The National Governors Association is led this year by Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a cheerleader for charter schools who launched two of his own.
The NGA, at Polis’ instigation, chose K-12 education as its leading issue for the year, which is very bad news, considering his low opinion of public schools.
At the top of their concerns was the failure of public schools to prepare students for the workforce. Long ago, education leaders used to describe the purpose of education as preparation for citizenship in a democratic society. But that was then and this is now.
DeGuire described the cohort assembled by Governor Polis, all leaders of the corporate reform sector:
As the 2024-25 chair of the National Governors Association, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, selected K-12 education as the priority of the NGA’s yearlong initiative. Titled “Let’s Get Ready! Educating all Americans for Success,” the project defined its purpose in its call to action: Identify solutions to address the belief that schools are not preparing graduates adequately for the work force today.
The initiative had support from philanthropic foundations and companies that promote technology-related solutions, school choice, data-driven accountability, and other neoliberal market-based reforms in public education. One of the supporters, Stand Together Trust, founded by Charles Koch, provided millions to groups that back charter schools and other “alternatives to public education.”
Many of the “project team” members were involved with organizations that prioritized “redesigning” the public education system. Polis has been a longtime supporter of expanding charter schools and workforce training as ways to address deficits in student outcomes, and eight of his staff worked on this project. Project team member Jen Walmer was on Polis’ staff in his first administration, and she worked previously as the Colorado director of Democrats for Education reform, which continues to call for Democrats to support school choice and charters.
The project team also included representatives from Watershed Advisors, All4Ed, Savi Advising, and the Urban Institute. Watershed’s CEO, Kunjan Narechania, was the CEO of the all-charter Recovery School District in New Orleans. Several Watershedand All4Ed staff either worked or trained in the Chiefs for Change program, which Jeb Bush founded to promote charter school models. All4Ed promotes online learning in both charter and district schools.
Savi Advising’s founder, Archana Patel, worked for KIPP charter schools and was the senior director at the Broad Academy, a training ground for school leaders to promote charter schools. The Urban Institute published research that downplayed the effects caused by charter schools in exacerbating school segregation. The Institute received $11 million from the Walton Family Foundation and other foundations to identify “measures of students’ skills and competencies in prekindergarten (PK) through 12th grade that drive economic mobility.”
Polis chaired seven “convening” sessions to determine the project’s outcomes. Featured “experts” at the sessions included Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy Charter schools in New York; Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a computer-based learning system; Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools; John B. King, founder of the Uncommon schools charter chain; Angela Duckworth, co-founder with Dave Levin (KIPP charter school chain founder) of the now defunct Character Lab; and Steve Levitt, author of Freakonomics and a promoter of personalized AI tutoring.
Secretary McMahon added her views about the needs of students today:
McMahon commented that a “return to shop classes” would serve some students better for their future job opportunities. She stated, “We have to rethink how we’re doing education … from beginning to end the goal is to get people into a productive job.”
“Shop classes”? Really. That’s really turning the clock back!
At a time when major corporations are shedding tens of thousands of workers and executives, when AI poses a challenge to many current occupations, none of these neoliberal ideas seems relevant today.
DeGuire recommends a broader role for education today:
While workforce preparation is an important part of schooling, defining education primarily as a pipeline for economic productivity in the marketplace ignores the broader purposes of education. The Polis report neglects to focus on the essential role educators provide in developing positive relationships with students, and the benefits students gain through an emphasis on critical thinking, creativity, collaborative learning and exposure to the arts, social sciences and the humanities. Focusing primarily on charter schools as the answer to America’s problems in education negates the findings that 70% of parents are satisfied with their local public schools, as well as the research that charter schools have not proven to be the answer to America’s education problems.
One of the defining characteristics of corporate reformers is that they cling to failed ideas. They have claimed for the past 35 years that school choice, high-stakes testing, competition, and incentives would drive school improvement. They refuse to admit that their ideas have been tried and didn’t work. NCLB, Race to the Top, and Common Core came and went. Of course, the “reformers” are dissatisfied because none of their promises was successful.
Rather than admit defeat, they keep repeating the same old same old.
If you have been following this blog for a long time, you know that in my estimation one of the best (actually the best) education bloggers is Peter Greene. Peter taught high school students for 39 years in Pennsylvania. He knows more about teaching than all the experts at the elite universities.
Best of all, he has a keen eye for flimflammery and a great sense of humor. His is one of the few blogs that makes me laugh out loud. He pierces through BS and shysters with ease. And he’s more prolific than anyone I know. Some years back, I devoted every post on one day to Peter’s writings. I consider him to be one of my teachers.
So I was immensely grateful when I discovered that he reviewed my memoirs in both Forbes and, in a different voice, on his blog Curmudgacation.
Most folks know the basic outline of the Ravitch career, that she was a recognized and successful part of the conservative ed reform establishment who then turned away from the Dark Side and joined the Resistance–hell, basically co-founded the Resistance.
I have never heard her talk or write much about what that change cost her, and she doesn’t really talk about it in those terms in this book, but the early chapters show just how in that world she was. Connected to all the right people, welcome at all the right gatherings, in demand as a speaker, and the people–the names just keep coming. Ravitch was in the Room Where It Happens, and not just in it, but close friends with some of the folks in it with her. And she walked away from all that.
I don’t point to that to say we should feel sad for what she gave up, but as a sign of just how tough she is. She looked at the reality on the ground and concluded that she had to change some core beliefs, and having changed them, she had to act on them. If there was more of that kind of intellectual and ethical toughness in the world, the world would be a better place. It’s unusual enough that folks on the privatizer side have often assumed that someone must be paying her off, and a handful of people on the public school side were reluctant to fully trust her.
There are other details in the book that attest to her guts and hard work. Her first book, The Great School Wars, was a history of the New York City public school system– a massive research project that Ravitch in her mid-thirties just assigned to herself, a project so thorough and well-constructed that she could use it as her PhD thesis.
There are lots of fun details in the book– imagine the young Diane Ravitch swinging on a rope ladder outside a Wellesley dorm room where a formal dinner was in progress.
The book tells the story of how she got there, how she concluded that the policies that she had believed in were simply not so. And again– many another person would have at that point either kept going through the motions, or retreated to a quiet cave, but Diane instead became an outspoken critic of the very policies, organizations, and people who had been her professional world.
