeply disagree with. But they are people that I can have a conversation with, who use and receive words like their purpose is to convey meaning and not as some sort of jousting tool.
The culture panic crowd is not serious about any of it. They are veiled and obtuse, deliberately misunderstanding what is said to them and using words as tools to manipulate and lever their desired results. They aren't serious about choice or educational quality or anything other than acquiring a dominant cultural position and personal power. There have always been some culture panic types within the reform tent (e.g. Betsy DeVos), but for half a decade they have been large and loud within the movement. "Let's use choice to encourage embettering competition" was replaced with "Get those trans kids off the track team." One of those is wrong, and one of those is simply unserious.
Petrilli points to what he calls "reform fatigue," the result of two or three decades of hard push by reformsters. He calls it society's tendency to want the pendulum to swing back to the middle. "Eventually, the public grew tired, and the opponents of reform became more motivated than we, its defenders."
He and Hess also point to the argument that Bush-Obama school reform was "simplistic and self-righteous," and Petrilli acknowledges the self-righteous part. Without naming Duncan, he says
I cringe when some reformers return to that self-righteous language, especially versions of “We know what works, we just need the political will to do it.” It’s a lot more complicated than that.
Petrilli also gives the movement credit for getting "big things" right, like the idea that "The American education system, with its 14,000 districts, elected school boards, and entrenched teachers’ unions, is not going to improve without external pressure." And he points to "student achievement" growing during the 1990s and 2000s, by which he actually means test scores.
Well, I think he's off the mark here. Fatigue? Simplistic? No, the reason that reform flagged was because it didn't work. Focusing on high stakes testing didn't achieve much, and most of what it did achieve was to damage school systems in numerous ways, from the narrowing of the curriculum to teaching an entire generation that the point of education is a Big Standardized Test. That and it became evident that test scores were a boon to data-grabbing tech overlords and people who simply wanted a tool for dismantling public education.
The premise of a necessary "external pressure" is also problematic. Petrilli suggests that the pressure can come from "top-down accountability or bottom-up market competition," but I don't believe either of those will do what he imagines they will. Top-down accountability guarantees policies that are mis-interpreted as they pass down through layers of bureaucracy and which result in a compliance culture in thrall to Campbell's Law. Market competition is a terrible fit for education (see Greene's Law-- the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing). One of the bizarre fundamentals of the reform movement is the notion that educators are not doing a better job because they have not been offered the optimum combination of bribes and/or threats.
Petrilli and Hess do not confront one of the fundamental flaws of reform, which is the notion that the Big Standardized Test is a good and effective measure of educational achievement, as if the question of how to measure something as vast and variable as the effectiveness of education is all settled. When David Brooks says that Republican states are kicking the Democrats' butts in education, all he's doing is comparing scores on a single math and reading test. As a country we have repeated this so many times that it is accepted wisdom, but the Big Standardized Test is just an emperor behind the curtain with no clothes. Will raising this student's BS Test scores give the student a better, richer, fuller, happier life than they would have had with their old lower scores? There isn't a shred of evidence for that assertion, but in the meantime, we keep pretending that a single mediocre math and reading test tells us everything we need to know about education.
Petrilli makes a passing reference to how unions never liked "testing, and especially accountability" (he has maybe forgotten their full-throated, member-opposed embrace of Common Core), which is just a rage-making assertion, because teachers and their unions have never, ever been against accountability. What they have opposed is accountability based on junk that has no connection to the work they actually do. Let's not forget that test scores soaked in VAM sauce gave us accountability measures that fluctuated wildly or that had to be run through other mechanisms in order to "evaluate" teachers via students and subjects they didn't even teach. The "accountability" created under Bush-Obama involved an awful lot of making shit up.
Did test scores go up for a while? Sure. I was there. They went up because we learned how to align the schools to the test. Not to the education-- to the test.
Petrilli muses about the nature of the reformster coalition, like the old one with members on the "ideological left, including Education Trust and other civil rights organizations" and I must confess that I never saw much "left" in the reform coalition. Petrilli says maybe we'll get back to a world where the parties fight over the center and then business groups and civil rights groups will become involved, and maybe, though reform has had plenty of chance to demonstrate how it can lift up minorities and the poor and it, well, didn't do that. If "populism" stays big, Petrilli muses, maybe they'll have to get involved with parents' groups and alternative teacher organizations "like the one that Ryan Walters now runs."
Well, except that would take them right back to a tent full of unserious allies who are not on the left, but are further right than Ye Old Reformy Garde.
I'm inclined to ignore the right-left thing when it comes to ed reform. I think it's more accurate to frame the sides as pro- and anti- public education, and pro-public education voices have always been in very short supply in the reform coalition. Instead, reform positions on public education range from "Let's rebuild everything" to "Let's dismantle it and sell the parts" to "Burn it all down."
Petrilli's smartest bit comes at the end:
For the people in the trenches, I’d encourage them to remember that student learning depends on student effort. And whenever they face a big decision related to curriculum, instruction, discipline policy, grading, AI policy, or anything else bearing on the day-to-day realities of schools, they should ask themselves: Is this going to make it easier or harder for my teachers to motivate their students to work hard and thus to learn?
This is actually pretty good, and it points to my suggestion for the imaginary new revived ed reformster coalition.
Include some actual teachers.
