The Network for Public Education urges you to sign a petition opposing the appointment of Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. McMahon is committed to privatization of our neighborhood schools. Her background in the wrestling industry does not qualify her to lead the federal role in education.
Open the link. It will send your petition to your Senators on your behalf.
Writing in his blog Curmudgucation, Peter Greene reviews Kevin Huffman’s career as a big Reform honcho and his latest advice about what the federal government should do to make schools better. Peter noted that none of Huffman’s ventures has been successful, which makes a fine example of someone who has mastered the art of “failing upward.”
Peter Greene writes:
A few weeks ago, Kevin Huffman was in the pages of the Washington Post, bemoaning the lack of education discussion during the Presidential campaign and offering thoughts about What America Needs To Do Next. Nobody needs to read it. Really.
Kevin Huffman is a long-time reformster; in fact Kevin Huffman, as the Tennessee Grand High Commissioner of Education, represents a reformster milestone. Huffman’s career path took him to Swarthmore, which led to a Teach For America posting, which led to law school, which led to practicing education law in DC, which led back to TFA, first as general counsel and later as various VP executive titly things. Then, a few years later, Governor Bill Haslam tapped him for Tennessee Educational Poobahdom. Which made him the first TFA temp to get to run an entire state’s education system.
Once in charge, he made his reformy mark. (I will mention, because someone always brings it up, that he was for a brief while married to Michelle Rhee). He chimed in with Arne Duncan to claim that low-achieving students, including those with learning disabilities, just needed to be tested harder. And as a super buddy of charter schools, he took $3.4 million dollars away from Nashville city schools because their board didn’t approve the charter that he had personally shepherded through the process.
He became one of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the Race to the Top keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn’t like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters)
Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of business investment opportunities private charter schools?
The ASD was Huffman’s audacious attempt to bundle the bottom 5% of schools and take them over as a state-run “district.” The 2012 edition of the now-defunct ASD website proclaimed:
The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students’ life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.
Three years later, Barbic gave up, saying,
Let’s just be real: achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment. I have seen this firsthand at YES Prep and now as the superintendent of the ASD. As a charter school founder, I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.
Barbic was replaced by a Broadie, who also failed to do anything other than move some goal posts (no more of that “top 25%” stuff). Huffman couldn’t close the deal on selling the model to other states. And the ASD just kept failing.
Failing so consistently that a little more than a week after Huffman’s WaPo op-ed, Chalkbeat reported that research by Brown’s Annenberg Institute found that the ASD “generally worsened high school test scores.” It also didn’t help on ACT scores and “data related to attendance, chronic absenteeism, and disciplinary actions wasn’t encouraging, either.” Researchers found neither short-term nor long-term gains for students, and Tennessee legislators seem to finally be getting the idea that the ASD is junk.
But the guy who created it is still failing upward, having passed through the reform-pushing City Fund and now working as CEO of Accelerate, one more educational consulting fix-it shop operated by people with lots in the reformy funding universe (the board includes John White and Janice Jackson). They’re particularly keyed in to tutoring and individualized instruction, both computerized.
So what advice does the chief with no actual edu-wins to his name have to offer? Well, he thinks that George W. Bush was swell, and remember, reading and math scores wet up in the early days of No Child Left Behind. Folks like Monty Neill of Fairtest have since pointed out that these gains were only on the state Big Standardized Test. I was in the classroom at the time, and I can tell you exactly why test scores went up initially– because once the tests were rolled out we could learn how to teach to the test, and after a few years we had collected all the test prep gains we were going to get.
Huffman likes the “gains” in race to the Top testing which, again, reflect teachers learning how to game the new PARCC and SBA tests.
But, Huffman complains, by the end of the Obama administration, the feds were giving in to demands for more local control and pre-COVID test scores were already dipping, then “following the academic wreckage covid-19 left behind, heavy deferral to the states on spending and policy has left us with massive learning gaps and no national plan for closing them.”
It takes a person whose educational “experience” is almost entirely outside the classroom to believe that the Big Standardized Test is a useful measure of learning that should be the centerpiece of education policy rather than understanding that BS Testing is the most toxic force to be unleashed on education in the last couple of decades.
