Archives for category: Education Industry

Nick Covington writes: “The War on WOKE was always a war on American values.”

Nick taught social studies in Iowa. He interviewed me on his podcast about my memoir, An Education.

*Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C (Wikimedia Commons)*

Books on brown wooden shelf. (Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash)

Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years.

The culture war battles we fight over our public schools are fundamentally disagreements about American values: what does it mean to be an American, and in whose image do we build our public schools?

“When Americans start fighting over their schools, you can be fairly sure of one thing: it probably isn’t really about school.”

— Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider,

The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual

From working as Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration to laying the foundation of the modern conservative education reform movement, Diane Ravitch—a one-time champion of No Child Left Behind—spent most of her life as a Republican with conservative values. The story of her life, as told in her 2025 memoir, is the story of the American Century. As today’s culture war on “wokeness” and “leftist indoctrination” targets diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools, Ravitch’s memoir makes a powerful case study for teaching these core American values.

Born in Houston in 1938, Diane recounts celebrating VJ Day with her family as a young child, surrounded by returning sailors and the pop of firecrackers. She learned to write with a quill pen and attended a segregated high school when the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. The descendant of Polish Jews who came to America in the 1850s, Diane experienced a level of antisemitism and misogyny in her personal and professional life that by today’s standards would be galling (and illegal). She learned as an adult that the entire Jewish community where her grandfather was born was murdered in the Holocaust.

Ravitch’s interest in education didn’t begin until she began attending community meetings as the only white person in the room with parents in Harlem, New York who had felt shut out of the school district’s planning process. As a member of the Silent Generation, she made explicit demands of American wealth and greatness:

“Why shouldn’t all people in our rich society—regardless of their wealth or class or race or personal attributes—have a decent life, meaning health care, decent housing, good schools, food security, and physical safety?…I think these are preconditions for a good society.”

If Diane’s values were informed by a life lived in the greatness of the American Century, what made America great was the steady—and always imperfect—realization of those values in action. The New Deal aligned our immense national resources toward popular economic recovery from the depths of the Great Depression, even as jobs and housing programs discriminated against Black Americans. The GI Bill helped create a thriving post-war middle class by providing housing to millions of veterans and their families and sending millions more to college, even as Black veterans were segregated out of the nation’s suburbs and universities.

As we underwent a decades-long civil rights revolution at home, the postwar world we rebuilt in our image was of an idealized United States that overcame a violent and prejudicial past to renew itself as a more diverse, pluralistic, multicultural, democratic, and egalitarian nation.

E Pluribus Unum. Out of Many, One.

Uneven and flawed as it was, American prosperity did grow in proportion to our inclusivity: by expanding citizenship and voting rights, integrating and publicly supporting schools and universities, asserting our obligations to the elderly and those in poverty, and protecting the rights of marginalized groups. The American Dream became a shorthand for people who came here to start their lives over, even from countries victimized by U.S. foreign policy, knowing their best days were ahead of them. And as Americans watched the Times Square ball drop on the eve of Y2K, they were standing in the most powerful, prosperous, innovative, and culturally dominant nation in the history of the world.

Now, at age 87, Ravitch reflects on how conservative politics abandoned these core values and caused her to leave the Republican Party in the early 2000s, as they became increasingly dominated by self-serving corporations, wealthy donors, and religious interests. “To use current parlance, I went from being a staunch conservative to being ‘woke,’” she writes, adding, “I wear the label with pride. To me, it means that I awakened to the inequity and injustice that deprives millions of people of a good life, the life that everyone wants and deserves.”

In other words, by taking seriously the charge of our founding documents to become “a more perfect union”, taking up “the unfinished work” of the American experiment, and bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice over the course of the 20th century, Diane Ravitch—like America itself—became woke.

Our fights about schools are really battles over American values and what it means to be an American, and the War on Woke has always been a war on American values.

At the start of this midterm election year, Moms For Liberty hosted Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidates in a debate that focused largely on education. Candidates spent their time hammering“leftist indoctrination” in teacher education and classroom teaching, with one complaining about “downright evil” ideology pushed on students in reference to a book about a boy wearing a dress to school. Another called for the installation of the Ten Commandments as a way to put the “concept of God” back in schools. Zach Lahn, founder of the unaccredited private Wonder School and current Republican nominee for governor, offered the closest thing to a positive vision with a partisan twist arguing, “Public school is to promote civic virtue, to understand the principles of faith in our country and our culture.”

The trouble comes in whose answer we enshrine in law, turn into policy, and live in the public sphere through our public education system:

What kind of nation are we?
What is the role of public education—that is, the system of tuition-free common schools mandated in our state constitution, accessible to all students, and maintained by taxpayer dollars—in a nation like ours?
What subjects and practices will inform such a system?
Whose values will we train in the adults who teach our children?

Today’s Republican Party demands that we forget the hard-fought lessons of history and remove challenging perspectives, making easier for children to believe in nationalist mythology than the imperfect lived reality of people like Diane Ravitch. A closer look at their changing values and legislative agenda tells us exactly what today’s Republican Party means when they appeal to “civic virtue” and “principles of faith in our country and our culture” in education: in the guise of a war on “woke” diversity, equity, and inclusion, Republican policies are at war with the very materials that made America great.

In Iowa, this has manifested as de-facto book bans and banning so-called “specific defined concepts” from public school curriculum. In response to Iowa’s vague and punitive “age appropriate” school materials law in 2023, schools immediately removed more than 3,000 books. The most removed literary classics included Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners written by Nobel Prize laureates: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Brave New World, and Slaughterhouse-Five among them.

These are perspectives that speak honestly about racial, sexual, and gendered abuse and violence, sometimes all at once, and inform a shared past that tolerated and protected it. They’re also some of the most acclaimed and influential works in American and English literature. It’s no accident that most of them are either written by Black authors, by women, or center the experiences of Black people in America.

Iowa Republicans have also banned so-called “specific defined concepts” from mandatory staff or student training. House File 802, in effect since July 2021, makes it a violation to conduct training that the United States and Iowa “are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist,” that anyone “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” or that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist.” One banned concept forbids including in mandatory training that any student “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.”

Although the law states that it does not “Prohibit the use of curriculum that teaches the topics of sexism, slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination,” and does not “Prohibit discussing specific defined concepts as part of a larger course of academic instruction,” it was widely misunderstood to prohibit classroom teaching about those topics.

The impact of House File 802 has been a documented chilling effect and over-compliance owing to the vagueness of the law as written and interpreted. In one interview-based study, Iowa educators described themselves as surveilled, isolated, and self-censoring. The researchers reported that “the perceived lack of clarity and guidance on this law fueled concerns about their ability to be effective justice-oriented administrators and classroom teachers,” and that teacher candidates are afraid of unintentional violations of the law.

These explicit bans on books and the implicit self-censoring of difficult curriculum leave our kids less prepared for the world outside of school, and outside of Iowa, and create a gap in our children’s public education that is ready to be filled by social media influencers, misinformation, and propaganda.