I get there is a challenge here. In the same way that policy wonks and bureaucrats don't have real on-the-ground knowledge of teaching, teachers don't have real on-the-ground knowledge of policy wonkage and promotion. But ed reform continually misses the viewpoint of the people who have to actually implement policy ideas.
Ye Olde Reformy Garde has come a distance since the days when they were hugely dismissive of teachers. Many have caught on to the fact that maybe deliberately alienating the people who have to implement your policy ideas is a poor choice. Maybe, just maybe, they've deduced, most teachers are in the profession because they really want to do a good job, and not because they are lazy sinecure-seeking slackers.
But reformsters still miss the actual aspect of how their ideas play out on the ground, and those insights could save everyone a great deal of time.
And no-- all those education reform leaders who spent two years with Teach For America do not count. Two years is bupkis; a real teacher is barely clearing her career throat after two years.
Would working teachers just defend the current system so fiercely that no reform could happen? Of course not-- walk into any school in the country and the teachers there could tell you ten things about their system that should be fixed. Would teachers support accountability? Of course-- if it were real and realistic. Teachers have a powerful desire to teach next door and downstream from other teachers who are doing a good job.
Lord knows I have no nostalgia for the old days of reform, when every year brought new policies that, from my perspective, ranged from misguided all the way to ethically and educationally wrong. Neither am I nostalgic for the days before modern reform. Public education has always needed to improve, and it always will, because it is a human enterprise.
It would be great to have a reformy movement based on asking the question "How can we make schools better," but way too much of the reformster movement has been about asking "How can we get free market activity injected into the public school system" with answers ranging from "inject market based school choice" all the way to "blow it all up." It has marked itself by and large as an anti-public school movement since the moment that the A Nation At Risk folks were told their report had to show that public schools were failing and we were subjected to decades of pounding into the "common knowledge" that American schools are failing. And if the reform movement wants to revive itself, I suggest they start by owning all of that.
We could have school choice, if that was what we really wanted, and we could have it without the segregation effects, the inefficiency and wasting of taxpayer dollars, without the pockets of really terrible education, without the instability of bad amateur players, without, in short, all the effects we get by trying to create free market school choice (I've explained how elsewhere). But the reformster movement has long seemed far more interested in the Free Market part than the Improving Education part. They have spent forty years explaining that public education is failing because that's the justification for going Free Market (and national standards and high stakes testing) and yet it turns out that none of those things have been particularly helpful at all.
I do sense a new trend in Ye Reformy Olde Garde, and it's there in Petrilli's last paragraph-- a focus on policies "bearing on the day-to-day realities of schools." It's a good choice which might yield some productive discussions, particularly if those discussions are expanded to include people beyond the A to B gamut, because I know where you can find about 3 or 4 million people who are familiar with those day-to-day realities.
I've followed Cory Doctorow for a few years now, and was certainly among the masses of people who, when he coined "enshittification," pointed and hollered "That's it!"
What Doctorow has explained is the process by which the once-bright promise of the internet has been turned to crap. And now, rather than hunting down the various articles and posts in which he has elaborated on his idea, you can get it all in one book-- Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.
The process by which so many services have been degraded is not, he argues, "the Great Forces of History bearing down on our moment," but a bunch of deliberate, purposeful choices that people with power didn't have to make. And it has a very clear pattern. Doctorow's simplest explanation of enshittification boils down to four steps:
1) First, platforms are good to their users.
2) Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
3) Next, they abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
4) Finally, they beconme a giant pile of shit.
Doctorow lays out the specifics by looking at several case studies-- Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, and Twitter. All once brilliantly important; now just a pain in the ass.
There are more details to understand. How competition is killed, and then regulation is also gutted, making it both impossible to enter the marketplace and to police that one monolith controlling the sector. Why everyone wants you to use their app instead of just accessing via web browser (nobody is regulating what they can do on an app with your info or money). Why you aren't allowed to fix anything yourself (because "fixing" might involve third party circumnaigation of what the techno-bros want). And how AI is so very useful for twidlling the dials so that our tech overlords can determine just how bad they can make things without losing customers over it.
There are applications for education here-- read enough about the digital publishing biz and digital textbooks will not seem like a remotely good idea.
More importtantly, I think that should school choice ever reach a tipping point, it would be ripe for its own version of enshittification, where captured families and gig working teachers and even education vendors could be squeezed dry as investors profit.
But mostly this is a book that helps explain why everything is so crappy, and the broadest definition of enshittification-- actively and purposefully making a product worse so that it will be more profitable-- seems to be everywhere.
Doctrorow has some ideas about how to make things better. The bad news is that making your individual consumer choices aren't high on his list of Likely To Help Actions. The solutions are mostly political and regulatory, and that part of the book is well worth reading as well. This is a book that has an awful lot to say about why we are where we are right now. If you have been following Doctorow on this, you won't find anything new here, but you will find all of his ideas on the topic in one convenient location. An excellent holiday gift for people who are generally angry at the techno-world but haven't figured out what's wrong yet.
Douglas Carswell at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy is excited about all the great privatization pushing that's been going on in the state lately.
Mississippi is a state that really aligns certain right wing priorities-- get rid of taxes, get rid of public schools, and just generally get rid of government, all of which is, I'm sure, fully disconnected from the state's past as a place where a lot of white folks really don't want to be told that they have to provide certain public services for those not-white folks. With all that in mind, they would really like to move to universal taxpayer funded vouchers and, really, a pure voucher system where no schools are funded at all and parents get a couple of bucks to go out and do who knows what for their children.
