NEPC - Blog Post of the Day

The Education Wars: What’s Left for Public Education?

elaine — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 13:31:03 +0000

The Education Wars: What’s Left for Public Education?

The left has no vision for public schools - and that’s a big problem

For months now I’ve been kicking around an essay that tries to explain why the ascendant left-wing of the Democratic party—those Democratic Socialist candidates who’ve been disrupting party primaries—is almost completely silent when it comes to the issue of public education. That question has taken on new urgency in light of the essay that officially broke the Internet, spawning a bazillion takes and forever rebranding the author as a monogram: NHJ. But the essay and its fallout have also spotlighted the fact that the NYC’s mayor, whose upset victory was powered by rage against inequality, has so little to say about the city’s unequal, segregated schools.

Full disclosure: I am a huge Zohran Mamdani fan. But I have been deeply frustrated by his administration’s lack of a vision for what is not only the nation’s largest school district, but the largest entity, by cost and headcount, under the mayor’s control. “What’s Mamdani’s agenda for K-12 education in NYC?” asked the education news site Chalkbeat recently, concluding that after six months, it was hard to say. Analyzing every press release released by the administration, Chalkbeat noted that just 11 had anything to do with the city’s schools. More recently, Mamdani announced a one-year ban on AI in elementary and middle schools in NYC—a smart move, given the parent-powered grassroots revolt against ed tech. But whereas we know the mayor’s views on, say, housing or worker power, his vision for public schools in the city remains largely mysterious.

The K-12 Hole

It’s not just Zo, as the New York Post likes to refer to him. The DSA platform barely touches on public education. The “thriving working class communities” the group envisions apparently don’t include schools. And with the exception of a handful of notables—Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, Angie Nixon in Florida and David Morales in Providence, RI to name a few—the candidates running under the DSA banner don’t mention K-12 education. Nithya Raman, the DSA candidate who will likely be the next mayor of Los Angeles, identifies 11 priority issues on her website. Animal welfare makes the cut, but LA’s schools, which educate more students than any district in the country save for NYC, do not. Then there’s Melat Kiros, who recently unseated a fifteen term incumbent in a district that makes up most of Denver. In an interview prior to her upset victory, she laid out this inspiring vision of the future:

I have a fundamental belief that our government is responsible for meeting our most basic needs, and in the same way that we have security and knowing that if our house is on fire, we can call the fire department, or if our home is burglarized, we can call the police, that if we are sick, we should be able to go to a doctor down the road and we should be able to go to that doctor on a yearly basis for primary care. We should be able to send our kids to the local public university tuition-free.

Notice anything missing? Lest you think that I’m unfairly picking on the DSA here, this lack of concern over what happens in the period between universal pre-K and free college is a broader problem on the left. The Working Families Party, for example, just rolled out its Guarantee, the product of a multi-year effort to come up with a proactive economic populist agenda that can bring the multiracial working class together. It doesn’t mention education at all.

Backlash

In recent months, I’ve reached out to all kinds of folks to ask about the absence of education from the left’s vision. I’ve talked to friends of mine who are active in left politics, activists I’ve encountered online, and even a few candidates. The explanation cited most frequently is a straightforward one: that the young activists who dominate the DSA don’t have children. Some version of realpolitik also tops the list. Left-wing mayors with bold, transformative visions cannot afford to alienate the powerful teachers unions, typically the largest organized force in the city. Witness, for example, the current stand off in NYC over a controversial plan to pay paraprofessionals, among the lowest paid employees in the schools, a one-time $10K bonus. After Mamdani flip-flopped on supporting the payments, the teachers union chief threatened an “all-out war” against him.

While both of these explanations are probably correct, I think that the composition of the electorate that has been increasingly drifting to the left may tell us more. Much has been made of the educational credentials of DSA voters, more than 80 percent of whom have college degrees, and over a third of whom have a master’s degree, a doctorate or some other professional degree. That these voters are also struggling financially has made them the target of endless mockery, for majoring in “Southeast Asian feminist literature” rather than a more lucrative STEM subject (Fox’s Jesse Watters) or secretly envying “more successful professionals,” like those who drill for oil and gas (Palantir’s Alex Karp.)

While voters who are “highly educated, downwardly mobile” may indeed be the DSA’s sweet spot, as Nate Silver calculated recently, we can also think of them as part of a (potentially) much broader coalition: those for whom education hasn’t paid off. As Noam Scheiber chronicled in his terrific recent book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class, young voters who can’t afford homes, or childcare, or life increasingly feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods regarding the payoff of college. As the college wage advantage drops, the ranks of the restive precariate will only grow. Nor are these folks all clustered in NYC’s “Commie Corridor” or the equivalent in other blue states. Of the nearly 10 million Americans who are in default on their student loans, for example, the highest concentration is in the south.

According to the most recent polling, some four in ten Democrats now consider themselves as democratic socialists, while more than half of Ds hold positive views of socialism. In addition to polls showing rising support for economic solutions to economic problems, surveys also show that the left, especially the young left, cares less about K-12 education than older voters. But perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way too and that the kids are simply telling us that they’ve lost faith in the mantra that education is an economic escalator.

Nearly a decade ago I wrote a piece that is still among my top faves, making the case that education reform had essentially ‘eaten’ the Democratic Party. The TLDR version is that in the quest for solutions to inequality that didn’t entail taxing the rich, the Democrats embraced charter schools and their billionaire backers, while making enemies of teachers and especially their unions. If bad teachers were the cause of generational poverty, as the “documentary” Waiting for Superman posited, then the billionaires who went to war against them were our new heroes. Forget that their other pet cause often seemed to be immiserating the parents of the would-be charter school students—this was a win/win.

I’d argue that despite the DSA’s relative silence on education issues, its rise is also a backlash to billionaire-driven school reform: the Bloombergs, the Broads, the Griffins, the Loebs. As one Mamdani campaign activist told me, “This is a movement that says we need redistribution. Nobody buys the idea that somehow charter schools are the answer to inequality. ”

It’s the structure, stupid

For the past five years I’ve been teaching a course called “The Politics of Public Education,” alternating between Yale and an actual jail—a medium security men’s prison in Massachusetts where I teach in the Boston College Prison Education Program. We start each semester talking about the myriad and conflicting purposes of education, and without fail, the favorite reading of both of these group’s is Jean Anyon’s nearly five-decades-old observational analysis of five different New Jersey elementary schools, each one preparing kids to occupy a specific rung on the social ladder. My Yale students mostly, but not exclusively, come from the classrooms that correspond to the ladder’s upper rungs: what Anyon calls “affluent professional” and “executive elite” schools. My incarcerated students, meanwhile, immediately recognize the schools Anyon designates as “working class”: chaotic, at times violent places, staffed by adults who were disinterested at best, uncaring at worst, with learning that rarely rose above rote.

In arguing that schools play an essential role in reproducing the unequal structure of economic relationships in which we work and live, Anyon offers up a class analysis that my students have rarely encountered before. What she doesn’t provide are any answers regarding whether doing school differently might disrupt this class hierarchy—an omission that plagues much education analysis on the left. Reflecting on their classic, Schooling in Capitalist America, twenty five years later, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis lamented that they’d avoided the question of what schools should be, and what, if anything could be done to improve them.

The point of this digression is that this view of schools as, not just reflecting, but deepening the contradictions of economic life, as Bowles and Gintis would have it, continues to shape the way the left thinks about education. This is why Mamdani, for example, is blazing a bold path when it comes to empowering workers, but seems comparatively visionless about the city’s schools. In her recent appearance on Brian Lehrer’s show, Nikole Hannah-Jones challenged Mamdani about his lack of a plan to address the racial and economic isolation of students in schools like PS 307, she argued that “nothing can help the working class change its material condition more than actually having access to an equal and quality education.” But it is the collective loss of faith in this belief that has been propelling the ascent of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

Schools as socialism

Ironically, the left’s surge in places like NYC, Providence and Washington DC is at least partly fueled by the desire to reclaim public goods, post pandemic. “It is in cities that voters most routinely encounter, and thereby come to value, public goods,” wrote David Wallace-Wells this summer, describing what he argues could be the dawn of a new political era for American cities. In an interview with Wells, Nithya Raman, the DSA candidate running to run Los Angeles, made the case that cities are the natural proving ground for the left:

To me, a city feels like the most impactful place — where you can make the case for progressive politics, where you can make the case for government working well because the impacts of functional government are so immediate and so real.

Which makes it all the stranger that public schools are somehow missing from the list of public goods that these voters value. After all, the right’s decades-long, and increasingly successful, crusade to dismantle public education is first and foremost about schools’ public-ness. Providing every American kid, papers or not, with a K-12 education that we collectively pay for is just about the most socialist thing we do in this country.

Speak up

As left-wing pols stay silent on the topic of the nation’s schools, there are plenty of other folks who have a great deal to say. The response to NHJ’s essay and its aftermath among education reformers, who’ve been wandering in the wilderness through the Trump years, has been euphoric. Mamdani et al may want to focus on material conditions and doing battle with billionaires, but here, at last, is an opportunity to shift the conversation back to schools. As one such billionaire implored, “We can’t wait to solve all societal issues before demanding higher performing schools.”

And yet any opportunity for the education reform movement brings its own dangers. The coalition that powered the cause last time around, the unlikely assemblage of billionaire philanthropists, charter school proporents, big city mayors, and civil rights groups, is mostly dead. Instead, self-styled school fixers are far more likely to find allies on the right these days, where talk of “standards,” “excellence,” and “back to basics” overlaps with race science and xenophobia.

