Critics slam teachers and public schools for low reading scores. Much of that criticism is wrong and misses the real problem. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Science of Reading (SoR) both seriously hamper children’s writing (their voices) and, in turn, their ability to learn to read.
Writing and reading are siblings. They complement each other, and for most children, if one isn’t working, the other isn’t either. That’s why, as children learn to read, they should be learning to write. Good reading and writing instruction involves interactions and feedback from teachers, students, and parents.
Below is a reminder of what makes a good writing program, but first I want to address the problem.
The National Reading Panel, which led to the SoR, failed to adequately research reading (See Yatvin, 2003). They ignored writing!
In 2023, Stephen Sawchuck of Education Week wrote about this omission: How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’? His points are valid, but his focus on breaking writing into explicit skills, much like the SoR breaks up reading, misses the mark.
The Science of Reading isn’t settled, since believers finally want to address writing. They sound like writing instruction never existed, calling for a Science of Writing. Adding “science” makes it sound legit and lends itself to for-profit programs.
While reading Sawchuck’s report, it’s easy to picture newly minted, skill-oriented, expensive online writing programs for states to add to their already crowded list of online decoding programs.
I would argue that none of that is necessary for children to learn to write (and read better). What’s needed is paper and pencil and adults who care about student writing, will read and value it, and help children improve upon it.
Teachers used to address writing well. They focused on it more and better. What happened?
Remember Common Core and David Coleman’s toxic words about student voice?
David Coleman, a businessman and codeveloper of the CCSS, who now makes millions as the head of the College Board, denounced student voice.
Around 2015, Coleman, discussing student narrative writing, stating to a group of teachers:
You grow up in this world, and you realize people don’t really give a shit about what you feel and what you think.
Along with this, SoR enthusiasts largely ignored the critical connections between writing and learning to read. The heavy focus on decoding and direct instruction still permeate early learning classrooms, and writing has been an afterthought.
Coleman was wrong, of course. The most critical part of writing is student voice. The SoR folks are wrong too. Skills are secondary to writing well. With both writing and reading, children must first understand what’s in it for them.
Please open the link and read Bailey’s explanation of the best approaches to teaching students to write and to find their own voice.
Texas has a peculiar law: if only one school in a district is “failing,” the state can take control of the entire district. That happened to Houston. The state takeover was triggered by the “failure” of Phyllis Wheatley High School, which had a higher proportion of high-needs students than any other high school in the district.
The State Commissioner of Education, Mike Morath, who is not an educator, appointed Mike Miles as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District and fired the elected school board.
Morath previously served on the Dallas school board. Miles, a former military officer and a Broad Academy graduate, was the state-appointed superintendent in Dallas, where he drove out a large number of teachers and left with no grand accomplishments. Miles is a top-down manager who believes in standardization and compliance.
But here’s the fishy part. After failing in Dallas, Mike Miles started his own charter chain in Colorado called Third Future.
Here’s the sweet deal: if a district brings in a Third Future charter school, the state won’t take control of the district! It is the only charter school with that privilege!
Third Future started opening charter schools in Texas. The Houston Chronicle reported that it is $14 million in debt.
One of Texas’ most high-profile charter school networks could soon begin laying off staff amid a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall, throwing its future into question just as more and more districts have turned to it to avoid a state takeover.
The Texas branch of Third Future Schools, founded by Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles, is facing a $14 million deficit, forcing it to cut many of the 700 new employees it hired this year.
The grim budget projection follows years of multimillion dollar deficits and a dire warning by its auditor — issues that might have forced other charter schools out of business. Instead, the nonprofit has seen its footprint more than triple this year, and state officials continue to allow school districts that hire Third Future to avoid being taken over.
At a board meeting last month, its leaders said the nonprofit was experiencing the same problem as many of its traditional public school counterparts: fewer students.
“As you guys know, districts across Texas are seeing a declining enrollment,” Third Future Schools Superintendent Zach Craddock told board members. “Some of that is passed on to us.”
The Colorado-based nonprofit network is far from the state’s largest chain of charter schools, which are taxpayer-funded public schools operated by third parties. But it’s among the most scrutinized because of its ties to Miles, who was brought to Houston under a state takeover, and its unusual role. Rather than open its own campuses, school districts hire Third Future to turn around failing schools using a tool under state law that allows districts to avoid being taken over by the Texas Education Agency.
