Several years ago, I posted an item critical of homeschooling. I was bombarded by angry letters written by homeschooling parents. How dare I? The reaction made me cautious about stirring that hornet’s nest again, but I feel compelled to say what I believe.
Homeschooling is a bad idea. A terrible idea. Very, very few parents have the knowledge and skills to teach their children well. No matter what curriculum they buy, very few have the ability to provide the resources of a good public school.
Teachers are prepared to teach reading, writing, mathematics, and social studies. Their work is supplemented by teachers of science, art, music, and foreign languages.
In good public schools, students with disabilities get well-educated teachers, small classes, and individual attention.
Students in public schools may participate in drama, orchestra, jazz band, and advanced technology classes, all supervised by well-trained professionals. They may choose to participate on sports teams, in film-making, and in other activities. If they want to go beyond, there are advanced classes in most subjects.
Homeschooling means that children are completely dependent on their parents, for better or worse. If their parents are ignorant, so too will be their children. If their parents are sadists, no one will know or care.
In 2018, a couple with 13 children claimed to be homeschooling them. Instead, they were chained to their beds, beaten, starved, sexually abused--and the state of California didn’t pay attention. Edwin Rios of Mother Jones wrote about the ferocious homeschooling parents and their lobbyists who opposed any effort to regulate them.
Riverside, California (CNN) — A California district attorney painted a horrible picture of physical and emotional abuse as he announced torture charges Thursday against a Riverside County couple accused of keeping their 13 children captive and malnourished in their home.
Recently, I wrote a post about two grandparents in Florida who imprisoned four children in the cab of their semi-truck for six years. During that time, the grandparents “homeschooled” the children by purchasing Khan Academy ideas. The children reported frequent sexual abuse.
David Turpin, 56, and Louise Turpin, 49, were charged with 12 counts of torture, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said. David Turpin also was charged with a lewd act on a child by force or fear of duress….
Of the victims, Hestrin said: “They’re relieved. … Their health is being looked at. They’re in good hands. As far as where they’re going to end up, I don’t know.”
The 13 siblings range in age from 2 to 29. Six are minors.
Germany bans home schooling. It wants children to have a real education, not to live at the mercy of their parents, who may be abusive and ignorant.
In the United States, we pay parents who refuse to send their children to school.
Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.
I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX
There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.
Shocked. Absolutely shocked.
The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis
Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.
For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.
The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.
Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.
The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.
Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.
The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories
Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:
Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.
Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told
Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion
Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated
The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.
That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.
$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh
And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.
Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.
Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.
To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.
The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?
The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure
Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.
The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:
Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data
They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.
None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.
The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:
Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.
The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.
The Bottom Line
The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.
Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.
The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.
Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.
All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.
Critics slam teachers and public schools for low reading scores. Much of that criticism is wrong and misses the real problem. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Science of Reading (SoR) both seriously hamper children’s writing (their voices) and, in turn, their ability to learn to read.
Writing and reading are siblings. They complement each other, and for most children, if one isn’t working, the other isn’t either. That’s why, as children learn to read, they should be learning to write. Good reading and writing instruction involves interactions and feedback from teachers, students, and parents.
Below is a reminder of what makes a good writing program, but first I want to address the problem.
The National Reading Panel, which led to the SoR, failed to adequately research reading (See Yatvin, 2003). They ignored writing!
In 2023, Stephen Sawchuck of Education Week wrote about this omission: How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’? His points are valid, but his focus on breaking writing into explicit skills, much like the SoR breaks up reading, misses the mark.
The Science of Reading isn’t settled, since believers finally want to address writing. They sound like writing instruction never existed, calling for a Science of Writing. Adding “science” makes it sound legit and lends itself to for-profit programs.
While reading Sawchuck’s report, it’s easy to picture newly minted, skill-oriented, expensive online writing programs for states to add to their already crowded list of online decoding programs.
I would argue that none of that is necessary for children to learn to write (and read better). What’s needed is paper and pencil and adults who care about student writing, will read and value it, and help children improve upon it.
Teachers used to address writing well. They focused on it more and better. What happened?
Remember Common Core and David Coleman’s toxic words about student voice?
David Coleman, a businessman and codeveloper of the CCSS, who now makes millions as the head of the College Board, denounced student voice.
Around 2015, Coleman, discussing student narrative writing, stating to a group of teachers:
You grow up in this world, and you realize people don’t really give a shit about what you feel and what you think.