There is also the future of the Democratic Party to consider. The upsurge in support for the left is a backlash against the party’s establishment—against the gerontocracy, against support for Israel. But education is another key fault line. For decades, Democrats have been telling us that “what you earn is what you learn,” as Bill Clinton liked to say (and Rahm Emanuel is still saying). This insistence that every economic problem is really an education problem, as writer Tom Frank so aptly put it, is an underappreciated source of the Democrats’ woes, alienating workers without college degrees, and increasingly, even those who did follow the party’s prescription for success.

As centrists seek to tamp down the party’s left wing, they’ll be trying to head off demands for a progressive policy agenda by once again blaming our economic woes on the schools. Ironically, the best way to put this tired argument to rest may be for the left to finally start talking about education.

elaine November 13, 2026

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The Education Wars

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Cheating With AI (Emma Whitford)*

elaine — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 13:43:25 +0000

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Cheating With AI (Emma Whitford)*

This article appeared in Inside Higher Ed, July 8, 2026.

For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.

But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96 percent.

“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because … take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time,” Serrano said.

He knew something “fishy” was going on, and so he and his graders ran the test through ChatGPT. The AI gave answers that mirrored what his students had written, and which were “kind of correct, but very off and with a very convoluted style,” Serrano said. For example, one question asked students to prove a mathematical statement that could most obviously be done using a “direct argument,” Serrano explained. ChatGPT—and many of his students—used a “contradiction argument,” which gave the right answer but was “very contrived” and which Serrano could tell wasn’t written by a human.

In a message to students after the midterm that he shared with Inside Higher Ed, he told them he suspected many of them of using AI to cheat and, with the blessing of his dean, changed the final exam to an in-person test.

“I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.

In a follow-up message to students, Serrano announced the midterm was void and the final exam would be worth 80 percent of the students’ final grade. Any student that scored a 40 percent or higher on the final earned a passing grade—previously, he set the passing line at 50 percent or higher. In total, 19 students failed the class.

‘We Cannot Choose to Become Idiots’

In May, Serrano submitted the data … to Brown’s Standing Committee on the Academic Code and received no response. After he went public with his story in late June, the committee, through his department chair, asked Serrano to submit individual complaints against each student suspected of cheating, including copies of their exams, he said.

“What they are asking is ridiculous … I believe they plan to run them through some AI-detection tool, which is well-known to give many false positives and false negatives,” he said. “Their response, I must tell you, is seen as appalling and insufficient by hundreds of people who have emailed me in support, many of them Brown alumni.”

Asked about the university’s response to the cheating, Brown spokesperson Brian Clark told Inside Higher Ed that the procedure for investigating cheating allegations is the same whether it’s one student or several.

“Brown treats every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness. In regard to this economics course, multiple academic leaders from Brown were in touch with the faculty member who raised concerns to provide details about how the allegations raised could be formally adjudicated. To date, the faculty member has not provided the necessary details to the Standing Committee on the Academic Code to pursue this path toward resolution,” Clark wrote….

Adjudicating cheating allegations when so many students are suspected of having cheated is tough on faculty, said Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office and Triton Testing Center at the University of California, San Diego.

“They don’t get rewarded for dealing with a 60-person case of cheating,” she said. “They are not incentivized to really prevent cheating or to report it when it occurs … Their time is not compensated. If the professor’s a lecturer, and they get paid on the first day of class and stop getting paid on the last day of class, when are they supposed to do it? Or grad students who teach for the summer?”

At the same time, institutions can’t sacrifice fairness for efficiency, she said, but there are some steps colleges can take to find a middle ground. Bertram Gallant recommends that academic integrity committees allow students to accept responsibility for cheating via email rather than only during an in-person meeting, and to allow professors to submit complaints against multiple students at once. Ultimately, institutions that care most about upholding academic integrity will dedicate staffing and resources to the matter, she said.

“Edgar Schein, an organizational theorist, said leaders tell you what they value little by what they say, and more by what they spend their money on,” she said. “So the fact that most universities—especially rich ones—do not have academic integrity professionals that they pay, that’s symbolic.”

As the cheating scandal unfolded in Serrano’s classroom, a Brown committee on generative AI in teaching and learning was examining how the technology was being used at the university and formalizing recommendations for how Brown can adapt and respond to AI developments. Its inaugural report was published Tuesday.

Three-quarters of Brown professors said they are concerned about students using AI to cheat, according to feedback from 105 faculty members. The same share of respondents said the same in a 2025 nationwide survey from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. As part of a set of medium-term recommendations, the committee encouraged the university to amend the College Academic Code and the graduate student code “to address GenAI realities and safeguard against misuse.”

“The academic codes should speak to integrity, but also to the potential harms to student learning and personal growth,” the report states. “Beyond the campus baseline regarding GenAI use, it is important that bright lines around misuse be enforced. As such, the academic codes should explicitly address high-level issues such as: is something in ‘your own words’ if GenAI provides grammatical improvements? Are the thoughts ‘your own’ if you formed them through a brainstorming exercise with GenAI in the same way you would engage a colleague in conversation? How do we apply the concepts of knowledge production, original research, citation and attribution in the context of GenAI?”

The committee also suggests that faculty “de-emphasize punishment” and avoid highly restrictive rules around generative AI use.

“There is no way to check with 100 percent accuracy whether GenAI has been employed, and norms are likely to change in the years to come,” the report states. “Moving the conversation beyond punishment also allows for open dialogue that will be necessary as Brown navigates this moment.”

As colleges and universities grapple with AI, cheating must be taken seriously, Serrano said. “We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK,” he said. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society … We cannot choose to become idiots.”

____________________

*Emma Whitford: “I cover all things faculty for Inside Higher Ed, including labor issues and unions, shared governance, academic freedom, hiring, tenure, research and pedagogy. This is my second beat at IHE—I previously covered governance and leadership from 2020 to 2022. Prior to rejoining the newsroom, I spent three years at Forbes as a general education reporter.”

elaine November 12, 2026

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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Shanker Blog: Time: The Missing Ingredient in Literacy Reform

elaine — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 13:19:07 +0000

Shanker Blog: Time: The Missing Ingredient in Literacy Reform

Guest authors Jack Schneider and Ashley Carey are two of the co-authors of On the Clock: The Centrality of Time in Teacher Work, a new research brief published by the Albert Shanker Institute.

Across the country, states are rushing to adopt “science of reading” legislation. The motivations are sincere, and the research base is substantive. New curricula promise better outcomes; professional development workshops aim to equip teachers with evidence-based practices; data systems can help educators track student progress. From a distance, it seems comprehensive enough to close the nation’s yawning literacy gaps.

But policymakers have largely overlooked a critical ingredient that will almost certainly determine whether these reforms prove successful. And if you’re a teacher, you probably already know what it is.

Consider Ms. Smith, a second-grade teacher with a decade of classroom experience. She’s committed to her students and she understands why the new literacy approach matters. She wants to implement it well.

But she’s drowning.

The new curriculum requires her to learn new instructional methods. The assessment system requires one-on-one reading screeners for each of her 24 students—a process that eats up two full instructional days. New data management systems demand hours of tracking and reporting. And all of this has been added to everything Ms. Smith is already doing.

As a result, her willing participation has curdled into stress and exhaustion. She’s joining colleagues in griping about the new program and, more troublingly, beginning to question whether teaching is still a sustainable career.

This is not a story about a struggling teacher. This is a story about what happens when policymakers ignore the centrality of time.

Our research centers on a simple observation: policy doesn’t directly change what happens in classrooms. Instead, policy shapes the professional contexts in which teachers work—the schedules, resources, expectations, and conditions they navigate daily. These contexts interact with individual teacher characteristics to determine how teachers allocate their time. And how teachers allocate their time determines both their effectiveness in the classroom and their overall well-being.

This framework reveals why so many reforms disappoint. When policymakers add substantial new responsibilities without restructuring how time is used, teachers face an untenable bind. To make it all work, they debate whether to work unpaid hours in the evening, or if they should cut corners. Some debate whether to leave the profession altogether.

This dynamic—a labor-intensive educational reform with little concern for the existing time structures in which teachers carry out their work—is not new. We’ve watched this cycle play out for decades. Achievement gaps prompt ambitious policy. Stirring rhetoric and significant investments raise expectations. Early results suggest something is working. And then, slowly, the project of implementation crashes into the reality of teachers’ working conditions. The instructional core resists change. Results plateau. We move on to the next reform.

Our aim is not to weigh in on the “science of reading.” Instead, our argument is that policy implementation—whatever its evidentiary base—requires more than new curricula and professional development. It requires honoring the time constraints that define teaching. And it demands that we answer hard questions that typically go unasked. When teachers assess students individually, who covers their classes? When they learn new instructional methods, when do they have the opportunity to practice, reflect, and debrief with peers? When they face new lesson planning burdens, what existing responsibilities disappear? When they navigate new data systems, where does the time come from?

Until we answer these questions—and restructure accordingly—we’ll watch another generation of teachers struggle to implement reforms that were designed without them in mind. If policymakers are interested in a different outcome, they should ask teachers what their most valuable resource is.

elaine November 11, 2026

Source

Shanker Blog

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: The Dysfunctional Pursuit of Relevance in Educational Research

elaine — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 16:43:25 +0000

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: The Dysfunctional Pursuit of Relevance in Educational Research

In this paper, I explore the issue of relevance in educational research. I argue that the chronic efforts by researchers to pursue relevance is counterproductive. Paradoxically, trying to make research more relevant actually makes it less so. Drawing on an analysis by Mie Augier and Jim March, I show that this is the result of two factors. One is that there is a profound ambiguity about what education is supposed to accomplish. What’s relevant for one goal may be irrelevant for another. A second factor is that the stress on relevance creates a kind of myopia. The researcher is focusing tightly on a particular set of conditions in time and place, which will likely change by the time the study is published. Better to step back and see the larger picture in order to figure out what this case is a case of.