Carswell sent out his weekly update, declaring that "school choice is our top focus" and "remains our north star."
But Carswell wants to underline an appearance from Erika Donalds, Florida's big-time money-making school choice advocate, who apparently appeared on this occasion wearing her Moms for Liberty hat. Donalds certainly earned that hat, who knew and worked with that crew even before they started the M4L shtick. It's just that you don't see her waving the M4L hat around very often. They also heard from Patrick Wolf, Arkansas's go-to guy for shoveling privatization baloney (sometimes he even writes up some "research"). Lindsey Burke, the education chief at the Heritage Foundation (where she authored the education parts of Project 2025) and now Deputy Assistant Secretary-- she has also stopped by.
Caswell explains how choice would work, and provides some specific answers. Particularly notable is his explanation of how choice wouldn't lead to overcrowding:
Under our proposal, schools would get to set capacity limits and decline additional students if full. Schools could also reject students with significant disciplinary issues, maintaining safe and focused learning environments.
This is remarkably frank; school choice would be the school's choice. "We're just too full," they could say. Or "We think your child would be detrimental to our school's learning environment." Which seems fine, because exclusionary education has never been a problem in Mississippi in the past, right? Not that I should pick on Mississippi-- virtually every taxpayer-funded voucher program includes provisions that allow private schools to exclude whatever students they want to exclude. School choice is school's choice. That right of the school to discriminate is, in practice, given far more weight than any supposed "parent power." But Caswell is a bit unusual in laying it out so plainly.
Caswell also argues that all the other states that surround them are doing it, which is quite the argument to make in the Deep South, with its collective history of educational inadequacy.
Caswell offers other weak sauce as well. Folks say that choice programs defund public schools, "but that's misleading." "Misleading" is a great word for when you want to say "Well, they're not wrong, but I'd rather get you to look at something else." Caswell offers the free market argument-- if public schools don't want to get defunded, they should beat the competition. Of course, they're not competing on a level field-- they can't, for instance, reject students for whatever trips their fancy. Caswell also throws in his version of "fund students, not systems" which is an education version of "I want insurance to fund my broken leg, not my doctor" as if the system is not the "how" of serving the student.
This is particularly odd coming from Mississippi, where the public school system has produced the "Mississippi miracle" which conservatives are holding up as proof of the awesomeness of phonics and Science of Reading, and while there may be a mountain of baloney behind that "triumph," it is being touted as an achievement by the system.
Caswell asserts that school choice works. It's pretty to think so, but that's not what the evidence says. But for an outfit that would like to do away from any instruments that require taxpayers to support education for other peoples' children, a voucher system that pays parents to give up their right to a free guaranteed education is just the thing.
There are education reformsters who pursue choice because they believe in the magical marketplace or the benefits to students, or at least talk the talk. MCPP is not one of those. They barely discuss the educational aspects of their policy plans, which are coming on the heels of their successful drive to eliminate income tax in the state. They keep talking about "access to the educational opportunities that their kids deserve," but of course those opportunities will only be available to certain select children.
It's worth noting that Mississippi was always a big state for segregation academies, and some private schools that are essentially segregation academies are still thriving in the state. I bet those private schools will be more than happy to get big fat taxpayer subsidies under a universal voucher plan. Like a little mini-brexit with a state payoff.
"Unleash market forces" has been a rallying cry of both the right and some nominally on the left for the past twenty-some years. The free market and private operators do everything better! Competition drives improvement!
It's an okay argument for toasters. It's a terrible argument for education.
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And as we've learned in the more recent past, the free market also fosters enshittification-- the business of trying to make more money by actively making the product worse (see: Google, Facebook, and any new product that requires you to subscribe to get the use of basic features).
We know what competition drives in an education market-- a competition to capture the students who give you the most marketable "success" for the lowest cost. The most successful school is not one that has some great new pedagogical miracle, but the one that does the best job of keeping high-testing students ("Look at our numbers! We must be great!") and getting rid of the high-cost, low-scoring students. Or, if that's your jam, the success is the one that keeps away all those terrible LGBTQ and heathen non-believer students. The kind of school that lets parents select a school in tune with their 19th century values.
The market, we are repeatedly told, distinguishes between good schools and bad ones. But what does the free market do really, really well?
The free market distinguished between people who have money and people who don't.
This is what school choice is about, particularly the brand being pushed by the current regime.
"You know what I like about the free market," says Pat Gotbucks. "I can buy a Lexus. In fact, not only can I buy a Lexus, but if you can't, that's not my problem. I can buy really nice clothes, and if you can't, that's not my problem. Why can't everything work like that? Including health care and education?"
It's an ideology that believes in a layered society, in a world in which some people are better and some people are lesser. Betters are supposed to be in charge and enjoy wealth and the fruits of society's labor. Lessers are supposed to serve, make do with society's crumbs, and be happy about it. To try to mess with that by making the Betters give the Lessers help, by trying to elevate the Lessers with social safety nets or DEI programs-- that's an offense against God and man.
Why do so many voters ignore major issues in favor of tiny issues that barely affect anyone? Because the rich getting richer is part of the natural order of things, and trans girls playing girls sports is not.
What will the free market do for education? It will restore the natural order. It will mean that Pat Gotbucks can put their own kids in the very best schools and assert that what happens to poor kids or brown kids of Black kids or anybody else's kids is not Pat's problem. If Pat wants a benevolent tax dodge, Pat can contribute to a voucher program, confident that thanks to restrictive and discriminatory private school policies, Pat's dollars will not help educate Those People's Children.