Back in the early 2010s, I was a high school English teacher in a quiet rural and small town corner of Pennsylvania. I knew things were happening in education that just felt really wrong, and I went searching for answers. What I found was Diane Ravitch’s blog, which was like a gathering place for many voices of advocacy for public school. It was where I found many writers who could help me make sense of things like Common Core and NCLB’s undermining of public education.
There are several people who were responsible for my finding an audience (or the audience finding me) but it was Diane’s blog that got me my earliest connections to audiences. I didn’t know any of these folks, didn’t have any of the connections that hold together movements. At my first NPE conference, the most common question I got was some version of “Who the heck are you and where did you come from?” Diane’s network had made it possible for me to find my connections with a larger movement.
I’m just one example of how Diane’s extraordinary generosity in sharing her platform allowed all sorts of supporters of public education from all across the country to connect and support each other. It’s a notably different approach to leadership than, say, making a movement all about yourself in an attempt to collect personal power on the backs of followers instead of lifting everyone up to be a leader and activist in their own little corner of the world.
The book provides part of answer to where a person like Diane comes from, where that kind of intellectual and ethical courage and diligence come from. And it also provides a clear, compact explaining of where modern ed reform has gone wrong, from the toxic test-and-punish approach of NCLB to the billionaire-driven privatization push to the culture panic debates currently raging. If you want to hand someone a quick simple explainer of what has gone wrong, you can do worse than the last few chapters of this book.
At 223 pages, this is a brisk read but an illuminating one. I highly recommend it
I am reposting this article because I posted it before I had finished preparing it, omitting the name of the author and the publication.
Trump decided long before the 2024 election to close the Department of Education. Like many others, I predicted that Congress would not allow him to close the Department. I said, even Republicans will oppose closing the Department. What I did not anticipate was that Trump would destroy the Department by firing its employees and transferring its functions to other agencies.
Warning: if Trump turns funding for special education into block grants to states without strings, the money could be used for charters and vouchers, not for children with disabilities.
Earlier this month, the Trump Administration took aim at a vital program with deep bipartisan support that provides screening, accommodations, and interventions for 7.5 million disabled children each year, imperiling their access to the accommodations and services they need to succeed at school. The Administration announced that it intends to fire nearly all the staff responsible for distributing federal funding and ensuring states use it to provide disabled students the supports and services they need to succeed in school, from assistive technology to specialized teachers. Their work makes it possible for students with disabilities to get the free, appropriate public education they are guaranteed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Gutting the staff who administer IDEA not only threatens the quality education disabled children need, but also undermines Congress’s constitutional authority — and underscores why legislators must enact safeguards to ensure that the Administration follows the laws Congress passes.
This reckless and illegal action is another step toward the Administration’s goal of dismantling the Department of Education, which started with firing nearly half its staff in March, including the legal staff in the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), who protect disabled students’ rights. With this latest action, the Trump Administration is effectively shuttering OSEP, which distributed $15 billion in federal grants to schools in 2025. These grants pay for special education teachers and aides, speech and occupational therapists, assistive technology, screening and early intervention for infants and toddlers, and other critical services and supports that millions of families rely upon.
IDEA requires that the Education Department verify that states are lawfully supporting students with disabilities before granting funds, and to require states to take corrective action if they are not. Without OSEP staff, it is unclear who will review and certify states’ grant applications and ensure funds are lawfully distributed and that states are using them appropriately.
OSEP staff use a system of reporting, analysis, and auditing to ensure children’s needs are being met. They intervene if a school district systematically isn’t providing an accommodation that students need — for example, not hiring enough speech therapists or purchasing devices that allow non-verbal students to communicate. These cuts come as funding for public schools and the students they serve is already under threat from a growing list of sources, including state tax cuts, private school vouchers, and other federal actions.
About 15 percent of students receive services under IDEA. They have conditions such as vision and hearing impairments, speech and language delays, learning disabilities, and developmental disabilities such as autism, Down Syndrome, and intellectual disability. Meeting their needs requires not only funding, but continual oversight and assistance, because school districts often struggle to comply with the law’s requirements. OSEP gives states and school districts the assistance and assurance they need to avoid penalties or prevent a loss of federal funds in the future and, most importantly, to meet the needs of their disabled students.
IDEA has a long history of bipartisan support. Congress and President George H.W. Bush enacted the law on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis in 1990. In 2004, President George W. Bush and Congress reauthorized IDEA with substantial amendments, again with strong bipartisan approval. Despite President Trump’s call during the shutdown to end “Democrat programs,” federal IDEA funding benefits students and families in every state and across all political affiliations.
The Administration has been vocal about its desire to dismantle the Education Department, but it lacks the legal authority to make such a change. The President issued an executive order calling for the dissolution of the department, and he has spoken about moving IDEA administration to the Department of Health and Human Services. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought’s Project 2025 proposed turning IDEA into a block grant with “no strings attached.”
But an act of Congress is required to dismantle the Department of Education or undo the statutory requirements for the department to administer IDEAand maintain an Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. The Administration has not requested these changes, including as part of its 2026 budget request. And Congress has shown no interest in either ending the Department of Education or moving the special education office. The 2026 education funding bills approved by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees would not defund the Department of Education nor change its legal responsibility to implement IDEA.
This latest harmful and unlawful action by the Trump Administration will cause needless uncertainty and turmoil: they have fired the staff tasked with overseeing special education programs with no plan for fulfilling their statutory responsibilities. This is another illustration of why Congress must assert its authority to ensure that the Administration faithfully execute the laws it passes, including on federal agency structure, functions, and personnel. Congress should not let the Trump Administration take yet another step that undermines their role, at the expense of disabled children and their families.
Long ago, back in the 1990s, the idea of vouchers was proposed as a brand new idea. Its advocates said that vouchers would “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools.” They presented themselves as champions of poor and needy kids and predicted that vouchers would change the lives of these children for the better. Eminent figures proclaimed that school choice was “the civil rights issue” of our time.
Of course, as many writers have explained, vouchers were not a brand new idea. They were popular among segregationists after the 1954 Brown decision. Several Southern states passed voucher laws in that era that were eventually knocked down by federal courts as a ploy to maintain all-white schools.
