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Jeff Bryant: Did the Big Teachers’ Protest Rally in 2011 Make a Difference?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2026 //
6

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.

Jeff writes:

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.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Extremism, Failure, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Supporting public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

I Owe an Apology to Ted Dintersmith

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2026 //
13

About a dozen years ago, I heard from Ted Dintersmith. I didn’t know anything about him other than that he was a venture capitalist who was interested in education reform. My hackles went up, because the term “venture capitalist who was interested in education reform” immediately conjured up images of Democrats for Education Reform,” a faux group that is dedicated to charter schools, Teach for America, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and union-busting.

When I thought about the people in this category, I thought about very wealthy men like Ravenal Boykin Curry IV, Whitney Tilson, John Perry, Ken Griffin, Jeff Yass, Daniel Loeb, Arthur Rock, Joel Greenblatt, Bruce Rauner, and Paul Tudor Jones. They are financiers who have committed millions to the cause of privatizing public schools. They are united in their contempt for public schools, teachers, and unions.

So I was wary of Ted and suspicious of his motives. And I pushed him aside, thinking he was part of the cabal of know-it-all entrepreneurs with a zeal to reform (privatize) public schools.

So, I now publicly admit that I was wrong. Ted has traveled the country, visiting schools and listening. He knows how hard teachers work, and he admires them. He has teamed up with some savvy people, like Tony Wagner and the late Sir Ken Robinson, to produce films and write books.

When I recently read his latest article, I realized that I had completely misjudged Ted. He doesn’t want to destroy public schools or privatize them. He wants to make them better. He wants students to love school and learn what they need to know to make informed choices.

He has seen some good charter schools (as I have), but he knows that a few hundred charter schools won’t lead to the transformation of tens of thousands of public schools. And–my thought–to the extent that charter schools defund public schools, they create more problems, more inequities.

So, I hereby apologize to Ted Dintersmith for prejudging him and for lumping him with the Billionaire Boys Club, those who see school transformation as a hobby.

When you read this post you will see that he doesn’t have all the answers, but he is asking the right question.

He writes:

About these notes: Always Monday. Always short. Always free. Always about civil society’s future. At times, interesting. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe here.

First, thanks for your feedback on my recent posts. My goal of late is to explore the various factors causing America to unravel. Toward a systems model of the forces undermining America’s democracy, moral compass, and social cohesion. Today, education.

For five decades, U.S. education policy has been driven by two goals: test scores and college. The No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. Then in 2010, Common Core. Obama’s rallying cry: “By 2020, the United States will once again lead the world in college completion.” Our all-consuming education focus. With massive collateral damage.

Let’s start with the funnel. While the college path works out well for some, most end up on the wrong side of education’s Bell Curve. Over half go directly to career, lacking a hirable skill and often with gutted self-esteem. Of those heading off to college, half don’t finish. Of those who graduate, half don’t get any kind of dream job. A system that’s produced some 43 million adults burdened by $1.8 trillion of student loan debt.

With a boost from Harvard-educated JFK, America grew to equate a prestigious college degree with human worth. This equivalence worked its way into news stories, movies, television shows, commercials . . . and labor markets. Prestige employers (that’s you, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey) made an elite college degree the essential hiring criterion. Less glamorous companies (that’s you, Sherwin-Williams) made a college degree mandatory for promotions. Rich families push their kids from the womb toward an Ivy+ degree. Poor families want the same for their kids. University research teams (that’s you, Georgetown) produce skewed studies touting a massive $1.2 million earnings lift for college grads. The Federal government opens the spigot for readily-obtained, impossible-to-shake student loans.

We’d like to think that America’s education system levels the playing field, but it does the opposite. The SCOTUS 1973 San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez says it’s just fine for U.S. public schools to be largely funded by local property taxes. Rich kids are showered with resources’; poor kids show up to school hungry. Test scores point to an education ‘achievement gap’ that gets pinned on our teachers – not America’s staggering income inequality. The system’s winners feed elite colleges that educate more students from the richest 1% of families than from the bottom 50%. For more, read Paul Tough’s book The Inequality Machine.

With college placements as the measure of success, America’s K12 schools became college-ready test-prep institutions. Pit kids in dog-eat-dog competitions: class rank, SAT scores, AP scores, college placement. A barrage of state- and Federally-mandated multiple-choice exams that rank kids, teachers, schools, districts, and states. Clear marching orders for K12 schools – train kids to perform well on multiple-choice exams and get them off to some college.

To this day, America relies on two numbers to define the education quality of a school, district, state, nation, and human. Math and reading scores. That’s it. Don’t believe me? Just note what journalists write and what policymakers cite. We’ve pushed generations of young Americans to get those damn test scores up. No worries if we short-change career-based learning, civics, history, and art. No worries if we disenage kids and demoralize teachers. No worries if a relentless focus on rote learning crushes a child’s curiosity, creativity, joy, and agency. No worries if kids get the soul-sucking message that what matters in life is outcompeting others on pointless tasks. Education priorities that encapsulate the classic definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

So many reforms, so little change

During their formative K12 years, America’s kids take more than 100 standardized exams. These cost-minimizing exams are expressly designed to be graded by a computer. And if a computer can grade a task, it can do that task. In every sense, we push kids to develop rote skills that machines handle flawlessly. Already, AI aces every assignment and exam required to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard. Reading exams call for regurgitating what’s put in front of you – perfect training for conspiracy-absorbing adults. Math exams are tied to esoteric micro-procedures (e.g., factoring polynomials) that adults never use. Yet we chase these scores, for decades, making no progress, ignoring Goodhart’s Law: “Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.”

There you have it. America’s colossal education botch. Train kids to perform rote tasks. Crush out the essential human traits of curiosity, audacity, creativity, agency, and joy. Standardize what’s taught and tested to produce data that ranks and sorts — rather than helping each child develop their distinctive human potential. Most get a chronic ‘you lack proficiency’ message in a system that heaps advantage on the affluent. Botched priorities, paving the way to our current nightmare. A populace unable and unwilling to critically analyze the torrent of lies coming from the White House. A populace that holds its nose to vote for a convicted felon who rails on the ‘educated elite.’ A boiling cauldron of resentment, corruption, and anti-science vitriol. As to how this has worked out, read David Brooks’ fascinating How the Ivy League Broke America.

I don’t offer these views on education casually. For the past fifteen years, I’ve immersed myself in this world. I’ve visited hundreds of schools, and convened thousands of conversations, all across America. I celebrate the bright spots in my books (What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America) and films (Most Likely to Succeed and Multiple Choice). But I’ve seen the failure. Failure caused by an obsolete system and failed accountability measures. Our classroom teachers are heroes. It’s not easy to fight the system, but many do. Give special thanks to the teachers in your life, who persevere despite being shortchanged on pay, respect, and trust. They endure in an entrenched system that has churned out generations of young adults ill-prepared for career, citizenship, and life. A system sowing the seeds for democracy’s collapse.

