Oklahoman John Thompson writes about the conflict enveloping the Tulsa public schools: Ryan Walters, the extremist Secretary of Education, wants to take over Tulsa’s public schools. Opposition to Walters’ plans by Tulsa’s parents and political leaders is growing. State takeovers if school districts have historically failed but Walters doesn’t appear to know it.
For instance, Walters said at a Moms for Liberty event, “Tulsa Public Schools is getting money from the Chinese communist government,” He said, “They funneled it through a nonprofit — I mean, money-laundered it through a nonprofit in Texas.”
But then Walters said he “had been in regular communication with Houston [HISD] about their school takeover.” According to HTUL news, he has said “there’s currently a standards team and textbook committee to gather information on possible vendors like Hillsdale College and PragerU.”
Immediately afterwards, journalists, educators, and public school supporters studied the history of Broad Foundation takeovers in Dallas and the HISD. Even better, they spoke out in ways I had never seen in Oklahoma’s edu-politics. For example, TPS board member, Jennettie Marshall, “said during the board’s 90-minute discussion of the district’s accreditation status. ‘We are under attack. If you’re not keeping up with Houston, … if we continue the course we’re on, that’s where we’re headed. That shouldn’t be.’”
Just as important, the Tulsa World balanced its excellent reporting with editorials and publishing letters to the editors. The following 13 headlines were cited in just one day, August 18, 2023, of the paper’s E-Edition:
The first thing that stands out stands out about the World’s coverage is its excellent journalism, and its fact-checking of Walters. The first thing that stands out from the World’s opinion pieces and letters to the editor is the strong wording when opposing Walters’ threat to the Tulsa Public Schools. The letters opposed Walters’ “antics;” his “personal agenda;” his “political rhetoric;” how he “has no specific plans for Tulsa schools, only insults;” and how he “harms students across the state; as well as how he should “help improve schools, not tear down;” and how the mayor “must be more forceful defending Tulsa schools.”
The editorials criticize the “silence” of political leaders, who belatedly pushed back against Walters, saying the “TPS needs partners, champions and advocates to improve — not political firebombs and quiet bystanders.” Another argued that Walters’ “political rhetoric” hurts the retention of good teachers; and that it hurts the city. Ginnie Graham described the chaos that she witnessed when enrolling her child in school, and explained:
The TPS administrators are completely overwhelmed by the firehose of misinformation, distortions and lies coming at them. Their time is monopolized by people seemingly hell-bent on tearing down the district, rather than offering a helping hand or even sitting down for an informative discussion.
Your TPS Board of Education has a plan. Walters does, too, but not one that works on behalf of Tulsans.
I didn’t sign up for this takeover and neither did you. As a community, we must stop it: www.protecttps.com
Moreover, the World reported on powerful philanthropists, like the Schusterman and the Kaiser foundations, who have publicly opposed Walters takeover threats. Then, Mayor G.T. Bynum came out against the takeover. The resistance has even reached the point where the World editorialized, “conservative lawmakers must speak up.” And now, Gov. Kevin Stitt has distanced himself from the extremist (Walters) who he appointed and then repeatedly supported. The World reported, Stitt said he “believes the State Board of Education will not overreact when considering accreditation for Tulsa Public Schools.” Stitt now says, “I don’t know what takeover is, what they are talking about. I believe in local control. I think the local board needs to address that.”
When I first learned about Walters’ new threats, I worried, “If we don’t recognize the extent of the threats of a HISD-style takeover, he might unite the worst of the corporate reform privatizers, with his Moms for Liberty extremism, and impose irreparable damage on the TPS and other school systems.” But, “If we unite, the damage that Walters is promising to inflict on the TPS, and the Tulsa metropolitan area as a whole, could undermine his extremist campaigns.”
It looks to me, that Tulsans and other Oklahomans are pushing back, making it more likely that Walters will lose this fight
Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner wrote in their blog Steady about the importance of saving public education from the forces trying to destroy and privatize it. They remind us and the general public that public schools unite us; privatization is inherently divisive. It is ironic that the red states are implementing voucher plans as the evidence about the failure of vouchers and the null effects of charter schools grows stronger. (The boldfacing of passages in their essay was added by me).
It is back to school. Students of all ages flock to campuses and classrooms. Fleeting memories of summer are quickly replaced by tests and textbooks.
Getting into the swing of a new semester has always included an adjustment period, but this is a particularly difficult time for many of our nation’s students and their parents, guardians, teachers, and others entrusted with the education of young minds.
The pandemic wreaked havoc with the emotional, intellectual, and social development of America’s youth. Dismal test scores provide depressing data of yawning learning deficits. Talk to anyone in or around schools and you hear stories of setbacks and struggle — heaps of qualitative data suggesting a staggering scale of generational loss. As usual, those who were already the most marginalized have paid the heaviest price. The pandemic exacerbated existing disruptions and placed greater strain on finances and time, particularly in large urban districts and small rural ones tasked with educating children from families struggling economically.