Huffman argues we need “strong national leadership around education policy,” which makes sense only if such leadership is guided by an actual understanding of teaching and learning and schooling, but history suggests that isn’t happening any time ever. But, he asserts, everyone wants “the best basic education for their children.” I don’t know what to do with that “basic” in there.
How do we get it?
For starters, the next president should issue a national call for all states and all groups of students to surpass pre-pandemic learning levels in reading and math by 2030 — and direct the Education Department to report on each state’s progress.
God, one of my least favorite forms of management– management by insistence. This is like sales managers who issue increased sales targets with helpful directives like “sell more.” But worse, this is demanding that schools focus more intently on the wrong damn target– test scores.
Huffman also wants the feds to replace ESSA (too weak) with “a return to nationwide education goals” along with accountability measures. And also, grants for states that “pursue ambitious education reform” as, one assumes, defined by the feds.
In other words, Huffman would like to rewind to 2002 and start NCLB/CCSS/RTTT all over again, and I guess we can say that keeping on with something that hasn’t worked yet is on brand for Huffman. But man– it all didn’t work the first time, and not just “didn’t work” but “did more harm than good.”
But he has some specifics that he wants the feds to enforce this time. One is phonics-based learning and I don’t have time to get into the reading wars other than to say that any time someone says “if we just use X, every student will learn Y” they are wrong.
He also wants the feds to boost high-dosage tutoring, which coincidentally is one of the foci of his present gig. High-dosage tutoring is hard and expensive to scale up, with the research support very narrow and specific. He also wants more CTE (fine).
Bottom line, Huffman wants presidents not to abdicate their “responsibility to push school districts toward success,” a sentiment in line with the reformster notion that everything wrong with education is the fault of lazy educators who have to be coerced into doing their jobs (and certainly not treated like partners in the education world).
The federal standards and BS Testocrats had their shot, and they failed hard. In many ways, their failures are still haunting the public school system. Huffman is a poster child for the Teach For America crowd who visited a classroom for a couple of years and parleyed that into “education expert” on their resume, going on to promote and support an array of ill-advised policies flavored with a barely-concealed disdain for the people who have actually made education and teaching a career. They should not get a do-over. They cannot be taken seriously, even if they manage to be platformed by major media outlets.
Trump has promised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. He needs Congressional approval to do it. Trump made this promise during the campaign. The details are spelled out in Project 2025. The elimination of ED is step one. Then right wingers approve their dream, which is to “block grant” all the big funding. That means that the money goes to states without limits on how it is spent. They can spend it as they wish, without federal oversight. But then comes the kicker: the federal government stops funding Title 1, Special Education, and other “categorical programs,” and the states have to fund it themselves. This works for the well-off states, because they currently pay more than they receive. But the poor states, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, are screwed. They receive more from the federal Department of Education than they pay in. Tough justice. Bad for kids.
What about the U.S. Department of Education?
One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states.
In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.
It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.
The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.
A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science.
But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition.
In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.
After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”
The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values.
When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.
Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault.
In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination.
After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.
When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.”
During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.
But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars.
There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.
In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”
Think how much worse it could be. It could have been a Mom for Liberty. Or Chris Rufo.
John Thompson describes Ryan Walters’ frenzied campaign to be chosen as Trump’s Secretary of Education. In Oklahoma, where he is State Superintendent, Walters has been pushing the Trump agenda long before the election. He wants religion in the schools, he wants to dismantle the Department of Education, he wants to destroy public schools, he wants to purge the curriculum. He’s practically screaming, “Take me!”
Thompson writes:
We Oklahomans need to apologize to the nation for what some of us have been thinking since the election. But, how can we not hope that State Superintendent Ryan Walters gets a job in the Trump administration? As Oklahoma Watch has reported, Ryan Walters seems to be campaigning for an appointment to be Trump’s U.S. Secretary of Education. Walters has been “rumored to be angling for the post; he’s been on a taxpayer-funded national media blitz for months.” And after all, maybe Walters’s incompetence would make it harder to destroy the U.S. Department of Education than to realize his goal of destroying Oklahoma’s public schools.
