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Scott Maxwell: Voucher Schools in Florida Should Be Accountable

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2026 //
9

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.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Racism, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Pasi Sahlberg: The Making of an “Education Warrior”

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2026 //
8

This article by Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg tells the story of how he became an “education warrior.”

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.

He is one of my personal heroes.

Categories Accountability, Character, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Creativity, Curriculum, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Play, Students

Brian Brady: What Knowledge Is Worth Learning?

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2026 //
7

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.

Brian Brady writes:

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.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Real Education

Nancy Bailey: Robert Sweet and the Making of the “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2026 //
11

Retired teacher Nancy Bailey wrote on her blog about significant figures in the evolution of the history of reading. In this post, she focuses on the role of Robert Sweet, an important figure in the Department of Edication during the Reagan-Bush era.

Bailey writes:

Today’s Science of Reading (SOR) was born of a right-wing conservative phonics focus. A Nation at Risk helped advance that messaging, and one of the messengers was Robert Sweet, Jr.

As the country mandates the Science of Reading (SOR) and invests heavily in unproven programs, marketing disputes flourish over which best align with so-called evidence. These programs control teachers’ instruction through one-size-fits-all directives, delivered with manuals or online. It’s easy to see where this is going. States could spend millions more on reading programs that don’t appear to improve learning as teachers are driven out with tech.

During the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk raised unfounded negativity towards public schools and teachers (See Biddle and Berliner, The Manufactured Crisis). Reading, already controversial, became a vehicle for attacking teachers, their teacher colleges, and public schools, furthering a school privatization agenda that continues to this day. Schools weren’t doing badly, but those who wanted to privatize them worked to make them fail.

The obituary of Robert Sweet, Jr. is glowing. I don’t doubt that, like many SOR enthusiasts, he believed he was doing the right thing. He became instrumental in the phonics movement, working later with the Science of Reading and Reading First promoter Reid Lyon to create No Child Left Behind and Reading First. Yet he’s rarely mentioned today.

Sweet wasn’t a qualified reading teacher. He taught physics, coached, and sold textbooks. He arrived in DC as a member of the US House of Representatives staff during the Reagan administration. He supported Reagan initiatives such as tuition tax credits, low-income voucher programs, student self-help reforms, education savings accounts, and other conservative school initiatives.

He met Dr. Onalee McGraw, a PhD political scientist and a Heritage Foundation representative. McGraw, unrelated to the publishing company, was a Reagan appointee to the National Council on Educational Research (See Robert Sweet interview 4.17 below).

The Heritage Foundation is behind today’s Project 2025. Lindsey Burke, who wrote the education part, works with Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Neither are educators.

McGraw wrote “Family Choice in Education: The New Imperative,” arguing that public schools were in decline, academics had been replaced by social engineering, and humanistic curricula and subjective values had taken over. She believed education was inherently religious, not value-free. She promoted vouchers, minimum competency requirements, and moral education classes.

Sweet initially didn’t see reading as a problem. He and his children learned to read. But McGraw introduced him to Michael Brunner, who convinced Sweet otherwise.

Brunner wasn’t a reading teacher either. He had a degree in library science becoming the director of Title I in Idaho. He connected with the Reading Reform Foundation, created after Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read. Brunner wrote Vowelectomy. He believed in the work of well-known reading expert Jeanne Chall, but didn’t think vowel and mixed digraph instruction took place early enough, waiting until the end of first grade.

Both Sweet and Brunner repeatedly claim that students aren’t learning to read and teachers and especially their colleges are failing to teach phonics.

But Berliner and Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis pointed to media claims as being distorted and hostile, describing reporters failing to address cited study details, indicating that research really showed that poverty was the leading cause of reading difficulties (see p. 10-11).

Sweet became the director of the National Institute of Education and later the US Department of Education, bringing Brunner to DC to work on reading. They commissioned a report, Becoming a Nation of Readers. It’s informative, covering phonics importance, but also comprehension, meaning, and environmental influences. Sweet complained it was unfocused (8.45 video below).

He commissioned another report by Marilyn Jaeger Adams Beginning to Read: Thinking and learning about Print. The book, still popular today, stresses the importance of phonics and whole language. I could not find what Sweet thought about Jaeger’s book.