Trump’s first Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos –never considered a leader of civil rights–championed vouchers. So does Trump’s current Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
But guess who’s getting vouchers? Not the poor kids. Not the neediest kids. Mostly the kids who were already enrolled in religious and private schools.
The story is the same in every state but accentuated in states where every student can claim a voucher, regardless of family income, as in Florida and Arizona.
Now the numbers are available in Arkansas: 88% of students who use vouchers never attended public schools.
On Oct. 3, the Arkansas Department of Education released its annual report on school vouchers (or as the state calls them, “Educational Freedom Accounts”). The voucher program, which was created by Gov. Sarah Sanders’ Arkansas LEARNS Act in 2023, gives public money to private school and homeschool families to pay the cost of tuition, fees, supplies and other expenses.
Among the takeaways of the new report: Just one of every eight voucher participants in Year 2 of the program was enrolled in a public school the year before. (Year 2 was the 2024-25 school year; we’re currently in Year 3.)
This matters because Sanders and other school choice supporters often frame vouchers as a lifeline for poor families to escape failing public schools. Opponents of voucher programs say the money tends to mostly go to existing private school and homeschool families.
The Idaho state legislature passed a $50 million plan to subsidize vouchers. The usual arguments for vouchers–choice and competition–don’t apply in a largely rural state. The primary beneficiaries will be wealthy families whose children are already enrolled in private schools. The biggest losers will be rural schools, which desperately need upgrades.
“(I)t shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools.” — Article IX, Section 1, Idaho Constitution
A coalition of public school advocates announced Wednesday that it is asking the Idaho Supreme Court to rule that a refundable tax credit for families who send their kids to private schools is a violation of the Idaho constitution’s education clause.
We say it’s about time.
And just in time, since House Bill 93, which was passed last legislative session, allows families to start applying for the credits in January.
The law set aside up to $50 million for the tax credits.
We would much rather see that $50 million go toward the public education system, hiring more teachers, more counselors, repairing derelict school buildings and properly funding special education, which has an $80 million shortfall, according to the Office of Performance Evaluations.null
Most voucher schemes in other states started out like Idaho’s — small, limited and targeted. But state after state, the vouchers grew and are blowing holes in state budgets everywhere.
Many of these vouchers go to wealthy families who already have the means to pay for private school, and the vouchers merely subsidize part of the cost of a private school tuition.
The vouchers are open to fraud, waste and abuse.
There’s no accountability built into Idaho’s voucher system.
The Idaho Supreme Court won’t be interested in such policy discussions, but justices will be interested in hearing what we think is a valid constitutional argument.
One word, in particular, provides their best legal challenge: “uniform.”
We are compelled by the testimony Wednesday of one mother who said her children were denied entry to a public school based on their religion. A public school can’t do that.
The argument is not without precedent.
A district court judge in Salt Lake City halted Utah’s education savings account programearlier this year, according to Idaho Education News. The state’s teachers’ union argued that the Utah Constitution bars state dollars from funding an education system that’s not free or open to all students.
In June, an Ohio state judge struck down that state’s voucher program, ruling that the program created a separate, unfunded, nonpublic system and funneled public money to private religious institutions. That, the judge ruled, violated constitutional mandates to fund a single public school system.
In 2024, the South Carolina Supreme Court struck down a 2023 law that created a private school voucher system. The court said the law illegally funneled state public funds to private schools, which is prohibited by the state constitution. The decision said vouchers undermine the state’s mandate to support public schools for all students.
We find it particularly appropriate that Idaho’s organizers announced this legal challenge on Constitution Day. Yes, it’s referring to the U.S. Constitution, but Idaho legislators should hold Idaho’s Constitution in equally high regard.
Where are all of Idaho’s “original meaning,” “not a living document” conservatives in this state when it comes to the state constitution’s education clause?
Because, if you read the Idaho Constitution plainly, vouchers just don’t pass muster.
Let’s hope the Idaho Supreme Court sees it the same way.
Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the the danger that school choice and testing posed to public schools. Its title: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. I named a few of the billionaires funding the attacks on public schools, teachers, and unions–Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family–calling them “The Billionaire Boys Club.” Little did I know that they were the tip of the billionaire iceberg.
My hope in 2010 was that public school supporters would block the privatization of their schools. Public schools are as American as apple pie. I wanted the public to wake up, rally around their public schools, and repel the hedge fund managers and billionaires who were funding the privatization movement.
I was too optimistic.
The attacks escalated, fueled by the political power that money buys. The major media bought the corporate reform narrative hook, line, and sinker.
Neoliberal corporate reform brought us high-stakes standardized testing, A-F ratings for schools, charter schools, school closings, and rating teachers by the test scores of their students. And cheating scandals. All to get higher test scores, which never happened.
Now, Jennifer Berkshire asks on her blog The Education Wars whether it’s all over for public schools. Jennifer appreciates the importance of public schools as community builders and civic institutions that serve the common good.
I won’t lie. If you’re a member of Team Public Education, as I am, it has been a tough summer. And if you, like me, have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of school privatization, it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future we’ve been warning about has arrived. Five years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote a book called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: the Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School that culminated in a sort of “Black Mirror” chapter called “education a la carte.” In it, we described how the ultimate vision of school privatization advocates wasn’t simply to shift the nation’s youngsters into private schools, but to ‘unbundle’ education into a vast array of products for consumers to purchase on Amazon-like exchanges. Lest you think we were exaggerating, turn your attention to Florida, where, as Sue Woltanski documents, project unbundle has arrived with a vengence.
Florida, as usual, is slightly ahead of the curve. But the accelerating collapse of public schools in the state, chronicled in this recent New York Times story, pushed along by the now universal school voucher program, will soon be coming to a state near you. The NYT piece, by the way, was just one of many ‘are public schools over?’ stories to drop in recent weeks. The Washington Postversion headed to peer in the window of the GOP vision for education. Spoiler: it entails replacing public schools with “a marketplace of school options.” Then, of course, there was the annual PDK survey of attitudes towards public education, which found both sinking approval of the nation’s schools (with the usual exception for local schools) and rising warmth towards the idea of private school vouchers. As legal scholar Derek Black put it, “The deep well of faith in public education has a disastrous leak.”
