A Warning about Tech in the Classroom

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2026 //
14

A reader who calls himself “Gitapik” shares his experience with the introduction of new technology into the special education programs for which he was responsible in New York City public schools.

He wrote:

As a former tech guy for our five District 75 special education sites in Brooklyn, I had quite a ride on this tech roller coaster. I was in on it from the beginning.

I applied for and received multiple very large state grants in technology. Once the money was received, I would choose, order, and facilitate installation of what technology went where in all the sites. From classroom computers, iPads, laptops, Attainment Stations, and Smartboards to full scale labs. It was a very big undertaking.

This also included conducting professional  development classes and individual training session sessions…very often to an unappreciative audience.

My sales pitch was always the same: this is a wonderful tool for you to incorporate into your standard every day teaching methods. You can turn it on and off in order to create interest and  spur on new ideas. I would even give examples of how I, a teacher, would do a class, using the different devices.

This would’ve been all well and good if it hadn’t been so naïve on my part. I witnessed firsthand how the technology went from being a tool for the teacher to the teacher being the tool of the technology. Might sound like a catchy phrase, but looking back on it I can’t help but see it for what it was. A planned takeover of the school systems. 

I could go into specifics, but this is getting pretty lengthy as it is.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City recently endorsed the use of AI in the classroom. He said he had met with top officials who had assured him that teachers and administrators would have a voice in how the technology would be applied. I would like to have his ear, knowing what I know. It’s the same sales pitch as was given to me. They just want to get their foot in the door

Categories Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, New York City, Special Education, Technology

Jennifer Rubin: The Republican Crack-Up

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2026 //
4

Jennifer Rubin was a columnist for The Washington Post who departed when publisher Jeff Bezos bent his knee to Trump. Rubin, a journalist and lawyer, knows that Trump is a dangerous demagogue. She says in this piece that Republicans complain privately about Trump but refuse to stand up to him. They will pay for their cowardice in November, as they have in every special election since Trump returned.

Silence is complicity.

Rubin founded The Contrarian, an immensely popular blog, where this article appeared.

She wrote:

Republicans made a calculated bet that by indulging Donald Trump’s ill-conceived and cruel schemes (e.g., unleashing ICE on cities, tariffs, wars with Venezuela and Iran, slashing healthcare to pay for tax cuts for the rich), the country would somehow stumble through. They figured congressional Republicans would share in any successes but somehow avoid any blame when things (inevitably) went haywire. Politics rarely works out that way.

(Credit: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson)

Through Trump’s Iran War, shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, futile effort to pass a Jim Crow-style voter suppression act (the so-called SAVE Act), and inflation-aggravating tariff scheme, Republicans are discovering they are tied at the hip with Trump. Refusing to deviate from his dictates, they will bear the brunt of his serial failures.

Whether the Iran War ends this month or months from now, Republicans cannot escape responsibility for the massive expenditure of taxpayer dollars, loss of life, rise in energy costs, regional instability, and damage to alliances Trump has wrought. Congressional Republicans refused to invoke the War Powers Act — or even to conduct meaningful oversight hearings — and applauded a senseless, unconstitutional war. Now they seem prepared to rubber-stamp a preposterous demand for $200B more in war spending. Republicans will have no place to hide come November when voters come looking for politicians to blame.

The latest CBS/You Gov poll has nothing but horrendous news for the Iran war cheerleaders: 90 percent say the war will make gas prices higher in the short term, 58 percent over the long term; 63 percent predict it will weaken the economy (a plurality assume we will be in a recession); a plurality of 49 percent think the war makes us less safe; and 57 percent say the war is going badly. Some 62 percent disapprove of how Trump is handling the war. Perhaps Republicans should have fulfilled their constitutional obligations rather than contenting themselves with sitting on the sidelines.

Meanwhile, Trump’s web of lies about immigrants and voting fraud have entangled him and Republicans in a political knot. Trump’s lie about mass voting fraud drove him to insist on the unpassable voter suppression SAVE Act. He then made that a precondition for any deal to resume DHS funding. Even to Republicans, this made no sense.