Public schools are the institution where American values are practiced and lived, not just taught, and where we build shared American identity. All of our fights about books, curriculum, and school choice programs are really arguments over whose answers to these questions we write into law and into the lives of children where the stakes become very real. Through intention or its absence, built by us or built for us, the very real and shared world we inhabit is built bit by bit each day.

The question isn’t whether we teach values in public schools—we always have and we always will. The question is whether we teach the values that actually made this country great: pluralism, inclusion, democratic participation, honest history, and the belief that every child deserves a free and appropriate public education.

“I was a patriot who never questioned my country and its leaders. My complacency was a reflection of my comfort and affluence; radicalism had no appeal to me. If I were to meet that version of myself today, we would have a vigorous argument over everything related to education, race, and politics, although I still abhor violence. Today I want change, demonstrable change that narrows the gap between rich and poor; that provides equal opportunity to all; and that ensures health care and good education as a matter of right, not income. I am still not a radical. I don’t want to overthrow the government. I want it to work on behalf of its ideals to benefit everyone.”

— Diane Ravitch,

An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else

Tags: 2026 elections, Commentary, diversity, Education, IA-Gov, IA-Gov 2026, Iowa GOP, Iowa Politics, Zach Lahn

About the Author(s)

Nick Covington

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Iowa

Inside the Collapse of a “Montessori Ponzi” Scheme

By dianeravitch

September 14, 2026 //

In the new world of school choice, parents have to be savvy shoppers. Opening up K-12 education to all comers, regardless of their background or qualifications, is a risky business. And when the “business” of school is run for profit, parents should beware. They and their children are usually pigeons, drawn in to fatten the founders’ bank account.

Claire Suddath of The New York Times dug deep into the story of a chain that expanded too quickly and became “a $440 million fiasco.”

I attach a gift article so you can read the story in full. It is not behind a paywall.

Suddath wrote:

A man with a vision set out to revolutionize preschool. It became a $440 million fiasco.

Ten years ago, a Montessori enthusiast named Ray Girn had a vision. He wanted to bring high-quality, child-led education to as many babies and toddlers as possible, with a chain of for-profit schools that would grow at the pace of a tech start-up. He spoke about doing for preschools “what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved,” and he raised $335 million from investors, including venture capital and private equity firms, to make it happen.

For a while, Mr. Girn’s schools, which operated under the brand Guidepost Montessori, appeared to be successful, with 150 locations that served tens of thousands of children. But they also ran up an astonishing $440 million in losses. The parent company, Higher Ground Education, filed for bankruptcy in June 2025 and shuttered about 60 schools.

In Oregon, parents received an email notification on a Sunday afternoon that their school effectively no longer existed. In Wisconsin, a father went to drop off his 5-month-old son at a Guidepost only to find it had closed. In California, a mother learned that her children’s Guidepost had been sold and that its Montessori curriculum would be replaced with artificial intelligence. Guidepost teachers and parents lit up Facebook and Reddit groups with horror stories — allegations of neglect and mistreatment that made a lot more sense now that everyone knew how mismanaged the company had been.

For-profit education ventures are notorious for disappointing investors and leaving parents fuming. But even in this context, the Guidepost story is striking. “Schools close sometimes, but usually not this many, and not all at once,” said Rebecca Winthrop, who directs the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

What could have caused such a collapse? More than two dozen former teachers, administrators and corporate employees told me that they were deeply concerned by the company’s business model. Seven independently described it as a pyramid scheme. “We were calling it the Montessori Ponzi scheme internally,” said Alex Richardson, a teacher at Guidepost’s first school, in Orange County, Calif.

When Higher Ground opened new Guidepost schools, it often received large advances from landlords to improve their properties. As long as the company kept expanding, it seemed from the outside as if it were thriving. But when it came time to repay the landlords, and growth was no longer an option, the company collapsed. By the end, some Guidepost locations were losing $50,000 a month.

Mr. Girn is still active in the education industry. Last year, he and his wife, Rebecca Girn — the other founder of Higher Ground and its general counsel — welcomed me at a converted ranch-style house outside Austin, Texas, where they’ve already opened another school, called Fulcrum. Their three children are among the students…

Guidepost was not the first school chain that Mr. Girn had run at an unsustainable pace. Back in 2003, when Mr. Girn, a Canadian native, was a psychology and philosophy student at the University of Toronto, a friend suggested he come work at a school in Orange County called LePort Montessori. It was founded by a wealthy bariatric surgeon, Peter LePort, who sat on the board of the Ayn Rand Institute. Mr. Girn had no formal training in education, but he ran a Rand-focused club on campus. That was enough for Mr. LePort, who hired him to help start a new elementary school.

Mr. Girn became devoted to the Montessori method, which encourages children to direct their own lessons, with teachers as guides. “It’s as close to perfect as human education has ever gotten,” he once said at an Ayn Rand Institute conference. Traditional schools stifled children’s innate love of learning, he thought, and day care programs could be especially oppressive. “They’re literally putting the child behind bars, moving them from rocker to high chair to container,” he said. Montessori could free them.

In 2009, Mr. Girn became the chief executive of LePort. He envisioned turning the company into a national chain (“We had the opportunity to become the child care provider for SpaceX,” he said). But he was more focused on growth than Mr. LePort was comfortable with. In 2016, Mr. Girn was fired.

He resolved to try again, this time with a chain of schools that he could control. He and Ms. Girn formed Higher Ground and hired several of LePort’s corporate staff members. Some LePort parents soon followed, including Greg Mauro, a founding partner of Learn Capital, a venture firm known for backing education start-ups. Learn Capital invested about $1 million, and Mr. Girn opened his first two Guidepost schools. Within three years, the company had 27.

Guidepost employees describe these early schools as thoughtfully planned. White-walled classrooms were outfitted with charming, toddler-sized furniture made of pale, unfinished wood. “Everyone cared so deeply,” said Kiana Kometani, who in 2019 became the first head of school at a Guidepost in Folsom, Calif. Teachers spoke about fostering each child’s intellectual curiosity, of giving them agency before they could tie their shoes.

Mr. Girn was a skillful pitchman. He promised parents something rare: the rigorous education of a high-end preschool, but with the hours of a commercial day care. Most Guideposts were in wealthy places — Walnut Creek, Brooklyn Heights — and appealed to the kind of dual-income families who could afford the equivalent of a small sedan in preschool tuition.

“Guidepost catered to the elevated intellectual type,” said Emily Tkaczibson, who paid about $4,000 a month for her two children to attend a Guidepost in Tigard, Ore. “We would have recommended the school to anybody.” Matthew Espie, another parent in Tigard, considered himself “lucky” that his youngest child got off the waiting list after only 10 months.

There were signs, though, that the company was trying to do too much too soon. Mr. Girn expanded abroad, opening schools in Hong Kong and mainland China in 2019. Mr. Richardson, the Orange County teacher, said around that time, three Chinese toddlers came to his school for reasons that were never explained. None of them spoke English, and the Guidepost teachers didn’t speak Mandarin.

“One toddler would stand there and cry and say the same word over and over again,” Mr. Richardson said. “We learned later that she was yelling for her mom, but at the time we didn’t know. We couldn’t understand her enough to help her.”