To avoid takeover, districts have to have their plan approved by TEA, run by longtime education commissioner Mike Morath. Morath tapped Miles to lead Houston ISD in 2023, where he implemented Third Future’s rigorous learning model, which includes daily quizzes in core classes and requiring teachers to stick to provided curriculum rather than coming up with their own. The model employs high numbers of staff.
This year, Third Futures Schools Texas took over 15 campuses, bringing its total to 19 across seven school districts, including San Antonio and Waco. None of the schools are in Houston.
The Colorado-based nonprofit network is far from the state’s largest chain of charter schools, which are taxpayer-funded public schools operated by third parties. But it’s among the most scrutinized because of its ties to Miles, who was brought to Houston under a state takeover, and its unusual role. Rather than open its own campuses, school districts hire Third Future to turn around failing schools using a tool under state law that allows districts to avoid being taken over by the Texas Education Agency.
To avoid takeover, districts have to have their plan approved by TEA, run by longtime education commissioner Mike Morath. Morath tapped Miles to lead Houston ISD in 2023, where he implemented Third Future’s rigorous learning model, which includes daily quizzes in core classes and requiring teachers to stick to provided curriculum rather than coming up with their own. The model employs high numbers of staff.
“(We) have a significant amount of right-sizing to do over the course of the next month,” one of its finance directors, Rich Billings, said.
This year, Third Futures Schools Texas took over 15 campuses, bringing its total to 19 across seven school districts, including San Antonio and Waco. None of the schools are in Houston.
To handle the growing workload, the six-year-old nonprofit hired 700 new employees this year and expected to oversee 9,600 students, Craddock told the board last month. At the time, just 7,775 were attending the 19 schools.
Since the nonprofit’s funding is based on student attendance, the gap is expected to leave a $14 million hole. Student attendance is expected to go up slightly, but the nonprofit will be forced to cut $9 million, including reducing staffing, this month, officials said. The other $5 million was expected surplus.
Billings did not outline where the cuts will be made. A spokesperson for Third Futures declined to comment for this story.
A charter school overprojecting the number of students it’s enrolling is nothing new. It’s by far the top reason why charter schools close, said Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a critic of charter schools.
“It’s not that people are shutting them down because the test scores are bad,” she said. “The enrollment gets to a point where it’s unsustainable.”
Third Future Schools Texas has struggled to break even for years, according to financial audits, and has faced controversy over its finances. Its agreement with Beaumont ISD to operate three schools ended prematurely last year amid a request for millions more than it had previously agreed to. News reports that the nonprofit was inappropriately paying its Colorado headquarters millions of dollars were investigated and dismissed by TEA in 2024.
Miles stepped down as CEO of Third Future Schools in 2023, but was found this year to have accepted at least $190,000 in consulting fees from the nonprofit since then. Much of that was after a state law barred district administrators from profiting from outside education work.
Financial audits show that the nonprofit posted a $2.6 million deficit in 2023. In 2024, the deficit grew to $5.3 million, after a nearly $3 million “error in the payroll calculation” was discovered, auditors wrote.
Last year, the same auditing firm wrote that the nonprofit’s deficit grew to $7.3 million, “which raises substantial doubt about the organization’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
That kind of language from an auditor would make it hard for an organization to attract lenders and suggests it could be headed toward bankruptcy, said Nathan Goldman, an accounting professor at North Carolina State University who writes a column for Forbes.
“For any organization, it’s a big deal,” he said.
Typically, TEA might move to shut down a charter school with those kinds of deficits. The agency performs financial integrity ratings for traditional charter schools that includes submitting audits. But because of Third Future’s unusual business model, it falls outside those requirements. TEA told the Chronicle that local school districts that hire the nonprofit are responsible for overseeing its finances.
The agency does not approve those agreements, known as 1882 partnerships, but does approve the benefits, which can include a two-year delay for a state takeover. Some local school officials have said they felt they had to choose Third Future Schools because it was the only one with which TEA would agree to delay a takeover. TEA has said any outside group can be approved as long as it meets its requirements, including a track record of success.
Who is Jeff Yass? He is a multi-billionaire, the richest man in Pennsylvania. He is passionate about school choice, even though he is a graduate of the New York City public schools.
When Governor Gregg Abbott was fighting to impose a voucher plan on Texas, he was stopped by a solid bloc of Republicans who were devoted to their community’s public schools, the schools everyone attended, the schools that were the biggest employer in town, the schools where everyone knew the teachers.
