John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma. He keeps watch over the Red state politics of Oklahoma and follows the national education scene closely, He writes here about author Robert Pondiscio. I was at one time good friends with Pondiscio. We were on the same wave-length. But things changed. Curiously, as I moved from right to left in my views, he moved in the other direction.
John Thompson writes about him and his ideological journey here:
Since the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Robert Pondiscio agreed to join the Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ Executive Review Committee, I’ve wondered how he could collaborate with Russell Vought and the founders of Project 2025 in order to turn Oklahoma’s teaching standards into rightwing propaganda. (I should note that because of a scheduling problem, he wasn’t able to remain on the committee.)
Years ago, when I first met Pondiscio, he was focused on high quality curricula; the person I knew would have been horrified by Walters’ silently imposed standards, that, for instance:
Would require that high school students “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results’ including”‘ sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.’”
After reading Pondiscio’s “The Last Days of Public School,” I’ve wondered what corporate school reformers would have thought if, in 2010, he had written the same things about the “Risks and Rewards” of school privatization. My reading of it is that Pondiscio now makes mostly the same statements about test-driven school privatization, as he did back then. But he’s switched sides, allying with both the Billionaires Boys Club and MAGAs in order to advance his personal agenda.
Pondiscio has long supported Core Knowledge, but he and E.D. Hirsch sought tests for diagnostic purposes, not reward-and-punish. Pondiscio agreed with Hirsch that high-stakes tests “are fundamentally unfair to disadvantaged children, particularly low-income children of color.”
When being interviewed by Larry Ferlazzo, Pondiscio denounced the corporate reformers, who were non-educators, who believed that improving teacher quality and lifting charter school caps was a simple solution. They believed their “reforms” could overcome the extreme poverty and multiple traumas that his and my students endured. Moreover, he was repelled by stories about “Rubber Rooms” in order to engage in “bashing teachers.”
And, rather than blame public schools for wasting money, he pointed out the huge amounts of money spent for implementing the hunches of corporate reformers seeking disruptive and transformative change.
By 2018, however, Pondiscio seemed fully committed to his new test-driven, competition-driven allies. For instance, he enthusiastically supported New Orleans’ Superintendent John White, who was a true-believer in school privatization, Teach for America, and high-stakes testing. When debating Diane Ravitch about school choice, he “retorted that school choice was not a ‘rightwing agenda,’ it was a ‘moral agenda.’”
Even today, when explaining how public schools (which he confusingly calls the “legacy system”) are doomed, Pondiscio seems to acknowledge that punitive, market-driven policies have failed in the ways we defenders of public schools predicted. He acknowledges that student outcomes were declining before Covid hit. But it contributed to “mounting challenges: historic declines in student achievement, chronic absenteeism, discipline crises, and plummeting teacher morale. Even as schools return to normal, confidence in public education has suffered hammer blows.”
To his credit, Pondiscio also cites the challenges of the “baby bust”—a decline in the birth rate that will reduce the number of school-age children by an estimated two to three million over the next decade.
It is to his discredit, I believe, that he doesn’t mention the damage done by the Trump administrations, and the extreme anti-public school propaganda funded by the “Billionaires Boys Club.”
Pondiscio now writes that “the zip code–driven default mode of educating our children is unlikely to disappear entirely. It will remain a common mode for a significant number of children if only because of habit and inertia. But we have hit and passed peak public education. Its influence and dominance can only wane.”
While remaining on the AEI team and being open to working with the Heritage Foundation effort to dismantle public education, Pondiscio writes, “In practice, this means almost any parent can opt out of public education and redirect funds to offset the cost of private school, pay for tutoring, and purchase textbooks, technology, and almost any conceivable service they deem necessary to meet the educational needs of their child.”
While supporting this outcome, Pondiscio writes:
While public schools have largely failed to be the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” Mann envisioned, they have at least aspired to provide a shared foundation of civic knowledge and literacy. In a world where education is fully customizable, we risk losing the common civic framework that binds a diverse nation together. Schools transmit not just knowledge but shared values, norms, and narratives.
Moreover:
School choice does not guarantee better schools—only different ones. The same market forces that produce elite private schools could also create a “long tail” of low-quality options. Moreover, as more middle-class and engaged families exit public schools, the legacy system risks becoming the school of last resort for the most disadvantaged students—further intensifying educational inequality.
Why would Pondiscio, who makes such acknowledgements, seem to go along with the destruction of public education in order to defeat educators who disagree with him on curriculum and other aspects of instruction?
Reading his AEI posts, I’m struck by the anger he spews about educators who “worship to excess at the altar of student engagement.” I’m struck by his repeatedly blaming “Wokism.” Why does he invest so much in attacking schools as “Ideological Boot Camps?” At a time when Elon Musk and President Trump are trying to destroy the Education Department, why is Pondiscio doubling down on its administrators who he says order schools to “Comply with our enlightened vision or risk a civil rights probe that could cost you your federal funding?”
In other words, why is Pondiscio focusing more on defeating advocates for hands-on learning and civil rights, than defending the poor children of color that he and I taught?
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