Three Bold Ideas

Career-Based Learning for All: My recent film Multiple Choice showcases a mainstream public school district that immerses all high-school kids in career-based learning across a range of skills (e.g., carpentry, welding, healthcare, cybersecurity, digital media, AI). Better for the career-bound and, a bit surprisingly, better for the college-bound. The key is making career-based learning essential for all kids, not just ‘those’ kids who don’t resonate with academic curriculum.

Finland: America can learn much from Finland. Their remarkable education progress resulted from a budget crisis that forced them to choose between data and educator excellence. They dumped all standardized tests and focused on developing outstanding classroom teachers – better training, more pay, loads of respect. Finnish kids spend comparatively little time on ‘school’; even high-schoolers have just six hours of class time and homework during the school week. Lots of time for play and exploration. A well-educated populace. For more, read Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons.

Accountability: Base accountability on a child’s growing ability to create and carry out initiatives that help make their world better. Portfolios of purpose, not a checklist of counterproductive numbers. Check out New York’s Performance Standards Consortium or read Tony Wagner’s Mastery.

Bonus Idea: Long talked about, America would be well-served if every high school graduate engaged in public service — lifting up their community while developing important skills. Those going on to college bring maturity and real-world experience to years often wasted on beer pong. Those eschewing the college path are off and running with purpose and skills. Young Americans across all demographics in a melting pot that bridges our current demographic and political divides.

Nervously, 

Ted

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Higher Education, Jobs, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Jan Resseger: Reviving NCLB WILL NOT Improve Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2026 //
7

Jan Resseger, social justice warrior, strongly dissents from those who want to bring back the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

She writes:

Defining schools by their achievement test scores is reductive. Of course we want our children to learn to read, to enjoy and understand literature, to master math, and to study history and the sciences, but a fixation on comparing school districts’ test scores blinds us to the human relations that constitute a classroom, to the social formation of children that happens at school, and to myriad other ways of thinking about what students are accomplishing at school. The temptation then is to define schoolteachers as producers of test scores and forget about all the other ways they help our children learn and grow.

Because test scores provide a simple, universal measure, we grab onto it and give it more weight than all the other factors we can’t so easily measure. Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado and director of the National Education Policy Center identifies family income, a factor entirely outside of school, as the most significant variable affecting a school district’s aggregate test scores: “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America.  School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economical inequality.”

Last week, the NY Times’ Claire Cain Miller, Frencesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh reported on a major new demographic study documenting a widespread decline over the past decade in U.S. students’ standardized test scores: “Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago… A report on the new data describes a decade-long ‘learning recession.’… Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues. Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990—then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students. Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than pre-pandemic… Test scores in low-income districts fell furthest, but affluent districts—the types of places families move to for the schools—also lost ground.”

The reporters do acknowledge a number of factors that may correlate with dropping scores, but they seem to lean toward blaming a lot of the problem on the end of No Child Left Behind. They are mistaken when they declare that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA), NCLB’s replacement, ended test-based school accountability. In fact that 2015 law just made the states, not the federal government, agree to impose sanctions on the schools that had been unable significantly to raise test scores.  The reporters quote Brian A. Jacob, a professor at the University of Michigan, who believes NCLB’s fading influence has been one cause of test score decline: “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement… There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”

A prominent retired professor of education, Diane Ravitch pushed back immediately on what she understood as the bias of the recent NY Times article: “I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of  No Child Left Behind-Race to the Top pressures. Sure, they increased the pressure on students, teachers, and principals, but their negative effects undermined the quality of education. Picking the right bubble on a standardized test became the goal of education.  Campbell’s Law says that when a measure becomes the goal, it loses its value as a measure. Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that ‘the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’ “

Ravitch names a number of experts who have evaluated the damage wrought by the No Child Left Behind Act’s strategy: to punish schools and teachers who, supposedly, weren’t working hard enough to make all students reach test-score proficiency by 2014.  The most prominent is Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on standardized testing, who, in 2017, published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. Koretz not only explains Campbell’s Law, but he shows how the pressure of test-based accountability corrupted what happened public schools across the country when the federal government threatened mandatory closure, or mandatory privatization or charterization of so-called “failing schools.”

Koretz reminds us that in places where test scores did rise under No Child Left Behind, it may not have reflected students’ academic growth. Test score gains were in many places artificially produced through test prep, the narrowing of the school curriculum, and even cheating: “Cheating—by teachers and administrators, not by students—is one of the simplest ways to inflate scores, and if you aren’t caught, it’s the most dependable.” (The Testing Charade, p. 73)  His book covers the tragic Atlanta cheating scandal, and other examples when teachers read the tests in advance and prepared students to answer specific questions. Koretz describes various kinds of test prep coaching and drilling that were widespread in the NCLB era.  And, “(Teachers) reported that they reduced—sometimes very substantially—the amount of time devoted to teaching science, which was not tested, in order to make additional time for prepping kids in math and reading.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 95-96)

Last week’s NY Times report on the possible causes of an overall drop in test scores over the recent decade also names two other possible causes.  First, a decade ago, as schools began to provide laptops or electronic tablets to their students for online learning, students’ widespread dependence on their smartphones also became epidemic: “Something happened globally around the same time: the proliferation of devices, at home and in school.  Nearly half of American teenagers now say they are online ‘almost constantly,’ compared with just under a quarter who said that a decade ago, according to Pew Research Center.”  Due to the proliferation of devices, our classrooms operate differently, and our children are doing less reading of books for study and enjoyment.

Second, the reporters, explain, there was massive and well documented learning loss during the COVID pandemic: “Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly.  The new data shows that scores inched upwards in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground…. The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students.”

I have never heard anyone who has been able to trace the extent of long term damage during COVID, when students’ schools were closed and many children were left while their parents were at work to learn remotely on computers. Chronic absence has been a greater problem since COVID, and something schools have struggled to overcome.  No one has been able to assess how long COVID will keep affecting children who were preschoolers and young elementary students back in 2019.

Finally there is one other big factor that could also be related to falling test scores over time: states have been perpetually reducing funding for public schools. According to the most recent research from the Albert Shanker Institute: “There are 42 states (including the District of Columbia) that devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 schools than they did before the 2007-2009 recession. This seems to be a permanent disinvestment in public education.” “(U)nequal opportunity is (also) universal in the U.S. In all states, higher-poverty districts are funded less adequately than lower-poverty districts… We find that 37 percent of white students attend districts with negative adequacy gaps, compared with 75 percent of African American students and 62 percent of Hispanic students. In other words, African American students are about twice as likely as their white peers to attend school in a district with below-adequate funding, while Hispanic students are almost 70 percent more likely to do so, and Native American… students are 50 percent more likely. Similarly, African American students are over 3 times more likely than white students to attend chronically underfunded districts….” These economic factors are likely to have affected students’ learning over time.

Our society will not be able to address our economic, social, and educational injustices through No Child Left Behind-style, test-based public school accountability.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

John Thompson: Let NCLB Die, It’s Done Enough Damage

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
8

This week, a report by the Education Scorecard, led by Sean Reardon at the Stanford group; Thomas Kane at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard; and Douglas Staiger at Dartmouth proclaimed that we are in a decade-long “learning recession.” It found that 83% of state reading scores declined from 2015 to 2025. 