Please open the link and finish reading this fascinating article. Turning education into a business opportunity is dangerous.

Categories Childhood, Education Industry, For-Profit, School Choice

How the Billionaires Manufactured an Education “Crisis”

By dianeravitch

September 14, 2026 //

Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.

He writes:

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.

Shocked. Absolutely shocked.

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.

For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.

The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.

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

Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.

The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.

Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:

Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.

Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told

Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion

Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated

The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.

That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.

Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.

Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.

To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.

The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.

The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:

Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data

They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.

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

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.

The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:

Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.

The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.

The Bottom Line

The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.

Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.

The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.

Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.

🔗 Related Reading from Big Education Ape:

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

Gallup: Satisfaction With K-12 Education Hits New Low The primary source for the 32% satisfaction figure and the 11-point drop over two years. 🔗 https://news.gallup.com/poll/714017/satisfaction-education-hits-new-low.aspx
AP News: School Satisfaction Is at a Low Point — Gallup Poll Independent reporting on the Gallup/https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/share-widget?w=poi&o=t&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fved%3D1t%3A260882%26q%3DWalton%2BFamily%2BFoundation%2Beducation%26bbid%3D4984465999757231831%26bpid%3D64929726419391013Walton Family Foundation findings. 🔗 https://apnews.com/article/education-poll-public-school-gallup-2e2826f7508e7b13fb62690e8f4ec71f
The Hill: Satisfaction with K-12 Education Drops to New Low Coverage of the Walton Family Foundation/Gallup poll breakdown by ideological lines. 🔗 https://thehill.com/homenews/education/6077272-education-poll-satisfaction-record-low-gallup/
The Independent: US Public School Approval Drops to Historic Low International perspective on the Gallup findings and parent satisfaction data. 🔗 https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/gallup-survey-trump-education-satisfaction-b3046505.html

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

Education Research Report: U.S. Students Above OECD Average in Science, Reading, and Computational Problem Solving (2025 PISA) NCES release of 2025 PISA results for U.S. 15-year-olds. 🔗 http://educationresearchreport.blogspot.com/2026/09/us-students-above-oecd-average-in.html

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

Big Education Ape: School Funding Is No Fun — But Is It Fair? Deep analysis of how chronic underfunding, voucher expansion, and ESA diversion systematically defund public schools. 🔗 https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2026/09/school-funding-is-no-fun-but-is-it-fair.html
Big Education Ape: If You’re Struggling to Read This, You Have Some Very Rich Friends to Thank Connects billionaire-funded reform networks to reading score declines and social media cognitive disruption. 🔗 https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2026/09/if-youre-struggling-to-read-this-you-have.html
The Education Report: Federal Vouchers Mean Federal Control Peter Greene’s analysis of how federal voucher programs create federal control over private and religious schools. 🔗 https://theeducationreport.substack.com/p/federal-vouchers-mean-federal-control

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

Big Education Ape: Show Me the Money-Back Guarantee — The Science of Reading’s $1.8 Billion Snake Oil Problem Critical examination of the $1.8B Science of Reading industry, its vendor ecosystem, and lack of accountability. 🔗 https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2026/09/show-me-money-back-guarantee-science-of.html
Curmudgucation: Five Great Questions For “Evidence-Based” Programs Skeptical interrogation of “evidence-based” curriculum mandates, including the Science of Math and Reading. 🔗 https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2026/09/five-great-questions-for-evidence-based.html

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

Big Education Ape: The No Kings Coalition Is Back — And This Time, No Kings. No Excuses. Vote Early. Overview of the No Kings Coalition’s Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 ahead of the November 3, 2026 midterms. 🔗 https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-no-kings-coalition-is-back-and-this.html
Cloaking Inequity: Trump’s Latest — The State of New Mexico or New America? Contextualizes the broader political environment of executive overreach affecting education policy. 🔗 https://cloakinginequity.com/2026/09/08/trumps-latest-the-state-of-new-mexico-or-new-america/

All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.

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

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

By dianeravitch

September 11, 2026 //

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

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

Bailey writes:

Critics slam teachers and public schools for low reading scores. Much of that criticism is wrong and misses the real problem. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Science of Reading (SoR) both seriously hamper children’s writing (their voices) and, in turn, their ability to learn to read.

Writing and reading are siblings. They complement each other, and for most children, if one isn’t working, the other isn’t either. That’s why, as children learn to read, they should be learning to write. Good reading and writing instruction involves interactions and feedback from teachers, students, and parents.

Below is a reminder of what makes a good writing program, but first I want to address the problem.

The National Reading Panel, which led to the SoR, failed to adequately research reading (See Yatvin, 2003). They ignored writing!

In 2023, Stephen Sawchuck of Education Week wrote about this omission: How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’? His points are valid, but his focus on breaking writing into explicit skills, much like the SoR breaks up reading, misses the mark.

The Science of Reading isn’t settled, since believers finally want to address writing. They sound like writing instruction never existed, calling for a Science of Writing. Adding “science” makes it sound legit and lends itself to for-profit programs.

While reading Sawchuck’s report, it’s easy to picture newly minted, skill-oriented, expensive online writing programs for states to add to their already crowded list of online decoding programs.

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

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

I would argue that none of that is necessary for children to learn to write (and read better). What’s needed is paper and pencil and adults who care about student writing, will read and value it, and help children improve upon it.

Teachers used to address writing well. They focused on it more and better. What happened?

Remember Common Core and David Coleman’s toxic words about student voice?

David Coleman, a businessman and codeveloper of the CCSS, who now makes millions as the head of the College Board, denounced student voice.

Around 2015, Coleman, discussing student narrative writing, stating to a group of teachers:

You grow up in this world, and you realize people don’t really give a shit about what you feel and what you think.

Along with this, SoR enthusiasts largely ignored the critical connections between writing and learning to read. The heavy focus on decoding and direct instruction still permeate early learning classrooms, and writing has been an afterthought.

Coleman was wrong, of course. The most critical part of writing is student voice. The SoR folks are wrong too. Skills are secondary to writing well. With both writing and reading, children must first understand what’s in it for them.

Please open the link and read Bailey’s explanation of the best approaches to teaching students to write and to find their own voice.

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

Gary Rubinstein: Eva Moskowitz Sues NYSED for Inadvertently Exposing that They Have Been Gaming the U.S. News Rankings for Years

By dianeravitch

September 8, 2026 //

Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy charter chain, has been everywhere recently, promoting her brand. She has written op-Ed’s for major newspapers, she was interviewed by Margaret Hoover on PBS’ “Firing Line,” she is expanding from New York City to Florida. And just the other day, she published an article in The Washington Post saying that she is suing the New York State Education Department for failing to release the AP scores of her charter schools, which caused her schools’ ranking to plummet in the U.S. News‘ ranking of high schools.

Gary Rubinstein looked at her complaint and dissected it. Gary teaches advanced mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Stuyvesant is a highly selective school that accepts only the students who pass a rigorous test. Gary is a crack researcher and examiner of claims, who has repeatedly taken apart the Success Academy marketing brand.