Along with this, SoR enthusiasts largely ignored the critical connections between writing and learning to read. The heavy focus on decoding and direct instruction still permeate early learning classrooms, and writing has been an afterthought.
Coleman was wrong, of course. The most critical part of writing is student voice. The SoR folks are wrong too. Skills are secondary to writing well. With both writing and reading, children must first understand what’s in it for them.
Please open the link and read Bailey’s explanation of the best approaches to teaching students to write and to find their own voice.
In Florida, a couple were arrested and charged for keeping their four grandchildren confined in a truck for six years and allowing them to be sexually abused during their long confinement.
The good news (sarcasm) is that they homeschooled the children by enrolling them in Khan Academy online classes.
Did the couple know they were eligible for $32,000 in voucher payments to pay for all their educational expenses from the state of Florida? Maybe they did and were collecting. Why pay for the Khan Academy classes when the state will pick up the bill?
A grandmother and her fiancé are accused of trapping four children for six years inside a semi truck’s cab, where the children endured sexual abuse, malnutrition and neglect, prosecutors in Florida said on Tuesday.
Starting in 2019, the victims, two girls and two boys who now range in age from 11 to 15, slept on a top bunk without all fitting on the mattress, the authorities said in an arrest warrant. They urinated in a plastic cup and defecated in a grocery bag, the warrant said.
One child scarred her hand permanently when hot noodles burned her, and she was not taken to the hospital, the warrant said. One girl contracted a sexually transmitted infection, the warrant said.
“This is just straight evil, and a scourge on our society,” Mark Glass, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said during a news conference held on Tuesday.
The ordeal began when Ms. Epps and her fiancé, Tamra Marshon Stewart, 37, of Jacksonville, Fla., traveled with the children from Atlanta to Miami, James Uthmeier, the state’s attorney general, said during the news conference. Ms. Epps was a licensed semi truck driver, Mr. Williams said.
The couple served as primary caregivers for the children, and they all lived inside the truck’s cab.
The cab included two seats for a driver and a passenger, a bunk bed, a refrigerator, a microwave and a space for storage all packed into tight quarters, the authorities said in the arrest warrant.
“This was a prison, a rolling prison,” Mr. Uthmeier said.
One of the girls, who is now 12, said Mr. Stewart had touched her inappropriately every day for two years, the authorities said. She said her grandmother knew what was happening to her, and in one instance pretended to be asleep, according to the arrest warrant.
Mr. Stewart furnished the other girl, now 11, with candy and money after sexual encounters in an effort to keep her quiet, according to the arrest warrant. The victim “said it didn’t work,” the warrant said.
A 15-year-old boy confronted Mr. Stewart, calling him a pedophile and a child molester, according to the arrest warrant from the state’s attorney general office. Mr. Stewart punched the victims after the dispute, according to an arrest warrant filed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
The children did not attend school while with Ms. Epps and Mr. Stewart and instead used Khan Academy, a website with educational videos that is not accredited, the authorities said.
Neuroscience confirms what many of us long suspected: Fiction is more powerful for developing the mind, social skills, empathy, and imagination than non-fiction. And yet for nearly two decades, American schools have been encouraged to downplay fiction. Teachers have been told to downplay novels, fewer novels are assigned, and fewer students read whole books.
Instead of reading stories, students read excerpts in preparation for the format of standardized tests. There, students are asked questions about extracts without a beginning, a middle or an end.
Why?
Seventeen years ago, the Common Core State Standards were introduced to the public as the salvation of education. Its sponsors claimed that they would raise scores and close or narrow achieve gaps.
The Common Core standards were funded almost entirely by the Gates Foundation and enthusiastically endorsed by Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The Obama administration gave states a huge incentive to adopt the Common Core standards. States were required to endorse the Common Core to qualify to compete for a large chunk of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.
Most states adopted the Common Core standards, sometimes without actually reading or reviewing them. Behind the Common Core was the dubious belief that standardization of standards, tests, textbooks, and teacher training would have a dramatic positive effect on student test scores. That turned out not to be true.
But even worse, David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core (and now the President of the College Board, which publishes the SAT tests, the AP tests, and other standardized tests) believed that “informational text” was more valuable than fictional works.
The Common Core recommended that the curriculum be weighted 50-50 between literary and informational texts in fourth grade; 45-55 in eighth grade; and 30-70 in twelfth grade. That is, only 30 percent of reading in twelfth grade would be fiction.
Tom Loveless, then at the Brookings Institution, showed how these ratios, which were literally based on nothing, no research, led to a decline in the assignment of fiction in schools.