Pat's kids get to sit around a Harkness table at Philips Exeter, and the children of meat widgets get a micro-school, or some half-bakes AI tutor, and that's as it should be, because after all, it's their destiny to do society's grunt work and support their Betters.
One of the huge challenges in this country has always been, since the first day a European set foot on the North American continent, that many folks simply don't believe that it is self-evident that all people are created equal. They believe that some people are better than others--more valuable, more important, more deserving of wealth, more entitled to rule. Consequently, they don't particularly believe in democracy, either, (and if they do, it's in some modified form in which only certain Real Americans should have a vote).
The argument for the many layers of status may be "merit" or achievement or race or "culture" or, God help us, genetics. But the bottom line is that some folks really are better than others, and that's an important and real part of life and trying to fix it or compensate for it is just wrong. For these folks, an education system designed to elevate certain people is just wrong, and a system that gives lots of educational opportunities to people whose proper destiny is flipping burgers or tightening bolts is just wasteful.
For these folks, what the free market in education means is that people get the kind of education that is appropriate for their place in life, and that the system should be a multi-tiered system in which families get the education appropriate to their status in society. And it is not an incidental feature of such a system that the wealthy do not have to help finance education for Other Peoples' Children.
It's an ideology that exists in opposition to what we say we are about as a nation and in fact announces itself with convoluted attempts to explain away the foundational ideas of this country. Public education is just one piece of the foundation, but it's an important one.
When researcher Josh Cowen is talking about the negative effects of school vouchers on education, he often points at "subprime" private schools-- schools opened in strip malls or church basements or some other piece of cheap real estate and operated by people who are either fraudsters or incompetents or both.
This is a feature, not a bug. Because as much as choice advocates tout the awesomeness of competition, the taxpayer-funded free market choice system that we've been saddled with has built in perverse incentives that guarantee competition will be focused on the wrong things.
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. Now, the marketing can be based on superior quality, but sometimes it's just easier to go another way.
The thing about voucher schools is that quality is not what makes them money. What makes them money is signing people up.
That's it. Voucher school operators don't have to run a good school; they just have to sell the seats. Once the student is signed up and their voucher dollars are in the bank, the important part of the transaction is over. There is no incentive for the school to spend a pile of money on doing a good job; all the incentive is for the school to come up with a good marketing plan.
Betsy DeVos liked to compare the free market for schools with a row of food trucks, which was wrong for a host of reasons, but one was the market speed. Buy lunch at a food truck, and you become part of the marketing very quickly. Within minutes, you are either a satisfied customer telling your friends to eat there, or warning everyone to stay away. Reputations are built quickly.
But for schools, the creation of a reputation for quality takes a long time, time measured in years. The most stable part of the voucher school market is schools that already have their reputation in place from years of operation. But if you are a start-up, you need to get that money for those seats right now. If you are a struggling crappy private school with a not-so-great reputation, you don't have time to turn that around; you've got to up your marketing game right now.
So the focus (and investment) goes toward marketing and enrollment.
Won't your poor performance catch up with you? Maybe, but the market turns over yearly, as students age out and age in to school. And you don't have to capture much of it. If you are in an urban center with 100,000 students and your school just needs to fill 100 seats, disgruntled former families won't hurt you much-- just get out there and pitch to the other 99,900 students. And if you do go under, well, you made a nice chunk of money for a few years, and now you can move on to your next grift.
This is also why the "better" private schools remain unavailable to most families holding a voucher. If a reputation for quality is your main selling point, you can't afford to let in students who might hurt that record of success.
Meanwhile, talk to teachers at some of the less-glowing private and charter schools about the amount of pressure they get to make the student numbers look good.
Because of the way incentives are structured, the business of a voucher school is not education. The business of the voucher school is to sell seats, and the education side of the business exists only to help sell seats. Our version of a free market system guarantees that the schools will operate backwards, an enrollment sales business with classrooms set up with a primary purpose of supporting the sales department, instead of vice versa.
Charter schools? The same problem, but add one other source of revenue-- government grants. Under Trump, the feds will offer up a half a billion dollars to anyone who wants to get into the charter biz, and we already know that historically one dollar out of every four will go to fraud or waste, including charter businesses that will collect a ton of taxpayer money and never even open.
"Yeah, well," say the haters. "Isn't that also true for public schools"
No, it is not. Here's why. Public schools are not businesses. They are service providers, not commodity vendors. Like the post office, like health care in civilized countries, like snow plows, like (once upon a time) journalism, their job is to provide a necessary service to the citizens of this country. Their job should be not to compete, but to serve, for the reasons laid out here.
And this week-ass excuse for accountability-- if you do a bad enough job, maybe it will make it harder for your marketing department-- has been sold as the only accountability that school choice needs.
School choice, because its perverse incentives favor selling seats over educating students, is ripe for enshittification, Cory Doctorow's name for the process by which operators make products deliberately worse in order to make them more profitable. The "product" doesn't have to be good-- just good enough not to mess up the sales. And with no meaningful oversight to determine where the "good enough" line should be drawn, subprime voucher and charter schools are free to see just how close to the bottom they can get. It is far too easy to transform into a backwards business, which is why it should not be a business at all.