Both Bruner and Sweet favored Spaulding, a reading program spun from Orton-Gillingham (OG). Sweet criticizes Reading Recovery, praising Spaulding at the end of this interview. OG remains popular in the Science of Reading, despite common knowledge that it has lacked high-quality, peer-reviewed studies of its efficacy for 50 years!

Brunner and Sweet traveled the country observing teachers, without being reading experts. They blamed colleges for failing teachers on how to teach phonics. While teacher colleges can always improve, generalizing the same criticism towards all is dangerous. I knew of excellent teacher college programs at that time. Brunner created his own reading program, Phonics Made Plain.

He authored numerous articles on reading, including a Republican policy paper “Illiteracy: An Incurable Disease or Educational Malpractice?” Sweet’s paper was supported by the U.S. Department of Education and the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. It called for enlarging the restoration of the instructional practice of intensive, systematic phonics in every primary school in America.

Next, under President George H.W. Bush, Sweet became administrator for the Juvenile Justice Department. Brunner writes Retarding America: The Imprisonment of Potential, highlighting that juvenile crime is due to current reading methods (i.e. little phonics), while ignoring other variables. A good thing is that they establish reading programs in some detention facilities.

Sweet learns of the National Institute of Health and Human Development and met Reid Lyon. He seemed then to form the idea that reading must be based on scientific principal and one assumes he’s talking about phonics (11.58 video below).

In 1993, Sweet became co-founder and president of the now defunct National Right to Read Foundation which focuses again on phonics (12:41 video below). He still implied that teachers didn’t know about phonics.

Brunner criticizes the All Handicapped Children’s Act (PL 94-142) throughout the book listed above implying children simply lack phonics instruction.

But, public schools were working to accommodate children with reading difficulties in schools using phonics in resource classes especially after the 1975 passage of PL94-142. And phonics may have been taught later.

Sweet eventually helps pass the Reading Excellence Act in 1998 under President Clinton, although he doesn’t care for Clinton’s America Reads program where college students read to students (14.18 video below).

Under President G.W. Bush he collaborates with Reid Lyon, an advisor to the president, crafts language for the No Child Left Behind Act. Sweet becomes the primary author of the Reading First initiative which saw “scientifically based research” noted more than 100 times. Reading First turned out controversial.

Lyon immensely disliked educational schools, stating in 2002, a year after 9/11, You know, if there was any piece of legislation that I could pass, it could be to blow up colleges of education. He supports today’s Science of Reading initiative.

Around this time Reid, according to the NYTs, advised his former boss, Dr. Duane Alexander, about candidates for the National Reading Panel (Schemo, 2007). No early childhood teachers who teach reading were included on the panel. It’s controversial findings are still promoted by SOR enthusiasts, including some whom were on the panel. [I mention the lack of early childhood teachers but one teacher/principal was selected for the panel. Joanne Yatvin wrote many reports about her concerns about the panel itself. Minority View]

Robert Sweet and those described here were given much clout over teachers and how they teach. Yet after all these years, focusing heavily on phonics, and adding billions in technology often for SOR online programs, teachers, and their teacher colleges are still blamed as failing.

References

Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis : myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. Addison-Wesley.

Gursky, D. (1981, August 1). After The Reign Of Dick And Jane. Education Week, Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/education/after-the-reign-of-dick-and-jane/1991/08

Schemo, D. J. (2007, March 9). In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash. The New York Times, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/education/09reading.html

This post is adapted from my panel presentation at the 2025 Network for Public Education meeting.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Literacy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Denny Taylor: The Science of Reading is Behaviorism in a Digital Wrapper, Funded by For-Profit Corporations

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2026 //
35

Denny Taylor, a distinguished scholar in the teaching of literacy, has done impressive research to identify the origins of the “science of reading.” The roots of this latest fad are deeply entwined in the work of behaviorist Edward Thorndike. She explains how one view of literacy got embedded in the report of the National Reading Panel. Other views, other research was excluded.

It’s a fascinating article.