Of course, I’m kidding, mostly. But at times like this, education supporters have no choice but to seek comfort in humor, no matter how absurd such jokes may be.
During the last week, as the Oklahoman reports, Walters has promised on social media that “President Trump’s agenda will be enacted in Oklahoma.” Moreover, as the Tulsa World explained, “’Freedom to pray’ is among the education policy tenets listed by Trump’s re-election campaign.” And Walters issued a memorandum to parents and school superintendents advocating for the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education and replacing its functions with block grants.”
The Oklahoman further explains that Walters has “sent a five-point memo to public school superintendents and parents, detailing what he has described as Oklahoma’s plan to implement Trump’s agenda in schools. The memo covered topics such as ‘ending social indoctrination in classrooms’ and ‘stopping illegal immigration’s impact on our schools.’” And he also complained that “‘well-funded, out of state groups’ had ‘bullied’ an Oklahoma teacher into removing quotes from the Bible from a classroom.”
Walters now promises a “new office would help protect teachers in similar situations in the future.” So, “Walters said the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism would promote its namesake principles and make sure students and teachers can freely practice their religion.” While doing so, he blamed teachers unions for undermining faith and family.
The Oklahoma Voice adds, “Walters said public schools have been “ground ‘zero’ for erosion of religious liberty. While calling church-state separation a ‘myth,’ he ordered Oklahoma districts to teach from the Bible, sought to buy Bibles with taxpayer funds and advocated for opening a Catholic charter school in the state.”
Walters falsely argued:
It is no coincidence that the dismantling of faith and family values in public schools directly correlates with declining academic outcomes in our public schools. … In Oklahoma, we are reversing this negative trend and, working with the incoming Trump Administration, we are going to aggressively pursue education policies that will improve academic outcomes and give our children a better future.
The Oklahoma Watch also explains, contrary to Walters’ promises:
Due to the courts and lawmakers’ interpretation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government and Department of Education are not involved in determining curricula or educational standards or establishing schools or colleges.
Mostly, the department gives out money, some of which has strings attached, ensuring that schools adhere to federal non-discrimination laws.
Even so, we are likely to see Walters ramping up his attacks on Oklahoma schools in order to impress Trump. After all, “Trump proposes having parents elect school principals, abolishing teacher tenure and adopting merit pay. He vows to encourage prayer in schools and expel more disruptive students from classrooms.”
Real world, I’ve been asking whether Walters could impose more actual damage on his home state than on the country as a whole. Could we hope that his record of incompetence would be more likely to bring his MAGA agenda down if he tackles the more complicated battles with the U.S. Department of Education (or any other national institutions targeted by the new President)? And, wouldn’t his irrational zealotry be more politically damaging to Trump if he attacks government on the federal level?
Or, are Oklahomans just worn down by the stress Walters inflicted on us, which is what he wants to dump on the nation?
It remains a fact that vouchers have never won a state referendum. Typically, voters reject vouchers by large margins. Yet Republicans continue to push them. This election, three states that voted for Trump defeated vouchers.
ProPublica reported on the public’s rejection of vouchers:
In 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a measure that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest ones — to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private, typically religious schools.
Arizonans voted no, and it wasn’t close. Even in a right-leaning state, with powerful Republican leaders supporting the initiative, the vote against it was 65% to 35%.
Coming into this week’s election, Donald Trump and Republicans had hoped to reverse that sort of popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher ballot measures in several states.
But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky. In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime.
Expansions of school vouchers, despite backing from wealthy conservatives, have never won when put to voters. Instead, they lose by margins not often seen in such a polarized country.
Candidates of both parties would be wise “to make strong public education a big part of their political platforms, because vouchers just aren’t popular,” said Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, a teachers union. Royers pointed to an emerging coalition in his state and others, including both progressive Democrats and rural Republicans, that opposes these sweeping “school choice” efforts. (Small-town Trump voters oppose such measures because their local public school is often an important community institution, and also because there aren’t that many or any private schools around.)
Yet voucher efforts have been more successful when they aren’t put to a public vote. In recent years, nearly a dozen stateshave enacted or expanded major voucher or “education savings account” programs, which provide taxpayer money even to affluent families who were already able to afford private school.