We like to tell ourselves that the United States is a great meritocracy, but wealth and levels of family education continue to play outsized roles in dictating a child’s likelihood of academic success long before she learns her ABCs. The simple truth is that kids come to school from widely different circumstances, and these influence their ability to thrive, independent of whatever innate intelligence or drive they may possess. The pandemic made these differences more acute.
The United States does possess a system (or more accurately, a collection of thousands of systems) that, if nurtured and respected, could foster greater equality of opportunity. And it is exactly the institution that is now struggling the most: public education. America’s public schools were once the envy of the world as engines of opportunity and upward mobility. If the nation had the will, they could return to that status once again.
Our public schools certainly weren’t perfect in the past, especially during legal racial segregation, when the lie of “separate but equal” (separate is never equal) helped enshrine white supremacy. The segregated schools of the Jim Crow Deep South were a shameful injustice and a stain on our national identity. They were inconsistent with our founding documents, which spoke eloquently about equality among people. Of course there was (and remains, to some extent) de facto segregation throughout America based on who lives in what neighborhoods. Well-financed suburban schools were often part of the draw of “white flight” from urban districts.
The very ethos of public education should be one of inclusion for America’s diverse population. It should be a place where children of different backgrounds come together to learn both from teachers and from each other. Our schools should be places that allow students to wrestle with what it means to be part of this great country, including understanding America’s uneven and often bloody road to greater equality.
Sadly, in recent years, we have seen a grave regression from these noble goals. Our schools and school districts have become fiercely contested frontlines in an era of stepped-up culture wars. As reactionary political forces target what we teach our children, it is no accident that truth, empathy, and our democratic values have become casualties.
A chief concern is how and what we teach about our history, particularly the Black experience, and race and ethnicity more generally. We have written here before about the shameful whitewashing of racial violence and injustice, including slavery, by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But this effort is not limited to him or that state. There is a national movement to not tell the full — and unfortunately tragic — reality of race in American history and how it continues to shape the nation.
Another serious concern is the othering of LGBTQ+ students and teachers. After years of progress, we see a wave of intolerance spread across America, including in our schools.
Few institutions in American life are as essential to the continuation of our democracy as the public schools. In a time of ascendent autocracy, attacks on our schools — how they are run, what they teach, what books they have in their libraries — are among the most pernicious, pathetic, and painful assaults on the health of our nation.
Several months back, Texas Monthly ran a striking piece of journalism with the headline, “The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools.” It tells a story that extends beyond the raucous school board meetings and book banning campaigns that have gotten the most attention. There is a movement afoot, and not just in Texas, to destroy public schools more generally, to privatize education through vouchers and other means.
In this context, the various culture fights become battles in a larger war over the very future and viability of public education:
Taken individually, any of these incidents may seem like a grassroots skirmish. But they are, more often than not, part of a well-organized and well-funded campaign executed by out-of-town political operatives and funded by billionaires in Texas and elsewhere. “In various parts of Texas right now, there are meetings taking place in small and large communities led by individuals who are literally providing tutorials—here’s what you say, here’s what you do,” said H. D. Chambers, the recently retired superintendent of Alief ISD, in southwest Harris County. “This divisiveness has been created that is basically telling parents they can’t trust public schools. It’s a systematic erosion of the confidence that people have in their schools.
The ideal of quality, integrated public schools for all children in the United States epitomizes the promise of our country’s founding as a place of equality and opportunity for all. It thus makes sense that would-be autocrats and protectors of privilege would seek to undermine our public schools by whatever means necessary. We must see this as what it is: as much a threat to the nation as was the violent storming of our Capitol.
The future of the United States depends on an educated and empathetic citizenry. It requires us to share a sense of common purpose and recognize our common humanity. It requires an environment that allows every child to thrive and see themselves included in the American story. It requires quality public education. Full stop.
A historic battle to save this institution and the very idea of good public schools has been underway for some time. It is now intensifying. Attention must be paid.
A reader who uses the sobriquet “Retired Teacher” posted the following succinct summary of the harm caused by vouchers.
Vouchers represent anti-democratic education policy. Instead of serving the interests of society, vouchers turn unaccountable public dollars over to unaccountable schools and parents that can often do as they wish with the money. Vouchers are also a form of taxation without representation. When vouchers are used to supplement tuition for affluent children, which is often the case, they represent a massive transfer of wealth from working class to the affluent. They undermine community stability and force austerity on the public schools that serve the most students. They do not save poor students from failing schools. They create an economic reality that legitimizes the defunding of public education.