She writes:

This Substack post documents how George Bush and the Texas Business Council took control of how children are taught to read through their alignment with Reid Lyon and reading researchers on the Thorndike-Skinner-Engelmann-Carnine, stimulus-response, operant conditioning continuum, and delivered American children to technology companies, owned by hedge funds and private equity firms that capitalize on the profits of adaptive AI technology that constantly evaluates a child’s performance to adjust their instruction in real-time.

The post provides the historic foundations of how the integration of real-time adaptive AI into K-3 reading programs marks a shift from education as a social exchange to a closed-loop feedback system between child and machine. In future Substack posts I will focus on how this dynamic reshapes the learning process into a form of “distributed cognition,” where the boundaries between human and artificial thought – the child and the machine begin to blur.

**

Taylor then goes on to document the relationship between Reid Lyon and George W. Bush in the late 1990s. From 1992 to 2005, Lyon served as  the Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. He met up with Texas Governor George W. Bush and persuaded him that he had the key to reading success. Bush became a true believer in Lyon’s ideas and embedded them in No Child Left Behind after he was elected President in 2000.

In 1997, Lyon created the National Reading Panel, whose research leaned strongly towards one side of the “reading wars.”

Taylor narrates a historical account that should interest anyone interested in the origins of the “science of reading.”

She concludes:

The damage to the American public school system is extreme and for children the Science of Reading laws are catastrophic. The state laws that have been passed mandate beginning reading instruction in public schools that is developmentally inappropriate, and children’s health and wellbeing, as well as their academic development are at risk. The digitization of reading instruction exponentially compounds the risks.

For children in crisis in America the situation is dire, and we must respond. There is substantial evidence that between 60%and 70% of children in U.S. public schools have had Adverse Childhood Experiences and many of these children are coping with ongoing toxic stress which is compounded by 45 state lawswhich mandate state approved “Science of Reading” programs and excessive standardized assessments developed by technology companies owned by hedge funds and private equity firms….

The six year forensic analysis has provided extensive evidence that the experimental research studies that form the four cornerstones of the “Science of Reading” have no scientific validity. Of particular concern are the dog-whistles and lies that have been “sold” to policy makers and the public about the National Reading Panel Report, which has no scientific legitimacy. A compelling case can be made for the removal of the NRP Report from all documents that policy makers have used to require by law the fundamentally flawed “evidence-based reading instruction” in U.S. public schools. Such an action would remove the ban on cueing and the requirement of direct instruction in the “five pillars,” and thus, nullify the 45 state laws that mandate the Science of Reading. It would also mean that universities would be able to base reading courses on the peer-reviewed articles and books of reading researchers whose scholarship has been banned, and curriculum decision-making would be returned to teachers, parents, and local school districts.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Ethics, Literacy

NYC Parents and Activists Block “AI-themed” High School

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2026 //
2

Parents and activists banded together to persuade the New York City Board of Education (aka the Panel on Educational Policy) to reject a proposal to open an AI-themed high school.

Matthew Haag wrote in The New York Times:

In Brooklyn, an artificial intelligence program helps public school students pronounce words. In Queens, high school students ask Google Gemini how to improve their essays. And in the Bronx, students in a robotics lab consult an A.I. tool before building parts on a 3-D printer.

As teachers and students in New York City and across the United States have increasingly embraced artificial intelligence in the classroom, school leaders in the nation’s largest school system were set to make one of their biggest splashes yet — the opening of an A.I.-focused high school in Manhattan next school year.

But on Monday, the new schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, abruptly halted the creation of the school amid a groundswell of opposition to the rapid adoption of the technology and its potential harms.

In an interview, Mr. Samuels said that he understood the concerns and questions parents have about artificial intelligence in the classroom and its safety and impact on critical thinking. “I want to be able to think about the technology in a very thoughtful way,” Mr. Samuels said.

Despite the decision not to proceed, school leaders in New York City and beyond remain bullish on the future of artificial intelligence in education and its potential benefits. They argue that it could transform teaching and learning, a claim also promoted by companies that sell the tools, and that it would be irresponsible to ignore or restrict the technology.

But New York parents have expressed concern about the artificial intelligence programs used in schools or accessible on students’ computers, as well as the lack of information about the applications and data they collect. Some families recently delivered to Mayor Zohran Mamdani a petition with thousands of signatures calling for a two-year moratorium on generative A.I., such as chatbots.