While I respect the Scorecard’s skills in compiling test score patterns, due to my time as an academic historian, an education researcher, and an inner city teacher, who witnessed the extreme harm done to students by the No Child Left Act of 2001 and the 2010 Race to the Top, I must challenge many of the conclusions that are being drawn from the test score patterns that Reardon, Kane, Staiger, and their partners present.

For instance, Thomas Kane told NPR that around 2013, “‘school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.’” When I read this statement, my response was that Kane must be living in a different world.So many districts are still looking over their shoulders prioritizing accountability metrics, not real learning.

Kane then claimed that accountability-driven mandates due to the NCLB and the RttT produced gains that “‘may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about.’” That statement has been refuted by numerous studies including RAND’s research which concluded that the failure of attempts to improve learning through high-stakes testing added to the proof,  “that one does not fatten a hog by weighing it.”I believe the test-driven teacher evaluations that Kane pushed were the most destructive education policy that I’ve ever heard of, and were a major factor in undermining teaching background information and reading for comprehension.Their test results patterns, I argue, actually support the opposite of the defense of NCLB and the RttT; it was the full implementation of high stakes testing, not the rejection of those failed policies, that was one of the top two causes of the sharp decline in literacy.

On the other hand, I agree that a main reason for the decline is the failure to manage social media, and that chronic absenteeism is a major factor.

But, first, I want to explain the political reasons why reading outcomes in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), and the Oklahoma City Public School System (OKCPS) fell so far. Secondly, I want to help defuse the “blame game,” and push back against the ramping up of unfair criticism of urban schools that is likely to get worse.  

Reardon previously led the research by the Equal Opportunity Project which found that the TPS’s 3rd through 8th grade growth rates were the 7th lowest in the nation from 2009 to 2015.

TPS students had gained only 3.8 years of learning over five years. Moreover, the OKCPS students only gained 4.4 years.

The TPS had had better schools than Oklahoma City, and we repeatedly visited Tulsa to learn from them. But, in 2010 they received a Gates Foundation grant for evaluating teachers, that Kane and Staiger helped create. Then, I frequently visited Tulsa and listened to both teachers and frustrated consultants as they complained about the damage being done to teaching and learning. Not surprisingly, it became much harder to recruit or retain teachers.

Now, the TPS, when compared with around 10,000 schools with similar demographics, “ranked higher than 1% of districts nationwide in average reading performance during the 2022-25 school years.” 

Also, data from American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus showed that the TPS’s chronic absenteeism rate was 48.2%, compared to the nation’s 31.9% chronic absenteeism rate for similar schools.

Similarly, the Scorecard said, “Oklahoma City ranked higher than 0% of districts nationwide in average reading performance during the 2022-25 school years.” Its students performed 3.93 grade levels below the 2019 national average. Moreover, chronic absenteeism was 42.8% compared to the national rate of 33% for similar districts. 

But, before Oklahoma City’s educators in high-challenge schools are blamed, the extreme segregation they face must be taken into account. Oklahoma County has 14 school districts.  along with magnet, charter, and private schools. School choice resulted in neighborhood schools with intense concentrations of students from extreme, generational poverty, who have endured multiple traumas (known as ACEs), thus driving down the OKCPS’s test scores. 

Consequently, in 2015, suburban and exurban schools Edmond, Mustang, Moore, and Yukon were ranked higher than the national average by 1.6; .6; 1; and .8 years. By 2024, their scores declined by the same or by lower rates as similar national schools. So, it’s hard to make the case that the lack of teacher accountability, as opposed to segregation by choice, drove those drops in reading. 

At the risk of sounding too nerdy, the historian in me needs to recall the chronologies for test score gains and decreases. I argue that the most meaningful reading metric is the 8th grade NAEP, which had been improving incrementally from 255 in 1971, to 263 in 2012, before it fell to 260 in 2020, and to 256 in 2023. 

Both my experiences in the classroom, and the reading of the data, support the narrative that it took a while for the destructive policies of both interconnected reforms to be put in place, but when that happened, both laws drove meaningful learning down.    

On the other hand, some claim that the reversal of the most punitive parts of RttT caused that decline. But those changes didn’t occur until 2015, after 8th grade reading scores were already in decline. Even so, in Oklahoma, the conservative Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) blamed State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister for the drop in state reading scores because she ended the practice that made us second in the nation in retentions. 

Getting back to today’s national discussion about literacy, one data-driven scholar, Brian Jacobs, was cited for supporting NCLB despite its problematic features. He said, “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement.” 

But, if you follow the link to his research, it concludes, “Our results suggest that NCLB had no impact on reading achievement for 4th or 8th graders.” And it gives virtually no evidence that it didn’t undermine learning about science, history, arts, and music.    

Reading the news coverage of the Education Scorecard brings me back to three sets of memories. During the early 1990’s, our school superintendent bragged about implementing the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk. So many of my students who grew up in that era would thank me for teaching in a meaningful manner, and then complain that they had previously been “robbed of an education” by its testing.

Secondly, at the turn of the century, I repeatedly talked with smart, sincere data experts about methodological problems when using their metrics for real world policies, as opposed to economic theory. I repeatedly heard the reply that their job was to show that data-driven accountability can improve teaching. If I’m right, they would say, they would run some more controls (presumably after the policies were in place). But it wasn’t their job to predict what will happen if those policies are adopted.    

Thirdly, as the RttT was implemented, my students from the poorest elementary and middle schools would repeatedly thank me for showing them respect by teaching them in a meaningful manner. And, they kept volunteering that they had been “robbed of an education.”

It is also important to remember that the majority of OKCPS students are Hispanic, and remember that the OKCPS probably would have collapsed if it had not been for immigration. Now, when ICE is terrorizing immigrants, we must come together in support of our threatened students in order to reduce its contribution to chronic absenteeism. 

And Oklahoma has long ranked near the nation’s top for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and near the bottom for children’s wellness.

Moreover, I don’t recall talking to a parent who doesn’t see the need to help young people control, and not be controlled, by their digital devices.

And I almost never talk to a parent, a student, or an educator who doesn’t want to cut back on high-stakes testing and test prep.

So, I agree we need to take the Education Scorecard seriously, but we should use it as a diagnostic tool to help us come together for the team efforts required for bringing back the joy of reading.   

For instance, I agree with Elaine Allensworth, the executive director of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, who responded to the Scorecard saying we should not panic, but “We need to really start asking questions about what we can do to support students so they feel engaged in school.”

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Jennifer Berkshire: The Schools Are Failing! (Again!)

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2026 //
7

Jennifer Berkshire, keen-eyed commentator on the nation’s schools and their detractors, writes that the doomsayers are up in arms again. After 25 (or 40) years of nonstop “reform,” their lamentations are once again in style. Note that the lamentors never blame the failure of the “reforms” they imposed. No. It’s the students, the teachers, the public schools, anyone else but not themselves.

Berkshire writes:

The kids are dumb and getting dumber. They can’t add or read the books they are no longer assigned, rousing themselves from their stupid stupors only to demand extra time on tests or another (now meaningless) A. The schools are collapsing, thanks to weakened standards and something called “cargo cult equity.” Just how bad is it out there? Today’s kids are the equivalent of the subprime mortgage-backed securities that blew up the economy in the lead up to the Great Recession. (Yes, somebody actually made this argument).