To understand what’s happening, I’m going to pause here to spend some time with yet another of the ‘are public schools through?’ stories, Chandler Fritz’s eye-opening new feature for Harper’s, “The Homemade Scholar.” Fritz, a teacher and writer who pens the “Arizona Room” newsletter, took a job at a private religious microschool in order to get a close up view of Arizona’s education marketplace, what he describes as “a new frontier in American education.” I recommend paying attention to this piece because 1) Fritz is a terrific writer and 2) he provides real insights into the appeal of vouchers, or as they’re billed in AZ, education savings accounts—something my own writing rarely reckons with.
Fritz finds a grab bag of reasons that students and parents are drawn to this particular microschool, most of which will be familiar to you: a hunger for ‘customization,’ the desire for religious instruction, the appeal of a small setting, conservative backlash against public education. But there’s another reason we don’t hear as much about—the opposition to the standardized testing that shapes every aspect of what’s left of our public schools. Fritz’s piece is long (the audio version clocks in at nearly an hour), and infuriating in parts, but his observations regarding the attitudes of these ‘education consumers’ towards standardized tests get straight to the point: they hate them.
Bad math
A similar theme pops up in Dana Goldstein’s recent portrayal of the impact of vouchers on schools in Florida’s Orange County. While three quarters of the schools in the district earned an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ on the state’s school accountability report card, parents are eager to free their kids from the burden of taking the state tests, something Florida education watchdog Billy Townsend has been tartly observing for years. Now, I mention opposition to standardized testing here because, even in our deeply divided times, it is a cause that unites parents across virtually any line of division. If you don’t believe me, head down to Texas, where, in addition to re-gerrymandering the state’s electoral maps, legislators have also been pretending to address the popular revolt against the STAAR Test.
But there’s another reason to revisit the antipathy to testing. While you’ve been distracted by the relentless tide of bad and worse news, what’s left of the education reform movement has been busy reemerging, zombie style, seemingly without having learned a single thing about why it flopped in the first place. There are overt signs of the zombie’s return—like Democrats for Education Reform trying to rally the party around a vision of education ‘abundance,’ or Andrew Cuomo, flailing in the NYC mayoral race, now rebranding himself as the education reform candidate with a pledge to shut down failing schools and replace them with new ‘schools of promise.’ Then there’s the pundit-level narrative taking shape in which education reform was working just great until the teachers unions ruined everything and/or Democrats lost their nerve.
This version of events, encapsulated in this recent David Brooks column, goes like this:
School reform was an attempt to disrupt the caste system, to widen opportunity for the less privileged. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama angered core Democratic constituencies like teachers unions in order to expand opportunity down the income scale. But now Democrats have basically given up. Joe Biden didn’t devote much energy to education reform. Kamala Harris ran for president without anything like a robust education reform agenda.
Brooks goes on to cite Michael Petrilli on the ‘Southern surge,’ the rise in test scores in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee (but not Florida) that has education reformers so excited. Kelsey Piper, authoress at the brand new outlet the Argument, is excited too. In her back-and-forth with leftist policy analyst Matt Bruenig over the question of whether giving parents cash benefits poor children, Piper comes down squarely on the side of fixing the schools.
I think school reform after school reform has served every conceivable interest group except students (who do not vote) and so have failed to meaningfully increase literacy and numeracy, even though we now have a road map for how to genuinely let every child thrive.
If you guessed that the ‘road map’ referred to here is Mississippi, you would be correct. Mississippi, by the way, is a national leader in child poverty levels, an honor that the state, which just eliminated its income tax, seems determined to hold on to.
Proxy war
Such ‘if only the band would get back together’ takes somehow miss what a flop much of our recent version of education reform turned out to be. Here’s a partial list. The backlash to Common Core on the right didn’t just help to usher in Donald Trump but played a role in transforming the GOP from the party of big business (which was all in on pushing the Common Core standards) to one dominated by aggrieved populists. And the over selling of college tapped into a well of resentment so deep that the entire system of higher education is now threatened. Then there is the relentless push to narrow the purpose of school down to standardized testing and workforce prep, a bipartisan cause that, as I argue in a forthcoming essay in the Baffler, has now been abandoned by the right in favor of education that prizes ‘virtue’ over vocation, even as many Democrats continue to beat the ‘career readiness’ drum.
I’m not the only one to point this out, by the way. Teacher-turned-writer Nora De La Cour makes a compelling case that the appeal of so-called classical charter schools is due in part to the damage done to public education by neoliberal education reform. Students at these rapidly spreading classical schools encounter the ‘great books.’ Their public school peers get “decontextualized excerpts in corporate-produced test prep materials,” writes De La Cour.
Which brings me to the main point of this piece. (Finally!) Part of what’s so frustrating about our current moment is that by leaning into a deeply unpopular vision for public schools—test them, close them, make them compete—a certain brand of Democrat is essentially incentivizing parents to seek out test-free alternatives. Consider too that we’re in the midst of a fierce intraparty debate over what Democrats need to do to win. For the education reform wing of party, the answer to the question is to go hard at teachers unions and double down on school accountability, while also embracing school vouchers.
While this vision is inherently contradictory, it’s also a loser with voters. There may be no single less appealing sales pitch than ‘we’re going to close your school.’ Just ask former Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who was so unpopular in the city’s minority neighborhoods after shuttering 50 schools that he couldn’t run for reelection. As voucher programs expand rapidly, we’re about to enter a new era of school closures. If you don’t believe me, just check out this statement from a CATO Institute spox in response to that WaPo story on Arizona:
It’s tough for some families when their school—public or private—closes. Kids miss their friends, teachers worry about their jobs, parents have to adjust their transportation plans. But stories bemoaning public schools losing enrollment due to school choice policies are missing the point. Should parents who want a different option for their children be forced to stay in their assigned school in order to prop it up? Of course not. Public schools had a virtual monopoly on enrollment for decades, but no school can serve the unique needs of all the children who happen to live near it. As we continue down the path of more educational freedom, some schools will rise to the challenge and others will close. We shouldn’t sacrifice children’s futures in an effort to save schools that aren’t meeting their needs.
Close readers will note the moving goal posts—that we’ve moved from school choice as a means of escaping ‘failing schools’ to escaping any kind of school. But the bottom line is that we’re just supposed to accept that ‘education freedom’ means that lots of schools will be closing. Or take the ‘back to the future’ sales pitch for microschools, in which parents “form pods in church basements, barns, and any space they can find. Teachers are launching microschools in their garages.” This vision of what proponents like to call ‘permissionless education’ is one many parents, indeed entire communities, will find difficult to make sense of. It also seems like a gimme for Democrats who are trying to differentiate themselves from the right’s hostility to public schools.