If your foundational belief is that nobody ever does anything unless they can profit from it (and therefor everything must be run "like a business") then we are in "I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people" territory, and I'm not sure what to tell you. What is the incentive to work in a public education system? That's a whole other post, but I would point to Daniel Pink's theory of motivation-- autonomy, mastery and purpose. Particular a purpose that is one centered on making life better for young human beings and a country better for being filled with educated humans. I am sure there are people following that motivation in the school choice world, but they are trapped in a model that is inhospitable to such thinking.
At The74 (the nation's most uneven education coverage), Goldy Brown (Whitworth U and AEI/CERN) and Christos Makridis (Labor Economics and ASU) have a bold idea that involves putting fresh paint on a bad old idea--the national Big Standardized Test.
Their set-up is the usual noise about how the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) peaked around 2013, which is true if you also believe that the rise that carries I-80 across the Bonneville Salt Flats is also a peak. They are more accurate when they say that "student outcomes" (aka "Big Standardized Test scores") have "largely stagnated" over recent decades.
Yep, it's a roller coaster
Let me digress for just a moment to note the oddness of that idea of stagnation--as if test scores should keep rising like stock prices and property values. Each cohort of students should be smarter and better than the one before, a thing that would happen... why? What's the theory here? Each year's children will be genetically better than those that came before? That every teacher will significantly up her game with every passing year (because the students rotate out at a much higher rate than the teachers)? Schools get better at gaming the tests? If the expectation is that each successive group of students will score higher than the group before, what is supposed to cause that to happen? And how does it square with the people who think that education should be going "back" to something like "basics"? I mean, doesn't the vision of non-stagnating test scores include students who are all smarter and more knowledgeable than their parents?
Okay, digression over. The authors also point out that Dear Leader and his crew have "downsized" the staff that oversees the NAEP (while simultaneously insisting that NAEPing will continue normally)-- but they argue that the kneecapping will "create an opportunity to rethink the role this tool can play."
In particular, the Trump Administration could explore using the NAEP to promote greater transparency among schools, parents, and local communities, as well to enhance academic rigor and ensure genuine accountability in a comparable way across schools and states. That would mean replacing a disparate collection of state tests will a single national assessment administered to every fourth and eighth grade student every year.
Yikes. I checked quickly to see if Brown and Makridis are over 15 years of age, because if so, they should remember pretty clearly that the feds have tried this exact thing before. Every state was supposed to measure their Common Core achievements by taking the same BS Test, except then that turned out to be two BS Tests (PAARC and SBA) but then those turned out to be expensive and not-very-good tests and states started dumping them, while folks from all ends of the spectrum noted that this sure looked like an illegal attempt to control curriculum from the federal level.
With national standards and national testing, supporters argued, we would be able to compare students from Utah and Ohio, as if that was something anyone actually wanted to do. As if in Utah parents were saying, "Nice report card, Pat, but what I really want to know is how your test scores compare to the test scores of some kid in Teaneck, New Jersey."
No, these guys have to remember those days, because they are well versed in all the same bad arguments made at the time.
Parents, educators, and state leaders agree that more information — not more bureaucracy — is needed to make informed decisions for their children and communities, as well as to foster greater competition. Making the NAEP a truly national assessment would provide this information in a consistent, credible, and actionable manner.
Right. Test scores would be great for unleashing free market forces in a free market, education-as-a-commodity choice system. Also, competition doesn't unleash anything useful in education. Also also, choice fans have mostly stopped using this talking point because it turns out charter and voucher schools don't actually do any better on BS Tests. Get up to date, guys-- today it's all "choice is a virtue in and of itself" and "parents should get to choose a school that matches their values."
The writers call for the NAEP to be cranked out every year instead of every other, and for every student instead of the current sampling. No sweat, they say, because every state already has stuff in place for their own state test.
But an annual universal NAEP would be great because it's a "consistent and academically rigorous measure of student performance." There's a huge amount of room to debate that, but it only sort of matters because the writers have fallen into the huge fallacy of NAEP and PISA and all the rest of these data-generating numbers. "If we had some good solid data," says the fallacy, "then we could really Get Shit Done." We would Really Know how students are doing, we would Really Know about how bad the state tests are, and we would Really Know where the issues in the system are.
It's an appealing notion, and it has never, ever worked. For one thing, nobody can even agree on what critical terms like "proficient" mean when it comes to NAEP. But more importantly, the solid data of NAEP never solves anything. Everyone grabs a slice, applies it to the policies they were busy pushing anyway, and NAEP solves nothing, illuminates nothing, settles nothing.
The writers also want to use the test illegally in a method now familiar to both political parties. Tie Title I funding to compliance with NAEP testing mandates and presto-- "States would have a stronger incentive to align their instructional practices with higher expectations." In other words, test + money = federal control of local curriculum. Not okay.
They would also like the test to provide feedback to parents about their individual students. This also repeats a critical error of every BS Test to come down the pike. Tests are designed for a particular purpose and one should not attempt to apply them to a host of other purposes-- doing so gets you junk. Also, I still don't believe that conversation in Utah is happening. But this notion--
A national benchmark can support local autonomy while enabling cross-district comparisons that inform parents, educators, and policymakers alike.
Producing a test that generates data useful to all three groups is less likely than capturing a yeti riding a unicorn that is pooping rainbows.
The writers also argue that states could save money if the feds forced them to replace their current batteries of BS Tests with NAEP instead in just 4th and 8th grade. I suppose that depends on the test manufacturer who secures this national testing monopoly.
