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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

Florida: DeSantis Degraded Education at Every Level

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2025 //
4

Governor Ron DeSantis has done everything possible to destroy education in Florida. He apparently hates public schools. He pushed through an expansion of vouchers that provides a subsidy to every student in the state, no matter if the family is rich or poor. Of course, most of those using the voucher never attended public schools. Most vouchers go to students in religious schools. Florida currently spends $4 billion annually on vouchers, a sum sure to increase.

Bad as public K-12 education is, the state’s public higher education system is in worse shape. DeSantis has placed political cronies in charge of every state university. He took charge of tiny New College (700 students) because he was offended that Florida had one progressive institution of higher education where students were encouraged not to conform. DeSantis replaced the board with conservatives who put a political extremist in President. What was once a haven for free-thinking students was transformed into a school for jocks and business majors.

The editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel summarized DeSantis’s record of using higher education as patronage for political cronies:

When Gov. Ron DeSantis won his landslide re-election in 2022, a half-fawning and half-fearful Florida Legislature gave him whatever he wanted.

The Harvard graduate could have used that power to burnish Florida’s celebrated universities. He could have chosen the best and brightest to lead schools already among the nation’s best. He could have been the education governor.

That — not a bellyflopping bid for the White House — could have cemented his legacy.

Instead, DeSantis has earned a doctorate in cronyism. He’ll be remembered as the governor who did everything in his power to erode higher education and independent thought. He puts politics above merit and qualifications, with sham “searches” and secret deals.

College and university campuses are now soft-landing patronage pads for Republican allies, at sky-high salaries.

Former House Speaker Richard Corcoran was installed as president of New College in Sarasota. Another politician, former House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, was handed the FAU presidency. A run-of-the-mill former legislator, Fred Hawkins, won the presidency of a state college in Avon Park despite lacking academic qualifications.

Former Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez is now president of Florida International University. Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska was given the prestigious UF presidency, then flamed out amid reports of over-the-top spending.

It’s no surprise, then, that Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, a former Republican legislator from Hialeah who oversees state colleges and K-12 education, will slide into the presidency of the University of West Florida in Pensacola.

For DeSantis and Diaz, no university is too big and no kindergarten picture book is too small to escape being recast in the governor’s philosophy.

Step 1: Stack the board

First, DeSantis stacked UWF’s board of trustees. Then, newly appointed trustee Zach Smith quickly made clear that UWF president Martha Saunders was unwelcome.

Smith, a Heritage Foundation fellow, had to reach back to six years ago to find even a speck of mud to throw: Two student-organized drag shows in 2019; social media messaging about a Black Lives Matter co-founder and a book, “How to be an Antiracist,” once recommended by university librarians.

It’s true that best-seller is full of provocative opinions. But so is Smith’s book, “Rogue Prosecutors,” which pushes dark conspiracies about prosecutors corrupted by a wealthy Jew.

That did not stop his nomination to the UWF board by DeSantis, who only last year declared war on campus antisemitism amid great fanfare.

The widely popular Saunders saw the writing on the wall, and she resigned.

A farcical scene

That board meeting was an ambush, said trustee Alonzie Scott. The next one was a farce.

Without a job posting or a search, Diaz’s name alone surfaced as a replacement. Just as quickly, a special meeting was called by UWF trustees. There would be no search for a temporary president and no effort to pick an interim leader from the university.

There was only a perfunctory vote to install Diaz. Then, farce upon farce, the board voted with a straight face to begin looking for a permanent replacement for Diaz.

Barring a political earthquake, that will be Diaz. As former Pensacola mayor and UWF alum Jerry Maygarden said at the meeting, what serious candidate would apply for a job that smacks of a done deal?

Even Diaz’s roots defy all logic.

UWF’s strength is its strong community support among residents and businesses, including Republican leaders. Diaz’s Miami-Dade home is a 10-hour drive, 700 miles and culturally worlds apart from Escambia County in “Lower Alabama.”

None of this is about rescuing students who feel intimidated and indoctrinated.

After all, a state-mandated 2022 Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity report found that a majority of UWF students surveyed felt the school provided them the freedom to express their own opinions. Half said they had no idea if their professors were liberal or conservative.

New College 2.0

Never mind. In April, DeSantis told UWF to “buckle up,” announcing he would do for them what he did for New College.

It’s hard to see the success story in New College since the governor declared war on it. DeSantis’ hostile takeover of the tiny liberal arts college has devolved into a money pit: The state’s cost for each New College student shot to more than $90,000. Other state universities average roughly $8,000.