“The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years,” said Leonie Haimson, an education advocate in New York City and member of the Coalition for an A.I. Moratorium.

Leonie Haimson, a member of the Coalition for an A.I. Moratorium, said that she has witnessed “intense outrage” among New York City parents over A.I. use in schools. Credit…Madison Swart for The New York Times

Under Mr. Samuels’s leadership, the city’s Education Department has started to develop guidelines for how teachers and students should use artificial intelligence. Last month, the school system published its first playbook for A.I., developed in consultation with educators and education technology companies.

The creation of the new high school, known as Next Generation Technology High School and located in the financial district of Manhattan, was expected to be another major step toward the embrace of artificial intelligence in a school system whose decisions, because of its size, often influence other districts. A vote on the creation of the high school by a 22-member education oversight panel was scheduled for Wednesday.

The group’s chairman, Gregory Faulkner, said that he did not believe a single member would have voted in favor of it. Mr. Faulkner said that out of the many emails he received and conversations he had with parents, just a handful of comments were supportive of the school.

“If there’s anything that even has a hint of A.I., there’s strong opposition to it,” Mr. Faulkner said. “People are very nervous about the technology and how it is going to be used.”

Since this is a gift article, feel free to open and finish reading.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Failure, New York City, Parents, Technology

Jared Cooney Horvath Tells Congressional Committee How Screen Time Impairs Learning

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2026 //
15

Jared Cooney Horvath is highly critical of digital tools in the classroom. Horvath is a neuroscientist who studies learning, memory, and cognition. His most recent book is The Digital Delusion.

On January 15, 2026, he testified before a Senate Committee, where he linked the use of technology to declining academic performance, not just in the U.S. but in other countries.

Here is his written testimony with graphs, footnotes, and other evidence to support his thesis.

Take five minutes and watch.

What do you think?

Categories Curriculum, Ethics, Online Education, Real Education, Technology

Sweden Cuts Back on Digital Learning, Emphasizes Books and Writing on Paper

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2026 //
4

The BBC reports that that Sweden has joined Norway in ousting electronics from its classrooms and reviving the use of books. The Swedish government, like Norway’s, concluded that electronic tools were causing a decline in literacy rates.

Sweden’s government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.

Another publication, Undark, reports that the government is investing in textbooks, nonfiction books, and fiction books.

And again in the BBC:

Schools in Sweden are returning to more traditional learning methods – such as reading from physical books – after seeing their reading standards drop while ipads and laptops were used.

There is now a focus on using more printed textbooks, handwriting and less screen time in early education. Experts say reading levels are getting better because of this.

Some teachers have said students are asking for more books and paper based learning in schools, saying they learn more quickly and retain information better than using a laptop. 

This isn’t a total ban on technology in the classroom and digital devices are still used, but the government is spending millions buying physical textbooks, and library books.

During the 2000s and 2010s, books were sidelined in Swedish classrooms and replaced with laptops and ipads.

The idea was to prepare students for life in a digital world.

But it seems to have backfired.

Sweden’s reading standards, which were among the best in Europe in 2000, began to fall.

In 2012, after years of getting worse, its Pisa scores — a worldwide test that measures reading, maths and science literacy among 15-year-olds — hit their lowest point.

Now, by popular demand, the books are back in the classroom and things are improving again.

The state has launched a national reading challenge for ten-year-olds and the classes that read the most books win prizes.

Sweden had intended to be a leader in the field of digital learning, but eventually concluded that the heavy use of Ed-tech was harming student learning. Increased screen time was leading to distraction, inability to concentrate, and lessened ability to do deep reading. “Studies have linked heavy digital use to reduced comprehension and memory retention as well as eye strain.”

The U.S. spends billions every year for Ed-tech. But the pushback is growing.

Jonathan Haidt of NYU, a critic of Ed-tech and social media for children, has kept a running tab on his Twitter account of cities and school districts in the U.S. that ban social media for children. where students spend less time on cell phones and social media, libraries report an increase in books checked out.