That includes Arizona, where in 2022 the conservative Goldwater Institute teamed up with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP majority in the Legislature to enact the very same “universal” education savings account initiative that had been so soundly repudiated by voters just a few years before.
Another way that Republican governors and interest groups have circumvented the popular will on this issue is by identifying anti-voucher members of their own party and supporting pro-voucher candidates who challenge those members in primary elections. This way, they can build legislative majorities to enact voucher laws no matter what conservative voters want.
In Iowa, several Republicans were standing in the way of a major new voucher program as of 2022. Gov. Kim Reynolds helped push them out of office — despite their being incumbents in her own party — for the purposes of securing a majority to pass the measure.
A similar dynamic has developed in Tennessee and in a dramatic way in Texas, the ultimate prize for voucher advocates. There, pro-voucher candidates for the state Legislature won enough seats this Tuesday to pass a voucher program during the legislative session that starts in January, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said.
The day after the election, Abbott, who has made vouchers his top legislative priority, framed the result as a resounding signal that Texans have now shown a “tidal wave of support” for pro-voucher lawmakers. But in reality, the issue was conspicuously missing from the campaigns of many of the new Republicans whom he helped win, amid polling numbers that showed Texans hold complicated views on school choice. (A University of Houston poll taken this summer found that two-thirds of Texans supported voucher legislation, but that an equal number also believe that vouchers funnel money away from “already struggling public schools.”)
In the half dozen competitive Texas legislative races targeted in this election by Abbott and the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, backed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Republican candidates did not make vouchers a central plank of their platforms. Most left the issue off of their campaign websites, instead listing stances like “Standing with Public Schools” and “Increased Funding for Local Schools.”
Corpus Christi-area Republican Denise Villalobos pledged on her website that if elected she would “fight for increased funding for our teachers and local schools”; she did not emphasize her pro-voucher views. At least one ad paid for by the American Federation for Children’s affiliated PAC attacked her opponent, Democrat Solomon Ortiz Jr., not for his opposition to vouchers but for what it claimed were his “progressive open-border policies that flood our communities with violent crime and fentanyl.” (Villalobos defeated Ortiz by 10 points.)
Matthew Wilson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said that this strategy reflects a belief among voucher advocates that compared to the border and culture wars, vouchers are not in fact a “slam-dunk winning issue.”
In the wake of Tuesday’s results in the presidential election, NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said thatDemocrats had overlooked school choice as a policy that might be popular among working-class people, including Latinos, in places like Texas. But the concrete results of ballot initiatives around the nation show that it is in fact Trump, DeVos and other voucher proponents who are out of step with the American people on this particular issue.
They continue to advocate for vouchers, though, for multiple reasons: a sense that public schools are places where children develop liberal values, an ideological belief that the free market and private institutions can do things better and more efficiently than public ones, and a long-term goal of more religious education in this country.
And they know that popular sentiment can be and has been overridden by the efforts of powerful governors and moneyed interest groups, said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center who recently published a history of billionaire-led voucher efforts nationwide.
The Supreme Court could also aid the voucher movement in coming years, he said.
“They’re not going to stop,” Cowen said, “just because voters have rejected this.”
CBS News in Detroit reported on the latest study by the Network for Public Education, which showed that more than one-third of charter schools close within the first five years. The NPE study is based on federal data. Most charter schools in Michigan operate for-profit. Please open the link to see the video.
(CBS DETROIT) — A new national report finds that more than one in four charter schools fail in their first five years. And by year 15, nearly half have closed. The numbers are even more stark in Michigan charter schools.
The report, “Doomed to Fail: An Analysis of Charter Closures from 1998-2022,” was done by the Network for Public Education. It found that 36% of Michigan charter schools closed within their first five years.
The state’s population is dropping, and traditional public schools are closing as well, but at about half the rate of Michigan’s charter schools.
“I’ve kind of looked at Michigan as the wild Midwest of the charter sector,” said Mitchell Robinson, an associate professor at Michigan State University and a member of the Michigan State Board of Education.
He said he wasn’t surprised by the report’s findings.
