Kelly Edgar taught music in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas) for 25 years. She recently wrote this article in The Nevada Independent about the dangers of charter schools.
Charter schools have been touted as the solution to our “failing public schools.” To be fair, the original intention was good. Those who founded the charter school movement envisioned it as a way to collaborate with public schools by finding creative solutions for students who weren’t thriving in traditional educational settings.
But that’s not what’s happening today. Since retiring from the Clark County School District in 2024, I’ve developed my own theory: Between the dismantling of the Department of Education and free market ideologues wanting in on public school tax dollars, it’s now clear that the goal of privatizing education has been decades in the making. And charter schools are the stepping stones to get the job done.
Most people assume that charter schools are public schools because they’re free to attend and publicly funded. However, unlike traditional public schools, many are managed by private, for-profit companies — such as Academica in Nevada — and they filter enrollment via applications and lotteries.
Public education certainly has its challenges. I devoted decades to working inside the system and spent my final years sounding the alarm about overcrowded classrooms, insufficient resources, district leaders with ulterior motives and a lack of teacher autonomy.
According to a July 2026 report by the Network for Public Education, there’s a direct correlation between academic achievement and per-pupil funding. States that support public schools outperform those that do not. So why is Nevada’s education system still ranked 48th in the nation despite “historic education funding” being passed in 2023?
Because you can’t pour water into a leaky bucket and expect it to hold. The funding was a start, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that Nevada also aggressively redirects public funds toward “private alternatives” such as charter schools. As the Network for Public Education puts it, “Privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand.”
The groundwork for all this was laid when the President Ronald Reagan’s administration, ahead of his 1984 re-election campaign, convinced Americans that we were A Nation at Risk, public schools were to blame and only Reagan could save us. This report simmered with “apocalyptic rhetoric” and the media seized on it like a dog with a bone because nothing grabs attention better than lines such as “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.”
What A Nation at Risk and major news outlets failed to mention, however, was a statistical sleight of hand called Simpson’s paradox. Students weren’t actually doing worse; more students, not just the privileged few, were taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In fact, President George Bush’s own commissioned study concluded that on nearly every measure, scores held steady or improved. But those findings were suppressed, and politicians on both sides of the aisle doubled down on the same flawed premise that public schools were failing America.
And when public schools didn’t crumble under those “reforms” as anticipated, the Council for National Policy (CNP), a conservative network, manufactured a new crisis: convincing the American people that teachers are indoctrinating their children with radical, anti-American ideologies.
The impact of this conspiracy on teacher morale has been brutal. We went from being treated as professionals to villains overnight, pouring ourselves into our work just to be disparaged by the media and pundits who would never survive a day in our shoes.
But sadly, breaking us was the point so they could justify defunding public education, sell parents on charter schools and other private alternatives under the guise of “school choice,” and “save” Americans from the crisis they created.
In 2017, the council provided the Trump administration with a blueprint to return education to “free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice.” This “Education Reform Report” became the foundation of Chapter 11 of Project 2025.
And while we haven’t seen every part of their mandate unfold in Nevada, there are red flags. Clark County schools are seeing their lowest enrollment numbers in decades, with many parents opting for alternatives, citing “lax classroom discipline” and “poorly performing public schools.” One would assume lower enrollment could have been an opportunity for the district to address parents’ concerns by decreasing class sizes and offering more individualized attention. But instead, the district was forced to declare a reduction in force that affects 60 licensed professionals because when students leave, the funding follows the child.
The Clark County School District is not alone. Data indicate that by 2031, public school enrollment is projected to decline nationwide.
This begs the question: If by 2031, more students are enrolled in charter schools, then aren’t charter schools just glorified public schools without the safeguard of public oversight?
That absence of oversight is key when profit is the goal. It’s in the best interests of management companies to keep costs down. This inevitably leads to shrinking school budgets and compromising standards through raising class sizes, lowering pay and hiring less experienced teachers. And our students? Commodities.
Which brings us back to square one. But this time, instead of pulling our children out of one free school to attend another free school, parents will be forced to either pay for private education or send their children to a potentially substandard charter school. As we face rising inflation and artificial intelligence replacing jobs, private school tuition is out of reach for most families.
The paradoxes of “school choice” can’t be ignored. Public schools educate every child who walks through the door, including those who need more trauma-informed care, more expensive interventions or who face severe learning challenges. These are often the same students that the “choice schools” didn’t have room for. Comparing the educational outcomes of a school that accepts every child to one that does not is, frankly, illogical, especially since the system is rigged against us: per-pupil funding follows the child while proposed federal budget cuts gut the very resources our students need most: Title I and Title II funding, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections and ample resources for arts education and mental health services.
Healthcare in this country is run for profit, yet we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income nation. We don’t blame doctors or hospitals. We point to the economic disparities built into a broken system. Let’s not repeat the same mistake with our children’s education.
Kelly Edgar taught in the Clark County School District for 25 years, specializing in music education.
The biggest lie about American school kids is that most are “below grade level.” This lie is repeated so often by prominent figures that it is widely believed. But it’s not true. Those who believe it are wrong. Those who repeat it, knowing it’s not true, are liars.
The source of the lie and the confusion is clear: the achievement levels in which NAEP scores are reported. The levels are “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” and “below basic.” When the media write about the latest release of NAEP scores, they frequently treat “proficient” as “grade level.”
But “proficient” is NOT “grade level.” It represents solid achievement, a rigorous aspirational goal. “Proficient” is equivalent to a solid A.
Every NAEP report on test scores says clearly in a footnote that “proficiency” is not the same as grade level. For example: “NAEP Proficient does not signify meeting grade-level expectations.” Yet the media and prominent commentators who should know better repeat the lie that most students are below grade level. The fact is that most students will never reach the high bar of “proficient.”
In 2023, as Bruce Lesley points out, Biden’s Secretary of Education–Miguel Cardona–testified to a Congressional committee that only one-third of American students were reading “at grade level.” I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe he said something so outrageous. I called Dr. Peggy Carr, who at that time was the Commissioner of Education Statistics. She was as surprised as I was that Secretary Cardona repeated the erroneous statistic. I asked Dr. Carr whether she had ever briefed him on understanding NAEP results; she had not.
I gave her an idea. Propose a change in name for “proficiency.” Change the name to “mastery.” No one would claim that “mastery” was the same as “grade level.” She liked the idea and promised to take it to the board. Whether she did, I don’t know. But nothing changed.
Bruce Lesley wrote this open letter to the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP testing. Lesley is president of First Focus on Children and its partner organization First Focus Campaign for Children, bipartisan advocacy organizations dedicated to making children a priority in federal, state, and international policy. He has led both organizations since 2006 and 2009, respectively, building them into recognized national voices on child health, education, early childhood, economic security, budget and tax policy, immigration, children’s rights, and more recently, international child policy.
He wrote:
To the National Assessment Governing Board, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the leadership of the National Assessment of Educational Progress:
Every institution whose work affects children should begin with one question: “Is this good for children?”