Jeff Yass gave Gregg Abbott $10 million to run hardline, pro-voucher candidates against the moderates. He defeated enough of them to get his voucher bill passed.
Now Jeff Yass has decided that Vivek Ramaswamy should be governor of Ohio. Ohio already has charters and vouchers, but apparently that’s not enough for billion as ire Yass.
A single billionaire may now have given more money to help elect Republican Vivek Ramaswamy as Ohio’s next governor than Democrat Amy Acton has received from all her donors combined.
Politico reported this week that Jeffrey Yass of Pennsylvania had made a “fresh ten-figure donation of cash” – in other words, at least $10 million – to V-PAC: Victors not Victims, a political action committee set up to support Ramaswamy’s run for governor in this year’s elections. The money will help fund even more attack ads against Acton that attempt to paint her as unqualified, erratic and too liberal.
That new contribution, which a source familiar with the group confirmed to Andrew, adds to the $20 million that Yass previously gave to V-PAC. The $30 million (at least) from Yass now exceeds the $21.8 million Acton has reported raising for her entire campaign, based on the most recent publicly available numbers. As a federal super PAC, V-PAC is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, unlike official campaign committees, which must follow state campaign finance limits.
The new check from Yass – who’s among the country’s biggest financial supporters of taxpayer-funded private school vouchers and other school choice programs – further contributes to Ramaswamy’s lopsided fundraising advantage. Ramaswamy and his allies have now spent or reserved $82.3 million on TV and digital ads this year, compared to $11.1 million in expected pro-Acton spending, according to Medium Buying, a Republican political ad tracking firm. Team Ramaswamy’s ads have been running all year, while most of the pro-Acton ads, including an $9.4 million campaign funded by the Democratic Governors Association, are set to begin after Labor Day.
Republicans’ strategy to defeat Acton relies in part on convincing Ohio voters that she’s a liberal Democrat. But she’s taken a few conspicuous stances this year that align her in some instances more closely with Republicans.
As Andrew wrote this week, Acton has come out in support of Issue 3, the voter ID amendment, as well as Medicaid work requirements and Ohio’s ban on transgender girls and women participating in girls’ and women’s sports. Acton’s positions put her at odds with most Democrats, including repeated past statements from her running mate, former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper.
Acton made a couple more policy announcements on Tuesday that burnish her centrist bona fides.
Appearing in Columbus to tout a new endorsement from the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the state’s second-largest police union, Acton announced her opposition to a longshot citizens’ effort to eliminate qualified immunity, the enhanced legal protections that cover police officers and other government officials. Acton also said she would not block local police from helping federal agencies enforce immigration laws.
“We always work with the federal law enforcement, and we will do so – whatever it takes to keep Ohioans safe,” Acton said, according to cleveland.com.
The OPBA, which represents 8,000 law enforcement officials statewide, announced other endorsements this week. They were a bipartisan variety pack, including Democrats Sherrod Brown and Jennifer Brunner for U.S. Senate and Ohio Supreme Court, respectively, and Republicans Keith Faber and Dan Hawkins for state auditor and Ohio Supreme Court.
Another state police union with nearly three times as many members, the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police, previously endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy, Jon Husted and the rest of the Republican statewide slate this year.
As research continues to show the harmful effects of technology on student learning, parents are pushing against it. Los Angeles is the latest district to impose limits.
The district has a checkered history with technology, including massive purchases of a laptop for every student and allegations of payoffs by vendors.
AI has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s useful to obtain information, like where is a TV program streaming or who won the Presidency in 1920. But its interpretations are sometimes wrong, as is some of its information. It can write essays, after getting prompts. But when teachers assign essays, they expect students to write them, not AI.
I have corrected AI on several occasions, and the bot quickly apologized. On one occasion, I asked for NAEP scores in a particular state. The AI responded with a slant implying that NAEP “proficiency” was grade level, and those who did not reach it were below grade level. Of course, I pointed out that NAEP itself warns that “proficiency” is higher than grade level and represents “solid achievement, what most of us would call an A or B+. NAEP is not “grade level,” although many reporters think it is. The bot quickly admitted its error.
On another occasion, I asked for the bio of a friend, and AI had confused her with someone else. Again, it made a correction.
AI makes many errors. My college-age grandson told me he never uses it because it’s unreliable.