To those who are not on the payroll of Big Tech are likely to recognize that the frenzied spending of billions of dollars on Ed-tech had more to do with profits than with student learning.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, International, Technology

Paul Thomas: There Was No “Mississippi Miracle”

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2026 //
27

Paul L. Thomas of Furman University has been a persistent critic of the narrative about the “Mississippi Miracle.” The story gained great traction when New York Times‘ columnist Nicholas Kristof took it national on September 1, 2023, in an article titled: “America Has a Reading Problem. Mississippi Has a Solution.” The “miracle” supposedly was accomplished without doing anything to improve the lives of children and their families, without even raising teachers’ salaries. The “science of reading” did the trick; that, plus holding back third graders who didn’t pass the final reading test.

Many articles have been written since then recycling the claim that the “science of reading” was largely responsible for the impressive growth in Mississippi’s fourth grade reading scores on NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), which is administered every two years. If only states forced teachers to teach the “science of reading,” there would be no failure in reading (except, of course, for the students who were retained in third grade and not participants in the fourth grade testing.)

The “Mississippi Miracle” allegedly occurred within the context of a “Southern Surge,” where low-spending, non-union states like Alabama and Louisiana also participated in a miraculous increase in reading scores. These professors complexified that claim recently.

The most recent article confirming the “miracle” appeared in The Atlantic and was written by Rachel Canter, who participated in the Mississsippi reforms as leader of Mississippi First and is now at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Paul Thomas writes on his Substack blog:

“No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the ‘Mississippi miracle,’” Rachel Canter asserts in The Atlantic, adding:

Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research.

Canter, the Director of Education Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, released as well a report on Mississippi reading and education reform, noting:

I personally spent 17 years helping state leaders run that race. As the head of Mississippi First, a nonprofit I founded in 2008, I played a hand in, and sometimes led, many of the state’s key education policy conversations with the legislature while also working with the Mississippi Department of Education to implement the reform agenda. This is my insider’s view of what policymakers, philanthropists, and pundits should know about what really happened.

Both Canter’s article and her report are lessons themselves in how education reform in the US works, specifically during this cycle driven by the “science of reading” and “science of learning.”

Notably, Canter mentions “empirical research,” yet neither a magazine article nor a think tank report meet the standards of “scientific” championed by “science of” reformers—experimental/quasi-experimental research published in peer-reviewed journals [1].

Also, Canter’s article introduces on a larger scale one of the many multiverses of the “science of reading” existing currently.

The article and report express what Mississippi officials have been arguing for a while: Mississippi reform is not a miracle; it is many years of hard and complex work.

Canter, in fact, seems to double-down on Mississippi reform is effective due to high-stakes accountability (the core of education reform since Reagan, reform that has never worked but perpetuated a permanent cycle of crisis and reform in the US).

I will return to Canter’s argument about Mississippi’s reform success, but I think the criticism of overly simplistic stories about the Mississippi “miracle” are valid and many are beginning to acknowledge that news articles and podcasts have driven reductive and misguided reading reform, policy, and classroom practice [2].

In short, a lesson we should learn, finally, is to reject “miracle” narratives in education. 

Lessons Ignored (And Questions Unanswered)

The problem with Canter’s article and report (beyond that they lack experimental rigor) is that her claims are just as misleading and often just as incomplete as the media stories being sold.

One lesson ignored in the Mississippi story is that it suffers from “the moment” syndrome. I have been asking since the start of the “miracle” narrative: Why haven’t we looked at the historical increase in grade 4 NAEP reading scores, including an ignored spike well before the 2019 christening of “miracle”?:

A bigger lesson, however, is taking greater care when deciding if reforms work as well as what causes that success. Related, as well, is assuring that the data used to decide success or failure represents learning.

Here the Mississippi story is much different that the media “miracle” or Cantor’s argument that high-stakes accountability has worked in the state.

Several questions must be answered.

If Mississippi’s reform has worked, why does the state have the same wealth and race gaps as in 1998?

If Mississippi’s reform has worked, why does the state continue to retain about 9000 K-3 students per year?