When Senator John Thune (R-SD) initially recommended that Trump agree to Democrats’ proposal to pass a DHS funding bill that would pay for TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard (leaving ICE funding for later negotiations), Trump rebuffed him. By Monday night, however, Trump was considering a deal to do just that, namely to fund the rest of DHS and handle funding for ICE in reconciliation.

What happened between his refusal to relent on funding and his capitulation? Trump trotted out another senseless and entirely performative maneuver: deploying ICE to airports. ICE agents, untrained for any TSA duties, stood around with virtually nothing to do (reminding one of the National Guard deployed to D.C., who largely loiter around metro stations). This underscores Republicans’ responsibility for bollixing up air travel, Trump’s feebleness in resolving messes of his own making, and the dangerous transformation of ICE into a roving street militia Trump deploys to intimidate and harass Americans.

All the ICE/airport stunt accomplished was to trigger a robust blowback from Democrats and civil society groups, demonstrating once again Trump’s talent in supercharging the Resistance. Deploring Trump’s use of ICE as his “personal dystopian police force,” Public Citizen observed: “The confluence of authoritarian overreach of this moment is striking.” The ACLU likewise condemned using ICE at airports “despite their lack of training for airport security and interactions, and their clear track record of abusing their power, including through using excessive force against citizens and immigrants alike.” (Unsurprisingly, this venture, the ACLU noted, was the first time a president “sent armed ICE agents to airports to replace trained security agents and instill fear in families and other travelers.”)

Trump’s compounding calamities have fractured Republicans internally. Cultists demand perfect fidelity to Trump on the war abroad and bullying at home; others fret that a war betrays their America First ideology and the SAVE Act is a legislative cul-de-sac that now compounds the DHS shutdown disaster. (MAGA provocateur Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has become a chief enabler of Trump’s destructive schemes, “sparking a wave of mostly private animosity from GOP colleagues who believe his plan to push through legislation overhauling how federal elections are conducted is ill-conceived and potentially harmful to the party’s chances in the midterms,” Politico reports.)

Republicans fret privately that the Trump reign of chaos, coupled with the highly unpopular war, spells doom for them in November. One is tempted to ask about the private Republican hand-wringing: 

What did Republicans think would happen when they fully empowered a delusional narcissist, one who is so clearly ignorant of government and keen to pursue his own wealth and power, the country be damned?

Some dim-witted MAGA Republicans remain true believers and actually think Trump’s antics will pay off. Others know Trump is nuts and recognize the party is headed for disaster, but lack the courage to say so. They are banking that they will survive the blue wave coming in November to fight another day. Their lack of patriotism may be galling, but their self-preservation strategy looks increasingly daft.

The damage Trump and his flunkies have inflicted on our democracy will reverberate for years to come. American families may take years to recover from the economic hits. It is a small consolation that MAGA lawmakers and right-wing media stooges, who have chosen the route of cowardly compliance over constitutional duty and self-serving propaganda over truth-telling, will shoulder much of the blame. History in the long run and voters in the near term will hold Republicans fully accountable for the blunders they countenanced.

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Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans, Shame, Trump

My Views on Mayoral Control of Public Schools in NYC

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
17

I submitted the following testimony to the Committee on Education of the New York City Council, when it held public hearings February 10, 2026, on the current system of natural control of the schools.

I studied mayoral control and other forms of governance when I wrote my first book, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973.

My testimony follows:

The time has come to rethink the governance of the New York City public schools. 

Mayoral control in its present form was enacted by the Legislature in 2002, at the behest of newly elected  ayor Michael Bloomberg. 

The Legislature was no doubt dazzled by Mayor Bloomberg. He was and is an amazing businessman who built an iconic technology-media corporation. 

To think that this titan of American business was willing to take responsibility for the school system was an exciting prospect. 

What is more, the Mayor boldly said that he could fix the schools. He projected confidence. He believed, and he was convincing. 