By that standard, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has some important issues that deserve to be resolved. First and foremost, your achievement-level labels — “Basic,” “Proficient,” and “Advanced” — are being weaponized against the very children NAEP exists to serve, and you know it, because your own staff has been saying so for twenty-five years.
To be clear, this open letter is not a claim that NAEP’s underlying data is necessarily wrong, and it is not an argument against NAEP. The argument and request is narrower: you have a real and critically important ethical responsibility to correct the public misuse of your own data. NAEP should defend its credibility against those currently diminishing it.
This Week’s House Mark-Up Provides Another Example
On July 15, 2026, the House Education and Workforce Committee marked up a ten-bill package to facilitate the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education.
In his opening statement, Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) argued that “too many children can’t read or do math at grade level,” and used that claim as a central justification for several of the bills. That claim is false.
Chairman Walberg was drawing on NAEP data — the statistic that roughly two-thirds of American fourth-graders do not score “Proficient” in reading, which is wrongly cited as evidence of failing to meet grade-level reading levels. For some, this is done out of confusion and, for others, to promote a political agenda to undermine public schools. In reality, NAEP proficient is aspirational and reflects a standard that is well above grade level.
Unfortunately, during the markup, multiple members of Congress repeated the same error. But again, NAEP Proficient is not grade level. It has never been grade level.
When the public, the press, the administration, and Congress repeatedly miscite this fact, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) must do much more to clarify and correct misstatements about what it means.
The problem is two fold. One part of the problem is that “proficient” is used on many state and local assessments to mean “at grade level,” or what once upon a time would have been called a gentleman’s C; this leads to some honest confusion for some folks. The other part of the problem is folks who are invested in the narrative that public schools are failing and who benefit from the confusion surrounding the term.
Greene adds:
And every time NAEP scores are released, education journalists write piece after piece explaining “proficient” all over again, usually in the wake of some prominent person decrying the large number of students not “at grade level.”
That confusion is NAGB’s responsibility to address, and it has deserved attention for years, but all the more NOW.
This Is Not a Partisan Problem
Chairman Walberg and his colleagues’ misstatements are only the most recent officials to make this mistake (whether unintentionally out of confusion or internationally), and the pattern runs through both political parties.
Secretary Miguel Cardona, testifying before Congress in April 2023 under the Biden Administration, told lawmakers directly that only one-third of students were reading “on Grade level,” treating a NAEP proficiency figure as if it were a grade-level statistic, in nearly identical language.
And Secretary Linda McMahon, in the current Trump Administration, has used more careful wording — noting that nearly 70% of eighth graders are “not proficient” in reading — but has paired that technically accurate phrase with language implying total system failure. A Snopes piece by Rae Deng described this claim as lacking its own level of reading comprehension because, again, it completely mischaracterizes what NAEP’s “proficient” standard means.
Outside advocacy groups have been considerably less careful than any of them.
Corey DeAngelis, a leading advocate for school privatization, vouchers, and against public education, has cited NAEP proficiency figures directly, without qualification, as evidence that public schools are a system-wide “disgrace.”
Greene captures these types of political misuse of NAEP data in this Substack post.
This confusion is intentional by people arguing for both the dismantling of public education and federal investments in children.
Unfortunately, NAGB’s silence has allowed that rhetorical usefulness to go unchecked under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, and it is being used right now, this week, on Capitol Hill to justify eliminating the very agency that funds and safeguards the data NAGB produces.
NAGB’s Own Experts Have Been Saying This for Years
In 2001, Mary Lynne Bourque and Susan Loomis — a staff member and a board member of the National Assessment Governing Board itself — wrote plainly that the Proficient achievement level “does not refer to ‘at grade’ performance,” and that performance at Proficient is not the same as being “proficient” in a subject as any ordinary person would use that word.
Chester “Checker” Finn, Jr., who chaired the panel that adopted the achievement levels in 1992, has been candid that the levels were designed to be aspirational — a description of where students should ideally arrive, not a diagnosis of where most currently stand.
NCES itself has attached a caution to NAEP score reports for years: the Proficient level “does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards.”
If NAEP’s own architects and NAGB’s own website already say this, it is past time to be diligent in correcting the record when people misuse and misstate what it means. It is also on NAGB to stop publishing results in a format that predictably, foreseeably, and repeatedly gets misread as a verdict on grade-level performance, especially when you can see exactly how that misreading gets used again and again.
The clearest confirmation of all of this comes from NCES’s own data. Researchers Gina Cervetti and Kathleen Hinchman mapped every state’s definition of fourth-grade “grade-level” reading proficiency directly onto the NAEP scale and found that, as of the most recent analysis, nearly every state’s own standard for grade-level reading lines up with NAEP’s Basic level, not NAEP’s Proficient level. That means the honest translation of the data runs the opposite direction from how Chairman Walberg and others use it: by the states’ own definitions of grade level, roughly two-thirds of American fourth graders are reading at or above grade level, not below it.
Cervetti and Hinchman are also blunt about what actually is a crisis in the data: not a reading crisis, but an equity crisis. In 2022, only 48% of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch scored at or above NAEP Basic, compared with 76% of students who were not eligible — a 28-point gap that has persisted, largely unchanged, for decades.
That is a story about generational wealth and unequal access to housing, healthcare, and school resources, not a story about failing classrooms, and NAEP’s own framing continues to let people tell the wrong story with your numbers.
What Education Writers and Researchers Have Been Saying
Diane Ravitch, who served seven years on the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton, has called out the confusion between NAEP Proficient and grade level as one of the most damaging and persistent falsehoods in American education discourse, noting that NAEP itself explicitly warns against the equivalence you continue to permit others to make.
Greene has argued that cut scores like “Proficient” function as scaled, curved judgments dressed up as fixed standards — noting that if every child scored above a cut, the establishment reaction would be to declare the cut too easy, not to celebrate the achievement. That is not how a genuine, fixed criterion is supposed to behave, and it is worth NAGB’s honest reckoning.
Mark Weber, a New Jersey teacher and education researcher, has done careful public work mapping state proficiency standards onto the NAEP scale, and his conclusion undercuts a favorite talking point of your critics-turned-allies in this fight: there is no empirical evidence that closing the so-called “honesty gap” between state and NAEP proficiency rates does anything to improve student achievement. If setting state cut scores to match yours were actually the lever for better outcomes, we would expect to see it in the data. We do not. That matters because it means the standard is being imported into state accountability systems on faith, not evidence — exactly the kind of unsupported claim NAGB should be correcting rather than allowing to spread.
The Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy has been making this same case for nearly two decades. Tom Loveless, the Brown Center’s longtime director, authored a 2007 report concluding bluntly that NAEP’s cut scores were set too high.
His 2016 Brookings piece, “The NAEP Proficiency Myth,” went further, noting that the achievement levels came under critical review from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Education shortly after they were adopted — with the National Academy of Sciences review concluding the achievement levels were fundamentally flawed.