This paper originally appeared in Educational Researcher in 2008. Here’s a link to the original text.

THE DYSFUNCTIONAL PURSUIT OF RELEVANCE IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

In the title of her paper, Jacquelien A. Bulterman-Bos (2008) asks, “Will a Clinical Approach Make Educational Research More Relevant for Practice?” and by the end she comes to the answer, “Yes.” Overall this is an engaging effort to sort out the nature of educational research and understand its relationship to the practice of teaching. During the course of this discussion, the author draws on my analysis of the transition that teachers undergo when they enter doctoral programs on the road to becoming researchers – a shift in worldview from the normative to the analytical, from the personal to the intellectual, from the particular to the universal, and from the experiential to the theoretical (Labaree, 2003). She argues that this depiction of the differences between teaching and doing research is only useful up to a point, because it is grounded in a discredited Cartesian conception of the split between body and mind. Drawing on Michael Polanyi, she argues that knowledge is not full bodied and useful unless it remains connected to the real world of education, where knowledge necessarily retains within it elements that are normative, personal, particularistic, and experiential. Therefore, she asserts, educational research needs to be grounded in teaching practice if it is going to be able to represent the context of practice effectively. This means that educational researchers need to spend years as teachers before becoming researchers, and they need to remain active as classroom teachers during their time doing research. Such a clinical approach to educational research will produce a form of knowledge about education that is both more valid as a representation of education and more useful to practitioners.

Bulterman-Bos raises the kinds of issues about the aims and meanings of research that scholars in any field should be discussing, and such a discussion is particularly pertinent in a professional field like education, where policymakers, practitioners, funding agencies, and citizens routinely ask how research can help improve the profession. I welcome her effort to clarify the issues surrounding the relevance of educational research, and I appreciate the opportunity to join in this discussion; but I find that I profoundly disagree with her analysis. My disagreement operates at three levels of abstraction, starting with a quibble about her interpretation of my own earlier argument about the differences in how teachers and researchers view the educational enterprise and then moving on to much more basic concerns about the nature of scholarly research and the meaning of relevance.

First, although her paper in general represents the argument in my paper accurately, it does introduce a subtle distortion of my account of the teacher-researcher split. In my paper I acknowledge that, by laying out the polar differences in the orientations of teacher and researcher so starkly, I risk overstating the difference between the two modes of work. I note that researchers in their own practice also demonstrate elements of the normative, personal, particularistic, and experiential; likewise teachers show elements of the contrasting orientations. The difference, I argue, is not the function of a mind-body dichotomy but a matter of emphasis, the result of a division of educational labor structured by the institutional settings, occupational constraints, daily work demands, and professional incentives of each realm of practice. Teachers are primarily engaged in a practice of social improvement, grounded in personal relationships with particular students embedded in time and place, and the professional knowledge they build is largely an accumulation of clinical experiences. Educational researchers are primarily engaged in a practice of social analysis, grounded in intellectual conceptions of education generalized across contexts, and the professional knowledge they build is largely a web of theories. The different conditions of work lead to different modes of professional practice and different ways of thinking about education.

This leads to a second broader point, that the way to deal with these differences in orientation is not to combine the two in a single role – clinical researcher – which perfectly balances these elements, but to acknowledge and honor the different zones of expertise and to promote a fruitful dialogue between practitioners in the two zones. It seems neither practical nor necessary for all researchers to split their time between school teaching and educational research in order to establish the power and credibility of the research knowledge they produce. A differential allocation of functions between teachers and researchers seems fruitful for both professions, as long as the barrier is relatively low and the conversation across the barrier is ongoing. Universities are not eager to pay scholars to teach school, and school districts are not eager to pay teachers to do research, so it is hard to see how such a hybrid occupational role can become institutionalized. And the skills involved in being an expert researcher or teacher are so strikingly different that it would be difficult for individuals to achieve mastery in both at the same time. Each requires immersion in a particular institutional setting, fluency in a distinctive professional culture, and full engagement in a complex set of professional practices.

According to Bulterman-Bos, these differences in perspective between researchers and teachers are highly dysfunctional, leading to invalid research and ineffective teaching; but I see these differences as carrying great potential value. To teachers – immersed in a web of pedagogical goals, social contexts, and instructional relationships – research can offer a way to gain perspective on their realm of practice, holding up a theoretical mirror that allows them to see what is unique and what is commonplace in their classroom setting. To researchers – afloat in the intellectualized and decontextualized realm of educational theory – the classroom can offer a way to gain grounding in the personal and particular world of teaching and learning in schools, providing professional problems to spur theory development and providing clinical settings for testing theory. Both stand to gain from the interaction, since each side provides what the other is lacking. The answer, I suggest, is not to resolve this tension by merging the two roles but to take advantage of the tension by using it to enrich both modes of professional practice.

I want to advance this argument another notch by making a third, more fundamental point: It is counterproductive to press educational research – or, for that matter, any other form of research – to be relevant. One problem is that relevance is a tricky quality to define, since it is easier to recognize in retrospect than in prospect. A related problem is that earnest efforts to make research more relevant can paradoxically make it useless or even harmful, by focusing on short term results that are narrowly measured instead of on consequences with a longer horizon and broader scope.

But to argue against the press for relevance is not to say that educational research should be irrelevant. Research in general draws inspiration from real world problems, and this is particularly true in professional schools, where scholars feel the need to study issues that arise from problems of practice in their professional arena. In his book exploring the issue of research relevance, Donald Stokes (1997) called this sector of research activity “Pasteur’s quadrant.” He categorizes research according to the degree that its aim is to pursue fundamental understanding or to respond to pressing problems, and by this metric he locates Niels Bohr in the first category (pure basic research), Thomas Edison in the second (pure applied research), and Louis Pasteur in both (use-inspired basic research). I argue that scholarly research justifies itself primarily by its contribution to theory, sometimes inspired by immediate social needs (like Pasteur) and sometimes not (like Bohr), and this applies to a professional field like education as much as to a scholarly discipline. If we as educational researchers fail to contribute to theory with our research, then we are less scholars than engineers or product developers. Theory development frequently leads to product development, as the relationship between universities and the technology industry has demonstrated so dramatically in the last half century, but the distinctive value of scholarly research dissipates quickly when it segues from being use-inspired to use-driven. And this is what happens with the press for relevance.

Mie Augier and James G. March (2007) have written a persuasive account of how the drive to make research relevant can render it less so. Their focus is on the research produced and education provided by business schools, but their arguments apply with equal validity to the field of education. In both domains, there is a strong professional constituency asking professional schools to prove their usefulness by solving problems and serving the needs of practitioners. The problem is that this urge to be useful often turns counterproductive. Augier and March identify two key factors that undermine the relevance of research trying too hard to be relevant: ambiguity and myopia.

Ambiguity comes from the difficulty in trying to define what constitutes relevance for research. Presumably, educational research is relevant if it has some kind of clear connection to issues and problems in the field of educational practice, particularly if it promises to be useful to practitioners who are trying to deal with these issues and resolve these problems. But this begs the question, useful to whom and for what? Think of the wide array of actors involved in education: teachers, students, principals, and parents; test makers, textbook publishers, and educational technology producers; curriculum developers, superintendents, and school board members; policymakers, politicians, and educational bureaucrats; teacher educators and education school deans. What might make research useful for some of these might at the same time make it useless for others. Relevance is in the eye of the beholder. In addition, research may be useful for helping to accomplish some educational ends but not others. Studies that seem relevant to people who are trying to raise test scores may not be at all relevant for those who are trying to improve critical thinking, enhance civic commitment, increase skills in mathematical analysis, promote gender equity, reduce the racial achievement gap, increase graduation rates, or enhance human capital production. These studies may not even seem helpful to people trying to raise student scores on other tests. In fact, what is helpful in attaining one goal may be harmful in attaining another, which, for example, is the argument made by proponents of critical thinking about the effect of efforts to raise test scores. Almost any bit of educational research is likely to be seen as more or less useful for some actor concerned about some education-related goal, while simultaneously being seen as useless or harmful by most actors for most purposes. Under these circumstances, it is trivial to call research relevant or irrelevant, since it all depends on the peculiar mix of actors and goals.

But the problem of the inherent ambiguity of relevant research feeds into the more fundamental problem of its genetic predisposition toward myopia. Relevance is not only a function of person and purpose but also of place and time. As Bulterman-Bos and I have both argued, teaching and learning in schools is highly particularized and contextualized. This makes the relevance of research hard to establish across contexts. Studies that may be seen as useful in teaching and learning for one student – or subject matter or ethnic group or classroom or grade level or school or school district or state or country – may not be seen as useful in other settings. Likewise, what makes research useful at one point in time may make it useless or misleading at another. The knowledge may be so time sensitive that its usefulness expires quickly. And knowledge that is helpful in meeting an educational goal in the present (say, to improve engagement in a science lesson) may undermine a goal whose accomplishment cannot be measured until decades later (say, to improve science understanding in the workforce).

