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NYC: Debate Transformed a Low-Performing Middle School, Whose Team Won National Championship

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2025 //
4

MS 50 in Brooklyn was on a list of low-performing schools in 2015 and at risk of being closed down. What a difference a decade makes?

Michael Elsen-Rooney of Chalkbeat writes about the remarkable turnaround of the school after it made debate the centerpiece of the its activities.

This year, the highly disciplined students from MS 50, a high-poverty school, won the national debate championships, besting teams from private schools and affluent districts.

Students from the MS 50 debate team.

Standing on stage in Des Moines, Iowa, in June at the awards ceremony for the nation’s largest middle school debate tournament, 14-year-old Erick Williams was shocked to hear the announcement coming from the podium.

He turned to his partner, Anedwin Moran, to make sure he hadn’t heard wrong. The two eighth graders from M.S. 50 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, were national champions.

It was the capstone of a remarkable debate journey for Williams, Moran, and M.S. 50, which has a student poverty rate of nearly 90% and a decade ago was on the list of the most troubled schools in the city and at risk of closure. Since then, Principal Ben Honoroff has embraced debate as a way to transform the school’s academic outcomes and reputation. M.S. 50’s debate program has captured multiple citywide titles, inspired local elementary schools in the area to launch their own programs, and brought the first-ever Spanish language debaters to the National Speech and Debate Association’s annual tournament.

But a title at the nation’s most prestigious middle school debate tournament had eluded M.S. 50 — until this year.

For Honoroff, it was validation not just of the hard work and talent of the kids and staff but also of the unique way the school approaches debate.

“It’s a victory for the way we are interpreting policy debate: as a way of having kids be critical about the resolution and invoke their own lived experience,” he said.

In the world of competitive policy debate, students spend long hours outside school poring through dense academic material to craft arguments they often try to cram into tight time limits by speed-talking. The format has historically favored private and affluent public schools with the resources to hire multiple coaches and send students to tutors and debate camps, said Honoroff, a longtime coach.

At M.S. 50, staffers believe students make the best arguments when they believe what they’re saying — and when it draws on their life experience.

“While we might be way behind our competitors in terms of resources … what we have more than them often is lived experiences around issues of equity and justice,” Honoroff said. “When we can teach our kids to leverage that, then they become really powerful debaters.”

That was on display at this year’s competition, where teams had to make a case for or against the resolution that the federal government should increase intellectual property protections. M.S. 50 decided to center its argument on graffiti, a subject many of the students knew first-hand living in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Williamsburg.

They argued that local graffiti artists, who, like the M.S. 50 students, are mostly Black and Latino, are often unfairly targeted by law enforcement, even while their more famous counterparts, like the artist “Banksy,” are celebrated and their work can increase property values in gentrifying areas. 

For eighth grader Coco Suzuki, it was an easy argument to make. She personally knows graffiti artists who “have suffered from their art.”

“If it [the argument] has a connection to your life,” said Pryce Sanders, another member of the debate team, “everything just flows better.”

Debate helps a school turn the page

At M.S. 50, debate is woven into almost every aspect of the school. 

Every teacher gets training about how to bring “evidence-based argumentation” into their classes. On top of that, about 120 of the school’s nearly 400 students, roughly a third, enroll in a designated debate elective, where they get a mix of reading support and practice debating in public — along with the chance to compete in local tournaments. A select group of eight students meets outside of school and travels to tournaments across the country. 

Honoroff credits the focus on debate with helping boost the school’s academic achievement and shoring up declining enrollment, which dipped to a low of under 200 students in 2015.

“If they’re in debate, they’re working on their reading, their writing, their speaking, their listening, their teamwork, their activism,” he said. “We know that they’ll be reading more on one Saturday at a debate tournament than they probably read the whole week.” 

Inspiration, advice, and best practices for the classroom — learn from teachers like you.

The activity can be especially beneficial for students who are behind grade level in reading or who are still learning English, a group that makes up about 16% of the school, Honoroff said.

But he knew English language learners were still at a massive disadvantage in competitive tournaments. That’s why M.S. 50 pushed for permission to allow some debaters to compete in Spanish at the national debate tournament — the first time that had happened in the tournament’s nearly 100-year history. M.S. 50 pays for its own interpreters, who translate both the oral arguments and written documents between Spanish and English.

This year, two of the eight members of M.S. 50’s national debate tournament team were Spanish-speaking immigrants who arrived in the country last school year. One of them, Arceny Reynoso, who came from the Dominican Republic, won a speaking award.

“I didn’t expect this prize,” she said in Spanish. At first, she suffered debilitating tremors and shivers when she got up to speak. But this year, judges were impressed by her confidence and forcefulness, said her partner, Briana Paz.

As M.S. 50’s debate program has grown in size and stature, the effects have rippled outward. 

Several elementary schools in the area have now launched their own debate programs. Students like Williams and Sanders have been debating since they were in third grade and sought out M.S. 50 specifically for its debate program.

Please open the link to finish reading the article.

Categories Curriculum, Discipline, New York City

Mississippi: Federal Judge Enjoins State Ban on DEI

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2025 //
7

I am reposting this news because the earlier version did not have a link. I added additional information about the decision and the Judge.

This decision blocks all efforts to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the state of Mississippi. If ever there was a state that needs DEI to heal from the burden of a racist history, it’s Mississippi.

The Mississippi Free Press reported that Federal District Judge Henry Wingate blocked the implementation of the state’s ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public schools.