Loveless adds:
Advocates of the NAEP proficient standard want it to be for all students. That is ridiculous. Another way to think about it: proficient for today’s eighth graders reflects approximately what the average twelfth grader knew in mathematics in 1990. Someday the average eighth grader may be able to do that level of mathematics. But it won’t be soon, and it won’t be every student.
That is not a stray outside critique. That is respectable experts in the field, writing for decades, about the very categories NASB is still using today without correction.
One Point Should Not Separate “Failing” from “Successful”
NAGB also owes the public an honest accounting of what a cut score actually is. A cut score is a single point on a continuous scale, chosen somewhat arbitrarily by a panel, above which a child is declared “Proficient” and below which the same child, one point lower, is declared “Basic,” which is actually grade level.
Two children who are functionally indistinguishable in what they know and can do are sorted into entirely different public categories — one used as evidence that a school, a state, or a federal agency is failing, the other treated as evidence of success — because of a single point set by a committee, not because of any meaningful difference in the children themselves.
That is not a rounding error. It is the mechanism by which your data gets converted into political ammunition.
If NAGB cannot explain, in terms parents can understand, why the child who scores one point below the line is a different kind of learner than the child one point above it, then the line is doing rhetorical work the data was never built to support.
As the psychiatrist and educator William Glasser warned schools decades ago, chasing a point or two of movement on a test score is precisely the wrong institutional goal — and yet that is the goal NAEP’s cut scores hand every state, district, and school in the country by default.
Researcher Andrew Ho makes a similar point. He has identified proficiency cut scores as arbitrary markers, set through what he calls an “overwrought, judgmental, and ultimately political process,” not derived from any fixed line in human learning.
Ho has also documented a specific illusion that follows from that arbitrariness: because a large cluster of students always sits near the middle of the score distribution, a cut score placed close to that cluster will make small, ordinary shifts in performance look like dramatic gains or losses, purely as an artifact of how many students happen to sit right at the line — not because anything real changed in how much they learned. A researcher with no stake in the politics of this issue is describing the identical mechanism that turns your data into a rhetorical weapon: the closer the line sits to where children actually cluster, the more your data will appear to swing wildly for reasons that have nothing to do with children’s learning.
Criterion-Referenced in Name, Arbitrary in Practice
NAEP describes itself as a criterion-referenced assessment, distinct from norm-referenced tests like the SAT that simply rank students against one another. That distinction matters, and I want to represent it accurately rather than overstate it — NAEP does not “grade on a curve” in the way the SAT’s percentile scoring does.
However, the practical effect on families is not so different as the label suggests. NAEP’s cut scores were set by hand-picked panels making judgment calls about what students “should” know, not derived from an external, agreed-upon standard of competence, and independent evaluators — including a National Academies review in 2017 — have called for stronger evidence connecting NAEP performance levels to any real-world outcome at all.
A test that is criterion-referenced in name but whose criteria were set arbitrarily, and whose results still track family income and race as tightly as any norm-referenced test on the market, produces the same practical harm as the norming bias critics have long raised: it tells us more about a child’s zip code than about a fixed, meaningful standard of what that child knows.
Notably, NAGB has conceded the point this year. The 2026 NAEP reading framework — administered to students for the first time this spring — now explicitly disaggregates racial and ethnic subgroup results by socioeconomic status, on the premise, well documented for decades, that apparent racial differences in test scores largely track socioeconomic differences. That is a welcome and overdue acknowledgment.
But it is also, in effect, NAGB admitting in 2026 what critics have argued for years: that the results have been measuring wealth and family circumstance as much as they measure “proficiency,” all along. If that acknowledgment is real, it should extend backward, to how NAGB talks about every score ever published, not just forward, to a single new breakdown in the data tables.
The Test Itself Is Not Neutral
Even setting the cut scores aside, the content of the test carries its own bias, and NAEP’s own commissioned reviewers have said so. The NAEP Validity Studies Panel — a technical review body NCES itself created and funds — published an analysis by Gerunda Hughes in 2023 documenting that the statistical methods used to build NAEP-style test items can systematically disadvantage the very students the test is supposed to serve fairly.
When an item is answered correctly by nearly every student, it gets treated as a poor “discriminator” between high and low performers and is typically cut from the test in favor of harder items, even though that easy item may represent exactly the content that should be mastered.
In his book, Au cites researchers Kidder and Rosner, who examined more than 300,000 SAT test-takers and the pool of trial questions used to build future exams and found that some trial questions were answered correctly by Black students, or by Latino students, more often than by White students. Those questions were then discarded — not because they were poor measures of the content, but because they failed to reproduce the racial score gap the rest of the test already produced. A question only “counted” as valid if high-scoring test-takers, who are disproportionately White, tended to get it right in pretesting.
My mother has verified the same process when she was asked to be on a panel to evaluate whether the item questions were “fair”. The publishers of the Texas State assessment at the time ran through the questions and kept throwing out questions as biased toward Black or Hispanic children if they scored the same or close to the scores of White children.
In contrast, questions in which there was a substantial gap in favor of White students were not flagged – thus, “norming” the disparity in test score outcomes into subsequent tests. Although my mother repeatedly objected, she was overruled throughout the day and, not surprisingly, never asked back to be a reviewer.
The result, as Au describes it, is a self-reinforcing loop: item selection is calibrated to match existing racial score gaps, which locks those same gaps into every future version of the test, all without anyone ever explicitly considering race in the selection criteria.
NAEP is a different test administered by a different organization, and I am not asserting that NAEP’s item-selection process has been documented to work in the same way. But NAEP uses the same category of item statistics that made this outcome possible on the SAT, and NAGB’s own validity panel has already flagged the risk. Given what is now documented on a test as consequential as the SAT, NAGB owes the public a direct, public answer to a direct question: has anyone checked whether NAEP’s item-selection process does the same thing?
There is also cultural and geographic bias. As the son of an English teacher and a math teacher, it should be no surprise that I did fairly well on standardized tests throughout my life. But I vividly recall a reading passage from the PSAT that focused on nautical issues and the definition of a “flotilla.”
Having grown up in El Paso, Texas, a city located hundreds of miles from any coastline, the passage and vocabulary word were unfamiliar to any of us taking the test in the desert borderlands. On the other hand, we would crush a passage referring to “tortillas.” NAEP’s own reviewers have a name for this: cultural validity, the idea that a test cannot cleanly separate what a child knows from what a child has been exposed to.
Research that NAEP’s own validity panel cites has found that when students are allowed to choose among reading passages on different topics, rather than being assigned a single passage that may be unfamiliar or uninteresting to them, some groups of students — including Black eighth graders and Hispanic twelfth graders in the panel’s own cited study — score much higher. That is evidence that some of what NAEP currently measures is exposure and familiarity, not just reading ability, and it argues for reform in how passages and vocabulary are chosen, not just in how results are labeled.
Again, the validity panel’s report contains proof that this is a design choice, not a fact of nature. In 1972, the psychologist Robert Williams built a test called the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Hegemony, using vocabulary and content drawn from Black American culture instead of the dominant culture’s frame of reference. When Black and White teenagers took it, Black students substantially outscored White students by substantial margins.