I want to end on a hopeful note, because I’ve depressed us all enough by now, but also because there are some hopeful signs out there. While the education reform zombie may be reemerging, well funded as ever, a growing number of Democrats are showing us what it sounds like to run as an unabashed advocate for public schools. There’s Graham Platner, the challenger to Susan Collins in Maine, who calls out the endless attacks on public schools and teachers as “the tip of the assault on all things public.” Or how about Nathan Sage in Iowa, who puts the defense of public education at the center of his populist platform:
Public schools are the heart of our Democracy, and Republicans are tearing them down brick by brick, while treating our heroic public school teachers like dirt. They are underfunding our public schools and are diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to private schools and into the pockets of billionaires behind them.
To this list I could add Josh Cowen and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, or Catelin Drey in Iowa, who, if she pulls off a win in today’s special election to fill a state senate seat in a district that Trump carried by 11 points, will end the GOP’s supermajority in that chamber. Drey, by the way, is running as a pro-public-education-candidate and an outspoken opponent of Iowa’s controversial universal school voucher program. Plenty of influential Democrats will insist that that message is a loser. That the way for Democrats to win is to run against public schools—to talk about what failures they are, why we need to get tougher on them, and how maybe we don’t actually need them after all. I think they’re wrong, and that voters agree.
Drey did win in Iowa, decisively, proving that a pro-public education stand is a winning message. Drey won 55% of the vote in a district that Trump carried. Her victory broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.
Cybercharters have a terrible track record. They have registered many financial scandals. Some of their leaders have gone to jail for embezzlement and fraud. The biggest fraud in the nation was perpetrated by a cybercharter chain in California that collected $80-200 million from the state without providing the services that were advertised. The biggest academic evaluation of cybercharters concluded that their students don’t gain ground; in fact, they lose ground compared to their peers in public schools or in brick-and-mortar charter schools.
Pennsylvania is the jackpot for online charter operators. The rules are minimal as is accountability for results.
Commonwealth Charter Academy, Pa’s largest cyber charter school, has stopped providing detailed financial statements to the school’s board of trustees for their monthly board meetings, ending a transparency policy that has been in place at the school for more than a decade.
Those reports have typically included detailed information about hundreds of specific transactions, including the names of individual businesses and the amount of money spent the previous month. CCA previously provided these financial statements upon request to members of the public who attended its board meetings, along with the trustees.
The reports will still be available to board members but the public will now have to file a records request for the reports, according to Tim Eller, a spokesperson for CCA. Eller said the change was made to enhance the school’s cybersecurity.
During the board’s Wednesday meeting, Faith Russo, the school’s chief business officer, announced CCA was providing the board with a new report that would be more limited in scope.
“So this basically summarizes the information that we have already previously provided to you,” Russo said.
The new report includes only seven lines of detail about the total amount spent for payroll, general fund cash disbursements, employee retirement, employer paid health insurance, total capital project disbursements, general fund cash transfers and capital fund cash transfers.
In June, by contrast, CCA provided details of more than 1,000 individual financial transactions. The report provided the check number, the names of the vendors, the date of the purchases and the amount of the transactions. The largest single recipients of payments in June were Phillips Managed Support Services, $3.1 million, and Quandel Construction, $1.7 million. Although many of the transactions were for thousands of dollars, some of the transactions were for small amounts, such as a $46 payment to a fertilizer company and a $70 payment to an IT security company.
The detailed report redacted the names of around 130 parents of students who receive $550 per month to serve as “family mentors.” Family mentors serve as a personal concierge to help new students adapt to CCA in their first year. The report also redacted the names of dozens of parents who received a $300 reimbursement for students who participated in extracurricular activities.
Eller, CCA’s spokesperson, said the school has received malicious phishing attempts from scammers who have impersonated vendors that are listed on the school’s detailed financial reports. The financials reports will now be made available to board members on a more secure platform, Eller said.
“This change enhances cybersecurity and safeguards the school’s sensitive financial information against potential cyber and financial threats,” Eller said.
The reports will no longer be available to the public at the start of each board meeting, Eller said, because the school needs more time to redact the reports than it did in years past because the school has grown so large and its financial reports more complicated.Eller doesn’t believe the school has ever made a mistake in redacting its previous reports but said the school will need more time to do this in the future.
The decreased transparency comes as lawmakers in Harrisburg have been debating changes to how cyber charter schools are regulated. The Democratically controlled House passed a number of reforms in June including the establishment of a special council that would help set transparency requirements for cyber charter schools. The House’s reforms have yet to be taken up by the Republican-controlled Senate and it’s unclear if any reforms are part of the active budget negotiations.
Russo said during Wednesday’s meeting that CCA will still provide its trustees with a copy of the detailed financial report but not as part of the packet it makes readily available to the public.
“The detail has been provided to the board prior to this meeting,” Russo said. “So you still received the laundry list of all the disbursements, but this is a more summarized version for the board packet.”
When PennLive requested a copy of the detailed report that was provided to trustees before the meetings, CCA’s board secretary said PennLive would now have to seek the information through a public records request, a process that often takes a month or longer. PennLive filed a public records request for the information immediately but did not receive the records before publication.
The school’s detailed financial report has been provided in board packets since at least December of 2013–the oldest board packet in PennLive’s possession.
“This illustrates how Harrisburg allows cyber charter schools to play by their own rules,” Spicka said. “The time is now for Senate Republicans to step up and demand accountability from the cyber charter industry. They have a responsibility to ensure that all public schools are transparent in how they spend Pennsylvanians’ property tax dollars.”
Polk County Public Schools expressed relief July 25 after learning that the Trump Administration would release about $20 million in funding that it had withheld for weeks.
The district issued a news release, noting that the previously frozen grants in four categories directly fund staff positions and services supporting migrant students, English-language learners, teacher recruitment and professional development, academic enrichment programs and adult education.
The relief, though, was only partial. When the district eight days earlier took the unusual action of issuing a public statement warning of “significant financial shortfalls,” it cited not only the suspended federal grants but also state policies.