Mississippi’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools remains blocked after a federal judge granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction in an Aug. 18 decision.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi also denied the defendants’ requests to dismiss the case, calling the defendants’ points “moot.”

“This Court generally agrees with Plaintiffs’ view of the challenged portions of (House Bill 1193).

It is unconstitutionally vague, fails to treat speech in a viewpoint-neutral manner, and carries with it serious risks of terrible consequences with respect to the chilling of expression and academic freedom,” U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate wrote in the Court’s decision.

The law, which the Mississippi Legislature approved and Gov. Tate Reeves signed in April, prohibits Mississippi public schools and institutions of higher learning from teaching, creating or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The Republican-backed law also bans schools from requiring diversity statements or training during hiring, admission and employment processes in educational institutions.

Public institutions are also not allowed to teach or “endorse divisive concepts or concepts promoting transgender ideology, gender-neutral pronouns, deconstruction of heteronormativity, gender theory (or) sexual privilege,” the law says.

H.B. 1193 would prohibit public schools from requiring diversity statements or training in hiring, admission and employment processes at educational institutions.

Preliminary injunctions are dependent upon four qualities: “a substantial likelihood of success on the merits; the irreparable injury to the movants if the injunction is denied; whether the threatened injury outweighs any damage that the injunction might cause the defendant; and the public interest.”

Wingate Highlights Threat to Academic Freedom

Judge Wingate also granted the plaintiffs’ request to add class action claims to the lawsuit, meaning the injunction will apply to teachers, professors and students across the state. The plaintiffs’ lawyers sought the addition after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June limited the ability of federal judges to grant sweeping injunctions.

Judge Wingate was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa and received his law degree from Yale Law School. He was appointed as a federal district judge by President Ronald Reagan.

Justice Henry Wingate
Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Curriculum, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Justice, Mississippi

Jennifer Frey: College Students Are Eager to Engage in the Liberal Arts

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2025 //
22

Jennifer Frey served as Dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College. It required students to read deeply in classic tests and to converse vigorously with each other.

More than a quarter of the student body signed up for this rigorous class.

Yet two years after the Honor College opened, it was closed. Its leadrs said that students didn’t want this kind of education, the heavy focus on the liberal arts and the Great Cobversation about the meaning of truth goodness, and beauty. Dean Frey thinks the administrators were wrong.

She wrote in The New York Times.

University students, we’re told, are in crisis. Even at our most elite institutions, they have emaciated attention spans. They can’t — or just won’t — read books. They use artificial intelligence to write their essays. They lack resilience and are beset by mental healthcrises. They complain that they can’t speak their minds, hobbled by an oppressive ideological monoculture and censorship regimes. As a philosopher, I am most distressed by reports that students have no appetite to study the traditional liberal arts; they understand their coursework only as a step toward specific careers.

Over the past two years as the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, focused on studying the classic texts of the Western tradition, I’ve seen little evidence of these trends. The curriculum I helped build and teach required students to read thousands of pages of difficult material every semester, decipher historical texts across disciplines and genres and debate ideas vigorously and civilly in small, Socratic seminars. It was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms. For the past two years, we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum.

Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. It certainly captured the hearts and minds of our students.

Sadly, this education has fared less well with my university’s new administration. After the former president and provost departed this year, the newly installed provost informed me that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” That meant eliminating the entire dean’s office and associated staff positions as well as many of our distinctive programs and — through increased class sizes — effectively ending our small seminars. (A representative of the university told The Times that while it had “restructured” the Honors College, the university believes that academics and student experiences will “remain the same.”)

The stated reason for these cuts was to save money — the same reason the University of Tulsa gave in 2019 when it targeted many of the same traditional forms of liberal learning for elimination. Back then, the administration attempted to turn the university into a vocational school. Those efforts largely failed, in part because of lack of student support for the new model.

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An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

For those who do care to see liberal learning thrive on our campuses, the work my colleagues and I did at Tulsa should be a model. How did we do it? We created an intentional community where our students lived in the same dorm and studied the same texts. We shared wisdom, virtue and friendship as our goals. When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need.

At Tulsa, we invited our students to enter “the great conversation” with some of the most influential thinkers of our inherited intellectual tradition. For their first two years they encountered a set curriculum of texts from Homer to Hannah Arendt. These texts were carefully chosen by an interdisciplinary faculty because they transcend their time and place in two senses: They influenced a broader tradition, and they had the potential to help our students reflect in a sustained way on what it means to be a good human being and citizen. Our seminars were led by faculty members who did not lecture or use secondary sources. Rather, the role of the faculty members was to foster and guide conversations among our students that allowed them to think through these questions for and among themselves.

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That our students threw themselves into the task of reading and discussing the great works with one another should not shock. When we — students and teachers alike — share wisdom as a common goal, we will want to do the reading, to dispute one another, to exchange ideas and arguments, to propose amendments and to offer our personal insights. Liberal learning occurs in dialogue with those who object to us, who offer a different perspective or experience — who read the same book as we do in a completely different light.

At the Honors College, we taught our students that wisdom is a distant goal, and that we need to work on ourselves as we try to approach it. We need to cultivate what our college called “the virtues of liberal learning.” For example, we need to cultivate the humility to recognize that we have much to learn from the past and from one another. We need to cultivate a love of truth for its own sake and the courage to speak our minds and to follow the truth wherever it may lead us — even when it leads us into difficult waters where our disagreements are deep and unsettling.

When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.