I could keep going, but you get where this is heading. Also, we are only a few days into the new year and I am already exhausted. The point, reader, is that we find ourselves in the throes of a full-blown public education panic. But why now? And why does this one feel different? I kick off 2026 with a look at a story that is all but guaranteed to keep telling itself in the months ahead.

America’s oldest pastime

If you’re new to the great American pastime of bemoaning the state of the nation’s schools then perhaps you’re unaware that we’ve been doing this since at least the ‘70’s. By which I mean the 1870’s. If the railroad collapse that triggered the Panic of 1873 feels startlingly familiar in our own bubbly AI economy, so too will feel the ensuing laments about the schools. They were too expensive. They used to teach reading well, but no longer. They had too many administrators. And if you’ve been following the ‘women ruin everything’ discourse, this was also the time when teaching became a female-documented occupation. Related? You tell me. Over the past 250 years, complaints “that the public schools of today are inferior to those of a generation or two ago” have resurfaced as reliably as measles or whooping cough.

Too many of the wrong kids are in college

Several years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote an op-ed in which we argued that the GOP was using education culture war to appeal to vastly different constituencies, including rural voters enflamed over CRT and litter boxes and affluent moderates obsessed with getting their kids into elite institutions. Alas, our bleak prediction about the realigning power of this emerging coalition turned out to be premature, but only in the K-12 world. Today, the powerful backlash movement that is upending higher education is based on just such an unlikely coalition, united in the belief that there are too many of the wrong kids in college. As one wry observer noted on X: “Half the education posts are like ‘my kid has a 5.3 GPA and invented $5 insulin and got rejected from DeVry’ and half are ‘60% of freshmen do not know enough math to read the numbers on their classroom doors.’”

Or how about this one? “The Atlantic is Fox News but for high SES liberals worried their kids spot at a UC will be taken by some Latino kid from the Central Valley.” Touché! As Trump et al continue to expand the definition of “wrong kids” [immigrants, non-white students, protestors, poor students, women], affluent parents with an eye on the Ivies, not to mention the pundit class, are proving all too willing to play footsie with them.

Billionaires gonna billionaire

Here’s a question for you, reader: what was your favorite example of a billionaire purchasing state-level education policy in 2025? Mayhaps it was hedge funder Ken Griffin’s purchase of the state legislature in Florida. Or hedge funder Jeff Yass’ purchase of Texas governor Greg Abbott. Or maybe you prefer a more bespoke intervention, like when billionaire Lauren Overdeck rented mobile billboards to warn New Jersey parents that their kids aren’t that smart.

Nobody knows anything

“I Don’t Know What to Think About America’s Declining Test Scores and Neither Should You” was the title of a great post last year by teacher and writer Michael Pershan. Digging into the surging remedial math program at University of California San Diego that fueled roughly one billion hot takes, Pershan patiently pointed out the contradictory nature of the data regarding student achievement in California. Even as student math skills were supposedly declining, state test scores were increasing. Or take Los Angeles, one of the few bright spots in the post-pandemic recovery landscape. During the last golden age of education reform, roughly 15 minutes ago, the progress of LA’s students would have merited its own fawning press treatment. No longer. Today, the story is decline and failure, and while this is a global phenomenon that includes adults, why let a little complexity get in the way of a hot take? The emergence of our ‘hot take’ economy, by the way, in which content entrepreneurs are handsomely rewarded for their “obtuse penchant for moral and ideological incuriousity” (and pay no price for 1) being wrong or 2) contradicting themselves) is a major driver of our current round of public education panic.

Neoliberalism is gone (but not forgotten)

Every year I ban myself from using the word “neoliberalism,” and, well, you can see how that’s going. The story of education decline and collapse that’s now sweeping the land typically goes something like this. Back when we had accountability, standards and choice, things were going great, but then [insert teachers, unions, progressives, lazy kids here] did [insert bad thing here] and the result is [insert calamity here.] But if you’ve been paying attention to education politics for more than 15 minutes then you know that that story is not just partial but wildly inaccurate.

For example, did you know that grassroots opposition to the Common Core standards on the right blew up, not just the era of bipartisan accountability, but helped deliver the current occupant into the White House? The result is that we’re now in an in-between-state, in which the vision of market-minded education reform that has held sway for the last THIRTY YEARS is exhausted while no clear alternative has emerged to take its place. For a compelling explanation of how the crack up of education policy relates to our larger political disintegration, check out this essay by Matt Wilka and Kent McGuire, “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools.”

The neoliberal paradigm has cracked, but it has not crumbled. And this instability marks our current transition period, which has brought much graver threats to American democracy. The confluence of economic pain, demographic change, and new media has proved fertile ground for authoritarian leaders to champion resistance to government.

Human capitalists vs. the chainsaw

Of all of the reading I’ve done in the last month, it was this piece that stopped me in my tracks. The author, a used-to-be copy writer now being replaced by AI, asks an AI chat bot for career advice, to which he is instructed to pick up a chainsaw. I’ll stop here as I want you to read it yourself, but suffice it to say that the author uses his experience to take aim at two sacred cows of the neoliberal era: 1) that more and better education is the answer to our economic woes and 2) that the remedy for worker dislocation is retraining. (For evidence of our muddled moment, consider that the New York Times ran, in addition to the chainsaw op-ed, a Sal Kahn ripped-from-the-time machine argument for worker re-training and a good old-fashioned education-as-boot-straps editorial, all in the same month.)

What does this have to do with our current round of public education panic? For the past three decades, bipartisan education reform has been pitched as an alternative to economic redistribution. Why impose higher taxes on the wealthy when going after the teachers unions is so much more satisfying? But as downward mobility comes for a larger and larger segment of the workforce, that sales pitch has officially run out of steam. The big question now is ‘whither the Democrats?,’ who, to paraphrase the great Tom Frank, have long seen every economic problem as an education problem. Will they seize the populist economic mantle, as even James Carville is prodding them to do? Or will the centrist zombie rise again, flogging the exhausted case that “[e]ducation reform is the seed corn of economic prosperity”? My money is on the chainsaw…

Race science is back

What single silver bullet would cause US test scores to soar like a SpaceX rocket? If you answered ‘kicking out all of the immigrants,’ you would be quoting Trump advisor Stephen Miller. While the claim is measurably preposterous, it’s indicative of the roaring return of race science during Trump 2.0. But Goebbels envy isn’t the only reason for the obsessive fixation on IQ these days. For a forthcoming essay on the Democrats’ populism bind, I’ve been revisiting education historian Michael Katz’s 1987 Reconstructing American Education. In his survey of 100 years of education reform promises and disappointment, Katz identified a familiar pattern. Once the hypes and hopes of addressing an astonishing array of societal ills through the schools inevitably fall short, “hereditarian theories of intelligence reemerge” like clockwork.

Here’s Katz:

As so often in American history, education had been deployed as the primary weapon to fight poverty, crime and social disorder, and, as before, schools were unable to alleviate these great problems whose structural origins lie in the distribution of power and resources.