Legislative allocations for vouchers — scholarships to attend private schools or support home schooling — combined with increased funding for charter schools “are diverting another $45.7 million away from Polk County’s traditional public schools,” the district’s news release said.
The statement reflected warnings made for years by advocates for public education that vouchers are eroding the financial stability of school districts.
“The state seemingly underestimated the fiscal impact that vouchers would have,” Polk County Schools Superintendent Fred Heid said in the July 17 news release. “As a result, the budget shortfall has now been passed on to school districts resulting in a loss of $2.5 million for Polk County alone. We now face having to subsidize state priorities using local resources.”
Florida began offering vouchers in the 1990s, initially limiting them to students with disabilities and those in schools deemed as failing. Under former Gov. Jeb Bush, the state expanded the program in 2001 to include students from low-income families.
The number of students receiving vouchers rose as state leaders adjusted the eligibility formula. In 2023, the Legislature adopted a measure introducing universal vouchers, available to students regardless of their financial status.
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All of Polk County’s legislators voted for the measure: Sen. Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula; Sen. Colleen Burton, R-Lakeland; Rep. Melony Bell, R-Fort Meade; Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Lakeland; Rep. Sam Killebrew, R-Winter Haven; and Rep. Josie Tomkow, R-Polk City.
Allotment for vouchers swells
The vouchers to attend private schools are known as Florida Empowerment Scholarships. The state also provides money to families through the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and the Personalized Education Program, which financially supports home-schooled students.
The money for vouchers comes directly from Florida’s public school funding formula, the Florida Education Finance Program.
Families of students receiving such scholarships have reportedly used the money to purchase large-screen TVs and tickets to theme parks, spending allowed by Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most scholarships.
The state allotment for vouchers has swelled from $1.6 billion in the 2021-2022 school year to about $4 billion in fiscal year 2024-2025, according to an analysis from the Florida Policy Institute, a nonprofit with a progressive bent.
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In Polk County, 5,023 students claimed vouchers in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the FPI report. Those scholarships amounted to just over $41 million.
The figures rose in 2022-2023 to 6,124 students and nearly $58 million. The following year, the total was 7,854 students and nearly $72 million.
In the 2024-2025 school year, 11,297 students in Polk County received vouchers totaling more than $97 million, FPI reported.
A calculation from the Florida Education Finance Program projects that nearly $143 million of Polk County’s state allotment for education will go to Family Empowerment Scholarships in the 2025-2026 school year, a potential increase of about 47%. The total reflects 16.3% of Polk County’s state funding.
Statewide, the cost of vouchers has risen steadily and is projected to reach nearly $4 billion in the 2025-26 school year.
Florida’s State Education Estimating Conference report from April predicts that public school enrollment will decline by 66,000 students over the next five years, or about 2.5%. Over the same period, voucher use is projected to increase by 240,000.
The state projected that only about 27% of the new Family Empowerment Scholarship recipients would be former public school students.
Subsidizing wealthy families?
Since the state removed financial eligibility rules for the scholarships in 2023, voucher use has soared by 67%, the Orlando Sentinel reported in February. And the majority of scholarships have been claimed by students who were already attending private schools.
By the 2024-25 school year, more than 70% of private school students were receiving state scholarships, the Sentinel reported. The total had been less than a third a decade earlier.
The Sentinel published a list of private schools, with the number of students on state scholarships from the years before and after the law took effect.
Among Polk County schools, Lakeland Christian School saw a jump from 40 to 89, a rise of 122.5%. The increases were 102.7% for All Saints Academy in Winter Haven and 60.3% for St. Paul Lutheran School in Lakeland.
The scholarships available to Polk County students for the 2025-2026 school year are $8,209 for students in kindergarten through third grade; $7,629 for those in grades four through eight; and $7,478 for students in ninth through 12th grades. Those figures come from Step Up for Students.
There have been news reports of private schools boosting their tuition rates in response to the universal voucher program. Lakeland Christian School’s advertised tuition for high school students has risen from $14,175 in 2022-2023 to $17,975 for the current school year, a jump of 26.8%.
Stephanie Yocum, president of the Polk Education Association, decried the trend of more state educational funding going to private schools.
“In the 2023-24 school year, 70% of Florida’s universal vouchers went to students who already were in private schools,” Yocum said. “Seventy percent of those billions and billions and billions of dollars are going to subsidize already wealthy families, and our state continues to push welfare for the wealthy, while they are siphoning off precious dollars from our students that actually attend a public school, which is still the supermajority of children in this state.”
Critics of vouchers point to Arizona, which instituted universal school vouchers in 2022. That program cost the state $738 million in fiscal year 2024, far more than Arizona had budgeted, according to a report from EdTrust, a left-leaning advocacy group.
Arizona is facing a combined $1.4 billion deficit over fiscal years 2024 and 2025, EdTrust reported. The net cost of the voucher program equals half of the 2024 deficit and two-thirds of the projected 2025 deficit, it said.
Meanwhile, there is a move toward a federal school voucher program. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Congress adopted in early July uses the federal tax code to offer vouchers that students could use for private school tuition or other qualifying education expenses.
The Senate revised the initial House plan, making it not automatic but an opt-in program for each state. The Ledger emailed the Florida Department of Education on Aug. 4 asking whether the state plans to participate. A response had not come by Aug. 6.
The federal program could cost as much as $56 billion, EdTrust reported. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, called the program “a moral disgrace,” as NPR reported.
Canady: Let parents choose
Proponents of vouchers say that it is essential to let students and parents choose the form of education they want, either through traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools or homeschooling.
Canady, who is in line to become state House Speaker in 2028, defended the increase in scholarship funding.
“In Florida, we fund students — not systems,” Canady said by text message. “Parents have the freedom they deserve to make the decisions that are best for their own children. There are a lot of great school options — public district, public charter, private, and homeschool.”
She added: “In Florida, decisions about which school a child will attend are not made by the government — parents are in control.”
Canady has taught at Lakeland Christian for nearly 20 years and is director of the school’s RISE Institute, which encompasses research, innovation, STEM learning and entrepreneurship. She began her career teaching at a public school.
None of Polk County’s other legislators responded to requests for comment. They are Rep. Jon Albert, R-Frostproof; Rep. Jennifer Kincart Jonsson, R-Lakeland; and Albritton, Burton and Tomkow.