Their last argument is that universal NAEPery would "offer a balanced form of federal oversight." That means "less intrusive than programmatic mandates" which are not so much intrusive as they are illegal. At any rate, national standardized tests intended to drive programmatic choices are still pretty damned intrusive.
Now for the wrap up. Starting with this understatement:
Federal initiatives to improve student outcomes have historically produced mixed results.
Yes, and theater trips to see "Our American Cousin" have historically produced mixed results for Presidents. Of the whole list of "mixed" results, they include just the Obama era attempt to use test scores to drive teacher improvement (well, not "improvement" exactly, but teaching to the test in order to raise scores).
They say one right thing, which is "that policy tools must be both well-designed and responsive to local implementation contexts." But they follow that with "designating NAEP as the national assessment meets both criteria." And no, no it wouldn't, and we know it wouldn't because the last time we tried this national BS Test thing, it went very poorly. This is such a classic reformster construct-- "Historically this thing has failed, so we think the solution is to do it some more, harder."
In an era of educational fragmentation, the NAEP stands out as a uniquely credible and underutilized tool. Repurposing it as the primary national assessment — administered annually to all 4th and 8th graders in states receiving Title I dollars — would promote transparency, reduce redundant testing, and align incentives around higher academic standards. This reform would offer a shared benchmark to evaluate progress across states and districts. At a time when parents, educators, and policymakers are calling for both accountability and flexibility, a restructured NAEP provides a rare opportunity to deliver both.
Is that what parents, e3ducators, and policymakers are calling for, really? Doesn't matter, because NAEP provides nothing special for accountability (certainly not before we have a long, long conversation about accountability to whom and for what) and it certainly doesn't provide flexibility, not even under their repeat of the old argument that states could decide how to meet the national test standards, which is like telling someone "You can get to Cleveland any way you want as long as you arrive at E.9th and Superior within the next six hours seated in a blue Volkswagon, listening to Bob Marley, and eating a taco. Totally up to you what meat is in the taco, though. See? Flexible."
You know what's really flexible? An end to federal mandates for a nationalized Big Standardized Test.
A new study shows results that will be absolutely unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention. ChatGPT is not good at grading essays.
A good robograder has been the white whale of the ed tech industry for a long time now, and failing with impressive consistency. Scholar Les Perelman has poked holes in countless robo-grading products, and I've been writing about the industry since I began this blog. And this comment from the Musings of a Passing Stranger blog in 2011 is still applicable:
What Pearson and its competitors do in the area of essay scoring is not a science. It's not even an art. It's a brutal reduction of thought to numbers. The principles of industrial production that gave us hot dogs now give us essay scores.
The main hurdles to computerized grading have not changed. Reducing essay characteristics to a score is difficult for a human, but a computer does not read or comprehend the essay in any usual understanding of the words. Everything the software does involves proxies for actual qualities of actual writing. This paper from 2013 still applies-- robograders still stink..
Perelman and his team were particularly adept at demonstrating this with BABEL (the Basic Automatic B. S. Essay Language Generator), a program that could generator convincing piles of nonsense which robograders consistently gave high scores. Sadly, it appears that BABEL is no longer on line, but I've taken it out for a spin myself a few times-- the results always make robograders look incompetent (see here, here, here, and here).
The study of bad essay grading is deep. We have some classic studies of the bad formula essay. Paul Roberts' "How To Say Nothing in 500 Words" should be required reading in all ed programs. Way back in 2007, Inside Higher Ed ran this article about how an essay that included, among other beauties, reference to President Franklin Denelor Roosevelt was an SAT writing test winner. And I didn't find a link to the article, but in 2007 writing instructor Andy Jones took a recommendation letter, replaced every "the" with "chimpanzee," and scored a 6 out of 6 from the Criterion essay-scoring software at ETS. You can read the actual essay here. And as the classic piece from Jesse Lussenhop, part of robograding's problem is that it has adopted the failed procedures of grading-by-human-temps.
Like self-driving cars, robograding has been just around the corner for years. If you want to dive into my coverage here at the Institute, see here, here, here, here, here and here for starters. Bill Gates was predicting it two years ago, and just last year, an attempt was made to get ChatGPT involved which was not quite successful and very not cheap. Which is bad news because the "problem" that robograding is supposed to solve is the problem of having to hire humans to do the job. Test manufacturers have been trying to solve that problem for years (hence the practice of undertrained minimum wage temps as essay graders).
That brings us up to the recent attempt by The Learning Agency. TLA is an outfit pushing "innovation." It (along with the Learning Agency Lab) was founded by Ulrich Boser in 2017, and they partner with the Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Georgia State University, and the Center for American Progress, where Boser is a senior fellow. He has also been an advisor to the Gates Foundation, Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign, and the Charles Butt Foundation--so a fine list of reform-minded left-leaning outfits. Their team involves former government wonks, non-profit managers, comms people and a couple of Teach for America types. The Lab is more of the same; there are more "data scientists" in this outfit than actual teachers.
TLA is not new to the search for better robograding. The Lab was involved in a competition, jointly sponsored by Georgia State University, called The Feedback Prize. It was a coding competition being run through Kaggle, in which competitors are asked to root through a database of just under 26K student argumentative essays that have been previously scored by "experts" as part of state standardized assessments between 2010 and 2020 (which raises a whole other set of issues, but let's skip that for now). The goal was to have your algorithm come close to the human scoring results; and the whole thing is highly technical.