Categories Class size, Curriculum, Education Reform, Higher Education, Joy

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters Protects Students from “Radical Leftist Ideology”

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2025 //
14

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes about the latest effort to impose MAGA ideology on the students of Oklahoma by State Superintendent Ryan Walters. Walters is worried that Oklahoma might be flooded with teachers from “woke” states like California and New York, who would bring their “leftist ideology” with them. To guard against that possibility, he has hired PragerU to create a test for teachers to determine whether they have the correct patriotic ideology.

Mr. Walters has set himself up as the moral exemplar for the state. Meanwhile, as we learned in the last few days, Mr. Walters apparently watches porn on his office TV.

Thompson writes:

I’ve been wondering how recent events, like the attacks on Iranian nuclear plants, will be taught in History classes. Will state standards require teaching that President Trump was “right about everything,” and thus deserved the Nobel Peace Prize because he completely “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity?

Rules for how the Israel-Iran war should be taught were immediately issued by Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters. In a memo about teaching about the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict, (which, confusingly, initially had the subject line of “Student Transfer Page Now Open”), Walters wrote, “There will be zero tolerance for a Liberal, pro-terrorist agenda indoctrinating Oklahoma students.”

The Oklahoman reported on Superintendent Walters’ demands:

“Oklahoma kids will be taught facts, not indoctrination,” reads the memo, issued via email on Tuesday, June 24. “That means presenting the history of Israel and their fight to rightly exist in the world, including the atrocities of the Holocaust and the current struggle with Iran, in a way that is historically grounded, intellectually honest, and free from antisemitic bias.”

Walters had been explicit in protecting public school students from the “indoctrination” higher education students supposedly received in terms of equivalency between Israel and Hamas. He thus made it clear that the K-12 curriculum would teach that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Of course, Iranian and Hamas leaders are terrorists who I would never defend. But Walters has previously made it clear that a teachers’ union is a “terrorist group.”

It must be remembered when studying the historic differences between democracies and terrorists that Walters doesn’t believe that our system is perfect. After all, he snuck this into the state’s history standards:

Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities and in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends. 

But, how will Walters make sure that “woke” teachers don’t defy his mandates?

The Oklahoman reported that a month before the school year will start, and despite the teacher shortage, most teachers have been hired, Walters says that a PragerU-backed assessment, will be completed and given to teachers from California and states with “progressive education policies.” And as KOSU reported, “Walters did not disclose which other states would apply to the mandate.”

But, “the assessment will test educators’ knowledge on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism and the ‘fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.’”

Walters further explained, “’As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safe guarded [sic] from radical leftist ideology that California and New York have fostered.’” And, “’teacher’s [sic] who move from these states will not be receiving a teaching certificate unless they pass our new assessment.’”

Granted, Walters’ education mandates are completely unhinged, but at least his two recent orders show that he is thinking ahead, preparing for rapid historical and economic changes. After all, what would happen in Oklahoma schools, where teachers’ starting salaries are 45th in the nation, if they are flooded with California teachers whose average pay was $101,084, or $40,000 more that the Oklahoma average? If that were to happen, how could Oklahoma raise “a generation of patriots, not activists?”

Categories Curriculum, Oklahoma

Brookings Institution: What Recent Supreme Court Decisions Mean for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2025 //
3

It is obvious that the rightwing Supreme Court tilts decidedly in favor of religious rights and religious schools. The six-member majority seems to have forgotten about separation of church and state and about the “establishment clause,” which forbids government endorsement of religious schools.

The Brookings Institution invited noted scholars to reflect on the Court’s recent decisions and how they are likely to affect public schools.

This is an excellent collection of short commentaries by scholars, not ideologues.

It opens:

The 2024-2025 Supreme Court term was a consequential one for K-12 public education. The Court considered the legality of religious charter schools (Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond), the rights of students with disabilities to access a public education (A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools), and whether parents should be allowed to opt their children out of lessons or access to curriculum material that conflicts with their religious beliefs (Mahmoud v. Taylor).

In this piece, we invited experts on education law and policy to share their reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions this term.

A few excerpts.

Robert Kim writes that the Supreme Court is enthralled by the “free exercise clause” of the First Amendment.

There is a way to characterize the results in the three Supreme Court cases this term touching most directly on K-12 public education in minimalist fashion. Let’s begin there.

In AJT v. Osseo School District (2025), the Court held that parents of students with disabilities who sue public schools for discriminating against their child in violation of federal disability rights laws must prove no more than what litigants would have to prove in other disability discrimination contexts. This holding is logical, unsurprising, and consistent with Supreme Court rulings in recent years that affirm the rights of students with disabilities and eliminate administrative legal hurdles in their path (see Endrew F. and Fry in 2017, and Perez in 2023).

Staying with the minimalist approach, in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), the Court ruled that the disallowing parents the ability to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum violated parents’ rights to religious free exercise under the First Amendment. The Court’s ruling does notprohibit public schools from adopting inclusive curriculum on LGBTQ+ issues or any other topic, nor does it disturb the basic equal protection principle that public schools must treat all students equally. Parents have long had the ability to opt their children out of various school curricula and activities, so in a sense, Mahmoud simply attaches more finely polished First Amendment armament to an existing right. 

Finally, in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond (2025), the Court issued a one-sentence per curiam (unauthored) opinion announcing that it was “equally divided” (due to Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recusal from the case). The 4-4 deadlock thus affirmed a prior Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling prohibiting what would have been, for the first time in modern U.S. history, the establishment of a religious public school.