Canady noted that 475 fewer students were counted in Polk County Public Schools for funding purposes in the 2024-2025 than in the previous year.
“That reflects the choices that families have made,” Canady wrote. “During the same time, the Florida Legislature increased teacher pay by more than $100 million dollars and continues to spend more taxpayer money on education than ever before.”
She added: “Education today looks different than it did decades ago, and districts around the state are all adapting to the new choice model. Funding decisions should always be about what is good for students and honor the choices that families make.”
The 475 net loss of students in Polk’s public schools last year is far below the increase of 3,443 in Polk students receiving state scholarships.
Questions of accountability
Yocum said that public school districts face certain recurring costs that continue to rise, no matter the fluctuations in enrollment resulting from the use of vouchers.
“You’ll still have the same — I call them static costs, even though those are going up — for maintenance, for buildings, for air conditioning, for transportation,” Yocum said. “All of those costs still exist. But when you start to siphon off dollars that public schools should be getting to run a large-scale operation of educating children, then we are doing more and more with less and less.”
Yocum also raised the question of accountability. The Florida Department of Education carefully controls public schools, largely dictating the curricula they teach, overseeing the certification of teachers and measuring schools against a litany of requirements codified in state law.
Public schools must accept all students, including those with disabilities that make educating them more difficult and costly.
By contrast, Yocum said, private schools can choose which students to accept or reject. The schools are free from much of the scrutiny that public schools face from the Department of Education.
The alert that Polk County Public Schools issued on July 17 mentioned another factor in its financial challenges.
“PCPS is facing an immediate $2.5 million state funding shortfall due to what state officials have described as dual-enrollment errors that misallocated funding for nearly 25,000 Florida students,” the statement said.
That seemed to refer to a “cross check” that the Florida Department of Education performs twice a year, said Scott Kent of Step Up for Students. The agency compares a list of students on scholarships with those reported as attending public schools.
If a student appears on both lists, the DOE freezes the funding. Step Up for Students then contacts the students’ families and asks for documentation that they were not enrolled in a district school, Kent said.
“This is a manual process that can be time-consuming, as the state and scholarship funding organizations want to ensure accuracy and maintain the integrity of the scholarship programs,” Kent said by email. “The DOE currently is checking the lists before releasing funds to Step Up to pay eligible students.”
In the 2025 legislative session, the Florida Senate passed a bill that would have clarified which funds are dedicated to Family Empowerment Scholarships, a way of addressing problems in tracking students as they move between public and private schools. But the bill died, as the state House failed to advance it.
Yocum said the House rejected transparency.
“They want it to look like they’re funding public schools at the level that they should be funding it, where, in reality, more and more of our dollars are running through our budgets but being diverted to corporate charter, private schools and home schools that have no accountability to our tax dollars,” she said.
Effect of charter schools
The warning from the Polk County school district mentioned funding for charter schools as part of a “diversion” of $45.7 million traditional public schools.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate independently. Polk County has 36 charter schools covering all grades. Those include two charter systems: Lake Wales Charter Schools with seven schools, and the Schools of McKeel Academy with three.
Some other charter schools are affiliated with national organizations, including for-profit companies.
Yocum lamented the passing of public funds through the school district to charter schools, though specified that she had no criticism of the McKeel or Lake Wales systems.
“We’re talking about the corporate-run charters that are in it to make money,” she said. “We keep seeing billions and billions of our state dollars diverted to those money-making entities that do not make decisions in the best interest of children. They make decisions in the best interest of their bottom line.”
Canady sponsored a bill in 2023 establishing the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from traditional public schools to charter schools’ capital budgets by 2028. It passed with the support of all Polk County lawmakers, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law.
The Florida Legislature passed a bill in the 2025 session (HB 1105), co-sponsored by Kincart Jonsson, that requires public school districts to share local surtax revenues with charter schools, based on enrollment share.
The bill, which DeSantis signed into law, also makes it easier to convert a public school into a charter school, allowing parents to initiate the change without requiring cooperation from teachers. It also authorizes cities or counties to transform public schools with consecutive D or F grades into “job engine” charter schools.
Former Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire made a horrible choice for state school superintendent. He picked Frank Edelblut, after beating him in the election. Edelblut is a homeschooler of his 10 children with a low opinion of public schools. He successfully promoted vouchers and every other kind of school choice. He didn’t see the point of public schools.
The overwhelming majority of students in New Hampshire attend public schools. As soon as vouchers passed, most of them were used by families whose children never attended public schools. In other words, the state is spending many millions of dollars to subsidize the tuition of students already enrolled in private schools, whose families could afford the tuition.
Sununu was replaced by Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte. She did not reappoint Edelblut. Instead, she selected Caitlin Davis, a 15-year veteran of the state Department of Education. The selection of Davis was cheered by members of both parties, as well as the teachers’ union, no doubt thrilled to be rid of Edelblut.
Unlike Edelblut, she is unlikely to attack public schools but will collaborate with all sectors.
Davis, who most recently served as the director of education analytics and resources, had worked in the department for 15 years. She built a reputation as a neutral, data-driven financial expert, often sitting before lawmakers on the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee or Finance Committee to brief them on complicated budget spreadsheets. And she vowed to lead the department as a nonpartisan executive, carrying out both lawmakers’ and the governor’s policies without injecting her own politics…
In seeking the job, Davis styled herself as an experienced administrator. Near the start of a multi-hour confirmation hearing Tuesday, Executive Councilor Joseph Kenney, a Wakefield Republican, asked Davis whether she considered herself a “passionate educator” or a “passionate bureaucrat.”
“I suppose I’m a passionate bureaucrat, but I don’t like the term bureaucrat,” Davis replied. “… When you use the term bureaucrat, I think you take away all of the effort that state employees and the legislators and the citizens are putting into the system.”
Jennifer Berkshire is a veteran education journalist who understands the importance of public schools. She has a podcast called “Have You Heard?” She is the co-author of two books with historian Jack Schneider:
A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School. And: The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual.
Berkshire wrote the following brilliant article about the failure of the Democratic Party to recognize that most people send their children to public schools and don’t want them to be privatized. Some prominent Democrats support charter schools, which the radical right has used as a stepping stone to vouchers.