Last month, New College and the University of South Florida were found to be secretly working on a deal to “transfer” USF’s Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College. It’s dead for the moment. Community leaders, kept in the dark as usual, demand answers.

Meanwhile, USF has become the latest fertile field for DeSantis to reward his friends. USF’s president said she will resign, creating yet another job opportunity for a like-minded crony.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

Categories Corruption, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Higher Education, Vouchers

What Can the Federal Government Do to Promote Learning?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2025 //
12

On May 10, Dana Goldstein wrote a long article in The New York Times about how education disappeared as a national or federal issue. Why, she wondered, did the two major parties ignore education in the 2024 campaign? Kamala Harris supported public schools and welcomed the support of the two big teachers’ unions, but she did not offer a flashy new program to raise test scores. Trump campaigned on a promise to privatize public funding, promote vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, home schooling–anything but public schools, which he regularly attacked as dens of iniquity, indoctrination, and DEI.

Goldstein is the best education writer at The Times, and her reflections are worth considering.

She started:

What happened to learning as a national priority?

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.

At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.

President Trump has been fixated in his second term on imposing ideological obedience on schools.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”Since taking office, he has pursued this goal with startling energy — assaulting higher education while adopting a strategy of neglect toward the federal government’s traditional role in primary and secondary schools. He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress, and ended efforts to share knowledge with schools about which teaching strategies lead to the best results. A spokeswoman for the administration said that low test scores justify cuts in federal spending. “What we are doing right now with education is clearly not working,” she said.

Mr. Trump has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be “patriotic” — a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.

Actually, federal law explicitly forbids any federal official from attempting to influence the curriculum or textbooks in schools.

Education lawyer Dan Gordon wrote about the multiple laws that prevent any federal official from trying to dictate, supervise, control or interfere with curriculum. There is no sterner prohibition in federal law than the one that keeps federal officials from trying to dictate what schools teach.

Of course, Trump never worries about the limits imposed by laws. He does what he wants and leaves the courts to decide whether he went too far.

Goldstein continued:

Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Mr. Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. When Kamala Harris was running for president last year, she spoke about student loan forgiveness and resisting right-wing book bans. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.

All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.

“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”

I have been writing about federal education policy for almost fifty years. There are things we have learned since Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. That law was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s agenda. Its purpose was to send federal funds to the schools enrolling the poorest students. Its purpose was not to raise test scores but to provide greater equity of resources.

Over time, the federal government took on an assertive role in defending the rights of students to an education: students with disabilities; students who did not speak English; and students attending illegally segregated schools.

In 1983, a commission appointed by President Reagan’s Secretary of Education Terrell Bell declared that American schools were in crisis because of low academic standards. Many states began implementing state tests and raising standards for promotion and graduation.

President George H.W. Bush convened a meeting of the nation’s governors, and they endorsed an ambitious set of “national goals” for the year 2000. E.g., the U.S. will be first in the world by the year 2000; all children will start school ready to learn by 2000. None of the goals–other than the rise of the high school graduation rate to 90%–was met.

The Clinton administration endorsed the national goals and passed legislation (“Goals 2000”) to encourages states to create their own standards and tests. President Clinton made clear, however, that he hoped for national standards and tests.

President George W. Bush came to office with a far-reaching, unprecedented plan called “No Child Left Behind” to reform education by a heavy emphasis on annual testing of reading and math. He claimed that because of his test-based policy, there had been a “Texas Miracle,” which could be replicated on a national scale. NCLB set unreachable goals, saying that every school would have 100% of their students reach proficiency by the year 2014. And if they were not on track to meet that impossible goals, the schools would face increasingly harsh punishments.

In no nation in the world have 100% of all students ever reached proficiency.

Scores rose, as did test-prep. Many untested subjects lost time in the curriculum or disappeared. Reading and math were tested every year from grades 3-8, as the law prescribed. What didn’t matter were science, history, civics, the arts, even recess.

Some schools were sanctioned or even closed for falling behind. Schools were dominated by the all-important reading and math tests. Some districts cheated. Some superintendents were jailed.

In 2001, there were scholars who warned that the “Texas Miracle” was a hoax. Congress didn’t listen. In time the nation learned that there was no Texas Miracle, never had been. But Congress clung to NCLB because they had no other ideas.

When Obama took office in 2009, educators hoped for relief from the annual testing mandates but they were soon disappointed. Obama chose Arne Duncan, who had led the Chicago schools but had never been a teacher. Duncan worked with consultants from the Gates and Broad Foundations and created a national competition for the states called Race to the Top. Duncan had a pot of $5 billion that Congress had given him for education reform.