Katz was surveying the wreckage of the War on Poverty era, its optimism curdling into mainstream social science claims that 1) because IQ was largely inherited and racially determined 2) efforts to boost achievement through the schools were doomed to failure. Today we’re in a similar moment, the exuberant claims of the last education reform era (see above) crashing into the chasm of economic inequality. Katz argued that the only way to challenge genetic arguments, by the way, was to acknowledge “the structural origins of social problems and the inherently ineffectual nature of the reforms that have been attempted.” Sound familiar?

Too many of the wrong kids are in college

Several years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote an op-ed in which we argued that the GOP was using education culture war to appeal to vastly different constituencies, including rural voters enflamed over CRT and litter boxes and affluent moderates obsessed with getting their kids into elite institutions. Alas, our bleak prediction about the realigning power of this emerging coalition turned out to be premature, but only in the K-12 world. Today, the powerful backlash movement that is upending higher education is based on just such an unlikely coalition, united in the belief that there are too many of the wrong kids in college. As one wry observer noted on X: “Half the education posts are like ‘my kid has a 5.3 GPA and invented $5 insulin and got rejected from DeVry’ and half are ‘60% of freshmen do not know enough math to read the numbers on their classroom doors.’”

Or how about this one? “The Atlantic is Fox News but for high SES liberals worried their kids spot at a UC will be taken by some Latino kid from the Central Valley.” Touché! As Trump et al continue to expand the definition of “wrong kids” [immigrants, non-white students, protestors, poor students, women], affluent parents with an eye on the Ivies, not to mention the pundit class, are proving all too willing to play footsie with them.

Billionaires gonna billionaire

Here’s a question for you, reader: what was your favorite example of a billionaire purchasing state-level education policy in 2025? Mayhaps it was hedge funder Ken Griffin’s purchase of the state legislature in Florida. Or hedge funder Jeff Yass’ purchase of Texas governor Greg Abbott. Or maybe you prefer a more bespoke intervention, like when billionaire Lauren Overdeck rented mobile billboards to warn New Jersey parents that their kids aren’t that smart.

THERE IS MORE! OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH THE ARTICLE. And open the link to see the links to sources.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Jan Resseger: Don’t Believe the Lies about State Control of Federal Funds

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2025 //
9

Jan Resseger recently read Arne Duncan’s cheerful hopes for the Trump education agenda and encouraged the public to look at the bright side. Then Jan remembered Arne’s disastrous Race to the Top, which even the U.S. Department of Education rated as a waste of money, and Jan looked elsewhere for advice. She found Kevin Welner’s sage thoughts.

My view is that Trump, his budget director Russell Vought, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon ultimately hope to turn all federal funding into block grants to the states, no strings attached. No money dedicated to students with disabilities, no money for schools enrolling large numbers of low-income students. Federal regulations drafted by hard-hearted zealots of the Trump administration will be directed to vouchers, charters, cyber schooling and home schooling.

Don’t be fooled: The Trump administration wants to destroy public schools.

Jan writes:

In a recent column in the Washington Post, Arne Duncan suggested that even Democrat-led states can opt into the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax credit school voucher program and redirect the funds into public schools or at least into programs that support achievement in public schools as a way to replace COVID American Rescue Plan funds that have run out. “This solution is a no-brainer,” he declares.

Here is Arne’s prescription: “The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special education services and learning technology. For both current governors and gubernatorial candidates, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.  By opting in, a governor unlocks these resources for students in their state. Some Democratic leaders have hesitated, however, worried that the program could be seen as undermining public schools, since private scholarships are also eligible. But that misses the point.”

Remember that Arne Duncan launched Race to the Top, which brought No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish regime into the Obama years by offering gigantic federal grants as a bribe for states to turn around their lowest scoring 5% of public schools with rigid improvement plans—with the schools that failed to improve being closed or charterized—and with the teachers being held accountable and punished if they couldn’t quickly raise test scores. Because none of Arne’s programs worked out, I am hesitant to take Arne Duncan’s advice.

It is wiser to heed Kevin Welner’s warning in a new policy memo: Governors Beware: The Voucher Advocates in DC Are Not Serious about Returning Education to the States.  Welner is a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the director of the National Education Policy Center.

Welner explains that the One Big Beautiful Bill requires the governors of the states to opt into the federal tax credit vouchers (or choose to opt out).  As Welner lists how the money can be used, it is clear that the federal dollars can be spent on private education but that, in addition, some programs supporting public schools themselves or their students could qualify: “Under the OBBB, nonprofit Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) in states opting into the program are authorized to pool the donated money and then hand out “scholarships” for students’ ‘qualified elementary or secondary education expense[s].’ This is limited to the expenses allowed for Coverdell Savings Accounts,¹ which are tied to school-related needs, such as tuition, fees, and academic tutoring; special needs services in the case of a special needs beneficiary; books, supplies and other equipment; computer technology, equipment, and Internet access for the use of the beneficiary; and, in some cases, room and board, uniforms, transportation, and extended day (after-school) programs.”

Welner continues: “This idea of ensuring that each state could implement the program in ways that allow all flexibility is consistent with the Trump administration’s vociferous embrace of “returning education quite simply back to the states where it belongs.”  Welner, however, remains skeptical that the Trump administration really plans to return control of federal dollars back to the states:

“Unfortunately, the U.S. Treasury Department rulemaking is likely to deny states the promised flexibility, notwithstanding the administration’s rhetoric about ‘returning education to the states.’ While the law’s ardent supporters may want Democratic governors to participate, they don’t want to give them the flexibility permitted by the law itself… (T)he key issues for state leaders, particularly the governors who will make the opt-out or opt-in decision in most states, involve whether they can shape the program as it is implemented in their states.” Welner lists key concerns for governors and for those of us who have watched the damage done by the voucher programs now established by many state legislatures. “Governors will want to know… if they can:

  1. “Place requirements on SGOs involving reporting, governance, transparency, access, non-discrimination, profiteering, and prioritization of students with greater need;
  2. “Require that schools and other vendors… be accessible to students and not engage in discrimination against protected groups of students, including members of the LGBTQ+ community;
  3. “Put quality-control policies in place to weed out the lowest-quality of these vendors;
  4. “Limit the program to just one or two of the Coverdell categories, ideally research-based options such as high-impact tutoring and after-school programs.”

Welner warns, however, that powerful advocates at the federal level are “pushing hard for regulations that slam the door on any approach that does not further the growth of largely unregulated voucher programs.”

He recounts many of the problems with state level private school tuition vouchers:  Josh Cowen’s research documenting low academic achievement in voucher programs in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio; the failure of voucher programs to protect students’ civil rights; “free-exercise” justification for public dollars diverted to religious schools; failure to provide programs for disabled students; diversion of massive state dollars to support private school tuition for wealthy students; and states’ failure to regulate teacher qualifications, curriculum, equal access, and oversight of tax dollars.