The Legislature gave him an unprecedented level of control over the system. The Mayor would appoint a majority of a new board, which he called the Panel on Education Policy, its name a signal of its powerlessness. The eight of 13 members appointed by Bloomberg served at his pleasure, not with a fixed term. This arrangement eliminated any likelihood that his appointees would exercise independent judgment. On the rare occasion that they did, he fired them. 

And of course, the legislation gave Bloomberg the power to pick anyone he wanted as Chancellor. 

For Chancelor, Bloomberg appointed a lawyer, Joel Klein, who had no experience as an educator or an administrator. 

Klein spent 8 1/2 years as Chancellor. 

During the 12 years of the Bloomberg mayoralty, there were many changes–the dissolution of large high schools, the creation of scores of small schools, the opening of charter schools, the imposition of a standardized citywide curriculum in math and science, the launch of a Leadership Academy to train new principals, and a heavy emphasis on standardized testing to judge students, teachers, principals and schools.

Schools received A-F grades, based on whether their test scores went up or down. Schools were closed if their scores were persistently low. Test scores were everything. 

When Klein left on the first day of 2011, the Mayor appointed a retired magazine publisher who had no relevant experience. That didn’t work. After 3 months, she was gone. 

While there was much breathless reporting about a “New York City Miracle,” there was no miracle. New York City’s public schools are not a paragon for other cities to follow. 

The problems of educating New York City’s public school children have not been solved. 

Mayoral control in the administrations of DiBlasio and Adams continued to reflect the inherent flaws of the concentration of power in the hands of the Mayor. 

If we step back for a minute, the nation is now experiencing a Presidency in which almost all power resides in one person: the President. Surrounded by a servile Cabinet, a Congress whose majority supinely obeys almost every Presidential order, and a Supreme Court with a sympathetic conservative majority, Americans can see daily the dangers of a government that has no checks and balances. 

The New York City public school system is no different. Checks and balances are necessary. Presently, there are none. 

Top-down management with no checks and balances is especially inappropriate for the school system. Parents and communities feel that they have no voice, and they are right. 

The truth is that there is no organizational structure that is perfect. Mayoral control has been tried for nearly a quarter-century. We now know that it has multiple flaws. We know that there has been no”New York City miracle.”

Some adjustment is needed now. 

I propose reviving the Board of Education. Every borough should be represented on that Board. The Board should select the Chancellor, who reports to the Board on a regular basis. The Board should be composed of people devoted to improving the public schools–either as educators or community advocates. They should know the schools and school leaders in their borough. They should regularly attend meetings of local school boards. They should serve for a set term and should be free to exercise their independent judgment. They should receive a salary for their time, so that their service on the Board is properly compensated. It would be a full-time position. 

Clearly, the Mayor has a large stake in the schools. He or she should have representatives (but not a majority) on a reconstructed Board of Education. 

The Mayor’s ultimate power is that he or she controls the budget. 

Will such an arrangement solve all problems? No. But it will create a structure where parents and communities have a voice and are heard. The Board, when choosing a Chancellor, should select an experienced educator, whether chosen from the city or from another school system. 

There will still be controversies. It’s inevitable. Over funding. Over building new classrooms to meet the requirement to reduce class sizes. Over charter schools. Over admissions to gifted programs and selective schools. Over racial segregation in a system whose students are overwhelmingly Hispanic, Black, and Asian.  

The Mayor–every Mayor–has a full plate of issues to deal with: economic development, public safety, transportation, natural disasters, building codes, public health, housing, and much, much more. He or she doesn’t have time to run the school system, nor is he or she likely to be an experienced educator. 

I can’t think of any important problem that mayoral control has solved.

My advice: Create a stable and democratic structure.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Disruption, New York City

Paul Krugman: Treason in the Oil Markets

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
14

Paul Krugman, Nobel-Prize winning economist, writes about shady speculation in the oil futures market. He says it’s not just insider trading, it’s treason.

He writes:

Source: Yahoo Finance


Over the weekend Donald Trump threatened dire vengeance on Iran unless its government opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, a deadline that would expire Monday evening in Washington. Specifically, he announced that the U.S. would begin bombing power plants — plants that supply electricity to Iran’s civilian population — unless the Strait was cleared.

