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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