Augier and March call this tendency myopia in order to call attention to a potentially pathological consequence of the effort to make research relevant: it may lead to educational knowledge that is short-sighted. When educational researchers seek to make their work relevant, they feel the need to tailor their work to the demands of educational practice in the present time and the local place (or the location of the intended client-consumer). The problem is that this work, even if it is helpful in that particular context is not likely to be useful in the conditions of educational practice that exist a few miles away or a few months in the future. Conversely, research that seems like an abstract exercise in theory building at one time and place may become highly relevant for practical purposes that were unforeseeable at the point when the work was done. Bohr’s work on quantum mechanics is a good case in point.

In this sense, then, applied research may grow stale quickly while basic research may age well. Scholarly work that neither arises from a quest for relevance nor demonstrates any particular utility at the time it is carried out may turn out to be highly useful at a later time and in a different place. Research relevance, therefore, is not only hard to define, but the active pursuit of it may produce educational knowledge that is irrelevant.

References

Augier, Mie & March, James G. (2007). The pursuit of relevance in management education. California Management Review, 49:3 (Spring), 129-146.

Bulterman-Bos, Jacquelien A. (2008). Will a clinical approach make educational research more relevant for practice? Educational Researcher.

Labaree, David F. (2003). The peculiar problems of preparing and becoming educational researchers. Educational Researcher, 32:4 (May), 13-22.

Stokes, Donald E. (1997). Pasteur’s quadrant: Basic science and technological innovation. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.

elaine November 10, 2026

Source

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing:

Curmudgucation: Stop With the NCLB Nostalgia

elaine — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 16:41:34 +0000

Curmudgucation: Stop With the NCLB Nostalgia

Some reformsters just can't stop longing for the days of No Child Left Behind, particularly the test-based accountability component. Reformy Rahm Emanuel thinks there's political gold to be mined by harping on the issue. Mike Petrilli's substack includes spirited defense of NCLB, echoing Arne Duncan's misty-eyed insistance that we quit when we should have doubled down.

The narrative is that after NCLB started and brought test-based accountability that made schools just get better and better for about a decade, and then things just started to stall about the same time that Congress replaced NCLB with the less stringent ESSA. That was 2015.

Petrilli and others have been reacting to a New York Times piece from Ross Wiener, and while it gets some things wrong, he's right on the mark with this:

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now.

The narrative of NCLB doing swell things until America lost its nerve and bailed does not reflect any reality I lived through. I was classroom teacher of English in those years. Let me tell you the story of NCLB and test-based accountability that I remember.

When NCLB testing first hit, we received it initially as one more fiddly piece of government paperwork. But early on, there were some troubling signs.

One was how it trickled down through the bureaucratic infrastructure. NCLB came to us as a state policy; back in those days we didn't expect that kind of micromanagement to come from the feds and it took us a while to catch on to the real source of these policies. We were also used to state trainings that tried to convince us to buy in, the hope that we would nod and smile and adopt the policy like we'd thought of it ourselves. But in the days of NCLB, that changed; no more friendly convincing, but instead a steely-eyed "You can get with the program or get rolled over."

But the program was nuts. While NCLB was "launched" in 2002, very little trickled down to the classroom for five-ish years. My region didn't get our first training in Value-Added measures (PVAAS in PA) until the fall of 2009, and it was absolutely alarming. I wrote about that training at the time in my regular newspaper gig (I wasn't a sophisticated blogger yet) and said, in part, this:

This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.

This came just as local district administrators were waking up to the coming NCLB disaster. The required annual improvement on test scores increased slowly at first, but the last few years of NCLB included incredible demands for test score improvement, culminating in 2014 in which 100% of all students in every school were supposed to be "proficient." Every classroom teacher in the country knew this was not possible, but any time one wanted to bring this up to The People In Charge, they simply spat back, "Well, which children do you want to leave behind?"

Legislators and bureaucrats may have operated on the belief that of course Congress would change the law before 2014 arrived, but they failed to do so, and actual schools had to operate with the knowledge that by 2011 or thereabouts there would be only two types of schools-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating.

That unmeetable deadline had multiple effects. For one, there's something very demoralizing about feeling that legislators have set you up to fail. And of course that unmeetable deadline provided the leverage for Obama/Duncan to push states into Race to the Top (or RttT Lite) and the Common Core, with its accompanying message of "Teachers are doing a terrible job, so let us tell you how to do the work." Boy, we were hoping that Obama was going to make things better; that did not happen.

But why did test scores go up for a while, and then... not?

The early approach to the tests was hopeful administration directives. "We'll revisit our curriculum to make sure it's aligned, and then if you just do good teaching, the tests will take care of themselves." That was combined with practice testing and the kind of test prep that is aimed at teaching students how to take that kind of standardized test.

Then came targeting. Schools sorted students into three groups, usually with the aid of the practice test. Group A: These students will do well enough on their own. Group B: These students are unlikely to do well enough ever. Group C: These students are close enough to the line that with some extra work we might be able to drag them over. Group C got extra test prep. They were taken out of study hall and, in some cases, even taken out of music or art or science or history so they could spend extra time getting ready for the tests.

This was the infamous period in which schools used a simple metric-- Is it on the test?-- for deciding what mattered and what didn't. And for a while it worked, though it came at a cost to other aspects of education. Schools even altered districts structures in an attempt to get the notoriously-low-scoring 8th graders under the same roof as some other better-scoring grade,

But all of these fixes could only do so much. By 2015, an entire generation of students had learned how to take these tests-- there was nothing to be gained in scores there. Nor is there any good fix for one major obstacle-- making students actually care about how they do on a test that is boring and has zero stakes for the students themselves. And of course, painfully for those of us teaching English, a shift from teaching whole works to drilling dumb short excerpts with multiple-choice questions to better mimic the tests.

Schools were in the grip of Campbell's Law, and teachers were shoved into a Dilbert-esque world where we had to take a bunch of time away from doing the work in order to create reports on how we were doing the work.

So here's my narrative. In 2002, the was an attempt to reorganize the entire education system around standardized reading and math tests. It took about a decade for the reorganization to be fully implemented and for the schools to rebuilt themselves around the new normal. That adjustment period looked like an increase in test scores (which way too many people continued to treat as if they were a perfect proxy for educational achievement), but once the system was rebuilt around testing and students and teachers adjusted to the new status quo, and once they were settled into the new normal, test scores settled into a new equilibrium with the usual dips and bumps that every classroom teacher is used to seeing year to year (because students vary from year to year and test scores do not represent some ebb and flow of a singular body).

By the way-- the pandemic undoubtedly resulted in teachers and students achieving less than in an ordinary year, but the testing dip also represents schools spending less time to test-taking prep because instructional time was shortened and schools chose to use that precious resource for education rather than testing.

There are so many reasons not to go back to the days of NCLB, not the least of which is that it made the cynical assumption that education could only be improved by using threats and punishment. My question for every reformster arguing that we need to bring back testing and consequences-- at your workplace, do you only try to do your job well when you are sufficiently threatened by your bosses?

Some reformsters are going to argue that NCLB totally got real test score gains for Group Z. My response is a request to go do a follow-up study on those folks and find out if having a raised test score resulted in improved life outcomes. Because if the only desired goal of raising test scores is to have raised test score, I do not-- and I can't stress this enough-- give a shit.

NCLB and the attendant text-centered accountability movement gave a gut-kick the morale of the teaching profession as we were forced to understand that most of the people who we thought were supposed to have our backs actually viewed us a problem. Test-centered accountability has proven toxic to schools and education. And secondary effects are appearing, because a whole generation has been raised thinking that The Test is the main point of school, resulting in fewer people choosing the profession while those that do choose it come into it with some narrow, meager ideas of what the job is about.

I don't have a lot of trust of the Science of Reading movement, but I do appreciate the reform voices that are saying, "Look, teachers want to do well, so let's help them get the tools to succeed" as opposed to "Let's threaten teachers some more so they'll take out the secret magic lesson plans they've been hiding and start doing better." I know which message was more consistent with NCLB (right down to the implication that it was teachers who were leaving children behind).

I have no doubt that the whole history looks different when you have a mile-high view informed mostly by spreadsheets. But on the ground, in classrooms, NCLB was a mess and test-centered accountability was destructive and not particularly helpful. Nostalgia for those days is misplaced. Test-based accountability was worse than inadequate, and after two decades, we should know better.

elaine November 9, 2026

Source

Curmudgucation

Tomorrow's Mess: I’m Shocked, Shocked! A Reformed Lobbyist on Whisper Campaigns

elaine — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 13:49:19 +0000

Tomorrow's Mess: I’m Shocked, Shocked! A Reformed Lobbyist on Whisper Campaigns

On Meta’s campaign to amplify Jonathan Haidt’s critics.

At the outset of this post, I want to be extremely clear that the views herein are 100% my own.

After verdicts in Los Angeles and New Mexico this spring, a fresh $25 billion judgment out of New Mexico this month, and the attorney general settlement for $17 billion a few months ago, Meta’s legal losses in court and in the court of public opinion continue to mount. But these cases above are not fully over: as I’ve written about before, thanks to whistleblowers and these court cases, we know that Meta has systematically abused attorney-client privilege designations in order to withhold evidence from the American people, and now a court has agreed. Tens of thousands of documents are being re-reviewed for privilege by a “special master,” a judge appointed to see what should actually now be released. It didn’t help Meta’s case with the judge that Meta made custom hats celebrating the abuse of privilege and the judge found out about it.

Among those documents now available to the public are meeting notes from an internal “well being” team at Meta that has been in the news this week. As The Guardian put it:

Meta staff discussed deploying a “whisper strategy” to undermine the influential US academic whose work has inspired a global social media crackdown, according to court documents. . . . Minutes from a meeting on 8 March 2023 mention “Curtiss”, an apparent reference to Meta’s then vice-president of research, Curtiss Cobb. It states: “Curtiss’s goal for this work: how do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt. Can’t co-opt them, so how do we enrage them … so the media finds him not credible.”