Welner thinks governors might do well to wait to make the decision about opting in until they can review the formal guidance which will eventually be provided by the U.S. Treasury Department. “(F)or state leaders who are tempted to opt in, that decision could be publicly announced as conditional on the Treasury regulations allowing the state the flexibility to include specified access, quality, and non-discrimination protections for the state’s students. “

He concludes: “In sum, the federal scholarship tax credit may look to some state leaders like an opportunity to secure additional resources for students, but the risks are profound. The structure of the law, coupled with the likely direction of Treasury rulemaking, points toward a program designed not to empower states but to constrain them—pushing states into a rigid, federally controlled voucher system that undermines educational equity and quality and presents long-run threats to the fiscal stability of public schools.”

¹https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/530   The term “Coverdell education savings account” means a trust created or organized in the United States exclusively for the purpose of paying the qualified education expenses of an individual who is the designated beneficiary of the trust (and designated as a Coverdell education savings account at the time created or organized), but only if the written governing instrument creating the trust meets the following requirements….”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Race to the Top, Shame, Trump, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Arne Duncan Is Now Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2025 //
5

If you have ever wondered why I am crazy about Peter Greene, wonder no more. Just read this post that appeared on his blog. Peter is consistently smart, funny, wise, and insightful. He has a way with words. He is unerring in spotting phonies. He is fearless. Let me say it out loud: I love Peter Greene!

He wrote about the article that exposed Duncan’s true views. Until now, some of us had only inferred who he is. Now we know. Duncan”political advice” to Democrats–adopt Republican policies– is hilarious in light of Tuesday’s election results: across the nation, Democrats won school board races, and every Moms for Liberty candidate lost.

Peter Greene writes:

Mind you, on education, Duncan was always the kind of Democrat largely indistinguishable from a Republican, but with his latest print outburst (in the Washington Post, because of course it was), he further reduces the distance between himself and his successor as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. 

For this one, he teamed up with Jorge Elorza, head honcho at DFER/Education Reform Now, the hedge fundie group set up to convince Democrats that they should agree with the GOP on education.

It’s yet another example of reformsters popping up to argue that what’s really needed in education is a return to all the failed reform policies of fifteen years ago. I don’t know what has sparked this nostalgia– have they forgotten, or do they just think we have forgotten, or do they still just not understand how badly test-and-punish flopped, how useless the Common Core was, and how school choice has had to abandon claims that choice will make education better in this country.

But here come Duncan and Elorza with variations on the same old baloney.

First up– chicken littling over NAEP scores. They’re dipping! They’re low! And they’ve been dipping ever since 2010s. Whatever shall we do?

Who do Duncan and Elorza think holds the solution? Why, none other than Donald Trump.

Seriously. They are here to pimp for the federal tax credit voucher program, carefully using the language that allows them to pretend that these vouchers aren’t vouchers or tax shelters.

The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special-education services and learning technology. For both current and incoming governors, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.

The encourage governors to “unlock these resources” as if these are magic dollars stored in a lockbox somewhere and not dollars that are going to be redirected from the United States treasury to land instead in some private school’s bank account.

Democratic governors are reluctant to get into a program that “could be seen as undermining public schools.” But hey– taking these vouchers “doesn’t take a single dollar from state education budgets” says Duncan, sounding exactly like DeVos when she was pushing the same damned thing. And this line of bullshit:

It simply opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.

“At no cost to taxpayers” is absolute baloney. Every dollar is a tax dollar not paid to the government, so the only possible result must be either reduction in services, reduction in subsidies, or increase in the deficit. I guess believing in Free Federal Money is a Democrat thing.

The “support students in public and nonpublic settings” is carefully crafted baloney language as well. Federal voucher fans keep pushing the public school aspect, but then carefully shading it as money spent on tutors or uniforms or transportation and not actual schools. And they are just guessing that any of that will be acceptable because the rules for these federal vouchers aren’t written yet.

Duncan and Elorza want to claim that this money will, “in essence,” replace the disappearing money from the American Rescue Plan Act. “In essence” is doing Atlas-scale lifting here because, no, it will not. The voucher money will be spent in different ways by different people on different stuff. They are not arguing that this money will help fund public schools– just that it might fund some stuff that is sort of public education adjacent.

But how about some “analysis” from Education Reform Now, which claims that the potential scale is significant.” They claim that “the federal tax credit scholarship program could generate $3.1 billion in California, nearly $986 million in Illinois and nearly $86 million in Rhode Island each year,” drifting ever closer to “flat out lie” territory, because the federal vouchers won’t “generate” a damned cent. Pretending these numbers are real, that’s $3.1 billion in tax dollars that will go to SGOs in the state instead of the federal government. It’s redirected tax revenue, not new money. Will the feds just eat that $3.1 billion shortfall, or cut, say, education funding to California? Next time I get a flat tire, will I generate a new tire from the trunk? I think not.

In classic Duncan, he would like you to know that not following his idea makes you a Bad Person. Saying no to the federal vouchers is a “moral failure.”

Next up: Political advice.

Over the past decade, Democrats have watched our party’s historical advantage on education vanish.

Yeah, Arne, it’s more than a decade, and it has happened because you and folks like you have decided that attacking and denigrating the public education system would be a great idea. You and your ilk launched and supported policies based on the assumption that all problems in school were the sole treatable cause of economic and social inequity in this country, and that those problems were the result of really bad teachers, so a program of tests followed by punishment would make things better in schools (and erase poverty, too).

But now the GOP states are getting higher NAEP scores, so that means… something?

This is Democrats’ chance to regain the educational and moral high ground. To remind the country that Democrats fight to give every child a fair shot and that we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up, especially those left behind for too long.

Yes, Democrats– you can beat the Republicans by supporting Republican policies. And that “we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up” thing? You had a chance to do that, and you totally blew it. Defund, dismantle and privatize public schools was a lousy approach. It’s still a lousy approach.

Opting in to the federal tax credit scholarship program isn’t about abandoning Democratic values — it’s about fulfilling them.

When it comes to public education, it’s not particularly clear what Democratic values even are these days, and my tolerance for party politics is at an all time low. But I am quite sure that the interests of students, families, teachers, and public education are not served by having the GOP offer a shit sandwich and the Democrats countering with, “We will also offer a shit sandwich, but we will say nice things about it and draw a D on it with mayonnaise.”

We have always heard that Arne Duncan is a nice guy, and I have no reason to believe that’s not true. But what would really be nice would be for him to go away and never talk about education ever again. Just go have a nice food truck lunch with Betsy DeVos.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Character, Closing schools, Common Core, DFER, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Race to the Top, Trump

Parents Are the Most Important Element in Student Learning

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
18

Way back in 2014, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was selling the idea that teachers should be rewarded or punished based on their students’ test scores. That idea, baked into Race to the Top, was a dismal failure. Teachers who taught the neediest kids got low ratings, and teachers in the most advantaged schools got the highest ratings. Bill Gates was similarly infatuated with the idea, and he handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to districts and charter chains to test it. Rigorous evaluation showed it to be demoralizing to teachers with no impact on test scores.

What we should have learned from the experience of Race to the Top is that carrots and sticks applied to teachers do not help students and do not improve education.

It’s parents and home life that have the largest effect on student learning. So said the American Statistical Association in 2014, making a futile attempt to persuade Secretary Duncan that he was on the wrong track.

