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Julian Vasquez Heilig: Nikole Hannah-Jones and Her Daughter

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2026 //
4

Recently, superstar journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long essay for The New York Times Magazine regretting her decision a decade earlier to put her daughter into a local public school in New York City. Not only was the school segregated, it had a disengaged principal, indifferent teachers, and low-quality academics. She came to realize that she was imposing her ideas on her daughter at the cost of her education. Now that her daughter is in high school, she is attending a highly desirable high school with high standards. Hannah-Jones told her daughter to make her own choice within the public school system. She chose an excellent public school.

There’s hardly a commentator who has not passed judgment on the essay. Right-wingers praised it as an endorsement of school choice or a condemnation of public schools. Former NYC Chancellor wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the persistence of bad public schools was the fault of Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions. His article was titled “Nikole Hannah-Jones Vs. Randi Weingarten.” He maintained that it was the unions that preserved bad schools. The solution, he argued, was non-union charter schools.

But his argument dodged the responsibility of school leaders like himself to weed out incompetent principals and replace them with good principals who set high expectations for staff and students. And, of course, he neglected the failure of thousands of charter schools, due to academic failure, misappropriation of funds, or low enrollment.

In the following essay posted on his blog, Cloaking Inequity, scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig presents a different argument. In addition to his professorship at Western Michigan University, he is a founding member of the Network for Public Education.

He writes:

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay about her daughter’s education is heartbreaking because it poses a question almost every parent understands: Did I make the right choice for my child?

Hannah-Jones made the choice more publicly and politically than most. A decade ago, she and her husband sent their daughter, Najya, to a predominantly Black, high-poverty public school in Brooklyn. They could afford other options. Instead, they wanted their own choices to reflect their belief that privileged families help reproduce educational inequality when they abandon schools serving poor Black children. Then their daughter grew old enough to judge that decision for herself.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” Najya asked her mother after discovering how her middle school compared with New York City’s most prestigious public schools. Later, she put the question even more painfully: If her parents had the resources to get her a better education, why hadn’t they? That is not really a question about school choice. It is a question about parenthood.

Every parent makes these tradeoffs, although few of us have to explain them in The New York Times. Families choose schools because of academics, income, housing, sports, religion, culture, race, language, safety, disability services, discipline, transportation, friendships, family traditions and often simply what they can afford. Rarely does one school maximize everything a family values.

A parent might choose a Seventh-Day Adventist school with fewer Advanced Placement courses because faith formation matters deeply. Another might choose a suburban school for its academics but watch a Black child struggle culturally. A family might remain in a less prestigious district because grandparents live nearby. An athlete may choose a school because of a coach or a starting opportunity. A parent of a child with disabilities may value services more than test scores. Another family may choose a culturally affirming school where their child feels known. None of those choices can be reduced to a ranking on GreatSchools.

That is partly what makes Hannah-Jones’s conclusion so complicated. Najya did experience serious academic failures. Her elementary school sometimes failed to assess her properly, return graded work or even recognize substantial gaps in her mathematics preparation. Her mother eventually discovered assignments riddled with mistakes that had never been corrected. Those are not imaginary problems created by standardized tests or middle-class expectations. Children deserve competent teachers, rigorous instruction and honest feedback.

My own research has found that teacher preparation and teacher quality matter (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005). Defending public education should never require pretending otherwise. But an educator responding to Hannah-Jones’s essay on Facebook raised the concern that has stayed with me: the article can leave readers “to blame structural problems on the usual scapegoats who never had the power to create them.” That is where I think we need to be careful.

Hannah-Jones herself provides the evidence for a more structural conclusion. Najya’s middle-school principal explains that her school enrolled everyone, including children arriving years behind academically, while selective schools concentrated students already prepared to succeed. More than one-third of students at Najya’s middle school had identified learning disabilities, compared with 17 percent at her selective high school. The school was simultaneously expected to remediate years of lost learning, teach grade-level material, manage social and behavioral needs and prepare its strongest students for elite high schools.