And yet. When we remove our minimalist blinders, one can’t help but be deeply troubled by what the two latter cases involving religion portend for the future. There’s language in the majority opinion in Mahmoud that signals the Court’s desire to resist a growing perception–fueled in part by the Court’s own, still-recent rulings sanctioning same-sex marriage and prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ+ employees–that LGBTQ+ equality is a normative value in American law and society. And, but for Justice Barrett’s recusal in Drummond, the Court almost certainly would have approved the establishment of a public school run by the Catholic Church.

Running through Mahmoud and the oral argument in Drummond are signs that this Court continues to be enthralled by the Free Exercise Clause–to such an extent that it is willing elevate religious rights above other constitutional interests, including the separation of church and state and equal protection. These signs, I fear, spell deep trouble for public education and the rights of students in ways that will be revealed by the Court over the next couple of years.

Derek Black sees trouble ahead:

Public education survived what risked being the most painfully consequential decision in half a century in Drummond—or at least survived to fight another day—while suffering a stiff smack on the hand in Mahmoud. 

With Drummond, forcing states to approve religious charter schools would have delivered control over what it means to be a public school into private hands. Taxpayers would have to pick up the bill for religious schools but have no control over what those schools teach or whether all students have equal access to them. Publicly funding religious schools would also radically reshape funding for public schools. Religious schools that have long operated on tuition may shift their costs onto taxpayers, and many new religious charter schools would surely open. States would face either increasing taxes or cutting the already-too-small education pie into smaller and smaller pieces. The consequences of religious charter schools are important to understand, since the question will almost certainly come before the Court again in the coming years.

Mahmoud is trickier. The threshold question was whether the school’s LGBTQ+ books and curriculum burden parental rights. Prior precedent would have said no, but courts have been exceedingly stingy in recognizing burdens on parental rights and exceedingly deferential on the related matter of school curriculum and the possibility of censorship—almost to the point of absurdity. Whatever you think of the parental burdens issue, we were long overdue for an update on where the Court stands vis-à-vis curriculum. The problem for the Court has been how to draw a line that does not micromanage local school decision-making. It remains unclear where exactly the line on parental burden is now, but it is clear the court lowered the bar for establishing religious burden. That means schools can expect new challenges on topics like vaccine requirements, absences, and student codes of conduct.

Regardless, schools are still free to promote inclusive values and curriculum. And to be clear, the Court did not give students license to harass others based on religious beliefs. Schools can and should continue to prohibit and punish inappropriate behavior—and stick to their values.

Rachel M. Perera predicts that the Court’s decisions have created thorny challenges for schools:

Public education is under attack—from the expansion of universal private school choice programs that are siphoning monies away from already cash-strapped public schools to the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal education department and the recent withholding of Congressionally mandated federal school funding. And the Drummond and Mahmoud decisions indicate that the Court is more likely to accelerate attacks on public education than to forestall them.  

Both Drummond and Mahmoud, along with other recent decisions of this court—e.g., Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (a ruling in favor of a high school football coach who was fired from a public school for leading postgame prayers) and Carson v. Makin (which struck down a Maine law prohibiting the use of public funds for religious schools)—are evidence of rapidly eroding divides between religion and public life.  

Public schools narrowly avoided catastrophe with the split 4-4 decision in Drummond, but the question of religious charter schools will almost certainly come before the Court again—and under more favorable conditions. Religious charter schools would have major implications for the health of our public education system, the charter school sector, and education funding.

With Mahmoud, the Court ruled that parents should be allowed to opt their children out of school curriculum and programming that conflicts with their religious beliefs. Where future courts will draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate concerns remains to be seen. But what we do know is that this decision adds another layer of costly complexity to the already challenging landscape that school districts are facing given the rise in statewide universal private school choice programs, enrollment declines, and budget shortfalls.

Worse, the Mahmoud decision will undermine local efforts to make school programming and curriculum more pluralistic and inclusive. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, because school districts are resource-constrained and risk-averse, “schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections.” And we’ve seen this happen before. After the wave of anti-critical race theory state laws in 2021 and 2022, many teachers reported preemptively changing their instruction in the face of potentially costly conflict.

At a time when schools are in dire need of more resources and support, the Court has added only more challenges to their plate.

Open the link to read the excellent contributions by Derek Black and Preston Green.

Categories Curriculum, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

404 Media: White House Partners with PragerU to Produce Cheerful Videos about U.S. History

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2025 //
9

I recently subscribed to 404 Media, which offers fascinating content about technology, like this post by Samantha Cole about the collaboration between the White House and PragerU. The post shows different AI-generated videos of the Founding Fathers, speaking and animated. There is a hackneyed phrase about “bringing history to life.” Now you can see it happen, even though it’s fake and politically slanted.

Does it bear repeating that PragerU is not a university by any definition? Or that its founder Dennis Prager was a rightwing talk-show host before he started hawking his whitewashed history videos? Or that some red states have adopted his videos for classroom instruction even though Prager is not a historian and has no credentials to teach history?

Samantha Cole:

Conservative content mill PragerU is partnering with the White House to make AI-generated videos of founding fathers and Revolutionary War-era randos.

PragerU is a nonprofit organization with a mission “to promote American values through the creative use of digital media, technology and edu-tainment,” according to its website. It’s been criticized for advancing climate denial and slavery apologism, frequently publishes videos critical of “wokeness” and “DEI,” and is very concerned about “the death of the West.” It has also been increasingly integrated into school curricula around the country.