Does ChatGPT show bias? A study just last year said yes, it does, which is always a (marketing) problem because tech is always sold with the idea that a machine is perfectly objective and not just, you know, filled with the biases of its programmers.
This particular study found bias that it deemed lacking in "practical significance," except when it didn't. Specifically, the difference between Asian/Pacific Islanders and Black students, which underlines how Black students come in last in the robograding.
So yes, there's bias. But the other result is that ChatGPT just isn't very good at the job. At all. There's more statistical argle bargle here, but the bottom line is that ChatGPT gives pretty much everyone a gentleman's C. To ChatGPT, nobody is excellent and nobody is terrible, which makes perfect sense because ChatGPT is not qualified to determine anything except whether the strong of words that the writer has created is, when compared to a million other strings of words, probable. ChatGPT cannot tell whether the writer has expressed a piercing insight, a common cliche, or a boneheaded error. ChatGPT does not read, does not understand.
Using ChatGPT to grade student essays is educational malpractice. It is using a yardstick to measure the weight of an elephant. It cannot do the job.
TLA ignores one other question, a question studiously ignored by everyone in the robograding world-- how is student performance affected when they know that their essay will not be read by an actual human being? How does one write like a real human being when your audience is mindless software? What will a student do when schools break the fundamental deal of writing--that it is an attempt to communicate an idea from the mind of one human to the mind of another?
This is one of the lasting toxic remnants of the modern reform movement--an emphasis on "output" and "product" that ignores input, process, and the fact that there are many ways to get a product-- particularly if that's all the people in charge care about.
"The computer has read your essay" is a lie. ChatGPT can scan your output as data (not as writing) and compare it to the larger data set (also not writing any more) and see if it lines up. Your best bet as a student is to aim for the same kind of slop that ChatGPT churns out thoughtlessly.
Add ChatGPT to the list of algorithmic software that can only do poorly a job it should not be asked to do at all.
You can be forgiven for having forgotten that David Coleman is a thing. He's been laying low-ish as head of the College Board since his days of dropping Common Core on the US education system like sewage-filled water balloon. But he's still around, still sharing his ideas about education and how to use the College Board's big products-- the SAT and AP courses-- to inflict his vision on students.
Klein says, "AI tools can pass almost every AP test. Are students taught what they need to know to thrive in a future workplace dominated by AI?"
This might sound like a challenge to AP tests, but that's not what Coleman hears. "High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI." For once, he's not entirely wrong-- by reducing writing to a simple algorithmic process divorced from expressing ideas, many educators have turned it into a task that a computer can do. You know what pushed us--hard--in that direction? Common Core, and the tests that came with it.
Coleman says we have to make high school "relevant, engaging, and purposeful" by creating the next generation of coursework. "We," he says, "are reconsidering the kind of courses we offer." So I guess he's not going to address that whole "AI can beat your test" issue.
But it's this next exchange that shows how far off the rails College Board is ready to go.
Klein: College Board has previously partnered with higher education to create courses. Will you now be partnering with employers/industry?
Coleman: What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice.
So, an example of a new partner [in course design] is the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce. What’s cool about what we’ll do with business or cybersecurity is that it will simultaneously get you college credit at institutions that offer it and get you that workforce credential. [After successfully completing] AP Cybersecurity, you could definitely get some really good jobs and be qualified for them.
So, to expand their market, they're going to take the "college" out of College Board. Coleman says they might also take a whack at health care, sort of integrate chemistry and physiology and health care careers.
Klein points out that employers want "tricky-to-measure skills, like creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking." Does Coleman have a plan for dealing with this stuff?
He does, and it's dopey. The big move will be AP Seminar-- less required content, more group work. Also, the business and personal finance course "has heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship and responding to change, plus flexibility, adaptation, and resourcefulness.
So how do you measure stuff like resourcefulness asks the man who still hasn't acknowledged that AI can beat his current set of tests. And he has another non-answer:
In the business course, every student needs to make a business plan and share it and have a competition [around] it. And they have to act as a financial adviser to a family similar or different than their own. With those two projects, you can test students for their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Okay, but how do you test them? Give them a multiple choice question with one answer that is the resourceful one? Is there a special resourcefulness rubric for the project? Coleman is skating past a huge question here-- how do you use a standardized box to assess how well a student functions outside the standardized box?
Klein steers him back toward AI. Could an AI write the paper for that Seminar class?
The answer, buried under some verbage, is yes, and the student might be scored "whether they’ve effectively used it to advance their work. Also--
What we definitely are thinking about is, “How can students skillfully use AI without replacing their own skills development? How can you use AI resourcefully and powerfully without it totally eclipsing what you’re trying to get kids to learn?”
I think that interplay is essential for advancement in the AI world. We always want the check and balance of what can you do with it and what can you do without it, to see what you’re gaining separately from [the course].
Behind all this argle bargle is... nothing. It's meaningless noise until it's turned into specific plans. How would those "checks and balances" work? There is nothing remotely insightful about saying, "Students should know how to work AI and they should know how to work without it."
Will teachers be trained in AI or cybersecurity? Coleman's answer boils down to "Not really." Just give them enough resources to "stay a step ahead of their kids."
But Coleman also answers a question that Klein didn't ask-- would the AI replace teachers?