But at 7:05 AM Monday Trump called the whole thing off — for five days, he said, but many people are assuming that the threatened action, which would have been a massive war crime, is now off the table.

The reason for the about-face, he claimed, was that the U.S. was engaged in productive negotiations with Iranian officials — although this seems to have come as news to the Iranians, who denied that any such negotiations are taking place. Sad to say, in this case, as I tried to explain yesterday, the fanatical, brutal Iranian regime is more credible than the president of the United States. Is he lying or living in a fantasy world? Neither possibility is comforting.

But in any case, Trump’s sudden climb-down was startling. Who could have seen this coming?
The answer is, the person or people who bought large quantities of stock market futures and sold large quantities of oil futures around 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement. As CNBC reports,

At around 6:50 a.m. in New York, S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop. With thin liquidity typical of early trading hours, the sudden burst stood out as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.
A similar pattern was observed in oil markets. West Texas Intermediate May futures also saw a noticeable pickup in trading activity at roughly the same time, with a distinct volume spike interrupting otherwise quiet conditions.

This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.

This wasn’t the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn’t count the purchases of stock futures.

When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”

Why is profiting from insider information about national security decisions effectively a form of treason? First, it’s hard to think of a more fundamental principle for officials we entrust with important decisions, especially those that involve national security, that they or people they know should not be allowed to exploit their positions for personal gain.

Second, financial trading based on what should be closely held secrets reveals information to current or potential foreign adversaries. To exaggerate a bit, but only a bit, who needs to bribe agents within the government, or recruit them with honey traps, when you can infer the same information by keeping track of transactions on futures markets?

Finally, there isn’t that big a gap between using knowledge of national secrets to make lucrative financial trades and simply selling those secrets to the highest bidder. Once you’re breached the line that says you shouldn’t profit personally from access to information that is or should be highly classified, the line between trading based on state secrets and selling those secrets directly is a blurry one.

In fact, I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning. Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?

I’m sure we’ll find out once Kash Patel’s FBI carries out its careful, no-holds-barred investigation.

For the humor-impaired, that was a joke. However, I do believe that the culprits will be easy to determine once Democrats are back in power, and they must apply the full force of law to the people responsible.

One question that may be harder to resolve is the extent to which the possibility of insider trading may actually have influenced policy. Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest? If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.

There’s a broader lesson here: You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.

Among other things, deeply corrupt governments tend to be very bad at waging war, no matter how much they may exalt “warrior ethos” and “lethality.” When we do a post-mortem on how the Iran debacle happened, arrogant ignorance may still get top billing. But grotesque venality will come a close second.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Cheating, Corruption, Fraud, Trump

“The Pitt” is a Master Class in the Value of DEI

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
14

The Pitt is an award-winning series on cable about daily life in an emergency room in Pittsburgh. Each episode represents the traumas and rhythm of one hour in one day. It’s gripping and sometimes so gory in its realism that I divert my eyes.

Two articles recently gave the program the highest praise. One, which appeared in Fortune, said that The Pitt exemplifies DEI in action and demonstrates how it saves lives. Patients in extremis often need someone who looks like them to communicate candidly.

But race, color, ethnicity, gender are beside the point. What matters most is saving lives, expressing empathy for people who are in pain and often terrified.

The cast is white, Black, Indian, Hispanic, Filipino, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, male, female, and even includes a staff member in a wheelchair. It is the quintessence of DEI, and none of it is frivolous. It’s just who they are: trained doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers: people who have chosen to work in a high-pressure emergency room.

The article in Fortune by Robert Raben reminds us of why DEI is valuable.

As diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are under relentless attack, HBO’s medical drama The Pitt offers a masterclass in what DEI truly looks like when these values are woven into the fabric of an institution and put into practice. And how DEI benefits all of us.

There is nothing artificial about “The Pitt.” It is a gripping drama of everyday life in an urban emergency room.

Frank Bruni writes in The New York Times that The Pitt is the most patriotic show on television.