That is not simply a teacher-quality problem. It is institutional sorting. My research has documented versions of this dynamic for two decades. Jennifer Holme and I found persistent racial, economic and linguistic segregation long after Jim Crow formally ended (Vasquez Heilig & Holme, 2013). My colleagues and I later found intense racial segregation in charter schools as well, reminding us that giving families more choices does not automatically dismantle inequality (Vasquez Heilig et al., 2019). Research on accountability similarly showed how schools serving marginalized students can be punished for outcomes produced partly by unequal opportunities to learn (Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Vasquez Heilig et al., 2018).

School finance matters too. Davíd Martínez and I have argued that educational opportunity is fundamentally a civil-rights question because children cannot be held equally accountable when they have not been provided comparable opportunities to learn (Martínez & Vasquez Heilig, 2022). This does not absolve the adults who failed Najya. It changes the scale of the indictment. So Hannah-Jones’s story ultimately demonstrates why the parental decision is harder than “choose the better school.”

Najya eventually chose one of New York City’s highly selective public high schools. Academically, she initially struggled because her previous schooling had left gaps. But there was another cost. She had gone from Black schools where, as Hannah-Jones writes, nobody questioned whether Black children could be smart to an environment where classmates used racial slurs and questioned her intelligence. She briefly wanted to leave.

By the end of the essay, Najya herself recognizes the tradeoff. She tells her mother she is glad she did not spend her early childhood in predominantly white schools because her Black schools helped give her a strong racial identity and the confidence to challenge racism. She had also discovered something important about her more privileged classmates: They were not necessarily smarter or better behaved. “They just had more.” That may be the most important sentence in the essay.

Parents make choices. Systems distribute what there is to choose from. Honestly, I personally understand Hannah-Jones’s regret. When your child says, “I never really got the education I wanted,” intellectual arguments about the common good become painfully inadequate. I have heard that same argument from my children. Parents have a special obligation to their own children, and there is no shame in acknowledging that. But we must resist those who are turning this deeply personal story into another argument that the solution to educational inequality is for parents to make better individual choices via vouchers and charter schools. That road leads exactly where we already are.

Families with money purchase tutoring. Families with information navigate admissions systems. Families with mobility purchase homes near preferred schools. Families with social capital advocate successfully. Families without those advantages receive whatever the system leaves behind. The problem is not that parents love their own children too much. The problem is that we have constructed a competitive education system where high-quality education is rationed and doing the best for one’s own child can require leaving other children behind.

The goal should therefore not be to tell parents which sacrifice to make. Choose academics over culture. Choose integration over belonging. Choose religion over coursework. Choose athletics over proximity. Choose the collective over your child. Those are family decisions, and reasonable parents can weigh them differently. Our public responsibility is different. It is to make the consequences of those choices less brutal.

Conclusion

I should also say that I have long admired Nikole Hannah-Jones and her work. I first met her in Oakland in 2017 at the Network for Public Education conference, and I have been a fan of her scholarship and journalism (see photo). That is part of why her essay stayed with me. I read it not as an argument to defeat, but as an extraordinarily difficult question posed by a parent whose choices illuminate the choices millions of families are forced to make.

A Black child should not have to choose between cultural affirmation and rigorous academics. A poor child should not have to attend school with less because her parents earn less. A student should not need admission to a selective school to encounter advanced mathematics. And teachers in high-poverty schools should not be expected to repair years of accumulated inequality while working with fewer resources and then be blamed when they cannot perform miracles.

Hannah-Jones asks whether fighting for every Black child meant betraying her own. I think her essay points to this conclusion: There was never a perfect choice available. That is the real indictment. And it is not an accident. For generations, American education policy has created and maintained systems in which access to rigorous coursework, experienced teachers, enrichment, safety, social capital, and opportunity too often follows race, wealth, and geography. Parents are then asked to make intensely personal choices inside inequalities they did not create.

The question, then, is not whether Hannah-Jones made the right choice for her daughter, or whether another family would have been more virtuous for choosing differently. The harder question is why we continue to tolerate the American education system that makes families choose among things every child should receive together.