Worse, it is a shortcut to learning, like copying an answer from an encyclopedia. But it’s more dangerous because encyclopedias are usually subject to rigorous fact-checking. Students who turn in AI essays are not learning. They are cheating.
The Los Angeles public school system will vastly restrict the use of artificial intelligence at all grade levels, district officials said on Wednesday at a board of education meeting.
The move came shortly after the nation’s largest school system, in New York City, announced it would ban most A.I. through 8th grade. Both developments seem to respond to an extraordinary movement, driven by parents, to push back against the incursion of technology and screens into childhood.
The board of education in the Los Angeles Unified School District previously barred cellphone use during the school day and strictly limited the hours per day students could spend on laptops.
The new A.I. restrictions, reported earlier by the Los Angeles Times, will apply for the current school year, as a board committee considers how to potentially incorporate the technology in the future, according to a district spokeswoman.
Students may still see A.I. summaries on top of Google searches, but will not be able to engage with Google’s Gemini chatbot within those searches, according to the district.
And they will not be able to use chatbot helpers that Google offers inside its Classroom software, including Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides. Google Classroom is near-universally used in American schools.
Nicholas Melvoin, a school board member who sits on the committee studying A.I., said the board had been surprised by district officials’ decision to fully pause the technology for students.
While Mr. Melvoin has led the push to restrict student screen time, he raised questions about the wisdom of a complete A.I. ban for older teenagers, arguing they would need to understand the technology to prepare for college and the workplace.
“High school is where I would have more teacher discretion, with guardrails,” he said — similar to the path New York City officials outlined on Wednesday.
He said his committee would also consider the many big questions about how educators are using the technology, for lesson planning, grading, student feedback and communication with parents.
Los Angeles teachers continue to have access to A.I.
A.I. chatbots can help students learn, acting as a research tool or tutor breaking down complex concepts.
But chatbots can present misinformation. They have also led to an epidemicof cheating, as students prompt A.I. tools to write essays for them or complete problem sets. Even A.I. apps marketed specifically to schools have few blocks to prevent plagiarism or other forms of academic misconduct.
A growing body of research shows individuals who use chatbots can experience reduced critical thinking.
Common Sense Media, an advocacy group, has broadly tested A.I. chatbots and recommended their use be limited for people under 18, in part because they allow students to avoid the productive struggle of learning.
The group has also raised questions about A.I. search summaries, which may prevent students from seeking out multiple sources of information on contested subjects.
Yvette Renteria, chief program officer at Common Sense, praised the Los Angeles decision, saying it made sense to take a pause on a rapidly evolving technology. While Common Sense believes students of all ages should be given lessons in A.I. literacy to better understand how the technology works, she said that did not generally require classroom access to A.I. tools.
“At this moment, there is oftentimes more danger than opportunity,” Ms. Renteria said. She noted that students would still use A.I. outside of school on their personal devices, and argued that it remains crucial that educators talk to young people about the risks and potential rewards of A.I. use.
Jeff Bryant, prolific education journalist, writes in The Progressive about the efforts by educators to fight back against the failed and punitive policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It’s a valuable summary of the past 15 years. Teachers rallied. Teachers sounded alarms about the bipartisan attack is on teachers, teaching and public schools.
Did it make a difference?
Now, 15 years later, there are thousands of charters, and they are no better than the public schools, contrary to their promises. Now, most states have vouchers, and the public is funding religious schools, which was unthinkable in 2011.
But we can’t give up! At last, there are candidates running to fight for public schools. Gina Hinojosa is the most prominent of them. If she defeats Greg Abbott in Texas, expect major changes.
It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived…
At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.
I had read multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances.
Teachers turned out to denounce high-stakes testing, NCLB, Race to the Top, budget cuts, privatization, and the attacks on their profession, funded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other billionaires.
….The estimated crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 roared in approval at an array of speakers that included the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a professor of education), Ravitch, best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, renowned educator Deborah Meier, and policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera. When the speeches were over and we marched to the White House, the line of people stretched for blocks and blocks…
The range of themes the speakers addressed included lack of pay and respect for teachers; the harms caused by poverty and privatization; the continuing racial discrimination and segregation in schools and glaring inequities in their funding; the unbearable class sizes teachers endure, and the injustices that result from using test scores to sanction schools and evaluate teachers.