In response to the widespread adoption of the Common Core, textbook publishers and test publishing companies de-emphasized fiction. The National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the federal test called NAEP, downgraded fiction in its national tests for fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades.
According to an article by Richard Sima in the The Washington Post, the theory that fiction was of lesser value was wrong.
Sima, a neuroscientist and science journalist, writes that fiction is better for the growing mind than informational text.
He writes:
Reading in general — newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books — has been linked to slower rates of cognitive decline in older adults and even longer lives.
But reading fiction may have unique benefits. For example, the amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds. And, perhaps even more importantly, research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition — our ability to think about and interact with other people — and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place.
Why? Fiction forces you to imagine a story’s world and characters. It makes you grapple with different perspectives, mentally inhabiting distinct points of view, according to Nick Buttrick, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
This can help us find “better insight into our own experiences, insight into the experiences of others who are very different from us,” said Raymond Mar, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, who recently wrote a review on the benefits of reading narrative fiction. “It just tends to evoke a form of reflection and contemplation, which can only be good for us.”
Why reading is actually social
Social health is important for overall health. And it turns out that reading, though often thought of as a solitary activity, can boost our social abilities.
To understand why, it helps to look at how reading shapes us as we grow.
Between ages 4 and 6, children develop a theory of mind — the ability to understand that others have different beliefs, perspectives and feelings. Studies find that children exposed to more storybooks are further along this developmental milestone than those exposed to fewer ones, Mar said.
A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 studies found that children who read more storybooks had more empathy. And there is evidence that empathy and reading go both ways. Better reading comprehension was a predictor of empathy later in life, while empathy also was a predictor of better reading ability, according to a 2024 study of more than 900 children. And adolescents who read more for fun became more social adults, a 2023 study found…
Reading fiction “presents to us a complex cognitive and emotional simulation of the social world,” which is useful in the real world, Mar said.
The power of storytelling
These benefits may be due, in part, to the power of storytelling.
Neuroimaging studies find that brain networks involved in understanding stories overlap with brain networks needed for theory of mind. This suggests that “while engaging with stories, we’re also pulling online the same kinds of brain networks that we use to understand other people,” said Mar, who wrote a review about these studies.
Other forms of storytelling, such as television and movies, may provide similar benefits, but “one of the things that you do when you read is you have to construct the world” in your head, Buttrick said. “The world is not given to you. You have to do the work of imagining.”
The article goes on in greater detail about why fiction is more important for young people than non-fiction, the exact opposite of the premises of the Common Core.
As a native Texan, I have become unaccustomed to hearing good news about the state’s education system. Under the reign of Gregg Abbott, the state has persistently underfunded its public schools, and Abbott went to extreme lengths to enact a huge voucher program that will inevitably drain even more money from the public schools. The state’s elected leaders are more devoted to religious schools than to public schools, which enroll over five million children (most of whom are Hispanic).
These youngsters will one day be the majority in Texas, but the state legislature–which is about 2/3 non-Hispanic white–doesn’t care about them.
Imagine my surprise when I read this article by James Traub in The New York Times. I consider this account to be very good news indeed. Traub is a highly accomplished journalist, and I’m always interested in whatever he writes.
I have been a devotee of E.D. (Don) Hirsch Jr. and his ideas about curriculum since 1983. That was when I first read an essay he published in The American Scholar titled “Cultural Literacy.” I invited him to participate in a conference organized by me and Checker Finn, Jr. I urged Don Hirsch to write a book expanding his thesis, and he did. It was called Cultural Literacy, and it was a huge national bestseller.
In 1985-87, I helped to write the California History/Social Science Framework and inserted as much cultural literacy as possible, especially in the early grades. I wanted to oust the reigning ideology of “expanding environments,” which assumed that children were eager to learn about their neighborhood and community, replacing it with biographies and stories drawn from history, mythology, and timeless tales that children love.
Traub is wrong when he says that the reliance on classic children’s literature found in Rexas would not be welcome in California. I helped to plant the seeds for a similar approach in California.
In this article, Traub describes the mandated list approved by the Texas State Board of Education. It is heavily influenced by Hirsch’s ideas. I approve.
Traub writes:
This summer the Texas State Board of Education approved a mandatory reading list for public school students that includes fairy tales and nursery rhymes for little children, stories of America’s founders and Aesop’s fables for elementary schoolers, poems by Rudyard Kipling and Langston Hughes for middle schoolers and Shakespeare’s plays and Dante’s “Inferno” for high schoolers — and passages or stories from the Bible for every grade, save kindergarten.