She wrote on her Substack blog “The Education Wars”:
And just like that, the Trump Administration has released the billions in funds for public schools it had suddenly, and illegally, frozen earlier this summer. The administration’s trademark combo of chaos and cruelty has been stemmed, at least temporarily. That Trump caved on this is notable in part because his hand was forced by his own party—the first time this has happened in the endless six months since his second term began. Make that the second time. Since I posted this piece, key senators from both parties decisively rejected the administration’s proposals to slash investments in K-12. Which raises an obvious question: of all of the unpopular policies being rolled out by the administration why would school funding be the one that forced a retreat?
“Do they really care more about public schools than about…Medicaid?” is how historian Adam Laats posed the question. In a word, yes. That’s because Medicaid is a program utilized by poor people, a constituency that however vast enjoys neither a forceful lobby nor the patronage of a friendly billionaire. Public education, despite the increasingly aggressive efforts to dismantle it, remains one of our only remaining institutions that serves rich and poor alike. (For an excellent and highly readable history of how this came to be, check out Democracy’s Schools: the Rise of Public Education in America by historian Johann Neem.)
This enduring cross-class alliance behind public schools, by the way, is a big part of why public education has been in the cross hairs of anti-tax zealots for so long. It’s also why school voucher programs keeps accidentally benefiting the most affluent families. Offering them a coupon for private school tuition is a nifty way to drive a stake through, not just this cross-class coalition that consistently supports things like more school funding and higher teacher pay, but the entire project of public education.
A winning issue
As David Pepper pointed out recently, the Trump Administration was forced to back down on school funding because of the bipartisan nature of support for public schools—part of what he calls a “clear and consistent pattern” that we’ve witnessed again and again in recent years.
Whether we’re talking about the overwhelming votes against vouchers in red states in November or the bottom-of-the-barrell poll numbers for the Trump education agenda, public education defies the usual logic of these hyper-partisan times. Which makes it all remarkable that so few Democrats seem to understand the potency of the issue. Whither the Democrats is a question that Pepper, one of our most astute political commentators, has been asking too:
I’m talking about an unflinching embrace of the value of public schools to kids, families and communities, and a blunt calling out of the damage being done to those schools by the reckless privatization schemes of recent years.
It’s not coincidence, I’d argue, that rising stars in the Democratic Party including Kentucky governor Andy Beshear or Texas state representative James Talarico played key roles battling vouchers in their states. And before Tim Walz was muffled by the Harris campaign, we heard him start to articulate a sort of prairie populist case for public education, in which rural schools are the centers of their communities and today’s school privatizers are the equivalent of nineteenth-century robber barrons. The master class on how Democrats should talk about education, though, comes via Talarico’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Clocking in at two hours and 44 minutes, the conversation shows why Talarico is ascendant. But it was handling of the school voucher issue that truly demonstrated his chops. He deftly explained to Rogan that Texas has essentially been captured by conservative billionaires, and that despite their deep pockets and political sway, the anti-voucher coalition had nearly won anyway.
Ultimately we didn’t win. [It] kind of came down to a photo finish, but it did to me provide a template for what happens if we actually loved our enemies, if we rebuilt these relationships. Like who could we take on if we did it together? Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and progressives. Like, I don’t know, sometimes I sound a little Pollyanna.
Rogan’s response was just as instructive. “It’s not us versus them. It’s the top versus the bottom.”
The dud brigade
Having interviewed countless Republicans who oppose vouchers over the past year, I remain utterly convinced that there is no other issue that both resonates across party lines and exposes the influences of billionaires behind school privatization. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Democrats like Talarico and Beshear remain such a minority in the party. Especially at the national level, candidates and commentators largely view public education with disdain. Indeed, as the endless battles play out over the future of the Democratic Party, we can look forward to a full-court press pressuring blue state governors to opt in to the new federal voucher program. And while the school choice lobby will be leading the charge, influential voices from within the party—like this guy or this guy—will be making the case that vouchers = ‘kids-first policy’ and that Democrats need to get on board or be left behind.
Part of what has been so refreshing about listening to Talarico, Beshear, Walz and other rising stars like Florida’s Maxwell Frost, is that they’re not just opposing school privatization but making a bold case for why we have public schools in the first place. They’re rising to the challenge that David Pepper throws down in which Democrats unflinchingly “embrace the value of public schools to kids, families and communities” and bluntly call out “the damage being done to those schools by the reckless privatization schemes of recent years.”
Now contrast that with the way that so many influential Democrats talk about education—the bloodless rhetoric of ‘achievement,’ ‘data,’ and ‘workforce preparation’ that resonates with almost no one these days. Here’s Colorado governor Jared Polis, for example, rolling out the National Governor’s Association’s Let’s Get Ready Initiative, an impossibly dreary vision of K-12 education that hinges on a “cradle-to-career coordination system that tracks how kids are doing, longitudinally, from pre-K through high school into higher education and the workforce.” If you want a bold case for why we have public schools, you won’t find it here. Deftly combining right-wing talking points (the kids are socialists!) with the same corporate pablum that centrist Democrats have been peddling for years (the skills gap!), this is a vision that is a profound mismatch for our times. I read a sentence like this one—“Competition between schools, districts and states will lead to more students being ready for whatever the future might hold”—and I die a little inside.
Back in 2023, Jacobin magazine and the Center for Working-Class Politics released a study called “Trump’s Kryptonite” about how progressives can win back the working class. Among its many interesting findings was this: the candidate best equipped to appeal to working class voters with a populist message was a middle school teacher. I’ve referenced this study endlessly in my writing and opinonating but it wasn’t until I listened to the Rogan episode with James Talarico that I really reflected on why a middle school teacher might make such an effective candidate. The exchange consists largely of Rogan peppering Talarico with the sorts of endlessly curious queries that a bright seventh grader might fire off. To which Talarico, an actual former middle school teacher, responds patiently and without condescension, largely steering clear of the sorts of policy weeds that are incomprensible to regular people.
In the coming months, we’ll be told endlessly that the future of the Democratic Party belongs to Rahm Emanuel, Cory Booker, Gina Raimondo or Jared Polis—all of whom represent the identical brand of ‘straight talk’ about the nation’s schools that Democrats have been trying—and failing—to sell to voters for decades. That same Jacobin study, by the way, found that the very worst candidates that Democrats can run are corporate executives and lawyers. I’d add one more category to this list: corporate education reformer.
Diane Ravitch's blog 