Nothing about the underlying children changed between that test and the SAT. What changed was whose knowledge and cultural fluency the test happened to be built around.
That single fact should end, permanently, any claim that a test’s outcomes reveal some fixed truth about which children “can” or “cannot” read, think, or reason. What these tests reliably measure is often which cultural and economic frame of reference a child was raised in, and how well that frame matches the one test-makers chose to build around — which is another way of describing accumulated wealth, school funding, and generational inequity, not a verdict on a child’s mind.
That is real, and policies that address school finance inequity, child poverty, childhood hunger, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) deserve real policy attention. These issues would undoubtedly do more to improve educational outcomes in this country rather than privatization of public schools or the elimination of the Department of Education.
Claims that two-thirds of American children cannot read at grade level are simply false, and their interpretation by policymakers and advocates is harming children. There is an old warning that was popularized by author Mark Twain but attributable to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli about three kinds of falsehood — “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
In this case, even a true number, presented without its context, can mislead more effectively than an outright fabrication. NAEP’s “proficiency” level is an aspirational one, but the grade-level story built on top of it is doing real harm. NAGB is a position to explain the difference, and the public is not, until you tell them.
The Damage Is Not Abstract: What Gets Tested Is What Gets Taught
This is not a technical quibble.
Every time “below Proficient” gets reported to the public as “can’t read” or “can’t do math,” it becomes ammunition for defunding public schools and for portraying millions of children — disproportionately low-income children and children of color — as failures because of a label your board itself has said should not be read that way.
It also reshapes what happens inside the classroom. When reading and math scores on tests built around NAEP cut points become the metric by which schools, teachers, and even state superintendents are judged, instructional time follows the incentive:
Short, decontextualized passages crowd out real books — my children were taught how to write a brief constructive response (BCR) before they were even taught what a paragraph was.
Science, government, history, the arts, and physical education are pushed to the margins of the elementary school day because they are not tested and therefore not rewarded.
Children end up narrower, not better educated, in the very subjects that make them informed citizens — and NAEP’s own cut-score architecture is a direct contributor to that narrowing, whether or not that was your intent.
NAGB tried a partial fix in 2018, adding the word “NAEP” before each level — “NAEP Proficient” rather than “Proficient” — so people would stop equating your terms with generic ones.
James Harvey, executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable, was right to call that gesture insufficient at the time. Harvey said:
…the American people should understand that the misleading term “proficient” sets a performance benchmark beyond the reach of most students in the world.
Harvey argued “proficient” should be changed to something like “high” to avoid being “fooled.”
His point has been proven many times, including this week when a sitting congressional committee chairman, citing NAEP-adjacent data to justify eliminating a federal agency, still used the word “grade level” as if it meant what NAEP’s Proficient level does not mean.
The Perverse Incentive NAEP Has Inspired: Grade Retention As Score Manipulation
The clearest evidence that NAEP’s cut scores create perverse incentives and “manufactured” crises, rather than honest information, is what states have started doing in response to them: holding back third-graders who miss an early-literacy cut score, in order to produce a fourth-grade NAEP cohort that looks better on paper.
Education professor and researcher Paul Thomas has documented this closely in states such as Mississippi, where fourth-grade reading gains celebrated as a “Mississippi miracle” tracked closely with a mandatory third-grade retention policy.
A child who is nine years old competing against classmates who are eight will predictably score higher on a test built around the same content; that is a fact about test administration, not about literacy. Furthermore, those same “gains” have been shown to fade by eighth grade, once the retained cohort catches up in age to its peers without having genuinely caught up in learning.
This is worth NAGB’s own honest reckoning, not because the research on retention is unanimous — reasonable analysts, including some closely tied to NAEP’s own governing board, dispute how much of Mississippi’s gain is genuine instructional improvement versus retention’s effect on cohort composition — but because NAEP’s achievement levels are the mechanism creating the incentive either way.
States are not retaining eight-year-olds because it is good for those children. They are retaining them because a single cut score on a single test has been elevated to a measure of whether a state’s education policy is working. The cost of that incentive falls on children: retained students who show a short-term score bump can, over time, experience the opposite of what was intended — greater disengagement, higher rates of dropping out before graduation, and the well-documented psychological toll of being told, at eight or nine years old, that they failed.
William Glasser spent much of his career, in Schools Without Failure, and later in The Quality School, explaining exactly why this backfires. He argued that standardized testing reduces learning to disconnected, memorized facts at the expense of critical thinking and real application — and that the “right answer, wrong answer” format of a multiple-choice test teaches children that education is a hunt for a single predetermined answer rather than a process of genuine understanding.
In the schools Glasser held up as models, closed-book tests were replaced with open-book, collaborative assessments that actually resembled the problems students would face outside school. His deeper claim, grounded in what he called Choice Theory, is that people — including children — are driven by needs for freedom, power, and simple enjoyment in their work, and that using test scores to rank, shame, or coerce students destroys the very motivation that produces quality work in the first place.
Labels matter. When children repeatedly hear that two-thirds of them “cannot read at grade level,” many internalize failure that is not supported by the evidence. Parents lose confidence in neighborhood schools. Teachers become demoralized. Policymakers propose increasingly radical structural changes to fix a crisis that has been inaccurately described.
Glasser also warned explicitly against making small, arbitrary numerical gains — his example was raising a test score by a point or two — the primary institutional goal of a school, insisting instead on building a genuine culture of quality. That is precisely the trap a single-point NAEP cut score sets for states, and it is the trap third-grade retention policies walk students directly into.
That is the opposite of what an assessment meant to serve children should produce, and it deserves your acknowledgment, not your silence.
What We Are Asking You To Do, Now
Issue a direct, public correction each time a federal official misstates NAEP Proficient as “grade level,” the way you would correct any other material misuse of your data. Silence is not neutrality; it is acquiescence in the misuse.
Publish, prominently and alongside every score release, the state-by-state mapping showing that “grade level” as states themselves define it corresponds to NAEP Basic, not NAEP Proficient — the analysis your own data already supports and that outside researchers have had to do on your behalf.
Publish a plain-language document — “What NAEP Proficient Does, and Does Not, Mean” — and require it alongside every score release, every webpage, every press briefing, and every congressional testimony that cites NAEP data. Most of this letter’s argument could be prevented by a single page NAGB.
Stop using “Basic,” “Proficient,” and “Advanced” as headline labels without their NAEP qualifier in every release, chart, and public statement — not as a footnote, but as a mandatory part of the label itself, displayed with the same prominence as the number.
Retire “Basic,” “Proficient,” and “Advanced” altogether in favor of terms that do not already carry a plain-English meaning your data does not support. If the words themselves are the problem, changing a modifier in front of them has not been enough.
Extend the honesty of the 2026 reading framework’s socioeconomic disaggregation backward, not just forward. If you now accept that racial gaps in your data are substantially explained by family socioeconomic status, say so plainly every time a racial achievement gap is reported, and stop letting that gap be cited as evidence of school failure without that context.