Teachers recruit kids who did not believe that they could do [rigorous academic work]. They give feedback and encouragement daily. It is just foolish to condense teaching to the transmission portion of the teaching job.
So sure, someday we could get wonderful lectures and tutoring through AI. But not the encouragement, support, and engagement that a teacher does in responding to humans in front of him or her.
So, pretty much like the computer-delivered education models that don't require teachers-- just coaches to encourage and monitor.
How will they keep courses up to date? The course framework will be a 'living portion," which is some great corporate baloney-speak. But hey-- Coleman never built any capability for update in the Common Core, so maybe he has learned something?
How about AP Data Science? Coleman says the AP Computer Science Principles really covers that. Also, the new verbal section of the SAT includes charts, because to be literate you can't skip the tables in a science article ("unless you're just gonna read fiction," and we know Coleman's not a fan).
Also, they're not changing the AP African American Studies course, and states, schools, and students can choose.
Look, the College Board lost its way ages ago. The SAT division now trues to flood the market with variants, like a cookie manufacturer trying to some up with new flavors in order to suck up market shelf space. I look forward to the Fetal SAT, given in each trimester of pregnancy. The Advanced Placement courses and tests were arguably a good-ish idea, but they have lost their way (read Annie Abrams' Shortchangedfor a fuller telling of that story).
But this is clearly not an improvement. Coleman has never shown himself to be a fan of the liberal arts, so perhaps it's a surprise that he hadn't already shifted the AP course from liberal, college level academics to some high end vocational training, but here we are. Never mind that artsy fartsy thinky stuff; let's dig out the graphs and charts. Dump those crazy abstract maths and get down to crunching the kinds pf numbers that corporate overlords are interested in. Maybe as colleges and universities shift away from liberal arts education and toward meat widget prep, the AP was destined to be dragged along with them.
Thing is, Coleman, at least in this interview, doesn't seem to have a real vision of where he's headed-- just some obvious platitudes and vague gestures. And he can make noises about next generation education programs, but that doesn't really address the problem that a LLM bot can breeze through his tests (and, one wonders, how much bots are being used to score that same test).
Nothing here indicates that Coleman gas a plan-- just a vague impulse to get more vocational and computery. We'll see if that's enough to hang onto his steadily eroding market share.
“Where there are kids that lack opportunity, my heart pains for them,” said Treat, R-Oklahoma City. “We need to make sure they are not forgotten.”
Expanding the program will get poor kids into religious schools, or help poor kids escape bullying.
Governor Kevin Stitt pushed in 2023, proclaiming "Now we're gonna put the parents back in charge." Also, competition will raise all boats. And poor kids will be rescued.
Yessiree-- the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program would help poor families get their kids into super duper private schools. "This is an every kid wins policy and funding plan," said House Speaker Charles McCall back in 2023, when the bill passed.
Just barely. A similar bill tanked in 2022, opposed by rural Republicans who didn't want to see their schools drained of funding, and they didn't want to see taxpayer money going to unaccountable private schools. So the tax credit version was born. The idea was that instead of draining the general fund, taxpayers could contribute to vouchers instead of paying their taxes (which would, you know, cut revenue for the general fund.)
Lawmakers were a bit upset by what turned out to be the mechanics of the tax credit. They expected that it would come in the form of a line on tax returns (like any other tax credit). But no. In what may be the laziest attempt to maintain the fiction that these vouchers aren't a way to send public tax dollars to private religious schools, the Oklahoma system sends the voucher money directly to the school--but in a check that is made out to the parents. The parents come in to the school to endorse the check.
This baloney allows the Oklahoma Tax Commission to say, with a straight face, “No checks were issued by the Oklahoma Tax Commission to private schools."
Said some legislators, "We would not have voted for this if we thought this was how it was going to work." It took station KFOR to find out this was what was happening.
State Rep. Melissa Provenzano said that the vouchers are going "overwhelmingly" to students already enrolled in private school.
None of this should be remotely surprising, as it is exactly how vouchers have played out in other states. No mention yet about the students who were rejected by private schools.
One thing sure to be a factor-- the voucher program immediately led to private schools hiking tuition prices. Ruby Topalian at The Oklahoman reported on the issue, offering as a specific example
There’s a terrible stench that smells a lot like bull excrement emanating from the halls of our state Capitol right now, and Republicans are hoping that Oklahomans plug their nose and pretend their highly touted voucher-like program doesn’t stink to high heaven.
Many are also likely hoping that their constituents will suffer from a convenient bout of amnesia when it comes to recalling the promises made — and not kept — in 2023 about their Parental Choice Tax Credit Act.
As it turns out, Oklahomans were sold a sham when legislators sought to convince us why our hard-earned tax dollars should be used to pay for children’s private school educations even while their local public schools continue to struggle financially and academically.
And more to the point
Legislators would have you forget that they want to use public money to continue to subsidize the costs of a small subset of rich children whose parents have fled the public school system that 700,000 children rely on. The exodus further exacerbates the gap between the haves and have nots.
To further rub salt in the wound, many private schools used the new “tax credit” to raise tuition. An Oklahoma Watch analysis found that about 12% of 171 participating private schools capped tuition rates near $7,500, the max a family can receive. Some schools raised tuition rates 100%.
At this point, there's no state legislator anywhere that has any excuse. All of these issues have well documented in each of the universal voucher states. Vouchers are an expensive entitlement for the wealthy that try to hide behind a fig leaf of helping a few select actual non-wealthy folks.
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.
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.