“When we treat education like banks and dollar stores and dry cleaners and McDonald’s franchises, that’s the kind of results we’re going to get.”
Robinson said charter schools popping up and closing soon after hurt students, teachers, and other schools, sometimes creating public school deserts.
“There are parts of Detroit where kids have to travel up to two hours a day to get to a school because charter schools have come in, public schools have closed, then the charter school closes, then there’s no school at all,” he said.
The report by the Network for Public Education analyzed charter school closures across the country from 1998 to 2022. They found Michigan faces its particular challenges as charter schools here have less oversight and can be big money makers.
“Seventy percent of the charter schools in Michigan are run by for-profit entities. That is the highest percentage in the nation,” said Carol Burris, the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education.
She said every charter school in Michigan must have an authorizer that oversees it, and that authorizer receives up to three percent of the state money that goes to the school.
“Now 3% doesn’t sound like a lot, but it really is,” said Burris. “One case in point, Walker Charter Academy; it’s a National Heritage Charter Academy school. It received about $7.8 million last year in state funding, so 3% of that is $234,000. Now Grand Valley is its authorizer; they have 62 charter schools. You start doing the math; you’re talking about between $10 million and $14 million a year. That’s a lot of money.”
The President of the Michigan Charter School Association was not impressed:
“I’m not sure I understand their assumptions or their basic premises because their conclusions don’t align,” said Dan Quisenberry, the President of Michigan’s Charter School Association.
If Trump follows through with his education proposals, if the Republican-controlled Congress lets him do it, America’s students and teachers are in for a world of hurt.
Mercedes Schneider writes here about what’s at stake. I did not copy and paste the article in full. It is excellent. I urge you to open the link.
I do not believe American education is a top concern for Donald Trump. I do believe that he could well turn it over to the likes of the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025, so long as nobody outshines him in the press and puts anything (Constitution included) ahead of loyalty to him above all else.
So, when ABC News reports that Trump’s Agenda 47 as though the Heritage Foundation has not already done most of Trump’s homework for him, well, that fashions Trump’s interest in a number of issues as though it is something more than just letting those extreme-right-leaners who really care about that stuff have at.
Now that the election is over, Trump allies are openly admitting that Project 2025 was the Trump plan all along.
One featured Project 2025-Trump issue is the proposed dismantling of the US Department of Education (USDOE), which was created during the Carter administration. Talk of getting rid of USDOE began with the Reagan administration(in other words, soon after it was created). It should come as no surprise that in 1980, the “fledgling” Heritage Foundation was in Reagan’s ear and is proud to declare as much in the opening pages of its Project 2025:
Several decades later, USDOE still exists, and several decades later, the Heritage Foundation is still trying to kill it.
Heritage et al. has taken great pains to outline its 900+-page wish list of ultra conservatism, including nixing USDOE. However, it would take a lot to achieve the kind of legislative unity required to dissolve a federal department that supports numerous Americans in desired and positive ways, not the least of which is via the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
Brookings offers a concise discussion of the Project 2025 plan for education, including this “sample list” of negative consequences:
No surprise that Heritage wants school vouchers for all, a notably unpopular concept at the 2024 ballot box:
Of course, the key is to have legislatures jump onto the choice bandwagon and force choice onto voters whether they want it or not. But some voters do benefit from having access to publicly-subsidized private schools: Those with money. Heritage alludes to Arizona’s “expanded program… available to all families. However, in Arizona, those accessing school voucher cash tend not to be the working class but more affluent families.
Speaking of the affluent and private school vouchers: Billionaire former US Ed secretary Betsy DeVos, who in 2023 could not get private school vouchers over the line in her home state of Michigan, apparently smells opportunity.
On January 07, 2024, DeVos resigned as Trump’s US ed sec. In her resignation letter, DeVos placed the fault of January 06, 2024, chaos squarely on Trump:
In a November 07. 2024, interview with EdWeek about advice for Trump’s next Ed sec, , DeVos is fact checked as she tries to put lack of a school choice “big moment” at the feet of the Democrats. Not so, Betsy:
During Trump’s first term, DeVos’ inability to push private school choice to her liking has to be attributed in part to some Republican resistance to the idea. Heritage and any Heritage-sympathetic ed sec could well face similar issues in Trump’s second term.