“It’s an empathy exam. It’s a civics lesson. Above all, it’s a study of people under intense pressure — as they are when a pulse is fading, or when a nation is fraying — and the importance of muddling through and making things better, no matter the odds, no matter the obstacles…”

It makes an argument for diversity that’s smart and true, looking beyond the usual dividing lines — race, religion, gender — to less politically charged differences. A brand-new doctor who grew up on a farm in rural America draws on a sensibility that peers lack. A medical student suggests a way to lessen an uninsured patient’s financial distress that her co-workers didn’t think of. It occurred to her not because she’s Asian American but because she grew up in a family with limited means and daunting medical bills, so she was schooled in impediments and options…

There’s a war in America between erudition and improvisation, science and superstition, head and heart. The Pitt might be expected to come down unconditionally on the side of expertise. But it doesn’t, not exactly. While it routinely and rightly exalts medicine’s wondrous advances, it also suggests that experts can be hidebound, timid. And it understands that the wiring of people and of societies demands room for both proper procedure and imagination. 

One of the great things about The Pitt is that the executive producer–Dr. Joe Sachs– is an emergency room doctor who also has a degree in cinema. Every episode is overseen by medical specialists and expert nurses. Every word, every procedure is medically accurate.

Categories Equity, Ethics, Media

Peter Greene: Voucher Battle in Nebraska Sinks the State Budget

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
3

Yesterday, I posted Peter Greene’s post about the voucher battle in Nebraska. Republicans in the state legislature really want vouchers. Voters really don’t want vouchers. I no as recent referendum, Nebraska voters overturned the state’s voucher program. That shoukd have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t. The Republican Governor and legislature decided to ignore the voters and participate in Trump’s voucher plan.

But then Peter discovered the battle was not over.

He wrote an update:

As we noted last week, some Nebraska fans of taxpayer-funded vouchers tried–again–to get enact vouchers, this time through the sneaky technique of putting them in the budget. Instead of getting their vouchers, they raised a controversy that sank the entire budget.

State Sen. Rob Clements of Elmwood, Appropriations Committee chair, removed the $3.5 million of voucher money, meant to bridg the gap between the end of the state’s voucher program that was repealed by voters, and the beginning of the federal voucher system that Governor Pillen opted into (the voters get no say on that one). And lots of people were upset, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner.

Arguments for the voucher money were baloney. Sen. Christy Armendariz of Omaha argued that the vouchers were needed to protect poor kids who might be “kicked out” of public school. State Sen. Brad von Gillern of the Elkhorn area expressed frustration toward opponents, calling it hypocritical to oppose the measure when many of the same senators argue the state isn’t doing enough to help the poor.

“Shame on you,” von Gillern said. “If you make a pitch for poor people for any other reason, and you can’t support this, you’re a hypocrite.”

Except that vouchers are used mostly by wealthy, already-in-private-school students, and it’s the private schools that get to pick their students, not vice versa. It is telling that the voucher crowd did not have anecdotes of poor children who had been kicked out of public school and had been rescued by vouchers. The program ran all this year, so those stories, if real, should have been easy enough to locate.

Sen. Myron Dorn of Adams, the only Republican on Appropriations to oppose the $3.5 million in vouchers, criticized focus on this one issue, and also criticized the whole sneaky business of trying to slip this policy into the budget when there is no bill or law behind it. 

Said Tim Royers, president of Nebraska State Education Association–

This standoff is exactly why you don’t try and pass policy through the budget, especially when that policy is to extend an incredibly unpopular program that was repealed by voters in the most recent election. … We hope enough can come together and negotiate a path forward that keeps vouchers out of the budget.

So Nebraska voucherphiles managed to sink the state budget over a program that voters had already voted down. That’s a bold stance to take and one can hope that Nebraska voters will deliver the reward they so richly deserve. It’s yet another reminder, in a backhand way, that no matter how hard voucherphiles insist to the contrary, supporting taxpayer-funded school vouchers is not actually a winning political issue.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Nebraska, Privatization, Vouchers

Underground Railroad Museum Sues Trump Administration for Canceling Grant

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
1

The Trump administration began in its earliest days to try to erase what it calls DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), which, in practice, means eliminating federal grants that acknowledge the existence of race, ethnicity, or gender, except for straight white men. Straight white women are usually okay, but recognizing the history, struggles and achievements of others is unacceptable in the Age of Trump.