Race to the Top offered big rewards to states that applied and won. To be eligible, states had to authorize the creation of charter schools (almost every state did); they had to agree to adopt common national standards (that meant the Common Core standards, funded wholly by the Gates Foundation and not yet completed); sign up for one of two federally funded standardized tests (PARCC or Smarter Balanced) ; and agree to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students. Eighteen states won huge rewards. There were other conditions but these were the most consequential.

Tennessee won $500 million. It is hard to see what, if anything, is better in Tennessee because of that audacious prize. The state put $100 million into an “Achievement School District,” which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools into a new district and turned them into charters. Chris Barbic, leader of the YES Prep charter chain in Houston was hired to run it. He pledged that within five years, the lowest-performing schools in the state would rank among the top 20% in the state. None of them did. The ASD was ultimately closed down.

Duncan had a great fondness for charter schools because they were the latest thing in Chicago; while superintendent, he had launched a program he called Renaissance 2010, in which he pledged to close 80 public schools and open 100 charter schools. Duncan viewed charters as miraculous. Ultimately Chicago’s charter sector produced numerous scandals but no miracles.

I have written a lot about Race to the Top over the years. It was layered on top of Bush’s NCLB, but it was even more punitive. It targeted teachers and blamed them if students got low scores. Its requirement that states evaluate teachers by student test scores was a dismal failure. The American Statistical Association warned against it from the outset, pointing out that students’ home life affected test scores more than their teachers.

Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 failed. It destroyed communities. Its strategy of closing neighborhood schools and dispersing students encountered growing resistance. The first schools that Duncan launched as his exemplars were eventually closed. In 2021, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to end its largest “school turnaround” program, managed by a private group, and return its 31 campuses to district control. Duncan’s fervent belief in “turnaround” schools was derided as a historical relic.

Race to the Top failed. The proliferation of charter schools, aided by a hefty federal subsidy, drained students and resources from public schools. Charter schools close their doors at a rapid pace: 26% are gone in their first five years; 39% in their first ten years. In addition, due to lax accountability, charters have demonstrated egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Common Core was supposed to lift test scores and reduce achievement gaps, but it did neither. Conservative commentator Mike Petrilli referred to 2007-2017 as “the lost decade.” Scores stagnated and achievement gaps barely budged.

So what have we learned?

This is what I have learned: politicians are not good at telling educators how to teach. The Department of Education (which barely exists as of now) is not made up of educators. It was not in a position to lead school reform. Nor is the Secretary of Education. Nor is the President. Would you want the State legislature or Congress telling surgeons how to do their job?

The most important thing that the national government can do is to ensure that schools have the funding they need to pay their staff, reduce class sizes, and update their facilities.

The federal government should have a robust program of data collection, so we have accurate information about students, teachers, and schools.

The federal government should not replicate its past failures.

What Congress can do very effectively is to ensure that the nation’s schools have the resources they need; that children have access to nutrition and medical care; and that pregnant women get prenatal care so that their babies are born healthy.

Categories Civil Rights, Closing schools, Curriculum, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Graduation rates, Health, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Republicans, Segregation, Special Education, Standardized Testing, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

Randi Weingarten: Not Everyone Needs or Wants to Go to College. That’s OK.

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2025 //
4

A colleague said recently to me that the abandonment of vocational education was one of the great errors in American education in the past generation. I recall when New York City had successful high schools that prepared students for vocations and careers that paid well. The concept of “college for all” undermined support for such schools, and most of them closed.

A few days ago, Randi Weingarten wrote an article in the New York Times endorsing CTE–career and technical education--a cause she has been supporting for years. CTE is an updated term for vocational education. One of the r big complaints about vocational education was that students were being trained to service obsolete machinery. CTE incorporates the latest technology into its curricula.

Isn’t it time to recognize that electricians, plumbers, nurses, computer technicians, auto mechanics, and other skilled occupations are needed as much and often paid more than those with a Ph.D.? To be clear, I admire those who spend years to acquire a doctorate in the liberal arts, but the reality today is that most college professors are underpaid adjuncts.

We should recognize that education is a lifelong endeavor. Everyone needs a strong foundation from K-12 in the skills of reading, writing, thinking, and using technology, as well as a solid grounding in mathematics, civics, history, the sciences, and the arts. Students should graduate high school ready for college or careers. They should be ready to make choices and able to change course, which many adults do.