Please share.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Failure, New York City, Racism, Research

Do You Agree with the Education Experts?

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2026 //
67

The New York Times asked 37 education experts to rank the best ideas for reforming schools. This is a gift article. Many of you are current or retired teachers. Please read it and share your thoughts.

The experts were asked to rank the “best ideas” by their effectiveness and their cost.

Among the five “most effective ideas” were:

  1. Small-group tutoring.
  2. Science of reading.
  3. Universal pre-K.
  4. Increase per-student funding.
  5. Increase teacher pay for high-poverty schools.

The authors–Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris, and Claire Cain Miller–begin:

U.S. schools are facing a daunting problem. Students simply can’t read or do math as well as they used to.

Student test scores have declined over the last decade, in an academic slump that started before the pandemic and has continued since. Compared with 2015, reading scores are down in 83 percent of districts, and math declines are nearly as pervasive.

But improving student achievement is notoriously difficult. Do schools need more money? Better teachers? More standardized testing? Less?

What could actually help turn things around?

We asked 37 top academics and researchers who study education to rate a range of ideas for both effectiveness and cost, on a scale of 1 to 7.

*****£*******

Overall, no single idea was enough on its own, experts said. And no idea would be successful unless it was executed well. But the results showed there are a number of ideas that can work.

We asked experts to evaluate each idea for its impact on academic achievement, which is generally measured by standardized test scores.

Lots of other things matter, too, including enrichment activities like the arts, teacher work satisfaction, and student excitementabout learning. Children also have other needs beyond academics, including mental health and well-being.

But given the results of the last decade, we were interested in what could lift student achievement, which is tied to many later life outcomes, for students, society and the economy.

Interestingly, the least effective idea was “private school vouchers.” Second, reduced class size. Third, increase all teacher pay.

Among the comments, the most frequent complaint was: “Why didn’t you ask the real experts–the teachers?”

My biggest complaint about the survey and the responses is that it omits the most powerful influences on student performance in the classroom: the effects of poverty, family stability and support, health, and other factors outside the teacher’s control. According to the American Statistical Association, about 1-14% of variation in test scores is under the teachers’ control. This is not to say that teachers don’t make a difference, but that you can’t change a child’s academic performance if he or she is persistently sick, absent, has vision or dental problems, doesn’t get fed regularly, and lives in substandard housing.

I didn’t see any mention of community schools, which address some of these problems, making sure that children have medical check-ups, dental and vision screening, have a food pantry and clothing supply, offer job counseling for parents, etc. That is, the school recognizes that the children’s well-being is a necessary precondition to school performance.

I don’t have all the answers. Some of the ideas in the survey are good; some don’t go far enough. But if this I feel sure: children are at their best when they are healthy, when they are well-nourished, when they don’t worry about the physical safety of themselves or their family, when they have a stable home.

Maybe that is too much to hope for in our highly individualistic society, where everyone is on their own and expected to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even if they don’t have any bootstraps.

Recommended reading:

Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Class size, Closing schools, Community Schools, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Innovation, Literacy, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teacher Pay, Teaching, Vouchers

Florida Parents and Teachers Aghast at Downplaying of Climate Change and Evolution in K-12 Science Standards

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2026 //
13

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t want the state’s children to learn modern science. The Orlamdo Sentinel reported that parents and teachers were “gobsmacked” by the state’s new science standards. In one of the states most threatened by environmental degradation, the state has deleted the study of evolution and diminished the study of climate change.

Stephen Walker reported:

Florida’s new plan for teaching science in public schools lacks depth, skirts around the important topics of climate change and evolution and would be a “disservice” to the state’s students, dozens of parents and teachers told the Florida Department of Education late Wednesday.

Nearly 300 people attended a virtual education department forum, with nearly all 29 speakers criticizing the state’s proposed new science standards, which are benchmarks for what should be taught in science lessons in kindergarten through 12th grade. Experts who’ve reviewed them have shared similar views, calling them a step backwards

The state released its proposed standards on Sept. 25 and is now taking public comment on them, both on its website and in several meetings.