At the urging of Governor DeSantis, Florida’s legislature rubber stamped his proposal to expand vouchers to all students in the state without income restrictions. As Leslie Postal reported in The Orlando Sentinel, demand for vouchers in the state surged by 44%. Many of the applicants are already enrolled in private and religious schools. In other states where vouchers were made universal, most of the vouchers were claimed by students who never attended public schools. Thus, instead of “saving poor kids from failing public schools,” vouchers have become a subsidy for affluent families.
By Aug. 11, more than 382,000 students had received vouchers for the 2023-24 school year, giving them access to money for private school tuition, homeschooling services or therapies for children with disabilities, according to Step Up For Students, the private group that administers most of Florida’s scholarship programs.
That represents a 44% increase from a year ago when about 264,400 scholarships were awarded by the same date….
The scholarships are worth an average of about $7,800 a year, though actual amounts vary by student’s grade level and by county. The voucher programs are still required to prioritize giving awards to children whose families earn no more than 185% of the federal poverty limit, or a family of four earning $55,000 a year or less. But everyone, whether middle class or very rich, is now eligible to apply….
The hike in scholarships was expected after Gov. Ron DeSantis in March signed the new law, which he called a “major game changer” that would boost educational options for families. The law was celebrated by GOP leaders, school choice advocates and parents already paying for private school who are now eligible for state assistance.
They argued families who never opted for free public schools still pay school taxes and so it makes sense to provide them school vouchers to help offset private school costs.
This week, the Archdiocese of Miami credited the new law with boosting enrollment at its Catholic schools and creating waitlists at some campuses. “Step Up Blew Up,” it wrote on its website, like many, using Step Up as shorthand for Florida’s school scholarship programs.
The archdiocese noted that at one Catholic school in Coral Gables, with about 900 students, the number of families receiving state scholarships leapt from 160 last year to more than 560 this year.
“The public dollars that they have given to private schools, those are our public school dollars that they are now giving to people to go to a private school,” Castor Dentel said. “Those are public school dollars they are now handling over to unaccountable private schools where you don’t have to have a qualified teacher.”
Private schools that take state vouchers are mostly religious schools, and they make their own decisions as far as teacher qualifications, curriculum and facilities. Some have hired teachers without college degrees and employees with criminal convictions, set up in rundown buildings and offered curriculum outside mainstream academics, the Orlando Sentinel has reported.
Providing scholarships to families whose children already were in private school or were being homeschooled “is absolutely taking away from public school dollars,” said Norin Dollard, a senior policy analyst with the Florida Policy Institute, a progressive think tank that warned back in February that the new law would cost the state billions of dollars.
Dollard said the state earmarked about $3.3 billion for all its scholarship programs this school year and likely will run through that by the end of October, given the number of awards announced so far.
Thom Hartmann is an insightful, incisive journalist and blogger. In this terrifying post, he describes what to expect if the Republican Party wins the presidency.
Please read and react.
Thom Hartmann
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a GOP president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher…
Hartmann writes:
Every day that goes by, even with yesterday’s newest indictment, looks more and more like Donald Trump will be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2024. After all, his popularity stood at 44 percent when NY DA Alvin Bragg indicted him; it then rose to 49 percent when he was indicted in the documents crime; following his conviction for raping E. Jean Caroll it rose to 54 percent among Republicans.
But even if he’s not the candidate, Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.
There’s also the growing possibility that Trump or another MAGA Republican could win the White House. Yesterday, both the New York Times and CNN reported on polls showing that Trump and Biden are right now at a dead heat.
And even if Trump collapses in the polls as the result of the indictments, which is unlikely (Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery and some pretty terrible stuff and he just got re-elected), there are numerous other Republicans who would love to take his place.
And no matter who it is, if they are MAGA inclined, Trump has shown them where there are levers of power and corruption that are consequential in ways that they never dreamed of before him.
Joe Biden, at 81, faces multiple possible personal scenarios that could pull him out of the race. No Labels and the Green Party’s candidates (presumably Joe Manchin and Cornell West) could pull enough votes from Biden to hand the election to Trump as Jill Stein did in three swing states in 2016 (she pulled more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory).
The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election — and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then — because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.
And don’t discount the impact Putin throwing millions of rubles into social media can have: his previous fleet of trolls overwhelming social media helped get Trump elected in 2016 and drove Brits to make the crazy decision to separate from the European Union.
So, it’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans.
Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and all these predictions are based on past behavior and public statements:
Women make up 51 percent of the American populace but they won’t be spared by a MAGA presidency.
MAGA voters celebrate Trump’s “proof of manhood” through his multiple sexual assaults, from his alleged rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson (with Jeffrey Epstein) to the adult E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 others. He publicly bragged that he just “grabs them by the…” whenever he wants, and Republicans — including more than half of all white women voters — ran to the polls to mark his name on their ballots.
The MAGA base supports bans on abortion: the white nationalist part of that base is fervent about having more white babies (and middle class white women are the most likely to get abortions when they’re legal, according to these people).