  • 2014-2015 – 3064 (grade 3) – 12,224 K-3 retained/ 32.2% proficiency
  • 2015-2016 – 2307 (grade 3) – 11,310 K-3 retained/ 32.3% proficiency
  • 2016-2017 – 1505 (grade 3) – 9834 K-3 retained / 36.1 % proficiency
  • 2017-2018 – 1285 (grade 3) – 8902 K-3 retained / 44.7% proficiency
  • 2018-2019 – 3379 (grade 3) – 11,034 K-3 retained / 48.3% proficiency
  • 2021-2022 – 2958 (grade 3) – 10,388 K-3 retained / 46.4% proficiency
  • 2022-2023 – 2287 (grade 3) – 9,525 K-3 retained/ 51.6% proficiency
  • 2023-2024 – 2033 (grade 3) – 9,121 K-3 retained/ 57.7% proficiency
  • 2024-2025 – 2132 (grade 3) – 9250 K-3 retained/ 49.4% proficiency

And most significantly, if Mississippi reform has worked, do the test score increases in grade 4 represent greater student learning?

There is little scientific evidence on this important question, but the evidence is suggesting a principle by Gerald Bracey: “Rising test scores do not necessarily mean rising achievement.”

First, an analysis of reading reform and a statistical analysis of Mississippi test score increases suggest that those increases are statistical manipulations caused by grade retention and not student learning.

When grade 8 data are compared to grade 4, those analyses seem accurate since states behind Mississippi in grade 4 catch and pass by grade 8 (include the subgroup of Black students):

The irony here is that in 2019 when Hanford declared Mississippi reading reform a “miracle,” many uncritically jumped on that bandwagon.

The Atlantic article is receiving the same uncritical and effusive response—although it is no more credible.

Canter offers just a different compelling but ultimately misleading story.

As of 2026, there simply is no empirical evidence Mississippi’s reading reform has worked.

There remains no “science” in the multiverse of “science of reading” stories.

[1] One frustrating aspect of the “science of reading” movement has been the demand for “science” while advocates tend to use anecdotes, cherry pick evidence, and ignore research counter to their stories. Note the expectations, often ignored, for “scientific” by The Reading League:

https://radicalscholarship.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/scientifically-based-research.jpg

[2] I have four open-access articles in English Journal, documenting with research that the media stories (specifically by Emily Hanford) are misleading and inaccurate.

If you want to help with the costs of keeping my public work open access and free, please DONATE.

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P.L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), is the poetry editor for English Journal. NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. Follow his work @plthomasEdD.

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, Education Reform, Mississippi, NAEP, Research

Jan Resseger: Linda McMahon Decides Which Federal Programs Live or Die, Not Congress

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2026 //
1

Jan Resseger, the most reliable analyst of federal programs, reports on the Trump administration’s decisions to increase or decrease or eliminate federal programs at will–regardless of Congressuonal direction.

By the way, be sure to read The New Yorker‘s fascinating dissection of the career path of wrestling entrepreneur and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Wrestling prepared her for politics, says writer Zach Helfand.

A brief excerpt:

Eventually, Linda McMahon came to be “tombstoned” (held upside down and slammed on her head) by a wrestler named Kane, “stunnered” (put in a three-quarter facelock jawbreaker) by Stone Cold Steve Austin, sexually assaulted, cheated on, driven to seek a divorce, lusted over, and sedated. Vince tried to get Shane to slap her in a scene, but Shane [her son] refused. Stephanie [her daughter] slapped her, though, and she slapped Stephanie. McMahon’s most memorable story arc involved Vince demanding a divorce, triggering a nervous breakdown in the ring which rendered her catatonic. For months, Vince would roll out her limp body in a wheelchair and subject her to various humiliations. The wrestler Trish Stratus, who was kissed and groped by Vince in a scene in front of a vegetative McMahon, has recalled that during rehearsal Linda asked, “If I drool, would that be more effective for my character?”

Before the election, I foolishly predicted that Trump would never get rid of the Department of Education because many Republicans support it. I did not anticipate that Trump would appoint a Secretary willing to hollow it out by transferring most of its programs to other departments.

Resseger follows up by showing how McMahon has cut and rearranged the budget:

If you have been tracking what is happening to federal funding for the nation’s public schools, you won’t be surprised to learn that Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman continues his role as the best reporter on this subject.  Here are two updates from last week.

How will federal funding flow this year once most of the Department of Education’s programs have been sent to other federal departments through interagency agreements?