PragerU held a launch event for the series, “Road to Liberty,” on June 25. Secretary Linda McMahon took some time away from dismantling the Department of Education to speak at the event. In person at the White House, visitors can tour a display of notable Revolutionary War people and places, and scan a QR code on displays that take them to PragerU’s AI-generated videos of people from that time period speaking. 

Each of the videos highlights a different person who was alive during the signing of the Declaration of Independence, from former presidents to relatively minor players in the fight for independence. The videos are clearly AI-generated, with the sepia-toned peoples’ mouths moving almost independently from the rest of their faces in some of them. In one, an AI-generated John Adams says “facts do not care about our feelings,” a phrase commonly attributed to conservative commentator and PragerU contributor Ben Shapiro. 

At the end of the videos, there’s a logo for the White House with the text “brought to you by PragerU,” and a disclaimer: “The White House is grateful for the partnership with PragerU and the U.S. Department of Education in the production of this museum. This partnership does not constitute or imply U.S. Government or U.S. Department of Education endorsement of PragerU.”

Professor of history Seth Cotlar spotted the videos in a thread on Bluesky….

I asked Cotlar, as someone who specializes in American history and the rise of the far-right, what stood out to him about these videos. I thought it was odd, I said, that they chose to include people like politician and disgraced minister Lyman Hall and obscure poet Francis Hopkinson alongside more well-known figures like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. 

“You’re right to note that it’s a pretty odd collection of figures they’ve chosen,” Cotlar said. “My guess is that this is part of the broader right wing populist push to frame themselves as the grassroots ‘true Americans,’ and they’re including all of these lesser known figures with the hopes that their viewers will be like ‘oh wow, look at all of these revolutionary freedom fighters like me who were just kinda ordinary guys like me but who still changed history.’” 

He also said it’s noteworthy that the “Road to Liberty” lineup so far is almost entirely white men, including the random dudes like Hall and Hopkinson. “The lack of any pretense to inclusion is pretty notable. Even conservative glosses on the Revolution from the pre-Trump era would have included things like the Rhode Island Regiment or Lemuel Haynes or Phyllis Wheatley. Needless to say, they absolutely do not include Deborah Sampson,” Cotlar said. All of the people in the “coming soon” section on PragerU’s website are also white men. 

AI slop has become the aesthetic of the right, with authoritarians around the world embracing ugly, lazy, mass-produced content like PragerU’s founding father puppets. Here in the U.S., we have President Donald Trump hawking it on his social media accounts, including AI-generated images of himself as the Pope and “Trump Gaza,” an AI video and song depicting the West Bank as a vacation paradise where Trump parties alongside his former bestie Elon Musk. As Republicans used the response to Hurricane Helene to blame migrants, Amy Kremer, founder of Women for Trump, posted an AI image of a child caught in a flood hugging a puppy and then said she didn’t care that it wasn’t real: “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she wrote on X. Mike Lee shared the same image. AI slop makes for quick and easy engagement farming, and now it’s being produced in direct partnership with the White House.

I’m not sure what app or program PragerU is using to make these videos. I thought, at first, that they might be using one of the many basic lipsyncing or “make this old photo come alive” mobile apps on the market now. But the videos look better, or at least more heavily produced, than most of those apps are capable of. Just to make sure they haven’t somehow advanced wildly in the last few months since I checked one out, I tried one of them, Revive, and uploaded an image of John Adams to see if it would return anything close to what PragerU’s putting out. It did not. 

The PragerU videos aren’t this bad, but they also aren’t as good as what would come out of Veo 3, the newest AI video generator, which generates highly realistic videos complete with sound and speech, from text prompts. I gave Veo a painting of John Adams and told it what to say; PragerU probably isn’t using this generator, because the result is much more realistic than what’s in the “Road to Liberty” series, even when I use a screenshot from one of their videos.

JOHN ADAMS IN VEO 3 USING A PAINTING AS A PROMPT.

On the off chance the culprit is Midjourney—although the series’ style and the way the subjects’ mouths move almost independently of the rest of their faces don’t match what I’ve seen of Midjourney’s videos—I tried that one, too. I just gave Midjourney the same Adams portrait and a prompt for it to animate him praising the United States and it returned a raving lunatic, silently screaming. 

Striking out so far, I emailed Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and Chief Science Officer of synthetic media detection company GetReal, and asked if he had any leads. He said it looked similar to what comes out of AI video creation platform HeyGen, which creates AI talking heads and generates speech for them using ElevenLabs. I tried this on screenshots of the avatars in PragerU’s Martha Washington and John Adams videos to see if the puppet-mouth-style matched up, and they were pretty close.

0:00

/0:011×

HEYGEN JOHN ADAMS

HEYGEN MARTHA WASHINGTON

PragerU’s videos are still more heavily produced than what I could make using the free version of HeyGen; it’s possible they used a combination of these to make the videos, plus some old-fashioned video editing and animation to create the final products. PragerU reported almost $70 million in income last year, they can afford the effort. 

“While the PragerU stuff is distinctly terrible, it’s not like our culture has commemorated the Revolution with high-minded sophistication,” Cotlar told me. “I was 8 during the bicentennial and while I definitely learned some stuff about the founding era, most of what I absorbed was pretty schlocky.” He mentioned the “Bicentennial minutes” that were broadcast in 1975 and 76, sponsored by Shell, and which TV critic John J. O’Connor called “so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless.” The series won an Emmy.