Catholics and evangelicals even support bans on birth control, an issue that’s already been floated by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in several state legislatures. Fully 195 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against protecting birth control from state bans. And all of the Republicans on the Court are conservative Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church, but was raised Catholic).
Additionally, MAGA Republicans support ending no-fault divorce and limiting alimony, putting women back under husband’s thumbs; lowering the marriage age for girls to as low as 12, as Republicans have already attempted in Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana; and seizing and monitoring the health and doctor’s records of all childbearing-age women to catch early pregnancies so those women can be detained or surveilled “for their own good” (yes, it’s already happened).
The LGBTQ+ community will come under assault in ways not seen for decades.
Like in Germany in 1933, the trans communitywill be the first to come under assault, a process that’s already begun as Red state after Red state enacts laws banning gender-affirming healthcare. Drag queens are already criminalized in multiple states.
Gays and lesbians won’t be far behind; Republicans are already trying to outlaw gay marriage and adoption. Three-quarters of all House Republicans voted against a Democratic bill protecting gay marriage; all but one Republican on the House Appropriations Committee voted for a Republican bill that would allow states to ban gay and lesbian parents from adopting.
Stochastic terrorism against the LGBTQ+ community will explode, and, in a throwback to the 1980s (when Reagan refused to say the word “AIDS” for 8 long years as tens of thousands, including close friends of mine, died) and before, rural law enforcement will often yawn when queer people are assaulted or even murdered.
Terror against racial and religious minorities will become routine.
The last time Trump was president and sanctioned a “very fine people on both sides” climate of hate and bigotry, incidents of lone-wolf terrorism exploded. Jews executed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; Blacks gunned down in a supermarket in Buffalo and executed at Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston; Hispanics slaughtered in El Paso. All of the killers cited or wrote what were essentially MAGA or MAGA-aligned propaganda instruments as part of their motivation.
When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity. As I noted yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse is now lionized by Republicans and three states have passed into law provisions that hold people who kill protestors with their cars free from prosecution.
American support for democracy around the world will end and Putin will destroy Ukraine.
During his first four years, Trump did everything he could to ridicule and minimize our democratic allies and suck up to strongman dictators around the world.
He tried to blackmail Ukraine’s president and then withheld defensive weapons from that country when Zelenskyy refused to go along.
He told the world that he trusts Putin more than America’s intelligence services. After meeting privately with Putin, he demanded a list of all of America’s spies and their stations around the world; within months, the CIA reported that their assets were being murderedwith an unprecedented speed and efficiency.
He or his son-in-law conveyed top-secret documents to the brutal murderer MBS in Saudi Arabia that enabled him to stage a coup and seize control of that nation, a gift for which the Trump family has already received at least $2.5 billion with more coming every day.
Trump has now said that he will end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” His strategy? As Mike Pence (who would know) said, “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”
Putin’s allies, in fact, have told the press that his main strategy for seizing all of Ukraine is to wait for Trump to re-take the White House (and, of course, he’ll do everything he can to make that happen). And just last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump came right out and saidthat he’d end all arms support to Ukraine on day one.
Seeing that America will no longer defend democracies, China will take Taiwan and North Korea may well attack South Korea. It could trigger a nuclear World War III, although instead of America being the “bulwark of freedom” as we were in the 1940s, that burden will fall to Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Reagan’s Republican War on Workers will resume and even pick up steam.
The Heritage Foundation already has a 900+ page plan to change the American government, stripping the DOJ, FBI, FCC and the Fed of their independence while ending most union rights and effectively outlawing strikes.
Billionaires will receive more tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare will be fully privatized, and public schools will be replaced with vouchers for private, segregated, religious academies as has already happened under Republican administrations in Arizona and Florida.
The EPA and other regulatory agencies that protect workers, consumers, and the environment will be gutted to the point of impotence in the face of corporate and billionaire assaults.
Efforts to mitigate the climate emergency will be rolled back and fossil fuel extraction and use will explode.
The world just lived through the hottest month in human history; ocean waters off Florida are at the temperature Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs; the world’s oceans are dying and winter sea ice isn’t forming in Antarctica.
Right now we humans are adding heat to the atmosphere (because of higher levels of greenhouse gasses) at a rate identical to 345,600 Hiroshima bombs going off in our atmosphere every day: four nuclear bombs per second, every second, minute, and hour of every day.
In response, our planet is screaming at us.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their shills, however, are unconcerned as they continue to fund climate denial nonprofits and Republican politicians who claim it’s all a hoax. They apparently believe their vast wealth will insulate them from the most dire effects.
And they’re probably right: a third of poverty-stricken Bangladesh was underwater this year, as drought, floods, wildfires, heat domes, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, derechos, and typhoons ravaged America with unprecedented ferocity. Increasingly, those without the financial means to withstand weather disasters are killed or wiped out, losing their family homes and often their livelihoods.
Scientists tell us we may have as few as fiveyears, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.