Most of us working on tech accountability issues had the same reaction to the news as Captain Renault’s famous response in Casablanca upon finding that gambling was taking place at Rick’s nightclub:

Now that the news has settled in a bit, some of Haidt’s critics have started to push back on the insinuation that they colluded with a toxic corporate benefactor.

Whether they did is in fact beside the point.

Below, I’m going to break down — based on my experience formerly in house at Amazon — how such a campaign would have worked, how such campaigns obstruct the policymaking process, why these critics’ responses are not compelling, and where we should go from here.

Because this is a long post, here is the tl;dr version:

Meta would not have had to cut a check to academics in order for them to benefit from an arrangement where Meta amplifies their work and vice-versa; this is so common an arrangement that agents of influence have a term for it: “third-party validator.”
The way in which these folks engage with policy debates, at a minimum, demonstrates unfamiliarity with how Meta and tech companies are abusing the policymaking process, and the role of their own scholarly work in abetting that abuse.
Good faith criticism requires both better transparency about funding sources, acceptance of responsibility by scholars about how their work is used — and abused — in the policymaking process, and showing up when it matters with workable, viable solutions.

1. How Meta’s whisper campaign actually would have worked in practice

In 2017, when I led state tax policy for Amazon, a young lawyer named Lina Khan published a law review article titled, “Amazon’s Anti-Trust Paradox” that made waves in tech policy for arguing for a new approach to anti-trust enforcement that would target the company’s practices; Khan, of course, would rocket to wonk stardom and eventually be appointed to chair the FTC. Amazon — as is true of all sprawling tech companies — is terrified of antitrust enforcement, and, for a time at least, it was well-known throughout the company that Amazon’s legal chief David Zapolsky kept a white board in his office with a list of words like “market share” that were banned from use in internal emails for that very reason. Shortly after Khan’s paper made the rounds, some law professors approached Amazon, asking for support to publish a critique of Khan’s approach.¹ The support was thus given, and once the paper was published, tech companies like Amazon and Google then made generous use of this paper in conversations with policymakers to rebut and undermine Khan’s arguments.

With this in mind, consider the following. In a heavily quoted line, this week’s released document has Meta’s staff explicitly admitting that “we can’t coopt them” (we being Meta, them being academic critics; this would seem to suggest it’s unlikely it was as simple as a quid pro quo between Meta and academics). But below that, further down the page, is a mention of an “opportunistic critics proposal.” At a minimum — again, we shall see what other receipts may eventually come out when more unethically withheld documents are released — this is where these scholars fit in: as “opportunistic critics.”

It was always unlikely that a company like Meta would seek out and offer to just cut a check in exchange for a takedown — although dumber things have happened. It would be to everyone’s benefit and easily achieved to keep direct fingerprints off of such an arrangement. (When tech companies do fund sympathetic research, it can be laundered through opaque intermediaries to obscure the origins; while not directly on point, see for example how Amazon set up a fake disability rights nonprofit in California.) As a former tech company lobbyist, what I read in this document that is being proposed is helping out such opportunistic critics, perhaps even in ways that would be invisible to the academics themselves.

Here’s one way in which this happens. A reporter wants to do a story on, say, a family suing Meta after their teen daughter was hospitalized after extreme weight loss due to anorexia following the daughter’s exposure on Meta platforms to extreme anorexia content (this has happened; and we know from Sarah Wynn-Williams’s book Careless People and her sworn Senate testimony that Instagram feeds beauty ads to teen girls after they delete a selfie.) The reporter calls Meta’s PR shop for comment. In addition to providing the normal stodgy corporate statement, Meta’s PR team also directs the reporter to a roster of its own favorite “experts.” ²

For a reporter at an outlet like the New York Times, which to a fault attempts to give equal weight to both sides of an issue and ends up platforming bad faith actors, this leads to these scholars’ work being quoted in the eventual piece. In influence game lingo, the scholar thus serves as a “third party validator” for Meta — yes, this is so common a tactic that agents of influence like lobbyists have a specific term for it.³ The validator also benefits from having his or her profile raised in kind — even if no money changes hands, and even if no direct contact was made between the company and the validator.

A synonym for the “opportunistic critic” in the Meta meeting notes is “conflict entrepreneur,” and that in my opinion can be used to describe some of Haidt’s critics, who appear to orient their work in opposition to his in a way that maximizes their exposure. (Again, many critics have been working on these issues for years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t marketing their work this way in the press and on social media.) I won’t name names here, but if you so choose, have a look at replies on x.com to stories on this Meta news, and you’ll find a few examples of these folks there promoting themselves. Being a conflict entrepreneur can be an effective way to raise one’s profile, since we of course know — again from internal company documents — that narratives of conflict get more views on social media.

Let us also not forget that in addition to having well-resourced PR shops that can pitch reporters on their favored scholars’ work, tech companies like Meta also control a huge share of the information environment through which stories get amplified and spread or suppressed (see, e.g., Meta removing ads for attorneys working on social media cases). This is one area in which causality is impossible to prove, but that impossibility cuts both ways; separating conflict entrepreneurs’ amplified exposure causally from the substance of their work is impossible now that we have these meeting notes. Of course, the possibility that their work had help in getting attention will likely be received poorly by such entrepreneurs and may explain some of the reactions; as La Rochefoucauld wrote, “Pride does not wish to owe; vanity does not wish to pay.”

So denials from critics that they didn’t take money specifically to make a critique is beside the point to me; if that’s true, it’s still possible — even likely — that a campaign amplifying their work proceeded anyway, benefiting them indirectly, perhaps without their knowledge. That this may have happened even when Meta’s own well-resourced research internally supported other conclusions should be disturbing to academics interested in the pursuit of truth.

It’s worth noting that nowhere in these meeting notes does it appear that anyone in the meeting objected to the substance of Haidt’s claims; having been in similar meetings, correcting the record on something the company knew to be untrue would be core to the response rather than altogether absent.

2. Why ‘but I think Meta is bad too’ isn’t enough in America’s vetocracy

In his book Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama makes the case that towards the end of the 20th century, America’s form of government had become what he called a vetocracy. Fukuyama argues that the Constitution’s checks and balances, a reliance on courts, and the capture of legislatures through organized interest groups have together produced a system in which any sufficiently well-funded interest group can block policy at one of many veto points, so that the state can neither act decisively for the majority nor reform itself. When nothing gets done to deal with problems, public trust in government erodes, which weakens the state further.

America’s tech giants uniquely benefit from a vetocracy, in large part but not only because of the impunity granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Most large American businesses — say, pharma or car manufacturing or energy businesses — once they get to a certain size, end up in a symbiotic relationship with policy and regulators, whether it’s to secure regulatory approvals or in an attempt to secure regulatory capture. But because tech has largely remained unregulated, tech lobbyists have a unique mission: to preserve maximum legal and regulatory flexibility for their businesses. Because few laws with real teeth touch tech, these companies — maximizing shareholder value — have an obligation to prevent any laws from ever coming into force that would constrain them. Compromise isn’t in their vocabulary. To kill bills is their primary objective.

Here’s where the Merchants of Doubt strategy becomes particularly effective. Let’s say you are a state legislator, inundated with calls from parents and teachers who are your constituents and who are frustrated that they have lost all agency to control the role of technology in their kids’ lives. You experience this problem in your own home — your kid downloads a problematic app without your knowledge or permission, gets bullied on social media, etc. I hear this story all the time, directly from legislators, as to why they take these issues up.

Even if you as a legislator believe manipulative and exploitative tech designs are a problem for everyone, you will soon be well aware that the companies have weaponized the First Amendment to challenge any legislation that does pass and are spending the hundreds of millions of dollars on political donations and lobbyist contracts to convince your colleagues to do nothing. So, you want to draft something that exploits the curb-cut effect: you’ll start with protecting a vulnerable population that has broad bipartisan support, see if the policy intervention is successful, and learn and improve and expand from there. And when you consult all the policy experts you can on the matter — they are hard to find and not always responsive because they are poorly resourced relative to the companies and you may not even have staff support yourself — and draft a bill (the first of its kind, because tech has never been regulated before) — you are then hit with critical op-eds like this.

You haven’t heard from the op-ed’s author (again, this is a hypothetical, but based on reality), who hasn’t engaged with the policymaking process and has not offered helpful revisions, nuanced feedback, or a workable model of their own; but nonetheless, your committee chair through which your bill has to pass has accepted tech donations, and the doubt raised by the op-ed is all she needs to kill the bill so that it never gets a vote in committee. Because you spent all session perfecting the draft and wrangling votes; time runs out for the legislative session, and you have to wait to try again next year — if you even get the chance.

This is may be a hypothetical scenario, but it is an amalgamation of what has played out in Congress and in state capitals over and over again over the last half decade. This is the vetocracy in action — one op-ed, timed correctly, that offers critiques with no way forward shuts down any and all progress, to the benefit of companies like Meta. They intentionally exploit all of these veto points; I’ve seen done it myself while on the inside. This is how even a well-meaning, good faith objection can become another arrow in Meta’s quiver — and when it’s coordinated with a third-party validator tactic as above, it’s a shockingly effective strategy for making sure nothing gets done at all. And yet, with every legislative session that passes with no meaningful regulation of any kind, the companies’ power, wealth, and influence increases, making future interventions even more of an uphill climb.