Gary wrote:

No matter where you go in New York City, you are forced to ponder the Success Academy charter network. On bus stops, in your mailbox, even as a commercial during a YouTube video, the school seems to be everywhere. A Success Academy looking student was even saved by Superman in the recent 2025 Superman movie.

Waiting For Superman? He finally came!

Starting in 2006 with about 170 students, it has grown to encompass about 60 schools and about 22,000 students. They are known for having very strict discipline and very high test scores.

Over the years I have examined pretty much every aspect of this school. I’ve done post after post about how it should be a red flag that they only graduate about 150 seniors a year despite having over 2000 kindergarteners and about 800 ninth graders across several schools. I’ve interviewed former students who say that, yes, the school stops everything and does test prep for several months before the state tests. I’ve interviewed parents who have been pressured to transfer their kids out of Success Academy. And if you do a search on reddit you will find page after page of stories that will break your heart.

But Success Academy does seem to have excellent test scores, at least the 3-8 Math and ELA state test scores. Though there are a lot of students who are pushed out of the school, the 3-8 test scores are even good considering that. But for these 3-8 scores to be more than a mirage, they need to translate into good high school scores, and here is where things get a bit complicated.

One metric that Success Academy has been able to boast about in recent years has been their position on the US News & World Report High School rankings. Last year, for example, they were rated the 11th best High School in New York State along with the big guns like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Townsend Harris, and Brooklyn Tech. Having a rating like that makes for a nice item to show to donors at fundraisers and can help them start new franchises in Florida, for example.

But the US News & World Report High School rankings have always been flawed. Here’s how they work: Three of the main categories are ‘college readiness’, state assessment proficiency, and graduation rate. The ‘college readiness’ score has been worth 30% and it is calculated by averaging the percent of seniors who took an AP test and the percent of seniors who got a 3 or higher on at least one of those AP exams. So if there is a school where every senior takes a bunch of APs and as long as everyone passes at least one of those APs, that school can get a full 30 points for that metric. So if there is a school where all the students get 5s on multiple APs, it gets the same score as the school where students get a 3 on exactly one AP. So this one is pretty easy to game because all you have to do is force your students to take a bunch of APs and since getting a 3 isn’t so hard as it is like getting a 60% or less on some of them, you can get the full 30 points if you make that the goal for the school. The same is true for the state assessment proficiency where as long as your students pass, even if they barely pass, they get the same rating as a school where the students get near perfect scores on the test.

It is possible to game the math component of the state assessment proficiency metric by not making your students take the Geometry and Algebra II Regents. Most NYC students take Algebra I in 8th or 9th grade and at a high performing school, they generally take those other two Regents the next two years. But those other ones aren’t needed for graduation so if a school doesn’t want those scores to affect their US News & World Report ratings, they might not have their students take math Regents beyond Algebra I. Success Academy is one of those schools whose math component of the US News ranking is based on just Algebra I. They seem to be the only supposedly high performing school whose students do not take the Geometry and the Algebra II Regents so their math score that US News uses is based on one easy test rather than three tests in which the other two are much more difficult.

In 2025 Success Academy was ranked 11th in New York State (out of about 1200 schools). But the latest ranking came out and Success Academy dropped to 196th. This prompted Success Academy to sue the New York State Education Department for what they felt was an unfair change in the reporting of the data to US News & World Report. I will try to explain why the 196th ranking this year is actually a more fair ranking than the 11th from the previous year and how this lawsuit could backfire on Success Academy.

So the big change from last year to this year is that New York State did not report the AP score data to US News & World report. So what US News did was increase the weight of the other categories to compensate for that. In theory, at least, it shouldn’t affect the rankings by so much. A school with good AP scores will also likely have good state assessment proficiency and a good graduation rate. Those things generally go up and down together.

But there was a strange thing in the new rankings. Most of the top 25 schools by the new ranking were not high performing on last year’s rankings. So 25 schools shot to the top and most of the other schools that used to be at the top of the list ended up moving down around 25 spots or sometimes a little more. This happened because though NY State did not report the AP scores, they did report for IB schools those scores and those IB schools got to use the college readiness metric which meant that they got the advantage of inflating their scores while the AP schools didn’t. Of the top 200 schools, 42 of them were IB schools in the new ranking, including about 25 of the top 30 schools. It would have been more fair for NY State to also not give the IB scores since it did make top performing AP schools lose around 25 spots on average.

But Success Academy did not just drop 25 spots. It dropped the most spots of any school in the state that I was able to find. Dropping 185 spots in a ranking revealed why Success Academy never really deserved to be in spot number 11 the previous year.

When the AP scores got eliminated from the calculation, the other scores got increased in weight including the ‘graduation rate’ statistic. Now of the top 20 schools from last year, they all had nearly a 100% graduation rate so changing the weight of that category didn’t change their ranking by much (other than the 25 spot move from the IB issue). But there was one school, Success Academy, that only had a 73% graduation rate. They have this because only 73% of their students graduate in 4 years. But what happens to the other 27%? Many of those are forced to repeat 11th grade. At the school last year there were about 180 11th graders but only 120 12th graders. So this 73% affected their overall score and brought them down so many places.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. See, when they don’t promote the 11th graders this accomplishes two things with the old US News formula from last year. Yes, it lowered their graduation rate but that was only a small component last year. More importantly, by not promoting those 11th graders, this served to increase their old AP college readiness score since those 11th graders who were left back did not have to try to pass any APs. So that policy to leave back so many 11th graders brought down their graduation rate but brought up their college readiness rate and overall since graduation rate wasn’t a big part of the grade, they were able to become 11th ranked with the inflated college readiness grade.

The big question I have is: Is that the reason that they leave back so many 11th graders? It would seem really unusual to get left back when you’ve been surviving at this school from kindergarten to 11th grade only to get left back just before becoming a senior. No other school that was high rated last year in US News had such a drop in enrollment from 11th grade to 12th grade, generally they had about the same number of 12th graders as they did 11th graders. I would not put it past Success Academy if they were altering the course of those left back students’ lives just so they would not hurt the US News & World Report ranking.

But it came back to bite Success Academy in the butt as the AP score was eliminated from the ranking and the graduation rate’s weight was increased. And now they are suing. As they are the only school to drop by 185 places, they will not have any other schools joining them. I don’t know why NY State chose not to report the AP data. They have had some recent conflict with the college board selling student information, and I think they won a giant settlement from them. Maybe that affected their decision. I don’t think the state was aware that it would affect the relative rankings and, in general, it didn’t. They probably should have anticipated the IB bump that gave the top 20 spots to IB schools but it will be really hard to prove in court that this choice was deliberate. Success Academy could just as well sue US News & World Report since they could have come up with some other creative way to weigh the remaining categories so that the top 20 spots wouldn’t have been dominated by those schools.