We must wake up America.
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a MAGA president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher.
ALEC has about 2,000 state legislators as members. ALEC writes model legislation on the environment, education, gun rights, and every other topic likely to be considered by state legislatures. The members take the model legislation back to their home state and introduce it after writing in the name of their state. ALEC is against gun control, against public schools, against environmental protections, etc. ALEC is funded by major corporations and acts as a voice for corporations that want no government regulation.
Erik Gunn is the deputy editor of the Wisconsin examiner, which first published this report.
Wisconsin State Reps. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton aren’t exactly the typical lawmakers to belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC for short.
Hong, of Madison, and Shelton, of Green Bay, are staunch Democrats who have consistently voted against bills advancing the policies of the sort ALEC promotes. While the organization is legally nonpartisan and a tax-exempt nonprofit, it has become widely known as the birthplace of right-wing legislative proposals that find a home mainly with Republican state lawmakers around the country.
Last week, however, the two second-term Assembly members were in Orlando for ALEC’s annual meeting. It was Shelton’s second visit and Hong’s third. When they posted about their participation on social media, some followers wondered what they were doing in a crowd so ideologically at odds with their own political stances.
“I think it’s important to understand the agenda of the opposition,” Hong says. “And our current political reality requires us to know what the motivation is of our colleagues and where they’re getting model legislation from [along with] talking points, candidate training. These are all things that are available at ALEC.”
“It gives us an understanding of what’s to come,” adds Shelton — in the form of future legislation that members of the Republican majority might introduce. “And it helps us prepare as Democrats, organizing our own legislation and messaging. There’s no better way to prepare than to hear it directly from the folks on the other side….”
Hong and Shelton view themselves as carrying on a tradition among progressive Wisconsin lawmakers in joining ALEC, attending its events and going back home to report what they see and hear. Their predecessors are former state Rep. Mark Pocan, now a member of Congress, and former state Rep. Chris Taylor, now an appeals court judge.
Their name tags for the ALEC event simply identify them as Wisconsin state representatives, and Hong and Shelton say they don’t go out of their way to out themselves as Democrats — but they aren’t undercover, either…
As paying ALEC members (dues are $200 a year; conference fees are $750), they can’t be excluded on ideological grounds because of the group’s nonpartisan legal status, says Hong, who adds she has asked ALEC for its guest list “multiple times” but never received it.
Membership includes the opportunity to join two subject-matter task forces. Hong chose energy and environment as well as taxation and federalism. Shelton’s two were health and human development and education and workforce. Those sessions are where the details of proposed model legislation from the organization are outlined. They are also where the role of big business is most evident in helping to shape the organization’s proposals….
On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.
“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”
Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.
“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”
On economic and social policy, a persistent talking point was “about making poor people rich, not rich people poor,” she adds, while government assistance is “dragging down the economy” and “morally wrong.”
“They’re really digging into that narrative and saying that growing government to help those people is going to be the end of time,” Hong says.
To be sure, ALEC is just one of many organizations, from the AFL-CIO to the Sierra Club, that pursue policy change, sometimes constructing model legislation for that purpose. The difference, Shelton says, is that the group’s agenda doesn’t appear to her to be about policy so much as about political power.
“I think what’s different here is a sort of militant approach by those on the conservative right to not be as interested in actually solving the problems in the critical issues of working people,” she says, “but rather creating legislation to drive issues that they see as winning at the ballot box.”
Even so, a prevailing theme was diminishing the role of government and freeing corporations and business, the two Wisconsin Democrats say.
Darcie Cimarusti died a few days ago after a valiant fight against ovarian cancer. She was the communications director for the Network for Public Education and a treasured friend to all who worked with her. Having served many years on her local school board in Highland Park, New Jersey, she was passionately committed to supporting public schools against baseless attacks on the schools and their teachers.
Last December, despite her illness, Darcie wrote an article about hyper partisan groups like Moms for Liberty that were besieging local school boards with baseless complaints and driving wedges among parents.
Her article was printed in newspapers across the nation. This one appeared in the Bedford Gazette. She never stopped speaking up for what she believed in. Hers was the voice of reason, calm, common sense, and responsibility.
She wrote:
I have been a local school board member since my daughters, now 11th-graders, were in second grade. In that time, I have been involved in education policy discussions at the local, state and national levels on issues such as the rights of LGBTQ students, standardized testing and the privatization of public education.
The rise of the so-called “parental rights” movement in public education has been one of the thorniest, most perplexing issues I have encountered.
Parents certainly play a crucial role in the education of their children. Who would dare argue that they don’t? But heavily funded, right-leaning parents groups such as Moms for Liberty have unleashed a juggernaut of opposition to “critical race theory,” LGBTQ rights, social emotional learning, diversity equity and inclusion. So it has become imperative that we have an honest discussion about how much say parents should have in what is (or is not) taught in our public schools.