I did not copy the entire article. Open the link to finish reading it.
Perhaps you remember “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” the overhyped documentary from 2010 that made the audacious claim that public schools were failing due to “bad teachers”and that the only sane alternative was charter schools. The documentary was funded by the Gates Foundation, with the obvious purpose of smearing public schools and promoting charter schools. I reviewed the film in the New York review of Books, in a review called “The Myth of Charter Schools.” Among other flaws in the film, I pointed out that it misused and distorted NAEP data to paint a horrifying picture of public schools. I concluded it was dishonest propaganda on behalf of the privatizers.
One of the amazing, miraculous charter schools featured in the film was a residential boarding school in D.C. called SEED.
Peter Greene writes that SEED is in deep trouble and may be shuttered.
The SEED School of Washington, D.C. was in the Washington Post yesterday, accused of inaccurate records and wholesale breezing past laws that are supposed to protect students with disabilities.
If the name of this unusual charter boarding school seems vaguely familiar, that may be because back in 2010, they were one of the charter schools lovingly lionized by the documentary hit piece, “Waiting for Superman.”
“Waiting for Superman” was a big hit, popularizing the neo-liberal narrative that public schools were failing because public school teachers were lazy incompetents. Every damn newspaper in the country jumped on the narrative. Roger Ebert jumped on. Oprah jumped on. NPR wondered why it didn’t get an Oscar (maybe, they posit, it was because one big emotional scene was made up). It helped sustain the celebrity brand of Michelle Rhee (the Kim Kardashian of education, famous despite having not accomplished anything). It was a slanted hatchet job that helped bolster the neoliberal case for Common Core and charter schools and test-centric education and heavy-handed “evaluation” of teachers.
And it boosted the profile of SEED, the DC charter whose secret sauce for student achievement is that it “takes them away from their home environments for five days a week and gives them a host of supporting services.”
Except it turns out that maybe it doesn’t do that after all.
According to the WaPo piece, reported by Lauren Lumpkin, audits of the school suggest a variety of mistreatment of students with special needs.
SEED underreported the number of students it expelled last year. It couldn’t produce records of services it was supposed to have provided for some students with disabilities (most likely explanation–those services were never provided). Federal law says that before you expel a student with an IEP, you have meetings to decide if the misbehavior is a feature of their disability, or if their misbehavior stems from requirements of the IEP that are not being provided.
These have the fancy name of “manifestation determination” which just means the school needs to ask– is the student acting out because that’s what her special situation makes her do, or because the Individualized Education Program that’s supposed to help deal with that special situation is not being actually done. For absurd example– is the student repeatedly late to her class on the second floor because she’s in a wheelchair? Does her IEP call for elevator transport to the second floor, and there’s no elevator in the building? Then maybe don’t suspend her for chronic lateness.
Founded in 1998, SEED enrolls about 250 students, which seems to preclude any sort of “just lost the details in the crowd” defense. But as Lumpkin reports, questions arose.
But after receiving complaints about discipline, understaffing and compliance with federal law, the city’s charter oversight agency started an audit of the school in July. One complaint claimed school officials had manipulated attendance data and were not recording suspensions.
The audit’s findings sparked scathing commentary from charter board members and questions about SEED D.C.’s practices.
“I’m the parent of a special-needs child, and I’ve got to tell you, reading what was happening in these pages, it’s like a parent’s worst nightmare,” charter board member Nick Rodriguez told SEED D.C. leaders. “I sincerely hope that you will take that seriously as you think about what needs to happen going forward.”
Lumpkin reports that this is not their first round of problems. A 2023 audit found a high number of expulsions and suspensions compared to other charters– five times higher. A cynical person might conclude that SEED addressed the problem by just not reporting the full numbers. Inaccurate data, missed deadlines, skipping legal requirements–that’s a multi-year pattern for the school.
The school is now on a “notice of concern,” a step on the road to losing its charter and being closed down (or I suppose they could just switch over to a private voucher-accepting school).
The whole sad story of the many students who have been ill-served by SEED is one more reminder that there are no miracles in education, and no miracle schools, either.