This is so patently obvious to anyone actually engaged in the work that I find it hard to believe that critics who claim to believe Meta is problematic and that social media should be reformed are unaware that their work has a tendency to increase the political power of companies like Meta, simply by giving them sand to throw in the gears of the policymaking process.

It is more than just the perfect being the enemy of the good; it’s actively prolonging impunity and a lack of accountability for the company these critics claim to agree is a problem.

Why everyone should be pissed about this, and what to do if you are a critic suspected of collaborating

Whatever one makes of the evidence on adolescents and social media, the meeting notes should alarm everyone with a stake in that evidence. Here was the company with more data on teenage behavior than any university, a company whose own researchers had found causal evidence of harm, plotting how to turn the scholarly community against itself. These notes were written by people who regard the academy as something to be manipulated, not informing better policy or contributing to human knowledge.

Much like a slugger’s stats during the juicing era of baseball, every skeptical study now will carry an asterisk, like it or not. Every reporter and policymaker who reads a debunking should rightly question who amplified it and why. Meta has done to the research process what it has done to so much else it has touched: it has robbed the commons of trust. That should be the thing honest folks on every side rally against.

Good faith critique requires more than a denial of a quid pro quo here; it requires accepting some share of responsibility for what happens to a piece of scholarship once it enters the political arena. Want to help make better policy? Try saying, “yes, and” rather than “no” — “no” is the default position of the tech lobbyist. Try offering revisions instead of broadsides and putting forward a workable model of one’s own that is realistic politically. You might well find out, the way many of us grinding it out in state houses and in Congress have experienced first hand, going through revision after revision of legislative text, that this is a really hard needle to thread. Conflict may get you followers, but it can’t pass legislation. Getting stuff done requires compromise.

Good faith also means disclosure. At least the professors rebutting Lina Khan put Amazon’s support in a footnote on their first page, rather than waiting until after a judge released a damning document — only withheld because of ethical abuses in the first place — to consider acknowledging they’d received money.

These two things are, in my view, a pretty low bar — but it is a bar that is far from being met.

At the end of Casablanca, Captain Renault picks up a bottle of Vichy water, considers it, and drops it in the wastebasket. Then he walks off into the fog with Rick to join the fight. The invitation to academics interested in making the world online a better place for everyone is open. We’ll see if they keep drinking the Vichy water or join.

1 One thing worth remarking on is that Amazon’s support for the paper, admirably, is noted in the footnotes on the first page; the authors were not attempting to hide the ball. Contrast this with the current situation, in which it’s only after being confronted that some of these critics are admitting to having received funding from tech companies; it’s generally very difficult to find the sources of these scholars’ support, as similar acknowledgements are not included in their papers as far as I am aware.

2 It’s worth noting here that the meeting notes we have are from a Meta research team, presumably much more above-board in the way they conduct their business than Meta’s PR, policy, or legal teams. The fact that they are engaging in this tactic makes me shudder to think what unseen complementary tactics these other teams were engaged in — and note that the leaked document does make mention of “rolling into whatever comms is doing” so “it won’t be separate sets of asks” (e.g., presumably of reporters).

3 Another way tech companies do this is to amplify the voices of small business owners who have built their businesses around the platforms in a symbiotic relationship; any policymaker or journalist would rather get a quote from a mom-and-pop store than a corporate PR person, and it’s much the same with these scholars.

elaine November 6, 2026

Source

Tomorrow's Mess

School Finance 101: A Letter to Governor Hinojosa: Fixing Texas School Finance

elaine — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:13:30 +0000

School Finance 101: A Letter to Governor Hinojosa: Fixing Texas School Finance

Full report: Digging Out: Restoring Equal Educational Opportunity in Texas (PDF)

Dear Governor-elect Hinojosa,

Congratulations. You take office in January with an opportunity no Texas governor has had in a long time: the chance to start digging the state’s public schools out of a hole Texas has spent the better part of two decades digging.

I’ve been working on Texas school finance since 2004, first alongside the state’s own analysts on the Texas School Finance Project, and later as an expert witness in the 2012 school finance trial before Judge John Dietz. I’ve just completed a new report, Digging Out: Restoring Equal Educational Opportunity in Texas (PDF linked below), that pulls together what the data show today. I’ll summarize the main points here.

Texas used to lead

It’s easy to forget, but Texas was once ahead of most of the country on school funding. After Edgewood v. Kirby in 1989, and the “Robin Hood” equalization that followed in 1993, Texas ranked 6th in the nation in school funding effort, measured as spending relative to personal income. Its state and local revenue was progressive, meaning higher-poverty districts got more per pupil. And by 2000, Texas students outscored the national average in NAEP math.

Then Texas stopped investing

Since the mid-2000s, the state has steadily backed away:

Effort fell from 6th to 35th. Texas spent 5.35% of personal income on schools in 1993 and 3.31% in 2024, below the median state.
Teachers fell further behind. A 35-year-old Texas teacher now earns 68% of what similarly educated non-teachers earn, down from 85% in 2000.
The basic allotment stalled. It went up $55 between 2019 and 2025. Once you account for inflation, it’s worth about 20% less than it was in 2019.
The highest-poverty districts are funded at about half of cost. Using the National Education Cost Model, the highest-poverty fifth of Texas districts spent about 50% of what it would cost to reach national-average outcomes in 2024. That’s 46th of 48 states. Even the state’s lowest-poverty districts are at 70%, down from 113% in 2009.

The map tells the story. In 2009, 73% of Texas students attended districts spending below the cost of national-average outcomes. By 2024, 98% did.

Texas school district spending as a share of the cost of national-average outcomes, 2009–2024. In 2009, 73% of students attended districts spending below cost; by 2024, 98% did. Source: NECM, 2026 data runs.

The children most affected are overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic. In 2024, 93% of children in majority Black and Hispanic districts attended districts that were both funded below cost and performing below the national average, compared with 45% of children elsewhere (87% versus 33% averaged over 2009–2024). Houston ISD spends about 46% of its estimated cost. Dallas spends 43%. Edgewood ISD, the district whose name is on the 1989 decision, spends 61%, while Alamo Heights, a few miles away, spends 114% of its cost.

Funding gaps (horizontal) and outcome gaps (vertical), Texas districts, 2009–2024. Blue = majority Black or Hispanic districts; bubble size = enrollment. Source: NECM, 2026 data runs; SEDA.

And outcomes have followed the money. Texas 8th graders went from 7.5 points above the national average in NAEP math in 2011, the year of the $5.4 billion cut, to 3 points below in 2024.

Money matters, and it matters most where Texas has underinvested

The research on this is no longer seriously in dispute. Increases in school funding improve student outcomes, and cuts make them worse. That holds whether the money goes to operations or facilities, and whether it comes from legislatures, courts, or local voters. And additional dollars have the biggest effect where states have historically underinvested and where child poverty is highest. That describes much of Texas.

The vouchers are the wrong priority

The state launched its Education Freedom Accounts this year at $1 billion. About 43% of selected students came from public schools; most of the money is going to families who were already in private school or homeschooling. The Comptroller has already asked for roughly $2 billion for the next biennium, and the Legislative Budget Board projected costs of $4.8 billion by 2030.

By comparison, closing the gap between what Texas districts spend and what it would cost to reach just national-average outcomes runs on the order of $45 billion a year. The voucher program is pegged to average state and local funding, which this analysis finds falls below cost in nearly every district. The state shouldn’t be expanding a private alternative at a funding level it hasn’t shown is adequate for its public schools.

You already know one fix

As a legislator, you filed HB 1246 in 2021 and HB 31 in 2023 to fund Texas schools on enrollment rather than average daily attendance. That proposal is right, and the evidence behind it goes back more than a decade. In my 2012 expert report in the school finance trial, I showed that attendance as a share of enrollment fell steadily from the lowest- to the highest-poverty fifth of Texas districts in every year from 2006 to 2011. Because Texas uses attendance both for the base count and for the students who generate need weights, that gap compounds through the whole formula. Sean Corcoran and I made the same point nationally that year in The Stealth Inequities of School Funding: funding on attendance works as an “unpoverty weight,” quietly moving money away from the districts that serve the most children in poverty.

Neither bill passed, and the problem is still with us. Texas still funds schools on average daily attendance; last year’s HB 2 changed only how often attendance is updated during the year, not what gets counted. Every Texan estimates that about 460,000 enrolled students, 8% of the total, went unfunded in 2023–24 as a result. Commissioner Morath put the cost of switching to enrollment at about $6 billion per biennium. That is real money, but it is a fraction of the gap documented here, it would go to exactly the districts furthest below cost, and it is the one fix that does not need to wait for a new cost study.

What I’d ask you to do

Fixing this takes three steps, and the first can start right away.

Study it. Commission an independent, Texas-specific cost study in 2027 to determine what it costs for every district and campus to provide equal opportunity to reach the state’s outcome goals. Texas has done this before. In 2004, Texas A&M researchers (Gronberg, Jansen, Taylor and Booker) and economists Jennifer Imazeki and Andrew Reschovsky both estimated cost models on Texas data. The methods have improved a great deal since.
Recalibrate it. Rebuild the Foundation School Program so each district’s funding target matches its cost. That means poverty and English learner weights sized to actual costs, a current regional wage adjustment to replace the Cost of Education Index the state abandoned, scale and sparsity adjustments estimated from data, and student counts based on enrollment rather than attendance. The 2029 session is a realistic target for a full new formula.
Fund it. Index the basic allotment to inflation. Stop counting property tax compression as new school funding. Phase in the gap on a fixed schedule. And before Education Freedom Accounts grow any further, show that public school districts are funded at cost.