My district, unlike many, is racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, with 31 languages spoken in the homes of our students. Educating such a diverse student body presents many challenges and requires a nuanced approach to policy and practice to ensure all students have equal opportunities to learn, thrive and grow. While it is easy for school leaders to say they embrace diversity, equity and inclusion, it’s far too challenging to implement policies promoting those principles.
I have spent my time on the school board helping to develop systems that ensure decisions are made collaboratively and with as many voices involved as possible. This means making space not only for administrators, teachers, parents and students but also ensuring that historically marginalized groups are represented.
Decisions that affect students should never be based on the whims of the most privileged or powerful, and not on whose voice is loudest.
But the latter has become the hallmark of parental rights activists. They attend meeting after meeting, berating, shouting down and even making death threats against school board members. During the pandemic, battles over masks erupted at podiums at far too many school board meetings across the country and quickly morphed into demands to ban books, censor curriculum and muzzle “woke” teachers that parents accused of “grooming” their children.
In the 2022 midterm elections, parental rights activists were on the ballot in many states. With the support and endorsement of Moms for Liberty, they ran campaigns to become school board members in districts in red, blue and purple states. Moms for Liberty operates county chapters that aim to serve as watchdogs “over all 13,000 school districts.” Chapters empower parents to “defend their parental rights” and “identify, recruit and train liberty-minded parents to run for school boards.”
The “anti-woke” agenda espoused by Moms for Liberty and endorsed by school board candidates had the greatest successes in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis proudly declared the state was “where woke goes to die.” But in many other parts of the country, parental rights candidates lost their elections, with even conservative political operatives acknowledging that many of their campaigns were “too hyperbolic.”
Chaos has already erupted in several districts where they succeeded and won board majorities, with newly formed, inexperienced boards firing superintendents or forcing them to resign. One board voted to ban the teaching of critical race theory just hours after being sworn in.
After a decade of experience as a school board member, one thing I can say for sure is that the majority of parents, teachers and community members do not respond well to instability and disruption in their local public schools. When school boards run amok and rash decisions make headlines, communities work quickly to restore calm. If parental-rights school boards continue to govern recklessly, they will undoubtedly face a backlash from voters.
Creating and implementing sound school policies and practices that respect and affirm all students requires collaboration. It does not allow for the divisive, polarizing rhetoric and impetuous, rash decision-making that have become the calling cards of the so-called parental rights movement.
In 2020, when I published my last book, Slaying Goliath, I opined that education “reform” as defined by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (standardized testing, school closings, school grades, charter schools, evaluating teachers by student scores, merit pay, Common Core, etc.) was a massive failure. The test-and-punish and standardization mandates had turned schooling into a joyless, test-obsessed experience that demoralized teachers and students alike. None of the promises of “reform” came to pass, but privatization via charter inevitably led to vouchers and the defunding of public schools.
The failure of federally-mandated reforms seemed obvious to me but Congress continues to use standardized tests as the ultimate gauge of students, teachers, and schools, despite the destruction that was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. And the reviewer in The New York Times slammed my book for daring to doubt the virtue of the “Ed reform” movement.
Perry Bacon Jr. wrote an article recently for the Washington Post titled “‘Education Reform’ Is Dying. Now We Can Actually Reform Education.” It was amazing to see this article in The Washington Post because for years its editorial writer was a cheerleader for the worst aspects of that destructive movement (Rhee could do no wrong, charters are wonderful, firing teachers and principal is fine). But the education editorial writer retired, hallelujah, and we get to hear from Perry Bacon Jr., in addition to the always wonderful Valerie Strauss (whose excellent “Answer Sheet” blog does not appear in the printed paper but online).
Earlier today, John Thompson earlier today responded on this blog to Bacon’s brilliant article. I meant to post the article by Bacon but forgot. Here it is. What do you think?
Perry Bacon Jr. wrote:
America’s decades-long, bipartisan “education reform” movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline. What should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.
Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing. He has not stated that “education is the civil rights issue of our time,” a sentence said by presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. His administration has backed policies, such as an expanded child tax credit, that view giving people more money, not more education, as the main way to reduce poverty.
There is a push from experts and politicians across partisan lines, including from Biden, to get employers to stop requiring college degrees for so many jobs. There is also a growing defense of college students who study English, literature and other subjects that don’t obviously lead to jobs in the way that, say, engineering does.
An education gospel is being dismantled, one that was 40 years in the making. In 1983, the Reagan administration released a report called “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” It warned that America’s status as an economic powerhouse was under threat because its students were doing so much worse than those from other industrialized nations on standardized tests. That report put education reform on the national agenda and explicitly tied it to economic growth.
But this education fixation wasn’t just about the economy. The two parties couldn’t agree on racial policy. Democrats wanted more funding and explicit policies to help Black people and heavily Black areas to make up for past discrimination, and the Republicans largely opposed them.