In our highly decentralized educational system, states don’t tell teachers which books to assign — the model Texas will begin using in 2030 makes it an outlier. Yet almost all of the reaction to the list, pro and con, has centered on the Bible. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization that promotes strict separation of church and state, described the list as “a brazen promotion of religious doctrine” that threatens to convert public schools into Sunday schools.
This is a wild overreaction to what is, after all, a tiny fraction of the required readings. What’s worse, the whole debate obscures the pedagogical radicalism of what Texas has done in issuing a mandatory reading list full of classic works at all.
I spent the 2023-24 academic year in public schools across the country researching a book on civic education. I was braced for the culture war in the classroom: conservative versions of history in red states, progressive versions in blue ones. And I did see that.
What I had not expected to find was that the pedagogical and curricular problems in American schools are more damaging than the political ones. Most students, even in the well-regarded high schools I visited, knew precious little about American history and government and had only a hazy sense of chronology. Teachers in English classes complained that students would not read whole novels — and so teachers didn’t assign them.
There are many culprits for this failure, including everyone’s favorite, children’s addiction to social media. But the root of the problem lies in the way we think about teaching and learning. The view that has dominated education for several generations holds that students learn by mastering general critical-thinking skills that can be applied across disciplines and occasions. If you learn to find the main idea, you can navigate through texts. If you can recognize and articulate perspectives, you can make sense of a primary document in history.
This doctrine makes content (that is, the specific material from which these skills derive) a secondary consideration. Combined with children’s real or apparent resistance to struggling with difficult material, that leads many teachers to choose works that pose the fewest challenges or have the most surface appeal — short excerpts from classics or young adult novels about troubled teens.
Texas seeks to solve that problem not only by requiring schools across the state to teach specific books but also by choosing works that are — with some telling exceptions — rich in language, ideas and feeling. (The list is meant to constitute only part of each year’s reading curriculum; the rest will be supplied by local schools and teachers.)
More than that, the list embodies a very different pedagogical theory, one most famously propounded by E.D. Hirsch in his 1987 best-selling book, “Cultural Literacy,” and other works. Literacy, he argued, is context-specific. We become good readers and learners not by mastering generalizable skills but by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information that allow us to make sense of a text. A child who knows a lot about baseball will do a better job reading and summarizing a passage on baseball than a child with a higher reading level but no knowledge of the subject.
From this perspective, it is better to read a classic than a relatable contemporary story not only because one is beautiful and the other is not but also because a classic, by the very fact of its persistence over time, has become part of our shared culture. It thus increases our conversancy with all the texts from that culture. That is why it makes sense for fifth graders in Texas to read “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” “The Phantom Tollbooth,” “Paul Revere’s Ride” and even, speaking of baseball, “Casey at the Bat.”
Texas has also created a social studies curriculum that has received less attention. It embodies a kindred principle to the one behind the reading list: You cannot learn to think like a historian until you have gained fluency in the materials history is made of — dates, places, events, names.
Children in Texas will start studying chronological history in third grade, a time when social studies is often devoted to broad themes like community. Fifth graders will be expected to explain how the Protestant Reformation encouraged people to question religious and political authority and why Montesquieu believed in divided government and the like, according to a draft of the new curriculum.
The Texas model will not suit everyone. The state’s idea of classic literature might not pass muster in, say, California. While educators everywhere regard Pericles’ funeral oration, which Texas students are to read in high school, as a rhetorical masterpiece, they may not feel the same way about Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan or the works of Ayn Rand and the conservative Black economist Thomas Sowell, which are also assigned. Although 53 percent of students in Texas public schools are Hispanic, the state school board included works by only a few Hispanic authors in the reading list.
Those choices reflect Texas’ conservatism. But there is nothing inherently conservative about the idea of a stipulated reading list or about the belief that children need to be exposed from an early age to great works of literature and to history taught chronologically, that they should memorize poems and speeches, that they should learn grammar. A different reading list could achieve the same goals. Cultural literacy is not a Procrustean bed: As we become more diverse and less anchored in the Western tradition, what it means to be conversant in our culture changes as well.
After my book was published, I was contacted by some of the leading philanthropic funders of public schools; they wanted to talk about how they could help improve civic education. Here’s an idea for them: Raise Texas’ bet by promoting an equally rich reading list suitable for students in blue states. Show the world that academic rigor is not just for conservatives.