What also animated the crowd, Anthony Cody tells The Progressive in a text message, was a sense of betrayal on education by the Democratic Party’s leadership. Cody, a fulltime classroom teacher at the time—he’s now retired—was one of the principal organizers of the march. “The great majority of teachers supported the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” he says. “[But] RTTT reinforced the worst elements of NCLB by encouraging states to link teacher pay and evaluations to standardized test scores.”
“A theme that ran through the rally was ‘how could a Democratic administration be so hostile to public schools?’ ” says Ravitch in an email to The Progressive.
“The speakers, me included, hated RTTT and saw it for what it was: encouragement for charters, high-stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, and other dreadful policies,” Ravitch continues. “We predicted [the policies] would fail, and they did.”
A particular target for invective at the rally was Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Ravitch recalls. “He regularly assailed public schools as failing. He attacked public school teachers. He constantly praised charter schools, and whenever national test scores came out, he gleefully pointed to results and made them sound worse than they were.”
“Duncan could have fit in a Republican cabinet,” Ravitch adds.
Fifteen years later, did that outpouring in July 2011 matter?…
The sad truth is that the grievances that motivated people to board buses and gather on the Mall on a hot July day in 2011 continue to dominate the K-12 school landscape today.
For instance, one of NPE’s reports that Cody references, published in 2026, found that states that have been the most aggressive about redirecting public funds for schools to private education operators have been the most neglectful of funding and supporting their public schools.
Although No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, it was replaced that year by the Every Student Succeeds Act that still enforces standardized testing. And the legacy of the funding cuts enacted during the Great Recession continues to harm schools.
“In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the United States lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools,” an analysis by the Education Law Center reported in 2021. Calling the time, from 2008 to 2018, a “lost decade,” the organization noted that while states’ economic activity as measured by gross domestic product increased by 17 percent, state and local revenues for public schools lagged, increasing by only 6 percent.
A 2025 Education Law Center report, “Making the Grade,” assessed states on how they fund public schools and found that not a single state earned an A grade on three crucial measures of funding: whether state and local revenues are adequate, whether funding is fairly distributed, and whether funding lags a state’s economic capacity.
In the meantime, the charter school industry continues to expand, with thirty-nine out of forty-three states experiencing growth in charters in 2025, according to charter industry data. And voucher programs also continue to grow, as fifteen states now operate twenty-three programs, and the Trump Administration is set to roll out a nationwide federal voucher program in 2027. As the right wing’s “long game” to end public education continues apace, prominent centrist Democrats call for a return to the education policies of the Bush and Obama years.
“Democrats [have] walked away from standards and accountability [for schools], and our kids are falling through the cracks,” former Chicago mayor and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is telling anyone who will listen. And Arne Duncan is back in the media spotlight, encouraging Democratic governors to embrace the Trump Administration’s voucher program. That the politics of education in 2026 seem so similar to those of 2011 is evidence that a left-right binary over education policy doesn’t really exist.
As I observed all those years ago on the cusp of the march in D.C., there was no middle ground in education debates. Factions on the right wanted to get rid of public schools. Business interests represented by testing companies, charter schools, and tech firms wanted to make money off schools. And a “reform” community led by wealthy foundations and technocrats wanted to mold public schools to their ideological, and often political, agendas.
As I wrote at the time, “Faced with this array of antagonists toward public education, where does the ‘middle ground’ lie? When people openly admit they want to get rid of you, where should the bargaining start? When people have shown you they are more apt to use you for their own profit, and then walk away when the ‘market changes,’ why should you trust them? And when people say they are willing to align with your cause but only when you say and do things how they want you to do them—even when your ideals inform you to do otherwise—why should you simply bend to their will?”
Those questions are still relevant today. They will remain so until a progressive left faction adopts a robust message on education and articulates it repeatedly in advocacy documents and political stump speeches.
“Our battle for public schools is steeper now than it was when the Save Our Schools rally was held,” Ravitch says. “It will be a battle for many years to come.”
But in 2011, for at least a day, it seemed that public school advocates had the power to, as Ravitch put it in her email, “push back and give people a modicum of hope.”
The battle continues, and it’s not over. America needs a strong public school system, not a hodge-podge of pop-up schools.
We need well-prepared teachers who can knowledgeably teach history, science, mathematics, literature, and foreign languages. We need well-funded schools and respected, well-paid professionals. We need equality of opportunity for all children, and we need excellence.
We need the strong public schools that built the Aunited States into a great nation. We need education for democracy, where children are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
We need an education system that produces engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, athletes, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, social workers, idealists, scholars, young people eager to use their hands, their brains, and their hearts to make our society better for everyone.