Trump’s concept of “Make America Great Again” apparently means erasing those who deviate from his white straight ideal of the best days of America (think John Wayne).

One grant recipient is fighting back.

NBC reported:

An Underground Railroad museum in upstate New York alleged in a lawsuit Friday that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated its federal grant on the basis of race, pointing to President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle diversity-focused initiatives.

The Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, New York, alleges that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ cancelation of a $250,000 grant amounted to viewpoint and racial discrimination, violating the First and Fifth Amendments, respectively.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, calls for the funds to be reinstated.

The suit cited Trump’s January 2025 executive orderthat required federal agencies to eliminate any operations supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within 60 days. The 40-page brief outlined 1,400 grants that were terminated in early April 2025 “for their conflict with President Trump’s EOs and the new agency priorities adopted in their wake.” 

Nina Loewenstein, a lawyer for the museum, told NBC News that there is “just no legitimate basis” for the grant’s cancellation, adding that it is “just explicitly erasing things associated with the Black race.”

Loewenstein and the team of lawyers volunteering on the case through Lawyers for Good Government, an organization that provides free legal services for civil and human rights cases, argued that the Underground Railroad Education Center is just one of thousands of organizations that have been unlawfully targeted by the Trump administration.

To finish reading, open the link.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Freedom, Freedom to Learn, Funding, Race, Racism, Trump

What One Iranian Thinks of Trump’s Threat to Wipe Out Power Grid

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
17

An article by Patrick Wintour in The Guardian describes Iranian responses to Trump’s threat to bomb Iran’s power grid unless Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz.

This comment stood out:

One well-known Iranian reformist writer Ahmad Zeidabadi likened what could lie ahead to the post-apocalyptic novel Blindness by José Saramago in which the whole world gradually becomes blind. The normally constrained Zeidabadi described Trump’s attack as “the greatest threat posed against our country or any other country in the world throughout history”.

He said: “If electricity to 90 million people were to stop, homes and streets would be plunged into darkness, the elderly and the disabled would be trapped in residential towers and water, gas, gasoline and diesel would become scarce, followed soon by no food, no hygiene and no transportation.

He went on: “If the people of America or other countries do not stop this savage being, the Middle East will instantly become an unimaginable hell and then a barren and uninhabitable land.” He described Trump as a mad individual who was nonetheless “the main decision-maker of the world’s greatest military power”. The sense that the US is in the grip of a deranged figure is quite common among Iranians.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, History, Trump

Tom Ultican: Grade Retention is a Popular “Remedy” That Hurts Students

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
12

When an education policy is tried and failed, then tried again and continues to fail, that policy may justly beee called “zombie policy.” It survives despite experience..

Tom Ultican, retried teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, here describes such a policy. It is called “grade retention,” but is more commonly known as flunking a student because he or she is not “ready” to be promoted with peers. The short-term effect may seem successful: test scores. But the long-term effect on students’ success is typically negative.

Ultican writes:

Twenty-six American states have a mandatory third-grade retention policy for students who do not pass the state’s reading exam and Maryland is set to implement that policy in 2027. According to researchers, this is bad thinking based on intuition not science. Writing for Education Trust, Brittney Davis declared, “The research is clear that grade retention is not effective over time, and it is related to many negative academic, social, and emotional outcomes for students — especially students of color who have been retained.”  

Economist Jiee Zhong won her PhD from Texas A&M in 2024 and is now an assistant professor of economics at the University of Miami. Last year, she just finished a very impressive study on the effects of grade retention for Texas third graders. Texas abandoned mandatory third-grade retention in 2009.

Zhong studied outcomes of third-graders from 2002-03, 2003-04 and 2004-05 school years who took the Texas reading exam that carried retention consequences. This large data set allowed her to use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to extract many results. By 2024, the students studied were all young adults over 26 years of age. She was able to evaluate their education, social and economic outcomes using powerful math techniques.