Commission and publish the external validity evidence the National Academies asked for in 2017 — a transparent accounting of what your cut scores do and do not predict, so the public can evaluate the standard rather than take your word for its meaning.
Publicly acknowledge the perverse incentive your cut scores have created for third-grade retention policies, and commission independent, longitudinal research — tracking students well past eighth grade, through high school graduation — before any state is permitted to point to NAEP gains as proof that retaining eight-year-olds is good policy.
Act on your own validity panel’s 2023 findings, and answer the question the SAT evidence now raises. Publicly disclose whether NAEP’s item-selection process has ever been audited for the same self-reinforcing bias documented on the SAT — where trial questions that marginalized students answered correctly were discarded for failing to reproduce the existing score gap — and commit to an independent audit if it has not. Explain how tests are “normed” from one year to the next and made comparable in a manner that is understandable to the public.
Kids can’t wait for another year of this same correction being offered and ignored, or for another cohort of eight-year-olds to be held back so a state’s chart can look better. NAGB has the power to end the confusion your own board identified more than two decades ago. Please do so. Kids deserve it.
When it comes to supporting its public schools, Florida ranks dead last in the nation. Not only was it dead last of all states, it was at the very bottom in 2024 and 2025.
Florida betrays its state constitution, which contains a clear mandate to create and protect strong public schools.
Article IX, Section 1(a) states:
“The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education…”
Under the misleadership of Republican politicians like Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis, Florida has diverted billions of dollars to privately governed charter schools and unaccountable vouchers for private and religious schools and home schooling. Bush and DeSantis have ignored and abandoned Florida’s state constitution.
And among all the states, Florida’s school rank dead last.
Based on the NPE report Public Schooling in America 2026, Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for public Education, wrote:
This is the third consecutive year that Florida’s statehouse has earned last place when it comes to supporting public schools. Florida’s lawmakers don’t merely encourage privatization through charters, vouchers, and homeschools; they actively engineer conditions that undermine public schools and worsen the environment for teaching and learning.
The damage from Florida’s universal voucher program is staggering. Close to four billion dollars in state education funding now flows annually to voucher programs — nearly one in four state education dollars diverted away from public schools, including to families whose children never set foot in a public school. And the funding mechanism puts the burden directly on school districts, which must absorb the loss.
Meanwhile, Florida continuously revises its school rating standards to ensure more public schools are labeled as failing, while simultaneously incentivizing and subsidizing charter expansion. Its Schools of Hope program even allows charters to colonize unused space inside public school buildings. Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz teamed up with a Florida billionaire to help draft the enabling legislation, then used it to muscle her chain into the Miami charter market with generous public funding in tow.
Fifty percent of Florida’s charter sector is run by for-profit operators — one of the highest shares in the nation. Only Michigan has more. Florida is home to Academica, the largest for-profit charter chain in the country, and to Charter Schools USA. Both profit from the real estate they build and lease back to their own branded schools.
Charter schools claim to be equally open to all students. That is not the case in Florida, which lost points for the numerous enrollment privileges its laws permit. Florida is one of a small number of states that allow company-based charter schools. The Villages, the largest retirement community in the country, has its own charter school, and it functions less like a school of choice than a company store. The school was created by the community’s developer, and at least one parent must be employed by The Villages or a company that services it. If that parent quits or is fired, the child must leave immediately. For a low-wage service worker who might want to change jobs, the school becomes a trap — a reason to stay put rather than pursue something better.
Florida sinks to the bottom not only because of its weak charter and voucher laws and the financial incentives it offers to expand privatization, but because it actively undermines its public schools through policy and funding decisions at every turn. Florida lost every possible point on school funding — whether measured by cost-of-living-adjusted teacher salaries, equitable funding distribution, or funding based on capacity to pay. It has low teacher satisfaction, high student-to-teacher and student-to-counselor ratios, weak anti-bullying laws, and it still permits corporal punishment.
Of 102 possible points, Florida disgracefully earned only 14. You can read our full NPE 2026 report card here.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, was the author of the recent report Public Schooling in America: Our 2026 Report Card on the States. The subtitle: THE BEST AND THE WORST STATEHOUSES FOR SUPPORTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS.
She wrote recently to explain why Ohio received a low grade:
Ohio lost more points on privatization in the NPE Report Card than any other state — more than Florida, more than Arizona. Its charter and voucher policies are among the most expansive and least accountable in the nation. The only reason Ohio does not rank at the very bottom is that it continues to fund its public schools at a relatively adequate level. That margin is shrinking.
The charter sector tells a particularly troubling story. Half of all charter schools in Ohio are operated by for-profit companies — an unusually high share even by national standards. Yet nearly half of all charter schools that have ever opened with enrollment in the state have since closed, a closure rate of 49 percent. These are not isolated failures. They reflect a system designed with too few guardrails and too little accountability.
A significant portion of these for-profit schools are credit recovery operations and online schools — low-cost, maximum-profit models held to lower academic standards than traditional public schools. Nearly one in three charter students in Ohio — 30 percent — attends a virtual school or an institution where instruction is delivered primarily online.
What explains so much low-quality supply? Ohio’s authorizing structure is a central culprit. The state permits multiple authorizers, including nonprofits that collect millions in authorizing fees and have a financial incentive to approve and retain schools regardless of performance.
Ohio also has more voucher programs than any other state in the country — eight in total — further diverting public dollars away from the students and communities that depend on public schools.
If Ohio continues on its current trajectory, the consequences are predictable: further erosion of public school funding, further decline in the rankings, and fewer educational options as the neighborhood public school choice disappears.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, thought that AFT President Randi Weingarten’s recent speech on the dangers of technology in the classroom was balanced and thoughtful. Yet the Trump administration attacker for raising valid questions. Trump and McMahon have such a knee-jerk aversion to unions, especially the teachers’ unions, that they had to attack her, even if what she said made sense.
As I will explain, Weingarten’s presentation synthesized both – scholarly research and communication with diverse groups of educators and AI users. It was a perfect example of bridging political differences. When I first read the transcript of her plan, I thought it would be hard to understand how anyone who wants to improve education would not want to join her team effort to make life better for young people in the 21st century.
When NewsMax interviewed Linda McMahon after Weingarten’s presentation, McMahon first criticized Weingarten for closing schools during the Covid pandemic (although the truth was that she proposed science-based protections to facilitate safe school openings.) Then, McMahon effusively praised AI in classrooms. Then the discussion returned to condemning unions for suposedly placing the good of teachers over that of students.
And Weingarten’s speech on AI was also condemned as a part of an AFT policy that “lines up perfectly with the ‘China First’ agenda.” And the AFT was accused on Substack for “evolving into some type of content-policing organization.”
But, getting back to Weingarten’s speech, NBC reported that she called for blocking most students from using computers in class until they reach third grade, and controlling Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs that are designed to act like real people. She would thus prohibit “student-facing AI in elementary schools” and ban “social companion (chatbots) until age 16.”