We are now in a period of disruption and dissolution. That way lies disaster. It is the road to elitism, segregation, indoctrination, and decay.
We need to raise our sights and build better public schools that offer a goood education for all children.
The blogger who identifies as “Accountabaloney” wrote to report on his/her political fortunes in a deep red county in Florida. It’s no secret that the blogger is a Democrat, but gets re-elected as a strong supporter of public schools. Trump, DeSantis, and the Florida legislature love charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling, and other alternatives, but Accountabaloney wins as a forthright supporter of teachers and public schools.
Accountabaloney writes:
In case you didn’t know, in my “spare time” I am an elected member of the Monroe County School Board and, unless expressly stated, the views stated here reflect my own opinions and should not be construed to represent the views of the Monroe County School Board.
I have been told that I am a unicorn: a registered Democrat who has repeatedly won countywide in an increasingly Republican county.
I was first elected to the Monroe County School Board without opposition in 2018. By then, I was already well known in my district as a passionate advocate for our public schools. Before filing to run, I reached out to virtually everyone I thought might be interested in the seat, told them I planned to run and asked for their support. One by one, I received it. In the end, no one filed to run against me.
In 2022, that support was tested at the ballot box. I faced a well-financed, politically savvy Republican opponent who had been recruited and endorsed by Moms for Liberty and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
I didn’t respond by running away from public education or by trying to out-partisan my opponent. I ran on my record and on my belief that strong public schools are essential to strong communities.
I won.
This year, the partisan question became even more explicit.
My opponent prominently displayed the word “CONSERVATIVE” on her campaign signs and made her political and religious identity an important part of her campaign. She attended churches encouraging voters to support a candidate who shared their Conservative Christian values and promoted publicly funded homeschooling and tuition vouchers. She even accused me of “hiding behind the nonpartisan label.”
But nonpartisan wasn’t a label I chose. Florida school board elections are nonpartisan by law.
And I wasn’t hiding.
People knew I was a Democrat.
So rather than fight an election over partisan identity, I made a different bet. I trusted voters to care more about what I stood for than the letter next to my name in other elections.
And I made what I stood for unmistakable.
I ran unabashedly for public education.
I talked about our successful schools and the extraordinary people who work in them. I talked about putting great teachers in every classroom—and paying and supporting them well enough that they can afford to stay. I talked about expanding opportunities for students through the arts, athletics, career and technical education, advanced academics, dual enrollment and field trips.
I talked about responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and protecting classrooms when budgets get tight.
Most of all, I refused to accept the premise that our public schools are failing institutions from which children need to escape. I talked about them as valuable community institutions worth protecting, investing in and making even better.
The voters responded.
I received 64 percent of the vote and won every precinct in Monroe County—including precincts that had voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump just two years earlier.
The voters didn’t suddenly become Democrats.
They knew I was a Democrat, and they voted for me anyway.
They chose a public education advocate for School Board.
And that makes me wonder whether the real lesson of this election has much to do with unicorns at all.
For years, education politics has been dominated by the language of “school choice”—vouchers, education savings accounts, publicly funded homeschooling and the growing movement of public dollars into private education. Advocates for public schools have too often allowed themselves to be put on the defensive, as though supporting the public system that educates the overwhelming majority of American children is somehow the politically risky position.
Maybe we have that backward.
My election certainly doesn’t prove that every person who voted for me opposes vouchers or publicly funded homeschooling. Elections aren’t referenda on a single issue. Many people who strongly support public schools also support a parent’s right to choose another option for their own child.
But there is an important difference between respecting individual choice and abandoning our collective commitment to public education.
And perhaps candidates have underestimated how many voters understand that distinction.
Supporting public schools is popular.
Supporting teachers is popular.
Giving children more opportunities is popular.
Believing every community should have an excellent public school is popular.
Those aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. They are community values.
So perhaps I’m not a unicorn after all.
Perhaps candidates don’t need to attack school choice to win the education debate.
Perhaps they simply need to stop being afraid to champion public schools.
A new study was recently released about the academic benefits of pre-K. It directly refutes the Trump administration’s determination to demolish Headstart.
The study asked and answered this question: Does pre-K give kids a lasting academic boost?
This question has plagued early education researchers for years, yielding widely mixed results. Some studies show decidedly positive outcomes, others find that initial benefits fade by 3rd grade, and still others show worse academic outcomes for children who attended pre-K over peers who didn’t.