Randi writes:

For years, America’s approach to education has been guided by an overly simplistic formula: 4+4 — the idea that students need four years of high school and four years of college to succeed in life.

Even with this prevailing emphasis on college, around 40 percent of high schoolers do not enroll in college upon graduating, and only 60 percent of students who enroll in college earn a degree or credential within eight years of high school graduation.

While college completion has positive effects — on health, lifetime earnings, civic engagement and even happiness — it’s increasingly clear that college for all should no longer be our North Star. It’s time to scale up successful programs that create multiple pathways for students so high school is a gateway to both college and career.

More than 80 percent of America’s young people attend public schools, and the challenges many students and their families face are well known. Chronic absenteeismworsened during the pandemic. For many reasons, the country’s lowest-performing students are being left behind. Cellphones and social media have helped fuel an epidemic of bullying, loneliness and mental health struggles among youth. Educators, who have less and less authority in their classrooms, are valiantly fighting those headwinds, too often with insufficient resources.

So far, President Trump’s response has been to order the dismantling of the Department of Education and to propose billions of dollars of cuts to K-12 education that will push our system of public schools closer to the breaking point.

Republican-led states are increasingly embracing school vouchers, which let parents spend public funds on private schools, despite evidence of the negative effect of vouchers on student achievement: Evaluations of vouchers in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show that these programs can cause drops in test scores. And vouchers divert vital funding that could and should go to public schools. Arizona is spending millions of dollars on vouchers for kids already attending private schools. Students in Cleveland’s public schools may lose up to $927 per pupil in education spending to vouchers each year.

I propose a different strategy: aligning high school to both college prep and in-demand vocational career pathways. Just as students who plan to go to college can get a head start through Advanced Placement programs, high schools, colleges and employers should work together to provide the relevant coursework to engage students in promising career opportunities.

I’m not suggesting reviving the old shop class, although there is value in aspects of that approach, including hands-on learning. We’ve got to shed the misperception some may still have of technical education as a dumping ground for students headed for low-skill, low-paying jobs.

I taught social studies and A.P. government in a career and technical education, or C.T.E., school. My students not only prepared for careers in health care such as nursing; they also had robust discussions about the Constitution and won national debate competitions. I have seen innovative programs throughout the country, which show that high schools — with work force partners — can prepare all students for a variety of careers and fulfilling lives whether they go on to four-year or two-year college or training for a variety of skilled trades and technical careers.

In April, I attended the opening of a C.T.E. high school, RioTECH, in Rio Rancho, N.M. RioTECH is a partnership between the public schools and a local community college, with support from industry partners and the local teachers union — an affiliate of the organization I lead, the American Federation of Teachers — giving students the opportunity to earn stackable credentials in high-demand skilled trades as well as tuition-free, dual-credit classes that count for both high school and college credit.

The Brooklyn STEAM Center is a public school at the Navy Yard that partners with businesses, public high schools and the local union, the United Federation of Teachers. Students there have access to internships and apprenticeships and the potential of full-time jobs with more than 500 businesses on site. Career pathways include cybersecurity, construction technology and computer-aided design and engineering.

In Newark, students at the Red Hawks Rising Teacher Academy can enter a no-cost, dual-enrollment program in partnership with Montclair State University, Newark Public Schools and the A.F.T. This high school experience with a high-quality teacher preparation program helps create a pipeline to educate, train and retain future teachers, and to diversify the teacher work force.

Last year, the A.F.T. and two affiliates began an advanced technology framework with Micron and the state of New York in 10 school districts, now expanding to districts in Michigan and Minnesota, with federal funding. In this program, high school students acquire technical and foundational skills, creating pathways to middle-class jobs in the microchip sector that often won’t require a four-year college degree.

More than 90 percent of students who concentrate in career and technical education graduate from high school, and about three-quarters of them continue their education after high school. Research shows that career and technical education has positive effects on students’ academic achievement, high school completion and college readiness…

Ensuring all students get a great public education takes resources, which is why Mr. Trump’s planned cuts are just plain wrong. The Senate passed a resolution this year “supporting the goals and ideals of ‘Career and Technical Education Month’”; a similar resolution is pending in the House. Now it’s time for Congress and the administration to offer tangible support for those goals in the federal budget.

Rather than undercutting the Education Department, or using the challenges that public schools face as a rationale to cut vital federal funding under the pretext of sending more authority to the states (which already have most of the authority for schools), why not support and scale practices, policies and programs that will make our schools more engaging and relevant to more students?

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, High School Graduation, Higher Education, Jobs
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