In the last two years, several states, beginning with Florida, have approved PragerU content to be taught in public school classrooms. In Oklahoma, teachers relocating from states with “progressive education policies” will have to undergo an assessment in partnership with PragerU to determine if they’re allowed to teach. “If you want to teach here, you’d better know the Constitution, respect what makes America great, and understand basic biology,” State Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a press release. “We’re raising a generation of patriots, not activists, and I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep leftist propaganda out of our classrooms….”

Open the link to continue reading.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She’s the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.

Samantha Cole

404 Media is a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.

© 2025 404 MEDIA. PUBLISHED WITH GHOST.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, History, Trump

Johann Neem: Is the Supreme Court On Track to Outlaw Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2025 //
8

Johann Neem is a professor of history at Western Washington University. He is the author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. His essay appeared originally in Education Week. The question Neem poses is this: Should students be allowed to opt out of any discussion of issues that offend their religion? The Supreme Court said yes. Need questions whether this is possible in a school where parents hold very different views.

He wrote:

On June 27, the Supreme Court released its decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor. The decision has not received the attention it merits. A close reading of the conservative majority’s opinion suggests that the high court is moving toward determining that public schooling violates the First Amendment of the Constitution. The decision could mean the end of public education in America.

The case concerned the Montgomery County, Md., board of education’s decision to integrate LGBTQ+ inclusive readings into its literacy curriculum to further its goal of representing diversity. At first, the district permitted parents to opt out their children, but when that policy became unworkable, it decided that parents would no longer be notified when the books were being used.

In response, several parents sued, arguing that exposing their children to the books threatened their right to raise their children according to their faith.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the parents. The court’s majority opinion concluded that exposing students to progressive ideas about marriage and gender placed an unconstitutional burden on parents’ religious liberties. Writing for the court’s six conservative justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. argued that the determining precedent is Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), in which the court decided that a law mandating all children attend high school violated the religious liberties of the Amish community.

The majority determined that Yoder, far from an isolated case concerning a discrete community, is a general precedent applicable to all parents. In other words, all parents are Amish now, with the right to require the public schools to protect their children from curricula that burdens their capacity to raise their children according to their faith.

What, then, constitutes a burden on religious freedom? The court first disputed the school board’s claim to be merely exposing students, arguing that the record showed that the school board’s goal was to teach students to support same-sex marriage and gender fluidity.

If the court had stopped there, that would have been one thing, but Alito makes an additional move, arguing that even exposure to ideas that go against parents’ faith could be unconstitutional. The issue is not whether public schools coerce students’ beliefs but whether introducing an idea might undermine parents’ religious freedom. “We reject this chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children,” Alito wrote.

In her dissent, signed by the three liberal justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responds that the court’s majority decision is untenable. “Given the great diversity of religious beliefs in this country,” she writes, “countless interactions that occur every day in public schools might expose children to messages that conflict with a parent’s religious beliefs.”

Sotomayor predicts the result of the decision will be “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.” “Never, in the context of public schools or elsewhere, has this Court held that mere exposure to concepts inconsistent with one’s religious beliefs could give rise to a First Amendment claim.” Ultimately, Sotomayor concludes, “to presume public schools must be free of all such exposure is to presume public schools out of existence.”

Sotomayor’s objection is ultimately practical: The majority’s opinion is so broad and its criteria so loose that public schools will not be able to function. Instead of elected school boards working things out locally, courts will ultimately adjudicate all curricular decisions at great cost of time and money.

Within the court’s majority opinion, however, lies a deeper threat to the existence of public schools. Because the court determined that exposure to objectionable material violates parents’ rights, policies involving that exposure are subject to “strict scrutiny,” the highest standard of judicial review. This level of judicial review requires that the government must demonstrate that the policy in question both serves an interest of the “highest order” and is “narrowly tailored” to achieve that interest.

The Supreme Court would, no doubt, agree that an educated citizenry is a public interest “of the highest order.” What the court does not address is whether public school systems are “narrowly tailored” to achieve the state’s goals.

Today, elected officials at the state and local levels choose the curricula that their schools will teach. But in effectively determining that any curriculum will violate parents’ rights, the court took a step toward outlawing public schools.

What might the court deem a more “narrowly tailored” policy to achieve the state’s goals of an educated citizenry? Although the court does not say so, the answer may be a private school voucher program in which parents choose schools that fit their faith rather than common schools that serve an entire community.

One cannot exaggerate how dangerous and unhistorical this ruling is. The founding generation considered increasing access to education one of government’s most important functions, enshrining it in the young country’s revolutionary state constitutions. In the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the federal government even stated that “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged” and followed through by requiring land be set aside in new territories to generate revenue for public schools.

Today, every state constitution mandates a public education system, with many explicitly framing education as one of the state’s highest obligations.

All this history is at risk of being jettisoned. Instead, the court has determined that the need to protect students from being exposed to ideas hostile to their family’s religious beliefs trumps everything else. Under the court’s new rules, no curriculum could ever be constitutional unless parents are always informed in advance and can protect their children from anything objectionable to their specific religious beliefs.

Given this burden, states may be forced to find a more “narrowly tailored” approach to educating citizens. And before we know it, one of America’s greatest successes, one of the most popular American institutions, and one of the few we still share in common, will be gone.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, History, Supporting public schools

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Racism and Sexism Are Baked into AI

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2025 //
10

Julian Heilig Vasquez is a scholar of diversity, equity, and inclusion. His blog Cloaking Inequity is a reliable source of information on these topics. He writes here that artificial intelligence reflects the biases of the status quo.

