Last night was a big night, a great night for public schools, writes Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. Carol was a teacher of Spanish for many years, then a high school principal on Long Island in New York. She was selected as New York State Principal of the Year by her statewide colleagues. As executive director of NPE, she excels as an organizer, a researcher, a writer, and an analyst of statistical data. We are so fortunate to have her leadership in the battle to preserve public schools against privatization and corporate interests. And, at the same time, to advocate for ways to improve our public schools.
She writes:
Last night was an extraordinary night for those who love public education.
For me, the highlight was Gina Hinojosa’s election as governor of Texas. Gina came into politics as a mom. She ran for the Austin school board to keep her son’s school, and other neighborhood schools, from closing. In the Texas House, no one has defended public schools more fiercely, fought vouchers harder, or been more skeptical of charter schools. She has promised to fire Education Commissioner Mike Morath on day one and end state takeovers of school districts, including takeovers like Houston’s, where the failure of a single school was used to seize an entire district. You can hear Gina’s address at the 2025 Network for Public Education Conference here.
James Talarico’s Senate victory drew more of the headlines, but Gina’s win should not be overlooked. She beat a three-term incumbent who had never lost a general election and who outspent her by tens of millions of dollars. Talarico’s opponent was Ken Paxton, a scandal-plagued attorney general. I suspect Gina helped bring Latino voters to Talarico as much as he helped bring a broader electorate to her.
Talarico’s win is also good news for public schools. He is soft on charters, but he is a fierce opponent of vouchers and has publicly opposed the federal tax-credit voucher. His arrival should add momentum to Senator Mark Kelly’s Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, which would repeal it.
He will be joined by other strong allies of public education: Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Sherrod Brown, who returns to the Senate from Ohio and has always stood with public schools. This matters. Corporate Democrats such as Cory Booker and Michael Bennet have too often sided with Republicans on school choice. The new Senate Democrats can help move good bills forward and block further expansion of the federal Charter Schools Program.
Ohio delivered another big win: Governor-elect Amy Acton, a strong supporter of public schools who earned the endorsement of the Ohio Education Association.
In the House, I don’t yet know where many of the newly elected members stand. But a larger Democratic majority should help us build support for reining in the federal Charter Schools Program and outvote the minority of pro-charter Democrats.
A pro-public education agenda for the new Congress
- Repeal the federal tax-credit voucher.
- Pass the CHARTER Act to end federal funding for charter schools run by for-profit operators.
- Hold the Department of Education accountable:
- Release the program funds it has frozen.
- Cut the federal Charter Schools Program.
- Rescind its anti-DEI policies.
As more results come in, I hope more pro-public education state legislatures will emerge as well.
~Carol Burris
I like Talarico’s suggestion: we need everyone to work together for good things. The problem is that so many people believe public education is a bad thing. I do not think we are done with divide and rule politics.
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There are TWO conflicting public opinions about the country’s K-12 public schools.
Gallup and PEW’s annual report always shows a massive gap between the country’s public percept of K-12 public schools compared to the public schools their children attend.
Only 32% of American adults say they are completely or someone satisfied with the quality of K-12 education “nationwide” for public school they knowlittle or nothing about, personally.
But when it comes to the K-12 public schools “their” children attend, around two-thirds to 80% of parents with school-age children report being satisfied with the education their own child is receiving–roughly double the satisfaction rate for the national system.
But there isn’t a national public K-12 public school system. There are fifty+ public education systems, one for each state (not counting the public schools for active military parents with children), and they all operate by different but sometimes similar rules. Some states have higher standards for their public schools and the public-school teacher. In some “red” states, a substitute may teach with just a high school degree. In a state like California, a substitute teacher has to have a BA degree at least. And teacher credential requirements are all over the place from state to state.
So, what’s happening when it comes to an opinion of what they have no direct experience with?
The majority thinks the K-12 public schools aren’t working because of the propaganda they hear or read, but when it comes to the K-12 public schools “across the country” that their children attend, the numbers reverse and up to 80% of parents think the public schools their children attend are doing a good job.
I think the negative perception is mostly based on opinions learned from the misleading, often lie filled propaganda machine that has been active since 1983, to destroy and dismantle the public education systems spread across fifty states and turn it over to the private K-12 education sector based on profits and greed.
Trump isn’t the only greedy misfit who generates BIG LIES. The anti-public education machine has been repeating another BIG LIE for the last 43 years.
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I agree. The republicans have built their formula for success on a tried and true ruse. They tell you you are in trouble because of some bugbear, then sell you the solution. It’s an old formula. Orthodoxy in revision works the same way. You are in danger because of this thing, so choose these beliefs and join our tribe.
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I’m adding another set of comaprions from PISA test results.
Target Group: Evaluates 15-year-old students near the end of their compulsory schooling.
A primary differentiator for the U.S. education system is school segregation by income. In many European OECD countries, low-income students are distributed across socioeconomically diverse divers schools. In the U.S., poor children are highly concentrated in specfic low-income schools.
In the United States, socioeconomically advantaged students (the top 25% in SES) outperform disadvantaged students (the bottom 25%) by 102 score points in mathematics. This is wider than the average OECD gap of 93 points.[1]
The gap between the highest-performing students (90th percentile) and lowest-performing students (10th percentile) in the U.S. is 298 score points in science, significantly larger than the OECD average gap of 258 points
Socioeconomic background accounts for roughly 15% of the total variation in student test scores in the U.S.
In countries with more equitable educational distributions like Finland, Norway, and Japan, SES accounts for less than 10% of the performance variance.
The OECD tracks “resilient” students—those who rank in the bottom 25% for socioeconomic background but still score in the top 25% academically.
Only 5% of disadvantaged students in the U.S. qualify as resilient, compared to the OECD average of 7% and highs of roughly 15% in East Asian systems like Hong Kong and Macao.
National research indicates that the overall U.S. average is heavily impacted by its distribution of wealth.
When evaluating only U.S. schools with low child poverty rates (under 10%), American students score an average of 562 in reading, which would rank them first globally.
Conversely, the high concentration of schools in high-poverty areas drops the aggregate national averages close to or just slightly above the baseline OECD mean.
Disadvantaged students in the U.S. struggle significantly in math. The performance gap between wealthy and poor students in the U.S. spans 102 score points, which is much wider than the OECD average gap of 93 points.[1]
U.S. high-poverty schools (where more than 75% of students are low-income) score vastly lower, pulling down the nation’s global average ranking despite the high performance of affluent districts.
The contrast between U.S. school funding and other OECD countries reveals a striking paradox: the United States spends more per student on K-12 education than almost every other developed nation, yet it suffers from some of the worst funding inequities.
The root of the funding issue lies in where the money comes from. The U.S. relies on a hyper-local funding model that is virtually unique among OECD nations. In the U.S., about 44% of school funding comes from local property taxes, 48% from state budgets, and only about 8% from the federal government. Because property values in the U.S. dictate local school budgets, affluent neighborhoods generate massive school revenues, while lower-income neighborhoods generate very little.
High-performing OECD nations like Singapore, South Korea, and Finland spend a larger share of their budgets directly on teacher salaries, robust professional development, and giving teachers non-instructional hours during the day to plan lessons. [1, 2]
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Take a look at results in Indiana. Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston and Bob Behning, longtime chair of the House Education Committee, both lost in upsets no one saw coming. These two, along with Mitch Daniels, are the primary architects of Indiana’s expansive school voucher program. I think Hoosiers are finally realizing this was always a scam to benefit the wealthy.
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Good idea!
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