In the op-ed that Eva Moskowitz wrote in The Washington Post, she says “Parents deserve to know how well high schools are preparing their students for college-level work. That’s why U.S. News & World Report is a great tool. For years, it has publicized students’ performance on Advanced Placement exams as part of its widely followed national high school rankings.” She also wrote: “We’ve done so [sued NYSED] to vindicate not only our right to make our results known, but also the rights of parents and policymakers to have accurate, objective data about our state’s schools. Parents can’t demand excellence if government prevents them from seeing it.” So here’s my challenge to Eva Moskowitz and if not to her, then to the New York State Education Department: Let’s see the granular data of the AP scores from Success Academy. Moskowitz writes that “students at Success Academy, the network of public charter schools I lead, perform extraordinarily well on those tests. We value each AP exam as an independent benchmark and require our students to sit for at least 18 of them to graduate.” That is quite a large number of APs. She says that most of them pass 3 exams, but that means they failed 15. I would really like to see all the scores, all the 1s and 2s on the different exams that students are forced to take for no other purpose than to increase the college readiness score that ended up not being calculated anyway.

A post on Yahoo! news misrepresents this story (with information likely from Success Academy themselves) as: “Because NYSED declined to authorize the College Board to release 2026 AP scores, U.S. News calculated the advanced course metrics using only International Baccalaureate (IB) data. Because Success Academy offers AP courses rather than IB programs, the network received zero credit for 40% of the ranking’s weighted criteria, causing its statewide ranking to crater from 11th to 196th.” But no, that is not at all what happened. Just like all the AP schools, the other rankings were weighted to make the top score still 100% — Success Academy is the only school to drop this much even though AP scores were dropped from about 1000 schools. I would love to see their lawyer try to misrepresent the facts this way in court.

If anyone should be filing a law suit, it should be any Success Academy 11th grader who was mysteriously left back just when they were about to enter their senior year. If they could prove that they were discriminated against for the purpose of juicing the US News ranking, that seems like a good class action suit.

Categories Education Industry, Ethics, Harlem Success Academy, New York, New York City, Standardized Testing

Freddy DeBoer: Whatever Happened to Raj Chetty and His Claims about Teachers?

By dianeravitch

September 3, 2026 //

Back in 2011, Harvard Professor Raj Chetty and two esteemed colleagues (John Friedman at Brown University and Jonah Rockoff at Columbia University) published a dazzling study of teachers, asserting that the best teachers are those whose students get improved scores. Those students have a higher income ($250,000 over their lifetimes), and enjoy a multitude of benefits, all because of that one teacher who induced them to have higher scores. President Obama cited Chetty’s research in his 2012 State of the Union address to show how important it was to find the “best” teachers and fire the “worst’ teachers.

Chetty’s work supported the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top plan to encourage evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. States that evaluated teachers by their students’ scores were eligible to apply for a share of RTTT funding. Those who did not were not eligible.

Most states, eager for a share of the $5 billion prize, agreed to adopt what was called “value-added modeling” or “value-added measurement.” (VAM)

I posted dozens of times about the flaws of VAM, first of all, because the American Statistical Association said that teachers account for only 1-14% of score changes; most changes were attributable to home life and school system issues. Secondly, because the VAM concept is very unstable and is highly affected by student demographics. Only teachers of reading and math in grades 4-9 could even be assessed by the annual tests, which are mandated only in grades 3-8. Schools started attributing scores to teachers not in those subjects and not in those grades, tied to the work of other teachers in the school.

The Los Angeles Times engaged researchers to calculate VAM scores for the district’s teachers, and the newspaper published them alongside the names of teachers. It was humiliating for teachers, but Arne Duncan thought this disclosure was wonderful.

I happened to be in Los Angeles on the day that a fifth grade teacher committed suicide after he received a poor VAM score. No one knows if that was the reason for his suicide, but it may have been. By all accounts, he was a good teacher in a tough school.

The New York Post did the same for New York City teachers. It listed names and scores. The teacher identified by the newspaper as the city’s “worst” teacher was hounded by Post reporters seeking an interview. It turned out that she taught classes of new immigrants, who moved in and then out of her class as they learned enough English to join regular classes. Her students in September were not the same students by June. The VAM scores for her were meaningless, as they were for other teachers. Teachers of the gifted saw few if any gains because their students were at the top year after year. Expert math teacher Gary Rubinstein noticed that some teachers had high scores in one subject, but not in the other. Should half the teacher get a bonus while the other half was fired?

Freddie deBoer, an independent writer who earned a doctorate in English and education assessment, re-evaluated Raj Chetty’s famous study.

It’s a long review, and I won’t post it all. Please open the link and read it.

He begins:

For a long time I’ve been getting some version of the comment, “What about Chetty!” in response to my perspective on education, as in Raj Chetty, the economist who for the past decade has made a lot of waves asserting that our education problems are straightforwardly the product of bad teachers and that replacing them will have implausibly large economic effects. I tend to try and work from a broader perspective than “this is why I think this guy is wrong,” but I get this request so often, here you go. This is why I think Raj Chetty is wrong.

Few empirical claims in modern education policy have traveled farther than Chetty et al’s findings on teacher “value-added.” In his famous 2014 American Economic Review papers, he and his coauthors reported that students assigned to better (excuse me, higher value-added) teachers were more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, save for retirement, and avoid teen pregnancy, and that replacing a teacher in the bottom five percent of the distribution with an average teacher would raise the present value of a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by roughly $250,000. Chetty’s research findings in this domain had been floating around for awhile at the time of publication, and President Obama cited the figure in his 2012 State of the Union address, and the judge who decided Vergara v. California leaned on it to strike down California’s teacher tenure laws. Take that, teachers! The findings are arresting, the dataset is impressive – 2.5 million children, linked to IRS tax records! – and the policy implications are clean: identify and remove bad (pardon me, low “value-added”) teachers, watch outcomes improve. It’s exactlythe kind of story our neoliberal policy establishment is desperate to tell, and was clearly catnip to the Obama administration, which was doggedly attached to a simplistic vision of delivery through better education, where the gutting of the uneducated labor market was ameliorated by turning every last child in the United States into a genius, scaling up the Stanford-to-Google pipeline until every American could pass through it.

Unfortunately, the Chetty story is ultimately another neoliberal just-so story, that is to say, a fable, a legend, a myth. The closer you look at what the “value-added” construct actually measures, how stable those measurements are, and how the Chetty results have fared under replication, the more reason there is to doubt both the magnitude of the claimed effects and, more fundamentally, whether “teacher quality” as the literature operationalizes it is a coherent, measurable attribute at all. (Spoiler: it is not.) Let us count the problems.

The construct itself puts the thumb on the scale. The first problem is conceptual. In the Chetty et al. studies, a teacher’s “value-added” is the residual variation in a student’s standardized test scores that remains after controlling for prior achievement and some demographic covariates. It’s not a measure of pedagogical skill, content knowledge, classroom climate, the cultivation of curiosity, or any other property normally meant by “good teaching.” It’s a statistical residual on a narrow set of assessments, usually math and reading tests in grades three through eight. That residual is then defined as quality. I want to be clear about this: any portion of variability in student outcomes that Chetty et al cannot or will not identify otherwise is assumed to be a product of teacher inputs. Since Chetty’s whole project is to argue that educational outcomes are the result of teacher quality, this is what we used to call begging the question – that is, he’s assuming the point he wants to prove, asserting the desired conclusion as a premise, by acting as though any uncaptured variation is necessary evidence of teaching quality. And it gets worse in the telling. When advocates and journalists and politicians summarize his work, the construct expands silently from “the part of test-score gains Chetty cannot otherwise explain” to “good teachers,” and the slippage is rarely flagged. But that’s the whole game, you guys.