Susan E. Mayer and Ariel Kalil explain why policymakers should focus on parents and help them become better parents. [Let me add, however, that I disagree with their comments about reading and math proficiency. As I have written many times before, NAEP proficiency is not grade level; it is a high bar, and it’s unlikely that most students would ever score the equivalent of an A.]

They write:

American schoolchildren are performing abysmally in tests of basic skills. Only 36% of fourth-grade students were deemed proficient in national math tests and only 33% were deemed proficient in reading as of 2022, the latest year for which such data is available.

Those numbers are even worse than before the pandemic – 5 percentage points lower in math from 2019 and 2 percentage points lower in reading. And the drop in reading and math proficiency after the pandemic has happened to both economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. Students across the board need help.

There is a tendency to blame schools – and by extension, teachers – for students’ poor performance. The temptation to focus solely on schools, however, is misguided. Parents are the ones who must build the foundation for children’s learning. Yet parenting has long been viewed as a private behavior for which women are presumed to possess unique instincts, leaving parents with little evidence-based guidance on how to develop their children’s skills.

Meanwhile, the political right often favors more accountability for teachers, more charter schools and more vouchers for private schools. The political left often favors more teacher training, reducing class sizes, more equitable distribution of school resources and patience as students recover from the pandemic-related dip in scores.

But it’s parents and family background that make the biggest difference. This is evident because the gap in children’s math and reading test scores is already large at the start of kindergarten, in line with their socioeconomic status, and does not narrow as children progress through schooling.

Many people think that the solution, therefore, is to improve parents’ socioeconomic status, which will in turn improve children’s skills. But the reason that low-income parents parent their children differently than high-income parents is not a causal result of the low income itself. Improving parents’ household income would be laudable for many reasons, but experimental evidence shows that giving parents cash payments after they have a child neither changes parental investments nor changes the child’s skills. [Note from Diane: I disagree. Making cash payments is not the same as improving family socioeconomic status; investing in good jobs, housing, and long-term improvements in SES would make a huge difference.]

Instead, we need to support parents in directly changing what they do. Our experimental research on specific parent behaviors that boost child skills points to the importance of reading and talking to children. Analysis we conducted of the American Time Use Survey shows that on average, however, only 21% of mothers of children ages 3 to 6 report spending daily time reading with their child, only 30% report any daily time playing games with them, and only 11% report daily time dedicated to “listening or talking with” their child.

Worse, many parents are misinformed about how to prepare their young children for school. According to a survey we conducted with 2,000 parents in Chicago, about 25% more parents thought it was essential that children know the alphabet before starting school than thought it was important to spark children’s curiosity.

But this is misguided. Children will eventually learn the alphabet and how to count to 50. Especially for parents with less than a four-year college degree, language interactions with young children – parental storytelling, reading books and asking questions about them – along with math interactions such as playing with shape blocks and reading books about numbers are correlated more strongly with growth in children’s language and math skills than activities such as teaching the alphabet and counting or practicing letter sounds and how to calculate simple sums.

We do a disservice to parents by not redirecting their attention from rote skills, such as memorizing letters, sounds and numbers, to more open-ended inquiry. But researchers are limited as well. We need many more resources devoted to improving high-quality research on understanding precisely what types of parent engagement build the child skills necessary for success in later life. We also need much more research on how to boost parents’ capacity for child skill-building.

But first we must acknowledge that mothers, fathers and other caregivers play a crucial role in building children’s skills. Second, we have to acknowledge that as a nation, we have an interest in what parents do. Children are not just the property of their parents. They are the nation’s future.

Their schooling can only build upon the foundation that parents provide. The United States spends more on education per pupil and less on supporting parents than almost any other wealthy country. The government needs to expand its vision of what it means to support childhood development and invest in helping parents create nurturing learning environments at home in the years before formal schooling begins.

We should signal the value children have for the nation by making work compatible with raising children through family leave, providing access to health care for all children and caretakers and offering free access for children to libraries and museums where they can build a love of learning.

We should also explore new solutions, such as providing digital libraries and utilizing technology in innovative ways to support parents in helping their children learn. Evidence from our recent research shows that this can increase parental reading, boost child language development and close the socioeconomic gap in children’s language skill.

Susan E. Mayer is a professor and a dean emeritus at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. 

Ariel Kalil is the Daniel Levin Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. They are the directors of the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the University of Chicago.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Reform, Literacy, Parents, Race to the Top, Research

What Can the Federal Government Do to Promote Learning?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2025 //
13

On May 10, Dana Goldstein wrote a long article in The New York Times about how education disappeared as a national or federal issue. Why, she wondered, did the two major parties ignore education in the 2024 campaign? Kamala Harris supported public schools and welcomed the support of the two big teachers’ unions, but she did not offer a flashy new program to raise test scores. Trump campaigned on a promise to privatize public funding, promote vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, home schooling–anything but public schools, which he regularly attacked as dens of iniquity, indoctrination, and DEI.

Goldstein is the best education writer at The Times, and her reflections are worth considering.

She started:

What happened to learning as a national priority?

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.

At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.

President Trump has been fixated in his second term on imposing ideological obedience on schools.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”Since taking office, he has pursued this goal with startling energy — assaulting higher education while adopting a strategy of neglect toward the federal government’s traditional role in primary and secondary schools. He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress, and ended efforts to share knowledge with schools about which teaching strategies lead to the best results. A spokeswoman for the administration said that low test scores justify cuts in federal spending. “What we are doing right now with education is clearly not working,” she said.

Mr. Trump has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be “patriotic” — a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.

Actually, federal law explicitly forbids any federal official from attempting to influence the curriculum or textbooks in schools.

Education lawyer Dan Gordon wrote about the multiple laws that prevent any federal official from trying to dictate, supervise, control or interfere with curriculum. There is no sterner prohibition in federal law than the one that keeps federal officials from trying to dictate what schools teach.

Of course, Trump never worries about the limits imposed by laws. He does what he wants and leaves the courts to decide whether he went too far.

Goldstein continued:

Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Mr. Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. When Kamala Harris was running for president last year, she spoke about student loan forgiveness and resisting right-wing book bans. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.

All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.

“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”

I have been writing about federal education policy for almost fifty years. There are things we have learned since Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. That law was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s agenda. Its purpose was to send federal funds to the schools enrolling the poorest students. Its purpose was not to raise test scores but to provide greater equity of resources.

Over time, the federal government took on an assertive role in defending the rights of students to an education: students with disabilities; students who did not speak English; and students attending illegally segregated schools.

In 1983, a commission appointed by President Reagan’s Secretary of Education Terrell Bell declared that American schools were in crisis because of low academic standards. Many states began implementing state tests and raising standards for promotion and graduation.

President George H.W. Bush convened a meeting of the nation’s governors, and they endorsed an ambitious set of “national goals” for the year 2000. E.g., the U.S. will be first in the world by the year 2000; all children will start school ready to learn by 2000. None of the goals–other than the rise of the high school graduation rate to 90%–was met.

The Clinton administration endorsed the national goals and passed legislation (“Goals 2000”) to encourages states to create their own standards and tests. President Clinton made clear, however, that he hoped for national standards and tests.