Findings from the latest study to examine this question, conducted by Florida International University and George Mason University researchers and published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, boosted the case for public pre-K attendance. It found that poor children in a large urban community in the Southeastern United States who attended public school pre-K performed better academically in 3rd grade than their peers who attended either center-based care or family childcare as 4-year-olds.
“The take-home point is that kids who went to public school pre-K do better in 3rd grade compared to those who went to center-based care, who did better than those who went to family childcare,” said Adam Winsler, a professor in the Department of Psychology at George Mason University and an author of the study.
These latest findings come at a pivotal time for early education. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced plans to dismantle many of the regulations that guide Head Start, the decades-old federally funded program serving over 700,000 low-income children from birth through 5, and to cap individual programs’ administrative budgets at 5%, down from 15%. At the same time, several states are pushing to increase access to publicly funded preschool or have already done so.
Given the current spotlight on preschool, policymakers and district officials are eager to understand the effects of pre-K on students long-term—especially as they pertain to children from lower-income families, whom researchers say have the most to gain from early formal education. While there doesn’t seem to be any clear path to long-term academic success, this and other related studies offer clues to a path forward.
Study background and findings
This study collected information between 2002 and 2007 on an estimated 30,000 students, mostly from low-income households, in Florida. Among the students, 60% were Latino, 33% were Black, and 7% identified as white/other. A partnership with the Miami-Dade County public schools allowed the researchers to access data on academic outcomes in 3rd grade from 4-year-olds who had attended either public pre-K, family childcare in a provider’s home, or center-based care.
Students who attended public pre-K had higher GPAs and scored better on 3rd grade reading and math tests. Also, pre-K attendees were 35% less likely to be retained in 3rd grade than those who attended family childcare. Researchers did not evaluate behavioral outcomes.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) is a centrist, Democratic-aligned think tank in D.C. It is known as a haven for high-Democrats when Republicans are in power and as an incubator for new policies. It is to the Democratic Party what the Heritage Foundation is to the Republican Party, except that the Heritage Foundation is allied with the extremists in the GOP, not the centrists.
CAP recently published a report concluding that Trump’s decision to station troops in Los Angeles, Memphis, and the District of Columbia cost $1.7 billion but had not reduced crime. Trump didn’t like that report. He didn’t agree with its conclusion.
Understand that journalists and think tanks publish articles critical of elected officials every day. Elected officials may use their bully pulpit to disagree, but they can’t stop critics from voicing their views..
That’s the way it has been, but Trump likes to break norms.
Trump has retained a lawyer and threatened to sue CAP for $5 billion.
If there was one school board in Florida that was the beachhead for Moms for Liberty’s efforts to push their agenda of censorship and right-wing ideology, it was the school board of Sarasota County. Last Tuesday, voters replaced the Moms for Liberty majority with moderates who want to make their public schools better, rather than a battleground for culture war issues.
The right-wing culture warriors won school board elections in other counties in the state, but Sarasota County is where their organization was born and gained national notoriety.
A Florida school board that was at the epicenter of national debates over covid mask mandates and book bans lost its conservative majority this week, a change that some say signals a priority shift among voters.
Two Democratic-backed candidates beat out conservatives in Tuesday’s school board election in Sarasota, Florida, flipping the board’s majority. Helmed for the past year by a co-founder of Moms for Liberty — a conservative group that gained a national following with its parents’ rights messaging — the board is moving in a new direction, the winners said. A third Democratic-backed candidate will head to a runoff election against a contender endorsed by Republicans in November.
“I really think at the end of the day, regardless of political affiliation, our community was just tired of the culture wars, the political theater and being the center of national attention for all the wrong reasons,” said Megan Tennimon, a former teacher who won election to the board on Tuesday.
While Democrats say the flip indicates voters want to move on from fights over social issues, Moms for Liberty points to conservatives’ wins in other parts of Florida.
“Every couple of years someone in the media writes our obituary, and every couple of years parents show up and prove them wrong,” Tina Descovich, Moms for Liberty co-founder and chief executive, said Wednesday. “School boards are ground zero in the fight for parental rights, and last night Florida parents made that clear.”
During covid, the Sarasota County school district was among those that saw heated board meetings and headline grabbing debates over parents’ rights. High-profile conservative leaders with documented ties to the county include former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Charlie Kirk, the head of a pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA who was killed last year.