Zhong concluded:

“I find that third-grade retention significantly reduces annual earnings at age 26 by $3,477 (19%). While temporarily improving test scores, retention increases absenteeism, violent behavior, and juvenile crime, and reduces the likelihood of high school graduation.”

For one outcome, she investigated a group of students who barely passed or barely failed the reading test. She learned that the barely failing students earn $1,682 (11.3%) less at age 23 than the barely passing students. Zhong noted that 64.2% of barely passing students graduated from high school while just 55.1% of the barely failing students graduated. She observed that both of these results were statistically significant at a 5% level.

Zhong also noticed a racial disparity. She reports, “White students experience a sharp 43.8 percentage point decline in high school graduation probability, higher than the reductions for Black (17.6 percentage points) and Hispanic students (0.6 percentage points).”

These results from 2025 add more weight to similar results that previous researchers have reported.

The Retention Illusion

In January 2025, Duke University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina published a linked series of three policy briefs concerning grade retention by Claire Xia and Elizabeth Glennie, Ph.D. The Duke researchers stated, “The majority of published studies and decades of research indicate that there is usually little to be gained, and much harm that may be done through retaining students in grade.”

They also mention the grade retention illusion is held by many community members, administrators and teachers who believe grade retention is helpful and needed. The Duke researchers stated, “The findings that retention is ineffective or even harmful in the long run seem counterintuitive.” This belief is so strong that on the 31st Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallop Poll, 72% of the public favor stricter promotion standards even if significantly more students would be held back. Other studies show the public being strongly opposed to social promotion believing low-achieving students will continue to fall farther behind.

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Failure, Research

Nancy Bailey: Why Are We Still Debating Retention? There Are Better Alternatives.

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
6

Nancy Bailey taught for many years. She writes a blog that is a source of wisdom, gleaned from experience and love of children.

She wrote recently that the debate about retention should be a dead issue. We know that it hurts the kids who are flunked. We know there are better alternatives.

She wrote:

The permanency of retention and the message it sends students may have long-term effects on self-esteem and school attachment that may override even short-term academic benefits (1995).

~Melissa Roderick, the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, the University of Chicago

Sometimes failing at a task or endeavor might be instructive. Most of us will experience failure, maybe often, and learning to be resilient in the face of it can create stamina and character. But being retained in school is a failure that many students may never overcome. It’s time to end retention and focus on solutions that work, that lift children!

There has been much debate about this over the years, yet it seems increasingly unnecessary, as there are enough child-friendly alternatives that render retention outdated and ill-informed. Retention simply isn’t necessary!

Many alternatives exist to support students without failing them. Summer school, smaller class sizes, small group instruction, looping two classes with the same teacher, a mixed-grade class, tutoring, and assistance with resource classes can help children catch up.

That hasn’t stopped some educators and non-educators from promoting third-grade retention as a major reform since 2003. It has persisted despite extensive research showing it doesn’t work.

Sadly, as of 2025, 17 states and the District of Columbia require third graders to repeat a year if they fail tests. English language learners and students who use alternative assessments may be exempt.

Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have always been retained at higher rates.

Middle School Hell

Melissa Roderick, a well-regarded expert on this issue, whose bio is linked above, has numerous studies and a book on retention, its effects on retained students, and the dropout effect.

Roderick points out that retention becomes a major issue in middle school because retained students are overage. This leads children to become disengaged, and that stigma they’ve carried since being retained may push them to drop out (1994).

Imagine middle school students who tower over their peers and who have already developed into students who look like they should be in high school.

If you still aren’t convinced, Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports on a new and unique study, Early Grade Retention Harms Adult Earnings, by economist Jiee Zhong of Miami University, which demonstrates that children who are retained might show initial progress but will eventually face significant employability problems, including lower earnings as adults.

The study  should be taken seriously and aligns with many studies, like Roderick’s, that have been considered for decades, showing that children are more likely to drop out of school after being retained. Research has consistently and strongly shown this connection over the years.