In Morath (2016), the Texas Supreme Court called the system “Byzantine,” “undeniably imperfect, with immense room for improvement,” and left it to the Legislature to fix. The Legislature has acted twice since then, in 2019 and 2025, and neither time changed the basic pattern: the districts with the greatest needs remain the furthest from adequate funding.

Texas led once. It can lead again.

Respectfully,

Bruce D. Baker
University of Miami

elaine November 5, 2026

Source

School Finance 101

Cloaking Inequity: The Terrifying Truth About Education and Politics

elaine — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 13:32:00 +0000

Cloaking Inequity: The Terrifying Truth About Education and Politics

This Halloween 🎃 , I want to tell you some truly scary stories about school vouchers, charter schools, segregation, and the future of public education.

As a scholar who has spent more than two decades researching educational equity, school choice, privatization, accountability, and their consequences for historically marginalized communities, I was invited to Tulsa this past week to address some of the most pressing questions facing public education at a community forum. You can explore my published research on these topics here at Academia.edu.

Who really benefits from school choice? Why are public schools closing while states expand private-school subsidies? And when families are told they are free to choose, who gets blamed when their children cannot access a high-quality education? These questions were at the heart of our discussion in Tulsa, where the history of Black Wall Street offers a powerful reminder of the relationship between race, economic opportunity, and public policy.

Julian Vasquez Heilig at Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK

A few days before Halloween, I found myself walking through Tulsa’s historic Greenwood District, once known throughout America as Black Wall Street. Visiting the Greenwood Rising museum and reflecting on the extraordinary Black businesses, families, and institutions that flourished there before the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was a powerful experience. White mobs destroyed almost all of this thriving community and murdered 300 people, but Greenwood’s Black residents persevered and rebuilt. Standing in that history reminded me that educational opportunity, economic power, race, and political decisions have always been deeply connected in America.

Later, I joined economist Clara Mattei, educators, school board members, and community advocates for an October 25 public forum hosted by the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation at Tulsa’s historic Big 10 Ballroom. Our discussion explored school vouchers, charter schools, state takeovers, school funding, and the struggle to improve public education. Tulsa provided an urgent backdrop: its school board had just voted to close or consolidate 17 schools while addressing a $12 million budget shortfall. Meanwhile, Oklahoma had authorized up to $275 million annually for private-school tuition tax credits beginning in the 2027–28 school year.

The contrast is as revealing as it is troubling. Oklahoma is expanding public subsidies for private schooling while Tulsa closes public schools to address a budget shortfall. This reflects a disturbing set of political priorities. State leaders can find hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize private education while public schools serving entire communities are told there is not enough money to keep their doors open. The result is a public education system increasingly subjected to austerity while private education receives expanding government support. How can politicians claim to champion educational opportunity while financing private school choice and charter schools while allowing neighborhood public schools to disappear?

The evening included two panels and an extended audience discussion. I had several opportunities to address the history, research, and consequences of education privatization. Below are reflections on my remarks, with direct links to the specific location in the recording of the forum.

1. The Frightening History of Vouchers: Brown v. Board and Segregation

With Halloween approaching, here is some history worth remembering: some of America’s earliest publicly funded private-school tuition programs were used to resist desegregation.

Consider Prince Edward County, Virginia, where officials shut down the entire public school system from 1959 to 1964 rather than desegregate after Brown v. Board of Education. While approximately 1,700 Black children were denied access to their neighborhood public schools, white families sent their children to newly established private segregation academies supported by state and local tuition grants and tax benefits. One of those institutions, Prince Edward Academy, became a model for segregation academies elsewhere in the South. Taxpayer dollars helped sustain private educational opportunities for white children while Black children were denied public education. This is a documented chapter in the birth of school vouchers that should not be forgotten.

During our first panel, I discussed the general history of vouchers and its relationship to contemporary voucher debates. Today’s programs in Florida, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere operate under different laws and policy rationales, but understanding the history is essential when evaluating claims that school choice automatically expands educational freedom.

Watch my remarks: School Vouchers, Brown v. Board, and the History of Segregation (7:40)

2. Who Really Gets to Choose?

One question from the discussion challenged the assumption underlying many school-choice arguments: If parents are free to choose schools, does that make them responsible when their children do not receive a high-quality education?

My response examined the importance of that argument. Families do not begin with equal financial resources, transportation options, access to information, or school availability. Geographic boundaries can separate neighborhoods with dramatically different educational opportunities.

And there is another fundamental issue: In many private-school choice arrangements, schools also choose which students they admit.

The ability to apply for admission does not guarantee acceptance, transportation, or access to the services a child needs. These realities complicate claims that expanding choice alone can resolve unequal educational opportunity.

Watch my remarks: Who Benefits From School Choice? Schools Do the Choosing (32:44)

3. Houston, New Orleans, and the Return of No Child Left Behind

When we returned to the stage for the second panel, I discussed the actual outcomes and unresolved controversies surrounding government takeovers in Houston and New Orleans.

Both cities have experienced major changes in governance, accountability, and school operations, although their reforms differ substantially. Advocates point to limited achievement gains on state-based tests and purported organizational improvements. Critics raise concerns about graduation rates, SAT/ACT scores, teacher turnover, community control, student experiences, and whether state-based tests measure performance adequately capture educational quality.

I also addressed renewed interest in high-stakes testing approaches associated with No Child Left Behind. Before reviving past accountability frameworks, we should seriously examine their results, unintended consequences, and what communities learned from living under them.

Educational improvement must be evaluated through credible evidence, including outcomes that matter to families and educators.

Watch my remarks: What Have We Learned From Houston, New Orleans, and Accountability Reform? (1:06:23)

4. Decolonizing Our Minds About Education

One of the most important questions of the evening concerned how communities can imagine educational futures beyond the assumptions that currently dominate policy debates.

I discussed the importance of decolonizing our thinking about education, including questioning whose knowledge is valued, whose experiences are dismissed, and why reforms so often arrive from outside communities with little meaningful involvement from those most affected.

My personal history with charter schools and educational inequality has repeatedly brought me back to the importance of examining institutional power, challenging assumptions with data, and listening to communities as sources of expertise.

Watch my remarks: Why We Must Decolonize Our Minds (1:48:42)

5. Be an Education Voter

As the midterm elections approach, education deserves serious attention.

School boards, state legislatures, governors, and other elected officials make decisions that affect school finance, staffing, academic programs, student services, and public accountability. Those decisions can shape a child’s educational experience for years.

During the audience discussion, I emphasized the importance of understanding education policy and participating in democratic decision-making. Education voters can examine what candidates propose, assess their records, and ask whether policies provide meaningful opportunities for children and communities.

Watch my remarks: Be an Education Voter (1:57:40)

6. What Happens When Educational Leaders Lack Courage?

Another audience question raised the problem of educational leaders who fail to act according to their stated values.

Having served as a university dean and provost, I understand that leadership involves competing responsibilities, institutional constraints, and difficult decisions. But communities also have legitimate expectations of values, courage, transparency, integrity, and accountability.

In my response, I discussed how organized public pressure can influence institutional decisions and why leaders must be held accountable for the consequences of their actions.

The question applies to university presidents and provosts, school superintendents, education commissioners, and elected governing boards alike.

Watch my remarks: Educational Leadership, Courage, and Accountability (2:06:46)

7. Are Charter Schools Really Public Schools?

This question closed another important part of our discussion.

Charter schools are discussed as public schools, but I argue they are privately managed schools because they differ substantially from public schools in governance, oversight, labor arrangements, enrollment practices, and accountability.

Important questions concern how public funds are spent, who makes decisions, what obligations schools have toward students, and whether families enjoy meaningful public accountability.

Stating public status alone does not resolve those questions. They deserve careful consideration across every type of publicly funded school (neighborhood public, charter, and private voucher schools).

Watch my remarks: Are Charter Schools Public Schools? (2:10:23)

Conclusion: From Black Wall Street to the Future of Public Education

My visit to the Greenwood neighborhood stayed with me throughout the forum. Black Wall Street tells a story of extraordinary community achievement, devastating racial violence, and the determination to rebuild. Its history challenges us to examine how institutions can either protect opportunity or undermine it.

Black Wall Street and the Greenwood neighborhood after it was destroyed by White mobs. Photo Credit: Greenwood Rising museum

The conversations in Tulsa raised contemporary versions of those questions. Who has access to educational opportunity? Who controls public resources? Who gets heard when schools face closure or takeover? What responsibilities do public institutions have to the communities they serve?

I appreciated the opportunity to join Clara Mattei, Shawna Mott-Wright, Darryl Bright, John Croisant, Maria Benzon, Aaron Baker, and the hundreds of Tulsa residents who contributed their experiences and perspectives at the community forum.

As Halloween approaches, the history of school vouchers offers some unsettling and honestly scary lessons. But history also offers examples of extraordinary courage, organizing, and collective action. My visit to Black Wall Street reminded me of something essential: Communities have always possessed the knowledge, talent, and determination to shape their own futures. Our educational institutions should help make that possible.