Open the link and enjoy!

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Research, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, VAM (value-added modeling)

Jeff Bryant: Did the Big Teachers’ Protest Rally in 2011 Make a Difference?

By dianeravitch

September 3, 2026 //

Jeff Bryant, prolific education journalist, writes in The Progressive about the efforts by educators to fight back against the failed and punitive policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It’s a valuable summary of the past 15 years. Teachers rallied. Teachers sounded alarms about the bipartisan attack is on teachers, teaching and public schools.

Did it make a difference?

Now, 15 years later, there are thousands of charters, and they are no better than the public schools, contrary to their promises. Now, most states have vouchers, and the public is funding religious schools, which was unthinkable in 2011.

But we can’t give up! At last, there are candidates running to fight for public schools. Gina Hinojosa is the most prominent of them. If she defeats Greg Abbott in Texas, expect major changes.

Jeff writes:

It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived…

At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.

I had read multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances.

Teachers turned out to denounce high-stakes testing, NCLB, Race to the Top, budget cuts, privatization, and the attacks on their profession, funded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other billionaires.

….The estimated crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 roared in approval at an array of speakers that included the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a professor of education), Ravitch, best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, renowned educator Deborah Meier, and policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera. When the speeches were over and we marched to the White House, the line of people stretched for blocks and blocks…

The range of themes the speakers addressed included lack of pay and respect for teachers; the harms caused by poverty and privatization; the continuing racial discrimination and segregation in schools and glaring inequities in their funding; the unbearable class sizes teachers endure, and the injustices that result from using test scores to sanction schools and evaluate teachers.

What also animated the crowd, Anthony Cody tells The Progressive in a text message, was a sense of betrayal on education by the Democratic Party’s leadership. Cody, a fulltime classroom teacher at the time—he’s now retired—was one of the principal organizers of the march. “The great majority of teachers supported the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” he says. “[But] RTTT reinforced the worst elements of NCLB by encouraging states to link teacher pay and evaluations to standardized test scores.”

“A theme that ran through the rally was ‘how could a Democratic administration be so hostile to public schools?’ ” says Ravitch in an email to The Progressive.

“The speakers, me included, hated RTTT and saw it for what it was: encouragement for charters, high-stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, and other dreadful policies,” Ravitch continues. “We predicted [the policies] would fail, and they did.”

A particular target for invective at the rally was Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Ravitch recalls. “He regularly assailed public schools as failing. He attacked public school teachers. He constantly praised charter schools, and whenever national test scores came out, he gleefully pointed to results and made them sound worse than they were.”

“Duncan could have fit in a Republican cabinet,” Ravitch adds.

Fifteen years later, did that outpouring in July 2011 matter?…

The sad truth is that the grievances that motivated people to board buses and gather on the Mall on a hot July day in 2011 continue to dominate the K-12 school landscape today.

For instance, one of NPE’s reports that Cody references, published in 2026, found that states that have been the most aggressive about redirecting public funds for schools to private education operators have been the most neglectful of funding and supporting their public schools.

Although No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, it was replaced that year by the Every Student Succeeds Act that still enforces standardized testing. And the legacy of the funding cuts enacted during the Great Recession continues to harm schools.

“In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the United States lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools,” an analysis by the Education Law Center reported in 2021. Calling the time, from 2008 to 2018, a “lost decade,” the organization noted that while states’ economic activity as measured by gross domestic product increased by 17 percent, state and local revenues for public schools lagged, increasing by only 6 percent.

A 2025 Education Law Center report, “Making the Grade,” assessed states on how they fund public schools and found that not a single state earned an A grade on three crucial measures of funding: whether state and local revenues are adequate, whether funding is fairly distributed, and whether funding lags a state’s economic capacity.

In the meantime, the charter school industry continues to expand, with thirty-nine out of forty-three states experiencing growth in charters in 2025, according to charter industry data. And voucher programs also continue to grow, as fifteen states now operate twenty-three programs, and the Trump Administration is set to roll out a nationwide federal voucher program in 2027. As the right wing’s “long game” to end public education continues apace, prominent centrist Democrats call for a return to the education policies of the Bush and Obama years.

“Democrats [have] walked away from standards and accountability [for schools], and our kids are falling through the cracks,” former Chicago mayor and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is telling anyone who will listen. And Arne Duncan is back in the media spotlight, encouraging Democratic governors to embrace the Trump Administration’s voucher program. That the politics of education in 2026 seem so similar to those of 2011 is evidence that a left-right binary over education policy doesn’t really exist.

As I observed all those years ago on the cusp of the march in D.C., there was no middle ground in education debates. Factions on the right wanted to get rid of public schools. Business interests represented by testing companies, charter schools, and tech firms wanted to make money off schools. And a “reform” community led by wealthy foundations and technocrats wanted to mold public schools to their ideological, and often political, agendas.

As I wrote at the time, “Faced with this array of antagonists toward public education, where does the ‘middle ground’ lie? When people openly admit they want to get rid of you, where should the bargaining start? When people have shown you they are more apt to use you for their own profit, and then walk away when the ‘market changes,’ why should you trust them? And when people say they are willing to align with your cause but only when you say and do things how they want you to do them—even when your ideals inform you to do otherwise—why should you simply bend to their will?”

Those questions are still relevant today. They will remain so until a progressive left faction adopts a robust message on education and articulates it repeatedly in advocacy documents and political stump speeches.

“Our battle for public schools is steeper now than it was when the Save Our Schools rally was held,” Ravitch says. “It will be a battle for many years to come.”

But in 2011, for at least a day, it seemed that public school advocates had the power to, as Ravitch put it in her email, “push back and give people a modicum of hope.”

The battle continues, and it’s not over. America needs a strong public school system, not a hodge-podge of pop-up schools.

We need well-prepared teachers who can knowledgeably teach history, science, mathematics, literature, and foreign languages. We need well-funded schools and respected, well-paid professionals. We need equality of opportunity for all children, and we need excellence.

We need the strong public schools that built the Aunited States into a great nation. We need education for democracy, where children are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

We need an education system that produces engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, athletes, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, social workers, idealists, scholars, young people eager to use their hands, their brains, and their hearts to make our society better for everyone.

We are now in a period of disruption and dissolution. That way lies disaster. It is the road to elitism, segregation, indoctrination, and decay.

We need to raise our sights and build better public schools that offer a goood education for all children.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Extremism, Failure, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Supporting public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

Peter Greene: Federal Voucher Money Will Not Go to Public Schools

By dianeravitch

August 18, 2026 //

Will the federal voucher program benefit public schools? Peter Greene says no. It is not intended to send funds to public schools, but to subtract them. How else can states afford the tuition of almost every child currently enrolled in religious and private schools? The states don’t intend to increase the funding pie. As voucher schools grow–with your tax dollars–public schools will experience budget cuts. Some will close. This is what Linda McMahon, Betsy DeVos and their allies want.