Robin Williams, a retired biology and environmental science teacher, called them a “disservice” to Florida students because they don’t fully tackle evolution.

The state’s current standards, adopted in 2008, call evolution one of science’s “big ideas” and insist it must be taught.

That makes sense and should not change, Williams said.

“Evolution is a fundamental underlying process unifying all of biology. To leave it out is ideology posing as biology,” she said.

The proposed standards barely mention evolution — a scientific theory explaining change in living species over time from natural selection that has been a cornerstone of biology for more than a century. The term “evolution,” in fact, is never defined in the new high school life sciences standards, though the concepts are sprinkled across several units.

The new standards would replace the current set, adopted after a months-long, statewide fight over the inclusion of evolution as a required subject of study. Those who opposed the 2008 standards argued creationism, or the biblical story that God created all living things, should be taught alongside evolution.

Education Commissioner Henry Mack seemed to some to re-ignite that fight with a statement released with the new standards that included a reference to “the book of creation.”

But Thursday morning he took to social media to insist he was not “smuggling a Sunday-school lesson into Biology,” adding in his post on X that, “I am not advocating religious influence in the standards. I am opposing the opposite error: treating nature as a prop for adult ideology, or treating wonder as something to be talked out of children by leftist zealots.”

His original statement said, “The classical tradition taught that nature is intelligible because it is ordered—that the book of creation can be read by reason. Florida’s new science standards will form students who observe carefully, reason rigorously, and treat the natural world as something given to be known, not invented.”

During Wednesday’s forum, one parent asked for clarification on what Mack meant by that. But state education department employees facilitating the meeting did not respond to that or other questions from speakers, instead thanking attendees and encouraging them to submit their concerns in writing.

Chris Vercelli, a parent in Sarasota County who regularly attends government meetings to preach Christianity, suggested at Wednesday’s meeting that he read the commissioner’s statement as an endorsement of his views and said he was in “full support” of the new standards.

It was “refreshing” to hear the state was “entertaining the idea of teaching creation and intelligent design in schools,” he said, referring to the argument that an “intelligent cause” better explains living things than evolution by natural selection.

“The way that evolution is taught really is like a bait and switch … that means that everything originated from primordial soup, and there is no God. That’s just ridiculous. That is like total non-science,” Vercelli said.

The proposed standards also give little attention to human-made climate change and do not use that term, instead referring to “anthropogenic activities” that affect “Earth’s systems.”

Brad Dupke, an Earth science teacher and geologist in Hillsborough County, asked how the state expects him to teach a required unit on fossils without teaching evolution and climate change.

“We need to call a spade a spade instead of trying to dance around what it is. I can’t teach geologic history of the Earth without being able to say how the climate changed,” he said.

In addition to complaints about the state’s proposed handling of evolution and climate change, several speakers said the standards were too numerous and lacked rigor and others criticized the way the state posted its proposal for public review. Instead of a single document, the department initially posted each standard on a separate page, requiring clicking through hundreds of pages to view all the standards.

I have s hunch that students in Florida don’t learn about the Scopes trials read the fictionalized version Inherit the Wind.

Tags
Categories Accountability, Censorship, Curriculum, DeSantis, Environment, Ethics, Florida, Science

Is It 1950 Again? Provost at University of Texas-Austin Removes Majors in All Ethnic, Racial, and Gender Studies.

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2026 //
5

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a professor of educational leadership at Western Michigan University. As a writer and scholar in Texas, California, Kentucky, and now Michigan, he has concentrated on issues of equity, inclusion, and diversity.

He writes here about the current drive to turn back the clock on civil rights in Texas. To put it mildly, he eviscerates the decision by the Provost at the University of Texas in Austin to close down

He writes:

Is the provost at UT-Austin a right wing political operative?

The University of Texas at Austin is eliminating majors in African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Race, Indigeneity, and Migration. These are not abstract academic labels. They represent the histories, intellectual traditions, and lived experiences of communities that built Texas and continue to shape the nation.