The Sarasota County School Board had been controlled by conservatives since 2022, on the heels of the pandemic. As school board meetings and elections, typically quiet and uncontroversial, became partisan battlegrounds, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) got involved around that time by endorsing candidates, something governors have rarely done. His involvement in the local races came as he pushed an education agenda that included a ban on teaching young students — and later all students — about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Among those who won DeSantis’s support was Sarasota County School Board Chair Bridget Ziegler, first elected in 2014.
Ziegler, who was embroiled in a sex scandal in 2023 and refused to step down when her husband was accused of sexual assault, did not run for reelection this year. Ziegler’s husband was cleared of the sexual assault charge in 2024. She did not immediately return requests for comment.
Elsewhere in the state on Tuesday, a Democratic-backed school board candidate flipped a conservative seat in Orange County, one of the largest school districts in the country. On the same ballot, a democratic socialist won an upset primary victory in the U.S. Senate race.
“I think that they realized how destructive those divisive policies really were,” Beth Mayberry, another Democratic-backed winner in the Sarasota County School Board race, said about voters. A retired educator, Mayberry’s campaign focused on school funding and mental health.
“What they’ve seen in the last four years, with basically the tabloid happenings on the school board and a lot of the policies and resolutions that were being made, our general community did not agree with,” Mayberry said.
Another candidate endorsed by the local Democratic Party, Jimmy Glover, won the most votes in his race against two Republican opponents, but failed to capture more than 50 percent of the votes. This will trigger a runoff election in November.
If Glover wins, the board will be completely Democratic-backed — and he will be the first person of color to serve on the Sarasota County School Board, said David Dean, chair of the county’s Democratic Party.
Two other members, who were also supported by Democrats and have previously opposed conservative members, round out the five-member board.
While school board elections are nonpartisan, political parties typically endorse candidates they believe will support their priorities. Dean echoed sentiments that residents are fed up with the culture wars and instead want their school board to focus on teachers and students. “School board meetings should be boring. They shouldn’t make the national news,” Dean said. “There’s certainly a shift in attitudes toward the MAGA agenda, even here.”
Led by conservatives, the Sarasota County School Board voted last year to remove references to race, sexuality and disability from its anti-bullying rules. In January, it reaffirmed the district’s stance to cooperate with law enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Ziegler, at the time, said it was a safety measure. “Our School District cannot provide safe harbor to criminals, including those who violate our immigration laws,” she wrote on social media. However, the measure did not change anything because the district had already agreed to work with authorities, Tennimon said. “That resolution was designed to do nothing but instill fear in our community.”
Sarasota is still deep red — many voters support voucher programs and religion in schools. Moms for Liberty rose to prominence during the pandemic, when conservative parents demanded more say over what their children learned in school — particularly around topics including race, sexuality and gender.
The group has expanded to about 130,000 members in 48 states since its founding in 2021, according to its website, hosting Donald Trump and DeSantis at its summit in 2023 in a run-up to the presidential election. It has since accrued influence in the GOP, in school board elections nationwide, and was called upon by the Trump administration to help shape national education programming.
The group has regularly attacked the LGBTQ+ community and spread “messages of anti-inclusion and hate” while aligning itself with extremist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But organization leaders are pushing back against reports that their influence on school board elections in their home state of Florida has waned. Moms for Liberty officials said 11 of the 15 school board candidates it endorsed in other races across the state won or advanced on Tuesday.
Heidi Brandt, a conservative who will face Glover in the runoff in November, said she was disappointed with the school board election outcome, but hopes the newcomers will concentrate on schools. Like the Democratic-backed candidates, she said she wants to remove political fights from the board.
“This is about our students and our teachers and our families, it’s not about a conservative or liberal majority or minority,” Brandt said. “I understand the celebrations and the turning of the tables, but I’m just truly praying that it’s not going to be about politics.”
David Sirota’s The Lever posted an important article about a hedge fund billionaire who hopes to redefine the Democratic Party. I thought I had heard of all the billionaires who were trying to remodel education to their own specifications, but I had never come across Steve Mandel.
Like many other billionaires, Mandel’s great passion is charter schools. He has poured millions of dollars into political campaigns, trying to elect candidates who share his values. His great hope appears to be to block candidates who are progressives and who are pro-union.
The article, by Katya Schwerin and Luke Goldstein, traces Mandel’s rise, from his elite schooling at