About a dozen years ago, I heard from Ted Dintersmith. I didn’t know anything about him other than that he was a venture capitalist who was interested in education reform. My hackles went up, because the term “venture capitalist who was interested in education reform” immediately conjured up images of Democrats for Education Reform,” a faux group that is dedicated to charter schools, Teach for America, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and union-busting.
When I thought about the people in this category, I thought about very wealthy men like Ravenal Boykin Curry IV, Whitney Tilson, John Perry, Ken Griffin, Jeff Yass, Daniel Loeb, Arthur Rock, Joel Greenblatt, Bruce Rauner, and Paul Tudor Jones. They are financiers who have committed millions to the cause of privatizing public schools. They are united in their contempt for public schools, teachers, and unions.
So I was wary of Ted and suspicious of his motives. And I pushed him aside, thinking he was part of the cabal of know-it-all entrepreneurs with a zeal to reform (privatize) public schools.
So, I now publicly admit that I was wrong. Ted has traveled the country, visiting schools and listening. He knows how hard teachers work, and he admires them. He has teamed up with some savvy people, like Tony Wagner and the late Sir Ken Robinson, to produce films and write books.
When I recently read his latest article, I realized that I had completely misjudged Ted. He doesn’t want to destroy public schools or privatize them. He wants to make them better. He wants students to love school and learn what they need to know to make informed choices.
He has seen some good charter schools (as I have), but he knows that a few hundred charter schools won’t lead to the transformation of tens of thousands of public schools. And–my thought–to the extent that charter schools defund public schools, they create more problems, more inequities.
So, I hereby apologize to Ted Dintersmith for prejudging him and for lumping him with the Billionaire Boys Club, those who see school transformation as a hobby.
When you read this post you will see that he doesn’t have all the answers, but he is asking the right question.
He writes:
About these notes: Always Monday. Always short. Always free. Always about civil society’s future. At times, interesting. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe here.
First, thanks for your feedback on my recent posts. My goal of late is to explore the various factors causing America to unravel. Toward a systems model of the forces undermining America’s democracy, moral compass, and social cohesion. Today, education.
For five decades, U.S. education policy has been driven by two goals: test scores and college. The No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. Then in 2010, Common Core. Obama’s rallying cry: “By 2020, the United States will once again lead the world in college completion.” Our all-consuming education focus. With massive collateral damage.
Let’s start with the funnel. While the college path works out well for some, most end up on the wrong side of education’s Bell Curve. Over half go directly to career, lacking a hirable skill and often with gutted self-esteem. Of those heading off to college, half don’t finish. Of those who graduate, half don’t get any kind of dream job. A system that’s produced some 43 million adults burdened by $1.8 trillion of student loan debt.
With a boost from Harvard-educated JFK, America grew to equate a prestigious college degree with human worth. This equivalence worked its way into news stories, movies, television shows, commercials . . . and labor markets. Prestige employers (that’s you, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey) made an elite college degree the essential hiring criterion. Less glamorous companies (that’s you, Sherwin-Williams) made a college degree mandatory for promotions. Rich families push their kids from the womb toward an Ivy+ degree. Poor families want the same for their kids. University research teams (that’s you, Georgetown) produce skewed studies touting a massive $1.2 million earnings lift for college grads. The Federal government opens the spigot for readily-obtained, impossible-to-shake student loans.
We’d like to think that America’s education system levels the playing field, but it does the opposite. The SCOTUS 1973 San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez says it’s just fine for U.S. public schools to be largely funded by local property taxes. Rich kids are showered with resources’; poor kids show up to school hungry. Test scores point to an education ‘achievement gap’ that gets pinned on our teachers – not America’s staggering income inequality. The system’s winners feed elite colleges that educate more students from the richest 1% of families than from the bottom 50%. For more, read Paul Tough’s book The Inequality Machine.
With college placements as the measure of success, America’s K12 schools became college-ready test-prep institutions. Pit kids in dog-eat-dog competitions: class rank, SAT scores, AP scores, college placement. A barrage of state- and Federally-mandated multiple-choice exams that rank kids, teachers, schools, districts, and states. Clear marching orders for K12 schools – train kids to perform well on multiple-choice exams and get them off to some college.