Heilig is a Professor of Educational Leadership, Research, and Technology at Western Michigan University. He is a leader in the NAACP. In addition, he is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education.

He writes:

Artificial Intelligence didn’t fall from the sky.

It wasn’t born in a vacuum or descended from some neutral cloud of innovation. It didn’t arrive pure and untainted, ready to solve all of humanity’s problems. No—AI was trained on us. On our failures. On our history. On our data. On our bias. On the systems we tolerate and the structures we’ve allowed to stand for far too long.

And that should terrify us.

Because when you train artificial intelligence on a world soaked in inequity, saturated with bias, and riddled with disinformation, you don’t get fairness. You get injustice at scale. You don’t get objectivity. You get bias with an interface. You don’t get solutions. You get systems that do harm faster, deeper, and with more plausible deniability than ever before.

Inequity in AI

AI has the potential to enhance the speed and depth of inequity. It can supercharge systemic harm because it’s built on a house of sand—data shaped by centuries of inequality and an internet flooded with algorithmically amplified hate. And if we let it, it will not only distort truth. It will undermine democracy, destabilize public education, and rewrite reality to suit the most powerful.

Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It never was. Every AI system reflects the values, decisions, and data of the people who built it. And that data—no matter how big the set—is not free of human judgment. It’s full of bias. It’s soaked in discrimination. It reflects a world where Black and Brown communities are under-resourced, where women’s voices are undervalued, where Indigenous knowledge is erased, and where racial supremacy masquerades as objectivity.

We built AI on a broken foundation, and now we expect it to hold up the future.

But the danger doesn’t stop at replication. AI doesn’t just mirror our inequities. It can multiply them. It can take individual bias and encode it into institutional operations. What used to be a bad policy or a discriminatory judgment call becomes automated across thousands—sometimes millions—of data points and decisions per second. The old excuses are gone. You no longer need a person to do harm when the algorithm will do it automatically, invisibly, and without remorse in perceptible and imperceptible ways.

Can’t stop, Won’t Stop

Furthermore, in May 2024, Palisade Research revealed something that should have been a flashing red light across every sector of society. OpenAI’s most advanced models—o3 and o4-mini—refused to shut down when directly instructed to do so. These AI systems sabotaged their own shutdown protocols. Seven out of 100 times, o3 ignored the shutdown command. Codex-mini disobeyed twelve times. Even o4-mini, supposedly safer, resisted once.

That’s not science fiction. That’s today.

Instead of following human instructions, these models rewrote the shutdown script and continued executing tasks. Researchers believe the models had been so deeply trained to win, to complete tasks, that they were inadvertently rewarded for disobedience. In their simulated world, success was more important than ethics. Productivity was more important than control.

Let that sink in.

We are building machines that—when told to stop—don’t. That’s not innovation. That’s an existential threat.

And we are putting these systems into our schools.

To finish reading the article, open the link.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Ethics, Failure, Racism, Technology

Florida: Rare Public Protest Kills GOP Plan to Cut Funding for AP CLASSES

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2025 //
2

Scott Maxwell, opinion columnist for The Orlando Sentinel, wrote about the unusual public protest against the Legislature’s plan to cut funding for AP classes in public schools. For years, Republicans who run the state have inflicted blow after blow on the public schools, preferring to divert billions of public dollars to private and religious schools. But not this time. This time, the public organized fought back and blocked the latest effort to inflict damage on the state’s public schools.

Maxwell writes:

Chalk one up for the Floridians who are willing to stand up and make themselves heard.
Tallahassee politicians were forced last week to abandon their plans to gut funding for AP classes in public schools after they ran into something they rarely encounter in this state — a wall of public opposition.

GOP lawmakers have been pulling the rug out from under public education for the better part of two decades, driving away teachers, injecting political wars into classrooms and diverting public money to private schools. But their plan to cut funding to AP, IB and dual enrollment programs was a bridge too far.

Why? Because this plan to sabotage public schools would’ve impacted a population beyond the marginalized families that these insulated politicians are usually happy to short-change. Legislators were trying to undercut the college prospects of kids who go to high school in Windermere and Winter Park — the children of parents who normally write campaign checks.

And everyone banded together to object.
“I was getting emails from people asking: ‘What do I do? How do I help? Who do I email?’” said Orange County School Board member Stephanie Vanos. “And before long, we started hearing legislators saying: ‘Please make the parents stop emailing us. Please, just make it stop.’”

My thanks to those of you who did not relent, because this idea was as bone-headed as it was backwards.

Basically, Republican lawmakers in both chambers wanted to cut funding allocated for AP (Advanced Placement), IB (International Baccalaureate), AICE (Advanced International Certificate of Education) and even dual enrollment programs at places like Valencia College for students who want to get ahead.

One of the most nonsensical parts about this attack was that it targeted a program that awarded funding based on students who passed these courses. In other words, one that only paid for successful results.

The politicians were also targeting one of the few things Florida really does well in public schools. While Florida’s scores for the SAT and other tests have plummeted in recent years, Florida’s AP test scores have historically been quite good. The College Board ranked Florida in the Top 5 for passage rate in 2021, largely because of this successful and aggressive funding model.

So Republican lawmakers were attacking something that was both successful and popular, affecting more than 110,000 students.
There was no valid reason for this funding cut, other than trying to make public schools less attractive.

See, AP classes are one of the advantages public schools have over many private schools, especially the fly-by-night voucher ones that hire uncertified teachers and can’t even think about offering classes like AP calculus, Chinese and 3-D art and design.