President George W. Bush came to office with a far-reaching, unprecedented plan called “No Child Left Behind” to reform education by a heavy emphasis on annual testing of reading and math. He claimed that because of his test-based policy, there had been a “Texas Miracle,” which could be replicated on a national scale. NCLB set unreachable goals, saying that every school would have 100% of their students reach proficiency by the year 2014. And if they were not on track to meet that impossible goals, the schools would face increasingly harsh punishments.

In no nation in the world have 100% of all students ever reached proficiency.

Scores rose, as did test-prep. Many untested subjects lost time in the curriculum or disappeared. Reading and math were tested every year from grades 3-8, as the law prescribed. What didn’t matter were science, history, civics, the arts, even recess.

Some schools were sanctioned or even closed for falling behind. Schools were dominated by the all-important reading and math tests. Some districts cheated. Some superintendents were jailed.

In 2001, there were scholars who warned that the “Texas Miracle” was a hoax. Congress didn’t listen. In time the nation learned that there was no Texas Miracle, never had been. But Congress clung to NCLB because they had no other ideas.

When Obama took office in 2009, educators hoped for relief from the annual testing mandates but they were soon disappointed. Obama chose Arne Duncan, who had led the Chicago schools but had never been a teacher. Duncan worked with consultants from the Gates and Broad Foundations and created a national competition for the states called Race to the Top. Duncan had a pot of $5 billion that Congress had given him for education reform.

Race to the Top offered big rewards to states that applied and won. To be eligible, states had to authorize the creation of charter schools (almost every state did); they had to agree to adopt common national standards (that meant the Common Core standards, funded wholly by the Gates Foundation and not yet completed); sign up for one of two federally funded standardized tests (PARCC or Smarter Balanced) ; and agree to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students. Eighteen states won huge rewards. There were other conditions but these were the most consequential.

Tennessee won $500 million. It is hard to see what, if anything, is better in Tennessee because of that audacious prize. The state put $100 million into an “Achievement School District,” which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools into a new district and turned them into charters. Chris Barbic, leader of the YES Prep charter chain in Houston was hired to run it. He pledged that within five years, the lowest-performing schools in the state would rank among the top 20% in the state. None of them did. The ASD was ultimately closed down.

Duncan had a great fondness for charter schools because they were the latest thing in Chicago; while superintendent, he had launched a program he called Renaissance 2010, in which he pledged to close 80 public schools and open 100 charter schools. Duncan viewed charters as miraculous. Ultimately Chicago’s charter sector produced numerous scandals but no miracles.

I have written a lot about Race to the Top over the years. It was layered on top of Bush’s NCLB, but it was even more punitive. It targeted teachers and blamed them if students got low scores. Its requirement that states evaluate teachers by student test scores was a dismal failure. The American Statistical Association warned against it from the outset, pointing out that students’ home life affected test scores more than their teachers.

Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 failed. It destroyed communities. Its strategy of closing neighborhood schools and dispersing students encountered growing resistance. The first schools that Duncan launched as his exemplars were eventually closed. In 2021, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to end its largest “school turnaround” program, managed by a private group, and return its 31 campuses to district control. Duncan’s fervent belief in “turnaround” schools was derided as a historical relic.

Race to the Top failed. The proliferation of charter schools, aided by a hefty federal subsidy, drained students and resources from public schools. Charter schools close their doors at a rapid pace: 26% are gone in their first five years; 39% in their first ten years. In addition, due to lax accountability, charters have demonstrated egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Common Core was supposed to lift test scores and reduce achievement gaps, but it did neither. Conservative commentator Mike Petrilli referred to 2007-2017 as “the lost decade.” Scores stagnated and achievement gaps barely budged.

So what have we learned?

This is what I have learned: politicians are not good at telling educators how to teach. The Department of Education (which barely exists as of now) is not made up of educators. It was not in a position to lead school reform. Nor is the Secretary of Education. Nor is the President. Would you want the State legislature or Congress telling surgeons how to do their job?

The most important thing that the national government can do is to ensure that schools have the funding they need to pay their staff, reduce class sizes, and update their facilities.

The federal government should have a robust program of data collection, so we have accurate information about students, teachers, and schools.

The federal government should not replicate its past failures.

What Congress can do very effectively is to ensure that the nation’s schools have the resources they need; that children have access to nutrition and medical care; and that pregnant women get prenatal care so that their babies are born healthy.

Categories Civil Rights, Closing schools, Curriculum, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Graduation rates, Health, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Republicans, Segregation, Special Education, Standardized Testing, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

Bye Bye, Tennessee Non-Achievement School District

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2025 //
5

If your memory is good, you may recall Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top, which had $5 billion of unrestricted funds with which to spur education reform. Duncan had a contest in which states competed for a piece of that big pie. To be eligible to compete, states had to pass a law authorizing charter schools, and almost every state did. They had to agree to adopt national standards, which meant the unfinished, untried Common Core State Standards, as well as the tests based on the standards. They had to agree to evaluate individual teachers based on the rise or fall of the test scores of their students.

Eighteen states “won.”

The biggest winner was Tennessee, which won $500 million. Tennessee’s biggest new program was the creation of its so-called Achievement School District. The ASD would gather the lowest performing schools in the state into a non-contiguous district and turn them into charter schoools.

The ASD hired Chris Barbic, leader of Houston’s YES Prep charter chain, to run the ASD. Barbic pledged that he would raise the state’s lowest-performing schools into top-performing schools in five years.

He failed. The state’s lowest performing schools continued to have low scores. In 2015, he resigned, saying he needed to focus on his health and family.

The ASD limped along for another decade, without success. Nonetheless, some other states–including Nevada and North Carolina–copied the model, creating their own all-charter districts. They also failed.

The Tennessee Legislature voted this week to shut down the ASD.

The ASD removed low-performing schools from local control and placed them under a state-run district, with the goal to push Tennessee’s bottom 5% of schools to the top 25%. Many of the schools were turned over to charter operators to run under 10-year contracts.

Research showed the ASD led to high teacher turnover, and did not generate long-term improvements for students. The district also faced community backlash for taking over schools in districts that served mostly low-income communities and predominantly Black student populations. The ASD cost taxpayers over $1 billion. Only three schools remain in the ASD.

Every other part of Race to the Top failed. Evaluating teachers by test scores was a disaster: it rewarded teachers in affluent districts and schools while penalizing those who taught the neediest students. Charter schools did not have higher scores than public schools unless they chose their students carefully, excluding the neediest. The Common Core standards, with which tests, textbooks and teacher education were aligned, had no impact on test scores. The U.S. Department of Education evaluated Race to the Top and declared it a failure., in a report quietly released on the last day of the Obama administration.

On to vouchers! Since voucher students don’t take state tests, no one will know that this is a boondoggle that benefits those already in private and religious schools.

The search for miracles and panaceas goes on.

Trump’s answer. Parents know best.

Next time you get surgery, make sure the surgeon is not licensed. Next time you take a flight, be sure to fly with an unlicensed pilot.

Categories Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Obama, Race to the Top, Tennessee
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