NBC News also reported that Weingarten proposed an “independent research consortium to study the effects of AI and screens on student learning.” She explained, “I am not calling for an AI ban or a Chromebook bonfire,” … “What I am calling for is getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harm.”
NBC further explained that “some states recently began limiting school-issued devices for the youngest students, and a handful of school districts crafted policies this year to scale back technology in the classroom.” But, “many states and districts are also rushing to require AI literacy education for students, and AI in schools is rising.”
That reporting connects with Dana Goldstein’s recent reporting that “across the educational landscape, from suburban districts and urban charter schools to community colleges and the Ivy League,” schools are pushing back against misuse of A.I. Unfortunately, though, “schools serving low-income students … are often under the most pressure to show that they are embracing innovative technology and preparing students for the working world, where it may soon be standard to rely on generative AI.”
Weingarten’s narrative was also consistent with what the Washington Post recently reported, “Most teachers use artificial intelligence, but relatively few — just 18 percent — have received any formal guidance on how to use it.”
Seeking multiple perspectives, Weingarten had recently visited a school where they used Sal Kahn’s AI for teaching. Khan once predicted it would be a “revolution” in learning, but now he acknowledges, “So far, the revolution hasn’t happened,” and AI tutoring “doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn or fill in gaps in knowledge needed to ask questions.
Kahn concluded, “I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems.”
An educator at that school also explained, “there’s been more enthusiasm for the product among administrators than teachers in her school.” Moreover, some of the “most advanced students have taken advantage of AI to learn new topics. But, as far as she can tell, more students are using it to just find answers, which has created a massive headache for teachers.”
Weingarten also drew on research funded by the AFT, and supported by Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI showing that:
Critical thinking is directly connected to the content in math, history, and science classes. This is an essential reality often absent from discussions about how schools should respond to the spread of generative AI.
Indeed, the common refrain that teachers should focus on abstract critical thinking skills, disconnected from content, risks de-emphasizing the very thing — fluency with a broad set of facts — that supports critical thinking.
“Domain knowledge is a crucial driver of thinking skill,” wrote University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham in 2020 for the American Educator, a publication of the American Federation of Teachers. “Critical thinking for open-ended problems is enabled by extensive stores of knowledge.”
After following the AFT’s footnotes, learning from the evidence Weingarten drew upon, and the insights she gained from educators, I agree with Diane Ravitch, who wrote, “Randi has given many speeches. This is one of her best.”
I see no way we can deny that AI is dangerous, especially for children, and that we must come together in a nonpartisan way to reduce its harms, while building on its strengths. I see no rationale for seeking simple solutions. And any solutions require listening to a broad spectrum of outlooks.
Regardless of what others see as other causes of the decline of meaningful learning, what sense does it make to attack Weingarten’s efforts to address this rapidly emerging crisis?
I’d argue that today’s attacks make no more sense than the rightwing’s refusal to work with Weingarten’s to build the infrastructure necessary for opening schools during Covid.
Rhode Island welcomed charters under former Governor Gina Raimondo. When she left to become President Biden’s Secretary of Commerce, lieutenant governor Dan McKee took her place. He was widely viewed as a strong supporter of charter schools. He was closely associated with the creation of Rhode Island’s mayoral academies, especially the Blackstone Valley Prep network. But this year, he signed legislation pausing the approval of new charter schools for three years. He said that declining enrollment and funding challenges warranted the pause.
This was awkward for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (sic), which had honored him in 2009 as a Charter School Champion. Taken aback, the Alliance did something unprecedented. It withdrew his award!
Today, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools withdrew its recognition of Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee as a Charter School Champion, marking the first time in the organization’s 21-year history this award has been rescinded.
This happened after McKee signed a bill “that enacts a moratorium on public charter schools for three years, lowers the statewide cap from 35 to 28, and prohibits already approved schools from opening.”
Think about it: 9.9% of Rhode Island’s students are enrolled in charter schools. Some are in private and religious schools. Probably 80-85% attend public schools. Where should the Governor’s priorities lie?
This is a rare and unusual move in the U.S. given how aggressively neoliberals have been imposing school privatization on the nation for the last few decades. It is also noteworthy that both chambers of the State’s legislature overwhelmingly approved the three-year moratorium on these privately-operated schools. Opposition to charter schools has been steadily growing across the country over the years.
Not surprisingly, many business groups, charter school advocates, and even some democrats tried to pressure the Governor and legislature not to approve such a moratorium. The fact that many democrats still support privately-operated charter schools goes against the mainstream narrative that it is mostly or only republicans who support school privatization.
Whether this moratorium decision by Governor McKee and the state legislature is based on principle or cynical maneuvering by certain factions of the rich against other competing factions, the moratorium is still a positive step forward for the public interest and public schools. More charter schools always means more problems.
The Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board has made some charter fans big mad, and now the courts will be involved.
FNSBSD last fall dealt with a request to open a charter school in the district, to be the Pearl Creek Steam Charter School. The board voted unanimously to deny the request. They had plenty of reasons– 52 pages worth, in fact. Those reason included a lack of a facility plan, lack of a clear enrollment projection, a mess of a contract, no transportation plan, an inadequate instructional plan that doesn’t fully address state standards, no student lunch plan, no professional development plan, an admission plan that is probably illegal, an error-filled and incomplete budget, and the fact that this would have a big financial impact on the district. FNSBSD has already been closing schools to deal with dropping enrollment and funding. “Hey, the district is financially strapped, so let’s open a new building,” said no responsible school board ever. The Pearl Creek proposal is to reopen one of the closed schools as a charter school.
Also, said the FNSBSD board, this school is probably going to fail. “The plans in the application do not demonstrate likelihood of success,” is how the board put it. Again, 52 pages of details covering the above.
The charter crew offers an estimate of $830,000 cost to the district. The district COO says it’s more like $2.8 million. Coverage of the “controversy” has been extensive, especially from reporters Patrick Gilchrist and Shyler Umphenour at KUAC and Corinne Smith at the Alaska Beacon.
But Governor Mike Dunleavy would really like to see more charters, and so would Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, and so would the Dunleavy-appointed members of the Alaska State Board of Education, which has the power to overrule local school boards.
So in April, the state board went ahead and approved the charter over the objections and explanations of the duly-elected local school board. The state board declared that, essentially, the charter board had filled out all the paperwork, and that was good enough. Took them a whole fifteen pages to say it.Bobby Burgess, the president of the FNSBSD Board of Education, had a comment for KUAC.
“Basically, my read of the state’s decision is that, if the application is filled out in full, the contents don’t really matter, even if the plan described is impossible to execute,” Burgess said. “It kind of seems like a lower standard than we hold students to on homework assignments.”
Now, in the newest twist, Acting Attorney General Cori Mills has filed an emergency petition to force the district to get that school opened. Because nothing says “We do too have an adequate plan for this charter school” than insisting you can get it up and running in two months. (Mills is Acting AG because the legislature rejected Dunleavy’s first choice.)