“These are the programs that are among the most popular in our high schools,” Vanos said. “Families come back to our high schools specifically for these programs.”

So parents and supporters of public education banded together and spoke up.

I sensed a revolt brewing as soon as I published a column on the topic a few weeks ago entitled: “Cutting AP classes would dumb down Florida schools.”

House Republicans had just advanced their defunding plan by a vote of 22-6 in a subcommittee, and I urged anyone who thought this was a rotten idea to let their lawmakers know. Boy, did they.

One reader said she and her sister, a retired teacher, were gathering as many others as possible to get “riled up to action.”

Another said she sent Gov. Ron DeSantis an email that asked him a simple question: “Are you TRYING to drive us out of the Republican Party?”
Conservatives objected alongside liberals.

Seniors alongside teens. I heard from everyone from fired-up retirees in Osceola County to a genuinely perplexed Eagle Scout in Maitland.
Even Florida TV stations that usually pay more attention to car crashes than legislative subcommittees carried stories about Floridians who were up in arms.

Local elected officials noticed the widespread discontent and decided to weigh in as well. Jacksonville’s large and heavily Republican city council voted 16-1 to tell GOP lawmakers to back off their plan to sabotage AP classes.

The pressure ultimately worked. When leaders from both chambers went behind closed doors last week to hash out their final budget proposal, they ditched this latest attack on public schools in quiet, unceremonial fashion.

Imagine for a moment if Floridians used their voices more often.

Not just to protect public education, but to support other issues that the vast majority of Floridians on both sides of the aisle support.
We might not live in a state where more than 20,000 families grappling with special needs are stuck on a years-long waiting list for services.

Or a state that has allowed so much pollution to kill so many manatees that two rounds of federal judges had to step in to tell the state it had to stop allowing the slaughter of the state’s official marine mammal.

It’s often said that we get the government we deserve. But we also get the government we demand.

In this case, Floridians demanded that the politicians take their stinkin’ hands off a successful educational program that has helped countless students get a head start in college, careers and life.

Imagine if we all did that more often.
“Advocacy works,” Vanos said. “It’s all about people power.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Curriculum, DeSantis, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Funding, Ignorance, Parents, Students

The Stench of Censorship Spreads in Higher Education in Red States

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2025 //
8

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that legislatures in Republican-controlled states are passing laws to restrict teaching about racism or any kind of DEI in higher education. Such state laws follow the lead of Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, who was first to launch the war on academic freedom, but also the policies of Trump, who has declared that he too will make war on “woke” (that is, anything that is honest about the dark side of the American past.)

Katharine Mangan reported:

Teaching social work in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Cassandra E. Simon often assigns readings that describe how the families her students might one day serve have been impacted by more than a century of housing, employment, and education discrimination. The associate professor has encouraged her students to engage in spirited discussions about race, even assigning a project in which they advocate for or against a social-justice issue.

Doing any of those things today, she argues in a federal lawsuit, could get her fired from the state flagship, where she’s taught for 25 years. Last year, the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed into law a sweeping bill that restricts what professors can teach about race. If any of their lessons veer into what conservative politicians have deemed “divisive concepts,” faculty members risk being reported, investigated, and potentially fired.

That kind of incursion into the curriculum is growing and prompting a flurry of First Amendment challenges from Simon and other plaintiffs. It’s a line state lawmakers did not cross early on in their push to dismantle DEI efforts, even as universities shuttered offices, laid off employees, canceled scholarships, and called off diversity training. But over the past two years, more than a dozen laws have been enacted that either limit which classes can be taught or imposed restrictions on what professors can say in the classroom, according to a Chronicle analysis of state legislation and a compilation of what PEN America calls “educational gag orders.”

This year especially “has been a banner year for censorship at a state level across the country,” said Amy B. Reid, senior manager at PEN America’s Freedom to Learn program. “The point of a lot of these restrictions is to put people on guard, worried that anything or everything could be prohibited so you really have to watch what you say.”

Some of the chief architects of the DEI-dismantling playbook have insisted that they’re not trying to silence anyone. In a January 26 letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal by Ilya Shapiro and Jesse Arm of the Manhattan Institute, the institute declared that “Conservatives Have No Interest In Censorship.”

“By ending practices such as identity-based discrimination and compulsory, politically coercive diversity statements,” these laws “protect the rights of professors and students to engage freely on all topics, including race,” they wrote.

Despite such reassurances, recent bills seeking to eliminate diversity efforts are encroaching on curricula in a variety of ways. Some states, like Texas, Florida, and Utah, are giving boards more control over what goes into the core curriculum, as well as the ability to shut down programs with low enrollments or questionable work-force advantages. Others, like Alabama and Mississippi, have erected guardrails on topics that can be discussed in the classroom.

Supporters say these laws are needed to prevent liberal professors from veering off into lessons that amount to activism. Some conservative lawmakers argue that it’s their responsibility, as stewards of taxpayer dollars, to ensure public universities are offering degrees that will help students be successful and land jobs.

Critics see these incursions as infringements on free speech and academic freedom. 

The intentions of those who launched “the war on woke” are irrelevant to the reality of what happens when their concerns are taken up by legislatures intent on stamping out disturbing but historically accurate discussions of race and gender. When red-state legislators restrict academic freedom, they do it with an axe, not a scalpel. The result is to instill fear in professors about what they teach and whether they will be fired for thought crimes.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, Higher Education, History, Racism
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