To this day, America relies on two numbers to define the education quality of a school, district, state, nation, and human. Math and reading scores. That’s it. Don’t believe me? Just note what journalists write and what policymakers cite. We’ve pushed generations of young Americans to get those damn test scores up. No worries if we short-change career-based learning, civics, history, and art. No worries if we disenage kids and demoralize teachers. No worries if a relentless focus on rote learning crushes a child’s curiosity, creativity, joy, and agency. No worries if kids get the soul-sucking message that what matters in life is outcompeting others on pointless tasks. Education priorities that encapsulate the classic definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
So many reforms, so little change
During their formative K12 years, America’s kids take more than 100 standardized exams. These cost-minimizing exams are expressly designed to be graded by a computer. And if a computer can grade a task, it can do that task. In every sense, we push kids to develop rote skills that machines handle flawlessly. Already, AI aces every assignment and exam required to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard. Reading exams call for regurgitating what’s put in front of you – perfect training for conspiracy-absorbing adults. Math exams are tied to esoteric micro-procedures (e.g., factoring polynomials) that adults never use. Yet we chase these scores, for decades, making no progress, ignoring Goodhart’s Law: “Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.”
There you have it. America’s colossal education botch. Train kids to perform rote tasks. Crush out the essential human traits of curiosity, audacity, creativity, agency, and joy. Standardize what’s taught and tested to produce data that ranks and sorts — rather than helping each child develop their distinctive human potential. Most get a chronic ‘you lack proficiency’ message in a system that heaps advantage on the affluent. Botched priorities, paving the way to our current nightmare. A populace unable and unwilling to critically analyze the torrent of lies coming from the White House. A populace that holds its nose to vote for a convicted felon who rails on the ‘educated elite.’ A boiling cauldron of resentment, corruption, and anti-science vitriol. As to how this has worked out, read David Brooks’ fascinating How the Ivy League Broke America.
I don’t offer these views on education casually. For the past fifteen years, I’ve immersed myself in this world. I’ve visited hundreds of schools, and convened thousands of conversations, all across America. I celebrate the bright spots in my books (What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America) and films (Most Likely to Succeed and Multiple Choice). But I’ve seen the failure. Failure caused by an obsolete system and failed accountability measures. Our classroom teachers are heroes. It’s not easy to fight the system, but many do. Give special thanks to the teachers in your life, who persevere despite being shortchanged on pay, respect, and trust. They endure in an entrenched system that has churned out generations of young adults ill-prepared for career, citizenship, and life. A system sowing the seeds for democracy’s collapse.
Three Bold Ideas
Career-Based Learning for All: My recent film Multiple Choice showcases a mainstream public school district that immerses all high-school kids in career-based learning across a range of skills (e.g., carpentry, welding, healthcare, cybersecurity, digital media, AI). Better for the career-bound and, a bit surprisingly, better for the college-bound. The key is making career-based learning essential for all kids, not just ‘those’ kids who don’t resonate with academic curriculum.
Finland: America can learn much from Finland. Their remarkable education progress resulted from a budget crisis that forced them to choose between data and educator excellence. They dumped all standardized tests and focused on developing outstanding classroom teachers – better training, more pay, loads of respect. Finnish kids spend comparatively little time on ‘school’; even high-schoolers have just six hours of class time and homework during the school week. Lots of time for play and exploration. A well-educated populace. For more, read Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons.
Accountability: Base accountability on a child’s growing ability to create and carry out initiatives that help make their world better. Portfolios of purpose, not a checklist of counterproductive numbers. Check out New York’s Performance Standards Consortium or read Tony Wagner’s Mastery.
Bonus Idea: Long talked about, America would be well-served if every high school graduate engaged in public service — lifting up their community while developing important skills. Those going on to college bring maturity and real-world experience to years often wasted on beer pong. Those eschewing the college path are off and running with purpose and skills. Young Americans across all demographics in a melting pot that bridges our current demographic and political divides.
Scott Maxwell is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. In this column, he argues that voucher schools in Florida should not be allowed to dodge accountability. And, he explains, they are completely unaccountable. The state Constitution requires that the state provide high-quality education, which voucher schools do not. He neglects to notice that the state Constitution states that no public money should go to religious schools. Not a penny, but most vouchers go to religious schools.
What is more, the voters of Florida rejected an effort to strip that language from the state Vonstitution in 2012.
Scott Maxwell wrote:
Teachers and parents have filed a landmark lawsuit challenging the legality of Florida’s billion-dollar school voucher system
The argument at the heart of their suit is that Florida’s constitution requires tax dollars be spent on “high-quality” education. Yet Florida’s voucher system is a black-hole of accountability, sometimes paying for kids to go to “schools” that are total disasters — where teachers lack degrees, inflate grades and use curriculum that is rubbish.