Meanwhile, Pearl Creek STEAM Charter is still announcing that it will be open in the fall on both its website and Facebook page.
There are other issues at play here. Veteran reporter and columnist Dermot Cole points out that Pearl Creek will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, part of a larger charter trend in Fairbanks:
I believe that nearly all of the charter schools in the Fairbanks area have tended to attract enrollment from families with higher incomes or families where the parents have the time, energy and ability to be directly involved in their children’s education…
There are far fewer economically disadvantaged students in Alaska charter schools than neighborhood schools. There are also fewer students for whom English is a second language. Most charter schools do not have bus transportation for students, school lunch programs or other features that would make them more accessible to poor families.
I’m guessing, based on what I know about Fairbanks, that most charter school families have more flexibility built into their lives, whether it’s because of economic status, help from extended family members or the sense of mission that the best parents share.
Beyond all that, Fairbanks now has the bizarre situation of a district that has tried to cut costs by closing a school now being told by the state that they must reopen the building and pay for someone else to run a school there, reversing the decision of the elected local school board.
It’s not the most extreme version of state governments usurping the power of local school boards (take Ohio, where school districts can get in legal trouble for failing to hand buildings over to charters). But it is one more literal example of how running multiple parallel school districts costs the taxpayers extra. If only choice fans were honest enough to say, “We want choice, so we are going to levy a new School Choice Tax to pay for it.” Good luck, Fairbanks.
Steve Nelson was headmaster of a prestigious private school in Manhattan, yet is a strong believer in public schools. Now retired, he holds to the principle that public money belongs to public schools, and only to public schools. If parents make a private choice for their own child, they are obliged to pay for it.
The latest, most manipulative and dangerous assault on American education is largely flying under the radar. Endorsed by such luminaries as former Ed Secretary Arne Duncan and Colorado governor Jared Polis, the soon-to-be rolled out federal school choice plan has gotten little public scrutiny, perhaps because the daily flash bangs tossed by the Trump administration keep folks distracted.
I encourage you to read this NYT article and then consider my post a rebuttal.
The program’s architects have brewed a kettle of artificial sweeteners to persuade policy makers that this is really a win-win-win proposition. For example, they argue that vouchers for private schools will not reduce funding for public schools because the vouchers will be paid for by donations to non-profits. The donations, up to $1,700 per person, will be 100% deductible. Sound harmless? Well, not really. Every buck funneled into this program is a buck diverted from other programs as a result of reduced tax revenue; which means the rest off us will pay for the vouchers once this sleight of hand completes its circular play.
The other “oh-my-gosh-ain’t-this-swell?” gimmick is that public schools can tap the funds for a few after school services, thereby realizing additional revenue. What is unmentioned is that the voucher scheme will result in students leaving the public system and per capita funding will reduce overall revenue for many schools. As any reasonably informed observer knows, a school cannot reduce expenses in proportion to enrollment losses.
As is already the case in many states, this scam allows affluent folks to access voucher funds to take to the private school of their choice. Stunning, I know, that wealthy families win agaIn.
Beneath the heaps of cleverly contrived bullshit, the purpose of this scheme is unambiguous. Conservatives constantly rage against those damn “government schools,” which they accuse of indoctrinating kids into socialism, atheism, and white self-loathing caused by all those DEI programs. In truth, of course, most “government schools” are having enough trouble managing huge classes, hungry kids, and the enervating expectations of the accountability crowd.
This “choice” program will also allow many parents to choose a school that doesn’t expose their darlings to too many brown and Black children. America’s schools have become steadily re-segregated in recent years. White flight will get a fresh pair of wings with this program.
So, beneath the thin, shiny veneer, this massive con job is designed to kill public education and redistribute money and children to unaccountable charter schools, storefront religious schools, online money-suckers and other varietals that might appeal to the average News Nation viewer. Trump famously said he likes the uneducated, and this Education Freedom program will swell their ranks.
The current conservative movement, led by people who are generally operating behind the scenes, does not care a great deal for democracy. They support an autocrat wannabe and have enabled a steady attack on democratic institutions.
Public education is the institution best equipped to sustain a thriving democracy. It is among the only systematic ways of forging a common culture out of a wonderfully diverse population. Most Americans, including the less rabid MAGA troops, say they bemoan the deep divides in our nation. Then they cheer the possibility of sending their children to a school that deepens the divide by indoctrinating them into a perverse understanding of our history and values.
Amidst the more spectacular offensives of the current era, this issue may seem less urgent, but it is more urgent, not less. Most of the Trump era unraveling of decency and democracy can be re-raveled within a few election cycles. Our public education system is nearing the point of no return. Once gone, it’s too late. I cannot envision any politician or policy maker demanding or persuading parents to leave the school they chose for a “government school.” What’s left of the public system will warehouse children in poor neighborhoods, whose parents have insufficient power, energy or resources to do anything about.
An objective look at American schools today shows that we are not far from that point now.
Jan Resseger, stalwart champion of public schools, is alarmed by the damage that privatization inflicts on public schools, attended by the vast majority of children. She describes the erosion of public schools as “a national wave of educational injustice that has reached crisis proportions.”
Resseger writes:
On Monday, the Network for Public Education (NPE) released an urgently important report, Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools. The report ranks the states on their protection of the institution of public schools that serve the mass of our children and adolescents and the degree to which school privatization is undermining that promise.
In what I found to be the report’s most shocking statistic, 19 states now provide Education Savings Account (ESA) vouchers and ten of those states give ESA vouchers to “virtually every family regardless of income or need.” An ESA is a virtual debit card that parents whose children do not attend public schools can use to pay for any kind of privatized education or for materials and services the parents claim to be using to homeschool their children. What this really means is that many of these states are basically just giving money away to parents to use as they please without appreciable regulations or oversight.
The Network for Public Education (NPE) confirms “a troubling and consistent pattern. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and education savings accounts—are the same states most neglectful of their public schools, their teachers, and their students. Our analysis found a strong, statistically negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and public school support…. Privatization and disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.”
What is the scale of the problem? “Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia now fund one or more private school voucher programs, and nineteen states operate Education Savings Account (ESA) programs… The charter school sector presents parallel concerns. Forty-seven states have charter school laws, and in the majority of them, private unelected boards govern schools with no term limits and no formal accountability to the communities they serve… The consequences fall hardest on the children least able to seek alternatives: those in poverty, those with disabilities, those in rural communities, and those whose families lack the time or resources to navigate a fragmented marketplace of educational options. Public schools remain the only institutions in American life constitutionally obligated to welcome every child, regardless of circumstance. They are governed by elected boards, funded by public taxes and accountable to the communities they serve…”
The report examines four related threats.