Watch the complete Tulsa public education forum

Please share this discussion with educators, families, researchers, and community leaders interested in the future of public education.

elaine November 4, 2026

Source

Cloaking Inequity

Janresseger: “One Big Beautiful Bill” Has Already Begun Damaging Children’s Well-Being: It Will Only Get Worse

elaine — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 13:38:01 +0000

Janresseger: “One Big Beautiful Bill” Has Already Begun Damaging Children’s Well-Being: It Will Only Get Worse

Huge omnibus laws filled with myriad amendments and unrelated provisions are always passed without sufficient public attention to the details and long term consequences. House Resolution 1, which the President has called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” was an omnibus tax and reconciliation law. President Trump signed HR 1 into law just a year ago on the 4th of July. The law poses a number of threats to the well-being of children and to public schooling. Many of us who follow public education policy are well aware of the Trump administration’s expansion of the privatization of public education with the new tuition tax credit school voucher program buried in HR 1, but other provisions of this federal law have also begun imperiling the welfare of our society’s most vulnerable children. The damage will only expand in the coming months and years.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently updated threats to children’s welfare in HR1: “Already the law is raising costs for families and taking away health coverage, food assistance, and other essentials from people who are already struggling to afford to meet their basic needs—all while showering more tax breaks on the wealthiest households and funding a violent immigration detention and deportation agenda. The law’s harm will only deepen as its more than $1 trillion in cuts for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act… marketplaces fully take effect and states fully implement SNAP eligibility restrictions and take drastic measures ahead of the federal government’s significant shift of SNAP costs to states… (T)he law’s cuts will expand the still-deep inequities long experienced by those who face the most economic discrimination and poverty, including Black, Latino, and Indigenous people and families with people who are immigrants.”

For political reasons, many of HR 1’s punitive provisions were delayed so that they will kick in only after the 2026 midterm election. The provisions with some of the most serious implications for families with children include future cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities predicts: “The harmful… megabill will take health coverage away from millions of people and dramatically raise health care costs for millions more. The law cuts $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and ACA marketplaces… The work requirement… will take away coverage for childless adults and some parents who can’t prove that they are participating in countable ‘community engagement’ activities at least 80 hours per month.”

KFF adds: “For the first time, the law conditions Medicaid eligibility for Medicaid expansion enrollees on meeting work and reporting requirements. These work requirements, which will go into effect in January 2027, or sooner at state option, represent the largest source of enrollment declines in the law.”

There are, however, two areas in which HR 1 has already seriously impacted families with children.

Sharp Drop in SNAP Participation It had been widely predicted that millions of families who need food assistance will, by 2028, loose access to food stamps (SNAP) due to the provisions of HR 1. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Dottie Rosenbaum and Joseph Llobrera report, however, that the sharp drop in access to SNAP has actually begun in 2026:

“Millions of people are losing food assistance through SNAP due to the 2025… HR 1. This includes many children and others not targeted by HR 1’s eligibility restrictions. In fact, more people are losing SNAP, and faster, than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted. The latest data show that about 4.7 million fewer people (including 808,000 children) participated in SNAP in March 2026 compared to the average month in fiscal year 2025… The most likely reason is the impact of HR 1’s shifting of enormous new SNAP costs to states, which they owe starting in fiscal year 2028. CBO estimated the cost shift mandate would have no impact until 2028, but it has already led many states to erect barriers to people’s SNAP participation, such as requiring more paperwork and imposing other requirements that states often don’t have the staff to administer.” In 2028, HR 1 requires states to start paying part of SNAP costs, and states are already trying to make participation “harder to navigate” with “more paperwork, shortening certification periods or adding more case reviews.” (Emphasis is mine.) HR 1 ‘s SNAP requirements will reduce future coverage among parents by adding a work requirement for parents and caregivers of children who are 14 years old or over.

This week the Center for American Progress released a report demonstrating that HR 1 may eventually also reduce free school meals for children and school districts that now qualify: “When children lose access to SNAP and Medicaid, they may also lose their direct certification for free school meals. This harm expands beyond individual impacts. As a result, schools participating in the Community Eligibility Provision CEP may fall below the 25 percent of direct certified students required to qualify for the CEP, ending free school meals for the entire school or district.”

Spending on Immigration Last July, the American Immigrant Council summed up how HR 1 would help fund the President’s expanded immigration enforcement—what we have watched during the past year: “H.R. 1 provides $170.7 billion in additional funding for immigration- and border enforcement-related activities to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP, as well as for the Department of Defense (DOD) for activities related to the military’s presence along parts of the southern border.”

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) details some of the consequences so far for children in immigrant families across the United States: “This historic ballooning of immigration enforcement funding has turbocharged family separations and child and family detention, threatening child safety and well-being. An estimated 205,000 children, 145,000 of whom are U.S. citizens, have experienced having a parent in detention… Moreover, the high level of disenrollment in SNAP and Medicaid is in part due to HR 1’s exclusion of lawfully present immigrants, such as asylum seekers and refugees, as well as the chilling effect on people whose children are likely eligible but are disenrolling because they are concerned about their participation being used against them in immigration proceedings.”

Research has shown for decades that family poverty and problems like hunger and homelessness contribute to achievement gaps as children enter school. Thirty years ago in The Manufactured Crisis, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle declared: “the larger the proportion of citizens who live in poverty, the greater challenge for public schools.” (p. 220)

More recently the National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner explained the correlation of children’s economic circumstances with their school achievement: “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America. School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economic inequality. When children are born in the United States, their educational and life outcomes can all be predicted based on their parents’ education, income and wealth… Inequality in the U.S. is stark and enduring.”

The tangled issues buried in the mammoth HR 1, what President Trump calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” threaten the well-being of millions of poor children enrolled in our nation’s urban and rural public schools. It will be urgently important for educators and public school advocates to press Congress to correct the bill’s myriad injustices.

elaine November 3, 2026

Source

Janresseger

10th Period: BREAKING: Ohio Appellate Court Finds Vouchers Unconstitutional

elaine — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 17:39:20 +0000

10th Period: BREAKING: Ohio Appellate Court Finds Vouchers Unconstitutional

The Ohio 10th District Court of Appeals has agreed with Franklin County Common Pleas Court Judge Jaiza Page’s decision last year that Ohio’s nearly $1 billion annual EdChoice taxpayer funded tuition subsidy program is unconstitutional.

Another huge win for Ohio’s public school kids!

The 10th District decision (authored by Judge David Leland, who used to be a Democratic state legislator) puts the stakes pretty clearly:

“The Supreme Court of Ohio … foretold the possibility that someday a greatly expanded voucher program could create a competing system of uncommon schools. Today is that day.”

The reasons for that conclusion are made plain throughout the decision:

The money funding the vouchers is directly harming funding for the 1.5 million kids in Ohio’s traditional public schools
The program is all but unaccountable to taxpayers
Private schools, not parents, choose which students attend those schools
Private schools are geographically isolated in more urban counties
Private schools cherry pick students so that the least difficult to educate are accepted, leaving more challenging students to traditional public schools

A couple interesting details in the opinion coming from the actual mouths of Ohio Department of Education administrators:

Ohio doesn’t verify that any EdChoice students are actually enrolled in the private school. They just take the schools’ word for it. This is how ECOT became the largest taxpayer ripoff in Ohio history (right, Sen. Husted?). Here’s how the state’s director of the program answered this question:

“Q. So, theoretically, a student could be absent every day in a year, and that school would still get paid for the EdChoice scholarship for that student even though that child has been not attending; is that correct?

A. Correct.”

Ohio also does not verify that private schools, the overwhelming majority of whom are now getting more than 75% of their funding from taxpayers, actually adhere to state education operating standards. From the same questioning of the state director:

“Q. And when you say maintain the operating standards at their school, how does your department monitor that?

A. There is no monitoring system.

Q. So you wouldn’t really know if [EdChoice schools are] maintaining the operating standards, because there’s no way to monitor it, right?

A. Correct.”

The ruling also had a few pithy quotes about the most obvious canard posited by the voucher supporters: That funding for vouchers does not hurt kids in districts — a canard I have pointed out ad nauseum on this blog.

Once again explaining that the money for vouchers comes out of the exact same pot as money for the state’s funding formula for the 1.5 million kids in traditional public schools — a formula that has not been fully funded, as the state itself has admitted — the 10th District hammers home the point.

“Defendants’ arguments resemble the old Groucho Marx line: ‘who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’”

One area that differed slightly from Page’s original opinion but was interesting nonetheless was on the impact EdChoice has on property tax levy passage. The argument the 10th District made was that because the EdChoice money is so large now (the high school voucher is more per pupil state aid than kids in about 80% of Ohio school districts receive) that it disincentivizes people from passing levies.

“By encouraging the departure of students from public schools, EdChoice gives voters less reason to approve local school levies,” it reads.

The opinion also takes a shot at the Ohio General Assembly’s failure to address the local property tax issue in a footnote.

The 10th District didn’t even get into the Ohio Constitution’s ban on religious schools controlling public education money. They just thoroughly dismissed the voucher proponents’ claims on the accountability and funding grounds. It’s unconstitutional.

Case closed.

There is a clear path here for the Ohio Supreme Court to agree with all the other courts that have examined this issue. As these opinions roll in with more and more convincing evidence explaining how EdChoice is hurting kids in public schools, I’m becoming more and more curious how the robed politicians on the state’s highest court are going to twist themselves into knots explaining how robbing money from public school kids to give to private, unaccountable schools, should continue.

Because not a single court or judge that has heard that claim has agreed that it should so far. Even during the DeRolph school funding case, the appellate court in that case overturned the trial court and found Ohio’s school funding system constitutional. It wasn’t until the Ohio Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional (4 times, eventually) that the original unconstitutional ruling was upheld.

But in this EdChoice case, there’s no dissenting opinion or anything that could give the Supreme Court something to hang their hat on.

It’s all going to have to come from them. And their ideology.

Because the law?

It ain’t with EdChoice.

elaine November 2, 2026

Source

10th Period