Peter Greene writes on his blog Curmudgucation:

Remember “backpacks full of cash”? It was a phrase coined by reformster Jeanne Allen that captured the way that taxpayer-funded vouchers turned private school students into couriers, bagmen who simultaneously delivered and laundered taxpayer dollars so that public money could be directed to private religious schools. We may someday be nostalgic for the era in which such manipulations were necessary– “Once upon a time, not only was the government not required to fund religious organizations, but they were actually rquired NOT to.”

Vouchers were always an elegant solution to the question of “How do we get public money to private schools?” Private schools were already funded by a stream of students carrying backpacks stuffed with their parents’ cash. To get government-to-school funding going would require a whole other stream to be created, but vouchers could just hop onto the stream that already existed. Parents could stuff the backpacks with taxpayer dollars as well as their own.

It’s important to keep this model in mind when discussing one of the hot issues around the federal voucher system.

Voucher fans argue that federal vouchers will benefit public schools, which is a careful choice of wording because the federal vouchers will not go to schools– they will go to families, to shove into their child’s cash backpack.

For private schools, that’s a distinction without much difference, because vouchers pack new cash into the same old funding stream. But for public schools, it’s a completely different issue.

The public school funding stream is taxpayer to government to school district. There is no public school version of a funding stream fed by individual students carrying backpacks full of cash. That is, in many ways, antithetical to the public school mission.

In the private school backpack model, the size of the student’s backpack determines where they can go with that load of money. A large backpack full of loads of cash? You get to go to Philips Exeter. A fanny pack loaded with a small, lonely stack? You get to go to Bob’s Strip Mall Academy.

How the market treats you depends on how big and how stuffed your backpack full of cash is.

The public system is designed to work differently. All the cash comes into one big pool, and every student gets to swim in it regardless of what their family’s contribution might have been. (Does it work perfectly? No, particularly because of the ties to housing. The irony here is that the public mission is undermined by market forces in the housing market).

Point is– federal voucher dollars are not going to go to public schools unless the public schools can figure out a way to create the new funding stream for students carrying cash backpacks, and that create a whole new set of issues. If a special tutoring program is available to Susie because she has a backpack of federal voucher money, then why shouldn’t that tutoring be available to any or all students, regardless of backpack status?

Addendum: If a district already has a program that charges fees, then the federal voucher would help families pay that fee, but that would result in zero new revenue for the district.

If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to pay for a basic service, how do we square that with the mission of providing the same basic service for all? If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to “buy” an extra service, how do we justify only providing that special service to some students?

These dilemmas are unavoidable because, again, the federal voucher program will not give money to schools, but to students. For private schools, that will mean business as usual. For public schools, that will mean a new business model that will have to somehow co-exist with the traditional public service mission. There are undoubtedly some public districts out there well-positioned to wrestle with this issue, but it would be great if governors and districts put some real thought and discussion into the issue, because federal voucher dollars will only make it to public schools via a new and potentially troubling path.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: The Trump Administration’s War on Children

By dianeravitch

August 13, 2026 //

Jan Resseger keeps a steady focus o what matters most in a decent society: the well-being of children. Trump and his minions don’t care. Not about children. Not about the rule of law. Not about democracy. Trump cares about greed and self-enrichment. He seems to care about his children. He cuts them in on the grift. His youngest son Barron is said to be worth $150 million. But he doesn’t care about yours.

The fact that he just issued guidance on childhood vaccinations, which reduces mandated vaccines and puts America’s most vulnerable at risk of serious illness and death, tells you all you need to know about this scientifically ignorant man.

Jan writes:

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s important new book, Regime Change, explores how the second Trump administration functions—the cast of characters, their relationships, and their operational style. A reader is also exposed, however, to the President’s and the administration’s big policy concerns—imposing tariffs, ridding the country of immigrants, ending nuclear weapons in Iran, proclaiming that everything is more affordable, and ending the public’s fixation on Jeffrey Epstein. These issues have also been widely covered broadly in the news.

Here are topics that do not appear at all in Regime Change‘s index: children, public education, CHIP, SNAP, Head Start, or Child Care. There is not even a mention of Trump’s tuition tax credit private school vouchers launched in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The issue of birthright citizenship is mentioned in the index only as a subhead under immigration, and in the book itself birthright citizenship is covered only in one sentence describing its proposed elimination by an early Trump executive order. In the index, there is only one page citation to the U.S. Department of Education itself, but the reference is to brief coverage of the administration’s attempt to eradicate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at Harvard University.

The lack of regular news coverage—particularly in the local newspapers—about Trump’s damaging public education policy and the administration’s failure to protect children’s well-being and children’s rights does not, however, mean that these issues have been untouched by Trump administration policy. For those of us who do not need CHIP or SNAP, who can afford quality child care and preschool, whose children attend well-funded public schools, whose families have been citizens for generations, however, there is minimal exposure to the Trump administration’s threats to the institutions on which vulnerable families and children depend.

Just this past week the Trump administration took two steps that, if they do come to pass, will seriously impact some of our society’s most vulnerable children—poor children benefiting today from Head Start, and the children of immigrants from whom the President is once again trying to steal the protection of birthright citizenship. First Focus on Children’s President Bruce Lesley has identified what he calls the Trump administration’s “organized abandonment” of the needs and rights of our society’s most vulnerable children.

The Trump administration attempted to destroy Head Start. At the end of last week, the Trump administration formally proposed new federal administrative guidance to deregulate the quality of Head Start programs that currently serve 700,000 children across the United States. The destruction of Head Start had been predicted early last week but on Thursday in a notice in the Federal Register, the administration formally proposed radically diminishing 133 pages of rules that have shaped Head Start since it was established in 1965 as a centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The Center on Law and Social Policy explains that the proposed new rules are being disguised by the administration with language describing “an effort to ‘streamline,’ ‘enhance,’ and ‘modernize’” the program. Politico‘s Mackenzie Wilkes reports: “The Heritage Foundation has long called for the elimination of Head Start, but the conservative group published a report last month saying the program should be deregulated in many of the ways the proposed rule suggests while ‘officials work to end the program.’ ”

The Associated Press‘s Moria Balingit outlines the changes the new rules would prescribe: “Head Start… is currently governed by more than 100 pages of regulations… (which) require centers to have low staff-to-student ratios and a research-backed curriculum, among other things, and they ensure centers are providing wraparound services that are critical to children in poverty, including medical and dental screenings and parent coaching. The proposal would toss out nearly all of that rule book. Education Week”s Elizabeth Heubeck adds: “The new proposal would require (that) all classroom instruction be conducted in English, except for immersion programs operated on Native American tribal lands. An estimated 30-35% of children enrolled in the Head Start program are dual language learners.” The program would also exclude many non-citizen children and children in some immigrant families.