Glenn Kessler is the fact checker for The Washington Post. He describes what it is like to check the nation’s most notorious prevaricator.
Kessler writes:
In my 14 years as The Washington Post Fact Checker, nine have been devoted to dissecting and debunking claims made by Donald Trump. Indeed, no person has been fact-checked more often than Trump, as he has bested or outlasted foes — Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — who drew their share of fact checks. And no other person has consistently earned Four Pinocchios — the badge of a committed liar — day after day, week after week.
I first covered Trump as a business reporter in the 1980s, so I was very familiar with his long history of exaggeration and bravado when he burst onto the political stage in 2015 (not counting his brief flirtation with the Reform Party in 2000). “Businessman Donald Trump is a fact checker’s dream … and nightmare,” I wrote in the fact check of his speech announcing that he would seek the presidency.
Now, he has convincingly won a second term via the electoral college and is even on track for the first time in three tries to win the popular vote. After his first two races, I wrote analyses that, in retrospect, misjudged the Trump phenomenon.
In 2016, I noted that “based only on anecdotal evidence — emails from readers — one reason that Trump’s false statements may have mattered little to his supporters is because he echoed things they already believed.” But I expressed hope that “now that Trump will assume the presidency, he may find that it is not in his interest to keep making factually unsupported questions.”
As an example, I noted that during the campaign he had claimed that the unemployment rate was 42 percent, rather than the 5 percent in official statistics. I suggested that he might find himself embarrassed to be contradicted by the official data once he took office.
I was wrong. He embraced the numbers as his own — and then bragged that he had created the greatest economy in American history, even though he had inherited it from Barack Obama.
When Trump was defeated in 2020, my analysis carried a headline that is embarrassing in retrospect: “Fact-checking in a post-Trump era.” I wrote that “his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden suggests that adherence to the facts does matter.”
The Fact Checker documented more than 30,000 false or misleading claims that Trump made during his presidency. Indeed, through that term, Trump was the first president since World War II to fail to ever win majority support in public opinion polls. A key reason was that relatively few Americans believed he was honest and trustworthy, an important metric in Gallup polls. Gallup has described this as “among his weakest personal characteristics.”
As evidence that Trump was hurt by falsehoods, I pointed to Biden’s narrow victories in Arizona and Georgia: “It’s quite possible that at least 9,000 people in Arizona and 5,000 in Georgia were upset enough at Trump’s continued false attacks on native sons Sen. John McCain (R) and Rep. John Lewis (D), even after they died, that they decided to support Biden over Trump.”
The essay appeared before Trump embarked on a months-long campaign to claim that Biden won only through election fraud — a lie debunked in court ruling after court ruling. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, inspired by his rhetoric, appeared to be an indelible stain. Yet from 2020 on, Trump used his false claim to maintain his Republican support and build a base for his comeback.
In this election campaign, Trump once again resorted to false claims and sometimes outrageous lies, especially on immigration and the economy. He rode a wave of discontent about inflation — a problem in every industrialized country after the pandemic — to falsely claim that the economy was a disaster, despite relatively low unemployment, falling inflation and strong growth.
Last month, the Economist magazine published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.” Yet exit polls show that two-thirds of voters said the economy was in bad shape.
I do not write fact checks to influence the behavior of politicians; I write fact checks to inform voters. What voters — or politicians — do with the information in the fact checks is up to them.
Trump certainly benefits from an increasingly siloed information system — a world in which people can set their social media feeds or their television channel so they receive only information that confirms what they already believe. It’s perhaps not an accident that Trump’s rise in politics coincides with the rise of social media, which he adeptly used to first attract attention by elevating (false) questions about Obama’s birth certificate.
In this campaign, Trump made many promises that will be difficult to achieve, such as reducing the national debt and cutting energy prices in half. He also said he would reduce inflation, though that’s already been mostly achieved, and many economists say his plan to impose large tariffs on imported goods might spark inflation again.
No matter what happens, or how many fact checks are written, this time I won’t doubt his ability to convince his supporters that it’s all good news — or that the problem is the fault of someone else, facts notwithstanding.
Diane Ravitch's blog 