The author of the new study found that third-grade retention deepened existing inequality.

She states:

Third graders who had to repeat a grade in Texas were far less likely to graduate from high school or earn a good living as young adults, nearly two decades later. The harmful effects were quite large and came despite initial improvements in test scores.

Mississippi Deception

Mississippi has been given accolades for student improvement, with students making early test gains, partly credited to retention, although there’s controversy over this and concern about comprehension and the later decline in 8th-grade scores.

Carey Wright, the state superintendent behind the changes to Mississippi’s schools, which included retention, claims in Barnum’s Chalkbeat report that students there received small-group instruction and they never focused on retention

But they did retain students. The New York Times presented a flattering report about the Mississippi gains, How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best, reporting that they hold back 6 to 9 percent of third graders each year (2026). Students take the test the following year after intense reading instruction. This has been controversial as well.

Also, Mississippi’s children may have been held back earlier. Oklahoma Watch found in 2024-25, Mississippi held back 8.2% of kindergarteners, 7.8% of first-graders, fewer than 5% of second graders and 6% of third graders, according to the latest report on the state’s Literacy Based Promotion Act. It’s unclear how many children, if any, have been retained twice.

Retention always raises questions about whether children may need more time between kindergarten and third grade to learn, perhaps being pushed to read too soon. What if they hadn’t been retained and had received intensive reading instruction throughout? Fourth grade is not an insignificant year for learning to read better.

While reading success is noteworthy by third grade, it doesn’t have to be the pressured year for students to prove their reading skills; that’s another issue.

Focus on Support

Wright is right that small groups might help children who are behind, but why do children need to be retained to make that happen?

Retention believers often argue that it’s wrong to simply promote students. They’re also right. The learning difficulties students bring to school should never be ignored. Students are entitled to critical assistance when they aren’t making progress in school.

But Shane Jimerson from the University of California, Santa Barbara showed in a Meta-analysis of Grade Retention Research: Implications for Practice in the 21st Century that children who are promoted, without extra help, still do better than those who are retained. Jimerson called for an end to the debate and stressed that neither retention nor social promotion of a student with difficulties was good. Children need help with their school difficulties.

As I pointed out earlier, there are various solutions to retention. Children don’t have to leave school with such a stigma. My favorite is looping. I’ve seen it work wonderfully!

Looping two years with one teacher is one great solution. Teachers get to know students for two years, understand their progress in reading and math, and bring them up to speed. Unlike retention, which funds another school year for a child, there’s no extra cost to this. The child would be in the next grade anyway and is never made to feel like a failure! A well-qualified teacher, in tune with this process, is critical for this class.

Scores of research studies show that retention harms students in the long term, and no child deserves to be demeaned because they have learning difficulties.

The retention debate is old and stodgy, perpetuated over the years by those doing studies to try to prove it works, who refuse to think outside of the box for better alternatives.

We should know better now! There’s no need to retain children and undermine their self-belief. It’s time to focus on solutions that lift students, like looping, rather than leaving children feeling like they’ve failed.

References

Roderick, M. (1994). Grade Retention and School Dropout: Investigating the Association. American Educational Research Journal, 31(4), 729–759. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312031004729

Mervosh, S. (2026, January 11). How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best. The New York Times. Retrieved at: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/mississippi-schools-transformation.html

Jimerson, S. R. (2001). Meta-analysis of Grade Retention Research: Implications for Practice in the 21st Century. School Psychology Review, 30(3), 420–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/02796015.2001.12086124

Addendum

I have written about this topic many times. It’s disappointing to see there have been few, if any, changes concerning this serious issue. Here are a few other posts.

13 Reasons Why Grade Retention is Terrible, and 12 Better Solutions

Why Do Science of Reading Advocates Accept Unscientific Third-Grade Retention?

Michigan fortunately no longer retains third graders but the points in this post are important.

For You Michigan!—You Are WRONG about Retention!

FORCE & FLUNK: Destroying a Child’s Love of Reading—and Their Life

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