While Congress establishes federal departments and the specific offices within the departments, the legislative branch has no power over the executive branch’s right to establish formal administrative rules and guidance. It is possible that the rules announced in last week’s Federal Register can be challenged in court, and it is also possible, of course, that public outrage might cause the Trump administration to modify the new rules during the 60 day period when the public is invited to submit public comments before the rule becomes final. A future President, of course, could replace the Trump administration’s new rules.

President Trump signed two new executive orders to undermine birthright citizenship. Last Thursday, The Washington Post‘s Isaac Arnsdorf, Justin Jouvenal, and David Nakamura reported: “President Donald Trump took another stab at restricting automatic citizenship for people born in the United States after the Supreme Court rejected his earlier attempt. In two executive orders signed Thursday, Trump reached for different legal maneuvers to test the limits of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The first order said children would be ineligible if born to ‘alien enemies,’ members of foreign terrorist organizations, or foreign lobbyists. The second order said children of people who fraudulently request tourist visas for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S. would not become citizens… The new orders marked a fresh effort to… deliver on a campaign promise by expanding the categories of people who the administration argues fall outside the constitutional guarantee.”

The reporters quote legal experts who doubt that the first executive order could survive a legal challenge: “An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department. No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic.”

The reporters attribute the second executive order to White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, who has made stopping “birth tourism” a priority. They provide data to demonstrate that what is called “birth tourism” is relatively infrequent. “In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births.”

None of the legal experts the reporters quote believes that either of these executive orders would be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court or would challenge in any way what Chief Justice John Roberts declared in his June 30, 2026 decision in Trump v. Barbara: “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

First Focus on Children’s Bruce Lesley believes that both of last week’s executive orders are seriously misguided: “The legal question isn’t simply what the government thinks about immigration. It’s whether an innocent child can lose fundamental rights grounded in the Constitution because of something government officials allege about a parent’s conduct and intent… The latest effort to gut a fundamental constitutional operating principle since our nation’s founding has been written clearly in the Constitution since 1868, is being sold to the public with pathetic history and legal arguments the Supreme Court itself rejected 128 years ago and early this year. Every administration has the authority to enforce immigration laws. However, none has the authority to rewrite the Constitution… by redefining which babies they deem are precious and which are pushed into the shadows of our society.”

Although there has obviously been some news coverage of the week’s public policy initiatives impacting our society’s children, the well-being of our children is neither the top policy concern for officials in the Trump administration nor the top story for the reporters who track the administration’s agenda. Because the needs of children are definitely not the primary lens through which the Trump administration views and conceptualizes our society’s important needs, it is especially important to watch for news about children’s welfare, their rights, and the enormous institution of public schools that serves the mass of our children

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Environment, Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Indiana: Republicans Have Systematically Undermined Public Schools, Where 87% of Students Are Enrolled

By dianeravitch

August 13, 2026 //

Indiana once took pride in its public schools. Not any more. Since the Republican Party took charge of state government, public schools have been neglected and underfunded.

Veteran educator Vernon Smith was elected to the state legislature after his retirement. He wrote this article, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

He wrote:

Sixteen years ago, Republicans assumed full control of Indiana’s state government, holding the governor’s office and winning majorities in the House and the Senate. Since achieving this trifecta, the Republican supermajority has systematically cut funding and programs that made this state work for the people who live here.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than the state’s complete neglect of public schools for nearly two decades. Since taking power, the Republican supermajority has done everything in its power to undermine public education, and Indiana’s children are worse off for it.

Let me explain where years of Republican education policy have gotten us. Last month, the Network for Public Education released a report revealing Indiana ranks 45th out of 50 states in support of public education. Last year, only 31.2% of students showed proficiency on both the math and ELA sections of the ILEARN test. More than half of fourth graders can’t read proficiently, and nearly seven-in-ten eighth graders aren’t proficient in math.

A record number of school districts across the state — nearly 40 — have turned to ballot referenda to secure the money they need this year because the state won’t properly fund them and has cut their local funding sources. These are the results of Republicans chipping away at Indiana’s public school funding for years.

Consider where their priorities lie. More than 87% of Hoosier children attend traditional public schools. Yet year after year, the supermajority pours its energy and political capital into expanding charter schools and private school vouchers for the children of families who were, in most cases, never going to need the state’s help in the first place. The legislature has made it clear: they have no issue abandoning working-class Hoosiers in favor of giving an extra leg up to the most fortunate among us.

When Indiana first opened the door to charter schools and voucher programs, lawmakers sold it as a lifeline for children of color and children in poverty whose assigned schools were failing them. But once the door was propped open, my Republican colleagues expanded it year after year, extending vouchers to families making well over six figures. If this were truly about rescuing kids who’d been failed by the system, it would have stayed targeted at the kids who needed rescuing. Instead, it grew into a subsidy for everyone but the working-class families the program was designed to serve.

None of this is by accident. The supermajority was warned by Democrats, education professionals and concerned Hoosiers of the consequences that their policies would inflict on our schools. It is the direct, foreseeable and self-inflicted result of almost two decades of choices made by men and women who have mistaken their own supermajority for a mandate to neglect the children they were elected to serve.

Districts across the state are being forced to ask voters to approve referenda to raise their own local property taxes just so schools can keep the lights on and pay their teachers. Let’s not pretend this educational belt-tightening is born of necessity. Indiana has nearly $4 billion in surplus and reserve funds, which is more than enough to return to our previous, robust support of public education. Our schools and the children attending them are being asked to make do with less while the state sits on more money than it knows what to do with.

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I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it out of partisan loyalty. I say it as a man who spent nearly 20 years as a school principal and six years as a teacher before I ever spent a day in the Statehouse. I have seen firsthand what happens when a school has what it needs, and I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

I am telling you, plainly: Indiana’s Republican supermajority has had 16 years to prove it knows the difference too. It does not. If it did, we would not rank 45th in the nation for public school support. We would not be watching our children fall further behind their peers in other states while the people entrusted with fixing it offer nothing but superficial, special-interest-backed policies that don’t address the underlying issues.

This is where years of unchecked Republican domination have gotten us: two decades of failure and of backs turned on the generation that makes up the future of this state, this nation and the world beyond.

For 16 years, they have stood before us and promised that this would finally be the year public education in Indiana gets fixed. And for 16 years, they have failed to deliver on that promise. The only question left is how much longer Hoosiers are willing to take their word for it and allow more children to fail academically

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Indiana, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

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About the Author(s)

Inside the Collapse of a “Montessori Ponzi” Scheme

How the Billionaires Manufactured an Education “Crisis”

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

The Bottom Line

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

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

Gary Rubinstein: Eva Moskowitz Sues NYSED for Inadvertently Exposing that They Have Been Gaming the U.S. News Rankings for Years

Freddy DeBoer: Whatever Happened to Raj Chetty and His Claims about Teachers?

Jeff Bryant: Did the Big Teachers’ Protest Rally in 2011 Make a Difference?

Peter Greene: Federal Voucher Money Will Not Go to Public Schools

Jan Resseger: The Trump Administration’s War on Children

Indiana: Republicans Have Systematically Undermined Public Schools, Where 87% of Students Are Enrolled

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About the Author(s)

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

The Bottom Line

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

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