I’m not convinced the teachers and parents will win this lawsuit. In fact, I doubt they will. Similar challenges have been unsuccessful. And Gov. Ron DeSantis has done a pretty thorough job of stacking the courts with political allies, especially at the appellate level.
But I know for a fact the teachers and parents have a point. In fact, It’s inarguable. This newspaper has spent nearly a decade documenting voucher schools that failed children.
Often, the parents themselves were shocked and outraged to learn that schools were failing their kids and that there was little to no accountability.
The Sentinel’s multi-year “Schools Without Rules” investigation into voucher (or “scholarship”) schools found some schools employed teachers that lacked any teaching credentials or college degrees.
Some were such financial disasters, they shut down in the middle of the year, stranding families. (One in Orlando was evicted from a commercial complex where a neighboring tenant was “Drug Tests R Us.”)
Some refused to serve children with disabilities, whether it was autism or reliance on a wheelchair. Even more refused to teach children who are gay or had gay parents. These were schools eager for the public money but unwilling to serve all the public. None of this was discreet. Some had written policies saying that they wouldn’t serve children with Down’s syndrome or who uttered the sentence: “I am gay.”
Some schools taught junk science and bogus history, suggesting that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together and downplaying slavery and segregation.
And at some schools, parents were so appalled at what they found that they reported to the state things like “Cleaning lady substituting for teacher” and “I don’t see any evidence of academics.”
If you think any of that represents “high quality” education, you might also believe the mini tacos at 7-Eleven are five-star dining.
Many private schools that accept vouchers do stellar jobs and fill niche needs that public schools have historically struggled to meet. But too many taxpayer-funded schools are total trainwrecks. And the reason is that Florida has very few standards for voucher schools.
That is, in fact, the crux of the lawsuit, which lists about 20 different things that public schools are required to do by state law, but which all voucher schools are not.
Like providing certain levels of school safety staffing and having threat-management plans in place. Offering vetted curriculum and providing transportation. Hiring qualified teachers. And publicly posting test scores from state assessments that show whether students are actually learning anything. Public schools must do all of that.
The argument from choice-without-standards supporters is that parents should be able to choose any education they want for their kids without exception.
There are two problems with that argument. One is that no other government-funded voucher program works that way — and for good reason. We don’t let recipients of food vouchers use them on Twinkies and Mountain Dew. This is public money meant to provide nutritional sustenance. So there are guidelines. The same way there is for Medicaid and Medicare. You don’t get to spent public money that’s meant to fulfill a public purpose on anything you like just because you invoke cries of “freedom” or “choice.”
The other problem is that using this money to provide “high quality” education isn’t optional. It’s part of the Florida Constitution — a point the lawsuit addresses when it says: “… choice does not change the Constitution. When public funds are used to educate a child, that child is entitled to the same level of educational opportunities, the same quality standards, and the same basic protections.”
You can certainly make the argument that some public schools have failed some students. Do you know how we know that? Because these schools were required by law to disclose their test scores, standards, hiring practices and curriculum. In fact, newspapers in Florida were often the ones that exposed problems at public schools.
And most anytime we did, public officials would spring to action and agree reform was needed. Yet most every time we’ve exposed problems in taxpayer-funded voucher schools, state lawmakers leaders looked the other way. The most pathetic part of all this is that it’s easily fixable.
Florida could still offer “choice,” but also demand that any schools that receive public money meet basic standards. Hire qualified teachers. Post the results of nationally-normed standardized test scores and graduation rates. And ban discrimination.
“To me, this is just common sense,” said Stephanie Vanos, an Orange County School Board member who also happens to be an Orlando mom and joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff in that capacity. “I’m not saying they need the thousands of pages of rules that apply to us, but we need a common-sense set of rules that should apply to everybody.”
She is, of course, right. Schools that do good jobs shouldn’t be afraid of accountability and transparency. Most aren’t.
In fact, ask yourself these basic questions: Why shouldn’t parents and students be guaranteed qualified teachers?
Why shouldn’t taxpayers be able to see what kind of test scores are being produced at all the schools they’re funding?
And why shouldn’t taxpayers be assured that the money they’re spending is actually providing “quality” education, as the Constitution requires? Better yet, ask those who defend the status quo.
Pasi is one of the best-known education gurus in the world. He is an articulate advocate of a “whole child, child-centered” view of education. He believes in the power of teachers. He has stood strongly against standardized testing, incentives, punishments, and markets throughout his career.