Lieberman reassures state education officials and school district leaders that most key programs will continue to have their funds released “through the U.S. Department of Education’s grant portal this summer… Programs like Title I aid for disadvantaged students and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)… allocate funds for school districts, but by law the money flows first to states in two batches, one on July 1 and another three months later… In a statement, an Education Department spokesperson said the agency is ‘committed to delivering formula funding by the July 1 deadline.”

Operation of Title I is traveling to the Department of Labor, and the work IDEA is traveling to the Department of Health and Human Services.  Lieberman describes what is expected to happen with Title I: “The Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration in recent months has advertised new education grant competitions ‘on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education,’ and the two agencies have touted their collaboration in jointly running the competitions.  Still, most staffers overseeing those programs still work for the Department of Education. The postings announcing grant availability list Education department email addresses under the section with contact information.”

To what extent did the Trump Administration Violate the Congressional power of the purse last year?

Lieberman reports that data recently released by the Department of Education shows that under Linda McMahon’s leadership, the Department of Education “sidestepped Congress on more than $1 billion in education spending.”

“The Education Department, under President Donald Trump, subsequently subtracted appropriated funding from more than a dozen programs and instead added those dollars to other priorities, according to an Education Week analysis of congressional justification documents the White House published this month as part of its fiscal year 2027 budget proposal… The Education Department typically publishes its ‘spending plan’ mere weeks after Congress passes a new fiscal year budget, confirming allocations lawmakers laid out in their budget bills.  Congress approved fiscal 2025 spending (last year’s final federal budget) in March of last year, but the Education Department’s spending plan never materialized. That means the recently published numbers offer the first glimpse at how the executive branch decided to spend funds Congress appropriated more than a year ago.”

Here are merely some of Lieberman’s examples of what the new numbers show.  “For four Education Department programs, the Trump administration spent more than what Congress had prescribed: charter schools ($60 million added), civics instruction ($140 million added), historically Black colleges and universities ($439 million added), and tribal colleges ($56 million added).  To come up with those added expenditures, the Trump administration effectively zeroed out another four programs entirely, rerouting a total of $463 million for teacher preparation, public television, university foreign-language studies programs, and Hispanic-serving higher education institutions.  For another eight programs, the executive branch underspent the allocation Congress approved. That included redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars for minority-serving institutions within a higher education grant program—Aid for Institutional Development—that the Trump administration has argued violates the Constitution.”

Lieberman explains where McMahon’s department found $60 million to add to charter school spending: “To bolster the Charter Schools program, the agency depleted the entire $31 million allocation for the Ready to Learn grant program, which supports the development of educational TV programming for young children. The remaining $29 million boot for charter schools came from portions of fiscal 2025 allocations for four other programs: Magnet Schools ($14 million), Javits Gifted and Talented ($9 million),  Statewide Family Engagement Centers ($3 million), and Assistance in Arts Education ($3 million). The Trump administration last year slashed ongoing grants for each of those four programs as well as dozens of others, arguing in many cases that individual grantees were engaged in diversity-related initiatives that contradicted the president’s priories. But for most of those changes, the department offered no public announcement, instead notifying individual grant recipients with little warning that their awards had been discontinued.”

Perhaps there will be less cutting or rearranging of Congressionally allocated education dollars in the coming year: “Lawmakers included language in the fiscal 2026 budget law they approved in February that much more explicitly restricts movement of money from one program to another. The Department has already begun soliciting new grant applications for programs it moved to disrupt or shutter last year… Lieberman reports that the ranking members of the Senate and House appropriations committees, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) “said they prioritized unambiguous guardrails in the fiscal 2026 budget to block the Trump administration from further reprogramming funds.”

Lieberman adds, however, that Office  of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought has threatened to use “pocket rescissions,’ in which the executive branch proposes to rescind appropriated funds so late in the fiscal year that the money expires whether Congress approves the changes or not. In other words, this year, Congress could allow Congressionally appropriated dollars expire.

Lieberman quotes Sarah Abernathy, who served for a decade as executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a federal budget advocacy group: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen an administration say, ‘We have tons of authority to make our own decisions about funding levels for programs.’ “

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Extremism, Trump, U.S. Department of Education
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