The manner in which this happened is almost as disturbing as the decision itself. Faculty members reportedly were asked to design proposals to preserve the existing majors inside the provost-initiatives consolidated Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, but the Daily Texan reported that Office of the Provost rejected that proposal. According to Professor Danielle Pilar Clealand, interim chair, faculty then discovered that the majors had already been removed from the admissions application while they were still working to redesign and save them.

That is not shared governance. It is administrative maneuvering designed to make consultation meaningless.

Vasquez Heilig explains that Provost William Inboden was imported in 2025, along with several professors from the University of Florida’s Alexander Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, which was part of a rightwing effort to increase the conservative movement in higher education. Inboden was director of the Institute.

Vasquez Heilig points out:

I have not seen evidence of a formal numerical quota for conservative professors. But when public resources build institutions expressly promoted as ideological counterweights, while programs studying marginalized communities are dismantled, the result resembles an ideological preference whether administrators call it an official quota or not. Political favoritism that overwhelms qualifications does not become academic freedom simply because its supporters describe themselves as restoring balance

He has faced the pressure from the right at his own university and paid the price personally:

I have discussed before that when I served as provost at Western Michigan University, I faced pressure to close Gender and Women’s Studies. The Faculty Senate recommended against closure, and I agreed with the faculty despite intense internal pressure to do otherwise. I paid a political price, and I would make the same decision again.

I also advocated for Black student success and community-centered initiatives while several deans complained about and opposed those efforts. Those complaints had consequences for me, but leadership without risk is merely management. If leaders support marginalized communities only when nobody powerful objects, they do not truly support those communities.

As provost, I said no to closing Gender and Women’s Studies because the university did not belong to me or to the loudest administrators around the cabinet table. It belonged to the students, faculty, staff, alumni, and communities whose labor, knowledge, and trust gave the institution meaning.

We must be of the people because the people are the institution. Buildings, endowments, rankings, and administrative titles are empty without them.

Please open the link and learn how pressure from wealthy alumni is reshaping higher education in states like Texas.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Texas

Homeschooling Enables Abusive Parents to Do What They Wish to Their Children

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2026 //
12

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.

CNN told the story of the Turpin family.

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.

Categories Arts Education, Curriculum, Home Schooling

How the Billionaires Manufactured an Education “Crisis”

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2026 //
7

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.

He writes:

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.

As the Big Education Ape’s deep dive into school funding makes devastatingly clear, the playbook was never subtle:

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.

As Big Education Ape’s piece on reading struggles frames it with characteristic bluntness: if you’re struggling to read this, you have some very rich friends to thank.

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

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.

🔗 Related Reading from Big Education Ape:

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

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.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Literacy, Privatization, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Nancy Bailey: How Common Core and the “Science of Reading” Undermine Writing

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2026 //
3

Nancy Bailey is a retired teacher who has a deep understanding of teaching. Hers is the voice of experience.

She writes here about recent innovations that have complicated the teaching of writing.

Bailey writes:

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.

In fact, another Ed. Week report (Schwartz, 2026) indicates that New Hampshire is getting $8M for evidence-based writing that will include online programming.

Arizona is getting $11.5M for the Arizona Education Foundation to partner with the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD). This includes Science of Writing online courses for purchase to teach teachers to teach students to master self-regulation to work on their own.

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.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Literacy

Florida Couple Homeschooled Their Grandchildren While Confining Them to a Truck and Sexually Abusing Them

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2026 //
13

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?

The New York Times reported:

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 victims are the biological grandchildren of Keysha Monique Epps, 51, of Atlanta, according to Jae Williams, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, which filed charges against the suspects.

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.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Ethics, Evil, Florida, Home Schooling, Vouchers

Reading Fiction Is Good for Your Brain and Your Social Skills

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2026 //
6

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.

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core, Creativity, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Reform, NAEP, Standardized Testing

James Traub: The Surprisingly Impressive Reading List in Texas

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2026 //
15

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.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Literature, Texas
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