Brian Brady is the grandson of Marion Brady, a progressive educator who has been critical of typical school subject-based curricula for many decades. Benjamin asks questions that his grandfather Marion has asked and puts them into the context of the 21st century, where information is easily accessible but hard to put into context as “knowledge.”
Brian has done his grandfather proud, as folks used to say.
The crisis is no longer information. It is orientation.
My grandfather Marion Brady is 99 years old. For most of his life he has been asking a single question that feels larger now than when he first asked it:
What is worth learning?
Not what is easiest to test.
Not what breaks neatly into standards and benchmarks.
Not what helps institutions sort children into rows, percentiles, and predictions.
What is actually worth learning?
It sounds like a school question. It is not. It is a civilizational question.
If you take it seriously, it does not just expose the limits of school. It exposes the limits of the world school was built to serve.
Modern education was designed for an industrial age. Its task was not wisdom, but coordination, standardization, and legibility. It divided knowledge into subjects, time into periods, children into age groups, achievement into grades, and called that order an education.
For the world that built it, this made sense. Industrial society needed people who could move through prearranged sequences, follow instructions, tolerate fragmentation, and mistake compliance for progress. School served that machine well.
The problem is that the structure remained after its justification expired.
And still we teach as if reality itself were divided into compartments. Math at nine. History at ten. Science after lunch. Literature here. Economics there. A little civics. A little technology. Each subject kept in its lane as though the world itself respected those borders.
It does not.
Life does not arrive in subjects.
A financial crisis is not economics. It is psychology, history, incentives, propaganda, institutional failure, and fear operating at once. Illness is not biology. It is money, labor, family, bureaucracy, grief, and mortality arriving together. Loneliness is not merely a private feeling. It is architecture, technology, work, romance, status, community, and meaning breaking down in a recognizable pattern.
Reality is not modular. It is entangled.
That is part of why so many people leave school with a disappointment they cannot quite name. They did what they were told. Learned the material. Passed the tests. Moved through the sequence. Then they entered adult life and discovered that reality does not present itself as a worksheet.
It presents itself as consequence.
That is the betrayal inside modern schooling. Not that it teaches facts, but that it too often mistakes fragmentation for understanding. Students are given pieces without pattern, procedures without orientation, answers without structure. They are trained to perform knowledge before they are taught how to organize reality.
For a long time, institutions could hide this weakness by controlling access to information. That was the old bargain. Sit still. Absorb the fragments. Repeat them back. We will certify that you know something.
That bargain is collapsing.
Information is everywhere. Explanation is instant. Summary is on demand. Generation is cheap. If education is merely the transfer of information, then large parts of the inherited model are about to be exposed by machines with humiliating ease.
This does not make my grandfather’s question obsolete. It makes it unavoidable.
What is worth learning when information is cheap?
The crisis is no longer information. It is orientation.
The central problem is no longer whether a person can retrieve facts, generate prose, summarize an argument, produce an image, or assemble code. The machine can assist with all of that. The deeper problem is whether a person can judge what is worth knowing, what is worth building, what is worth preserving, what is worth resisting, and what kind of intelligence a civilization should trust itself to become.
The machine is a tool. A powerful one. A dangerous one. Not because it thinks for us in some dramatic science-fiction sense, but because it amplifies whatever confusion already exists upstream.
The machine can generate almost anything. It cannot tell us what is worth becoming.
A culture that cannot answer questions of value will use powerful tools to accelerate its own disorientation. It will confuse fluency with understanding, output with insight, scale with wisdom, optimization with purpose. It will become more capable and less clear about why any of that capability should exist.
That is why my grandfather’s question now reaches far beyond school.
What is worth learning?
A person should learn how systems behave. How incentives bend institutions. How language hides power. How metrics deform the things they claim to measure. How technology reshapes attention, memory, and desire. How emotion alters perception. How to distinguish causes from symptoms. How to think across domains, across timescales, and across consequences. How to remain inwardly free inside environments built to colonize thought.
These are not luxuries. They are survival skills.
And they are difficult to teach inside the model we inherited because they do not belong neatly to any single subject. They live between subjects, across domains, inside relationships and consequences. They require synthesis, context, pattern recognition, and judgment.
That is the real educational question now.
Not how to cram more content into the pipeline. Not how to optimize test performance. Not how to produce students who can generate the approved answer in the approved format.
How do we cultivate minds that can actually perceive reality?
That was always the deeper force inside my grandfather’s work.
What is worth learning?
In an age of infinite information and machine generation, it may be the most important question we have.
Diane Ravitch's blog 