Privatization Vouchers are one form of school privatization. The Network for Public Education reminds readers that vouchers trace back to the combination of racism and libertarian ideology. The first voucher schools supported segregation academies in the years immediately following Brown v. Board of Education, and NPE’s report explains that even today, “Study after study has found that school choice programs generally increase segregation,” with vouchers “enabling outright discrimination with public money.” Thirty-four states have at least one voucher program; in total states operate 73 voucher programs, “including some that allow families to double-dip, applying for funding from multiple programs.” Besides their traditional school voucher programs, some states have education savings accounts (“the most damaging and irresponsible of all voucher programs”). Some states have tuition tax credit ‘scholarship’ programs with tax credits for parents and others who contribute to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) which are tapped by parents to pay for private schools and other educational expenses. “(S)ome states also give individual tax credits (TTCs) for educational expenses at private schools or homeschools.” Thirty-one states have now also opted in to the federal tuition tax credit program created in the “One Big Beautiful” Bill.
What about the effects of the vast growth of private school vouchers? Because few states set income limits on the families who can qualify for the vouchers, they primarily benefit children from wealthy families. The vouchers “result in the defunding of public schools,” fail to protect the rights of disabled students, often fail to admit LGBTQ students, fail to provide any proof that students are thriving academically, fail require teachers to be certified, and fail to require background checks for teachers. Many states are spending on each voucher a large percentage of what they spend per-pupil on each public school student, and many vouchers are going to children who were always enrolled in the private school where the voucher will reimburse the families who have been paying tuition.
Publicly funded, privately operated charter schools are the second primary form of school privatization. Kentucky’s supreme court recently found that state’s charter school funding unconstitutional, and Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont have never had charters. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia all have passed laws that enable the operation of charter schools. Additionally, “a growing sector operates entirely online—and is largely run by for-profit corporations”—often displaying flagrant “financial opportunism” and “fraud.” And, “Like voucher schools, charter schools are subject to fewer regulations and less oversight than neighborhood public schools. As with voucher schools, this has resulted in significant concerns regarding accountability, accessibility, fiscal responsibility, and academic quality… In 39 states, for-profit companies are permitted to manage nonprofit charter schools. One common arrangement—known as a ‘sweeps’ contract—allows a for-profit management company to handle a school’s day-to-day operations while receiving the bulk of its public funding in return… This practice is especially prevalent in six states—Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia….”
Protections for Homeschooled Children “Homeschooling… is now the fastest-growing education sector,” fed by Education Savings Account vouchers. However, “even as homeschooling growth has accelerated, laws to protect the homeschooled child have not. Through the relentless pressure exerted by the Homeschool Legal Defense Associations… even the most modest legislation designed to protect homeschooled children from educational or physical neglect and abuse has been opposed with breathtaking ferocity.” The report details how states fail to require that parents let states know they are homeschooling children; fail to protect students from sexual abuse or violence; and fail to demand some kind of evidence that students are progressing academically.
Conditions that Promote Teaching and Learning Along with the massive growth of privatization, “Right-wing political forces have mounted a coordinated campaign against public education—eroding trust in neighborhood schools, creating hostile working conditions for teachers, and withdrawing support from the students who depend on them…. (N)umerous states have enacted laws that make the lives of transgender students significantly more difficult, while not fully protecting… LGBTQ students from bullying and discrimination. Nearly half of all states still permit corporal punishment in schools.” Class size has been increased, collective bargaining to ensure adequate teachers’ salaries has been undermined, and other conditions to attract highly qualified teachers have been undermined.
School Funding NPE declares: “Research has firmly established a positive correlation between per-pupil (public school) spending and student learning.” “This report tells a clear and troubling story. Across the country, statehouses are making deliberate choices—choices that defund neighborhood schools, strip teachers of dignity and professional standing, leave vulnerable children without protection, and redirect billions of public dollars to private alternatives that are too often beyond public control… They are the predictable results of an ideological campaign decades in the making, whose architects have been candid about their ultimate goal: the elimination of public education as Americans have known it… States that most aggressively expand vouchers and charter schools are the same states that underfund their public schools, underpay their teachers, and provide the weakest protections for students… States with the most expansive ESA programs have produced the most egregious fraud… States that strip teachers of collective bargaining rights are the same states with the lowest teacher attractiveness ratings…the overlap is not coincidental. Privatization and disinvestment are two sides of the same coin.”
The report grades each of the states overall for their protection of the public schools.”Seventeen states earned an F for their lack of support of public schools, students and educators while embracing privatization.” A second privatization grade identifies the states where schooling has been most damaged by privatization. In both categories, Florida earns the lowest “F” grade, while Arizona’s grade is almost as bad.
NPE’s new report traces the impact of today’s national wave of school privation and the overall impact on our nation’s largest institution—a fifty-state system of public education. It cannot trace the convoluted history of any one state’s legislative and sometimes legal battle around school finance. It cannot examine the specific politics in any particular state that have contributed to the spread of today’s wave of privatization—of the role of gerrymandering, of particular regional funders of state legislators’ political campaigns or the lobbyists who surround the statehouse. And it cannot examine the role of disparities caused by racial and economic injustice any particular state’s school funding.
The fact that such a report cannot possibly explore state-by-state detail, however, does not reduce the report’s significance. The Network for Public Education accomplishes an urgently important goal: identifying a national wave of educational injustice that has reached crisis proportions. NPE concludes:
“Public schools are not merely institutions that deliver academic instruction. They are the places where children of every background, ability, faith, language, and circumstance are welcomed—not as paying customers, but as members of a community with an equal right to learn. They are governed by publicly elected boards, funded by public taxes, and accountable to the public in ways that no charter management company, no ESA vendor, and no private religious school is required to be… When public schools are weakened—through funding cuts, through the diversion of students and dollars, through the erosion of the teaching profession—the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to seek alternatives… For those left behind in underfunded, understaffed public schools… (there) is no choice at all.”
The organization called “In the Public Interest” is a valuable source of information on the creeping (or galloping) privatization of public goods and services. Headed by Donald Cohen, ITPI keeps tabs on takeovers by billionaires and equity services of public services that we all need and squeezing a profit out of them.
We’ve long argued that increased funding for alternatives to public education usually comes at the expense of public education. While some politicians have insisted that it’s a “yes, and,” not an “either/or” proposition, we’ve known that, since the 1960s, the long game has been to slowly defund public schools while increasing high-stakes consequences through reliance on standardized testing and sanctions against schools and educators to justify further defunding. As schools are increasingly labeled as “failing,” privatization in the guise of “school choice” becomes the only alternative.
Now a new, comprehensive study from our friends at the Network for Public Education (NPE), a nonprofit public education advocacy organization, brings the receipts.
Public Schooling in America: 2026 Report Card studied all 50 states, plus DC, reviewing nearly forty factors across four categories: Privatization, Protections for Homeschooled Students, School Funding, and Conditions for Teaching and Learning.
The study makes a clear case that the more states invest in private education alternatives, the less they invest in public education.
“The data confirm what we have long suspected: privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand,” says Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author. “These are not states struggling with limited resources. They have made deliberate choices to abandon their public schools while directing billions in public dollars to private alternatives.”
The full report, a must-read for anyone who cares about education in the United States, is available here, or you can start with the executive summary here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 