What Democrats and Republicans could agree on was making education a priority. So Republican politicians, particularly Bush, pumped more money into schools, as Democrats wanted. And Democrats broadly adopted the view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism, thereby shifting responsibility for Black advancement from the government to individual African Americans, as Republicans wanted.
Eventually education, particularly getting a college degree, became viewed as the primary way for economic advancement for not just Black people but people of all races who weren’t born into the middle class.
The result was a bipartisan education fixation for much of the period between 1990 and 2016. It included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well; increased government spending on college loans and grants as part of a movement to make college essentially universal; and a push for Black students in particular not to just get college degrees but ones in “STEM” fields (science, technology, engineering and math) that would help them get higher-paying jobs.
This agenda was racial, economic and education policy all wrapped into one.
The problem is that this education push didn’t work. While the number of Americans who have graduated from high school and college have skyrocketed in the past three decades, wages and wealth haven’t grown nearly as much. Black people in particular haven’t seen economic gains matching these huge increases in education levels.
Instead of increased education benefiting Americans broadly, this education dogma created a two-tiered system. White-collar, secure, higher-paying jobs with good benefits went disproportionately to college graduates, while those in the worst jobs tended to not have degrees. And to get those degrees, Americans often had to borrow tens of thousands of dollars.
So Americans started revolting. The Black Lives Matter Movement emerged in 2013 and expressed frustration not only with police brutality but also with the continued economic struggles of Black Americans. In the 2016 presidential campaign, both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Trump appealed to voters who felt abandoned by a bipartisan political establishment that appeared unbothered by the disappearance of manufacturing and other jobs that didn’t require higher education. Sanders called for free college, appealing to young people frustrated that their best path to a good job was accruing tens of thousands of dollars in education debt.
After Trump’s election, both parties embraced the idea that they must try to help Americans, particularly those without college degrees, who feel stuck in today’s economy. So politicians are no longer casting education as the ideal solution to economic or racial inequality. Biden and the Democrats are specifically trying to create jobs that would go to non-college graduates, and they are pushing policies, such as expanding Medicaid, that would disproportionately help Black Americans even if they don’t have much advanced education.
But if the real aim of education policy is no longer really economic and racial policy, what should its goals be? Neither party seems to have a clear answer. Most Democrats defend teachers, a core party constituency, and extol public schools and community colleges, trying to shed the Democrats’ reputation as the party for graduates of Ivy League schools. But they don’t have a broader theory of education policy.
The Republicans are doing something much worse. At the state level, they are largely abandoning public schools and instead aggressively pushing universal voucherlike programs for K-12 education to help as many families as possible to enroll their kids in private and/or religious schools. They are also casting K-12 public school teachers and in particular college professors as propagandists who impose liberal values on students. At the college level, Republicans are trying to force out left-leaning faculty and push campuses to the right.
I certainly prefer the “teachers, professors and public schools are good” perspective (the Democratic one) over “teachers, professors and public schools are bad” (the Republican one). But neither is a real vision for American education.
Here’s one: Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.
They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. Our schools and universities should of course also provide people the core skills for jobs that actually require higher education. They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt. What our education system should not be is 16 years of required drudgery to make sure that you can get a job with stable hours and decent benefits — or a punching bag for politicians who have failed to do their jobs in reducing racial and economic inequality.
“What I think colleges and universities should do right now is to stop selling this myth that education is going to be the great equalizer,” University of Wisconsin at Green Bay professor Jon Shelton said in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed.
Shelton, author of a new book called “The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy,” added, “I think what we need to do is focus on being the institutions that are going to help society solve these bigger problems, to be the place where people can encounter controversial ideas on campus, where we can have far-reaching conversations about what needs to change in our economy, and how we’re going to create the kind of world in which climate change doesn’t destroy our entire way of life.”
Blessedly, education reform is dying. Now we can reform our schools and colleges in a way that actually improves teaching and learning.
If you can open the article, you will see two graphs displayed: one shows that Black educational attainment has risen substantially (the percent who have graduated high school and college) but Black income and wealth has stalled. Those who were counting on education alone to eliminate poverty were wrong.
Note to reader: a version of this post was published at 1:30 p.m. This was WordPress’s error. This is the finished version. Too complicated to explain.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reacts to an article in the Washington Post.
He writes:
I agree with Perry Bacon’s excellent and optimistic Washington Post analysis and its new path for improving America’s schools – with the possible exception of his first sentence and the first sentence of his last paragraph. After decades of working for the education policies and principles he supports, I’ve become too pessimistic to not doubt his title, “‘Education reform’ is dying. Now we can actually reform education.” I sure hope I’m wrong and he’s right.
Bacon writes, “Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing.” Biden offers a 21st century path away from the 40-year “education gospel” launched by the 1983 Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk,” which was joined by presidents of both parties. Bacon then described the bipartisan “fixation” which:
Included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well.
“By 2001 and the passage of No Child Left Behind,” Shelton further explains, “Democrats and Republicans competed with each other to remake our education system under the pretext that our schools needed to be held accountable to the long-term economic fortunes of American workers.” Since they could only agree on making education a priority, Bacon added, the Republicans adopted the Democrats’ “view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism.”
Based on decades of experience teaching in the inner city, and studying what it would have actually taken to achieve equity, I’ve seen the way that the students who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of accountability-driven, competition-driven mandates, were damaged the most. And on-the-cheap, quick fixes hurt these kids in the way educators and education research predicted. Even worse, I would add, the Billionaires Boys Club turned education into a reward-and-punish, data-driven privatization campaign based on the neoliberal venture capitalist model.
Having seen how worksheet-driven “accountability” and segregation by choice reforms drove our school into the lowest-performing mid-high in Oklahoma, and hearing my students protest that they had been completely robbed of an education, I thoroughly support Bacon’s vision of education. He writes:
Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.
They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. … They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.
But, I’ve also seen the rightwing attacks on public schools. And these assaults come after decades of destructive, neoliberal corporate reforms. The difference was that they sought to “blow up” the education system so that entrepreneurs could rebuild it. Today, we have to resist extremist and conservative privatizers who are going for the kill while education is on the ropes.
And that gets me back to Bacon’s optimistic introduction and conclusion. Yes, he is correct in beginning, “America’s decades-long, bipartisan ‘education reform’ movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline.” The vast majority of the people I know agree that these reforms failed, and “what should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.” I hope I’m being too pessimistic because of my state’s rightwing minority’s assaults on democracy, but I don’t see evidence that the majority of parents and educators, as well as researchers, will be listened to.
Similarly, his last sentence is true, “Now we can reform our schools and colleges in a way that actually improves teaching and learning.” Yes, we can, but what will we be able to do as we again go up against market-driven elites and, worse, MAGA zealots?
I must emphasize that I have always been an optimist so, ordinarily, I would celebrate his sentence, “Blessedly, education reform is dying.” But after four decades of undermining the principles of public education, I worry that its decline has come too late, and I see no sign of progress in my state. Even so, regardless of the odds we face, we must draw upon the wisdom of Jon Shelton and Perry Bacon, and that requires us to keep our hopes up.
One of the original intentions of creating charter schools was to improve student learning—which is why it’s telling that proponents of “school choice” now justify charter-school and school-voucher expansion by saying they are necessary to provide parents with options other than traditional public schools.
Choice for choice’s sake—originally a secondary rationale for charters—has become the go-to line of charter school proponents. Meanwhile, measures of academic performance have faded into the backgroundas a justification for school options. Nevertheless, for years, the question of whether or not charter schools academically out-perform traditional public schools has gnawed at the industry like an annoying uncle who insists on having the last word in every family debate.
The latest attempt to prove the supposed superiority of the charter industry comes from the Center for Research for Education Outcome, or CREDO, which has taken prior stabs at the question with results that were far from convincing.
“Remarkable” was how Margaret “Macke” Raymond, CREDO’s director and author described the results of CREDO’s latest national charter school study. Her enthusiasm was infectious. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board proclaimed that CREDO’s new evidence showed charter schools are now “blowing away their traditional school competition.”
But despite the headlines that popped up in pro-charter media, the only thing “blown away” was the truth. Like prior national studies, CREDO’s latest report, “As a Matter of Fact: The National Charter School Study III,” shows tiny average differences between charter and public school students—0.011 standard deviations in math and 0.028 standard deviations in reading. These are differences so small that the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless once likened them to standing on a few sheets of paper to increase one’s height.
And CREDO knows it. The organization characterized nearly identical differences in their 2009 national study as inconsequential—referring to them as “meaningless,” “small,” and possibly derived from “measurement error.”
How could “meaningless” suddenly become “remarkable” once a tiny statistical tilt in outcomes favors charter schools? The answer lies in who runs CREDO, who funds it, and the methodological problems inherent in its reports.
Although reporters refer to CREDO at Stanford University or Stanford’s CREDO, the relationship between CREDO and the prestigious university is complicated.
CREDO is based in the conservative, pro-charter Hoover Institution, a private think tank on the Stanford University campus. The Hoover Institution governs and finances itself without oversight or control by the university. In fact, Hoover has a “long and fraught relationship” with Stanford’s faculty and students who have objected to its lack of diversity, controversial scholarship, and conservative ideology.
What all of these funders have in common is a vested interest in charter schools and—at least in Pearson’s case—profit.
Expanding school choice is a focus of the Hoover Institution. For example, in 2021, Hoover hosted Betsy DeVos in a stop on her book tour. Secretary DeVos was introduced and praised by Raymond, who, along with her role at CREDO, refers to herself as the education program director at Hoover in the video.
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