NEPC - Blog Post of the Day

Generation Tech: Phones at School: Less Learning, More Loneliness

elaine — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:24:14 +0000

Generation Tech: Phones at School: Less Learning, More Loneliness

The first evidence we had for the impact of smartphones and social media was for teens’ lives outside of school. Teens were spending less time hanging out with their friends, less time sleeping, and more time on screens, often holed up alone in their bedrooms. That’s not a good formula for mental health, and sure enough, teen depression doubled as smartphones and social media took over after 2012.

But what about during school, where teens spend more than 30 hours a week? Those hours, too, are filled with technology. Sometimes that’s for truly educational purposes – they’re working on an essay for English class, reading a science textbook in an online library, or taking notes in class.

But not always. Even school-issued laptops often allow access to YouTube and streaming (like Netflix, Disney+, and Peacock), allowing students to sit in the back of class and watch endless hours of entertainment. Others play games. Personal smartphones are also a huge distraction: A recent analysis found that American teens spend more than an hour using their phones during the school day, and almost none of that time is spent on educational activities. Instead, teens scroll through social media, watch videos, and play games. Some take videos of their peers without permission, or sneak off to the bathroom to watch TikToks.

Thus, teens are spending about 20% of their time at school not focusing on schoolwork or talking to their peers. That may be one reason why standardized test scores in math, reading, and science have declined since 2012 and why students have increasingly reported feeling lonely at school. Electronic devices are both distracting in the classroom and isolating in the lunchroom. What impact does that have on teens’ learning and on their mental health?

In a recent paper, my students and I looked into these issues in the PISA dataset of 15- and 16-year-olds around the world. In 36 countries, students consistently took standardized tests in math, reading, and science between 2006 and 2022. In 2022, they were asked how much time they spent using electronic devices (like phones, tablets, and laptops) for leisure purposes (like social media or entertainment) during the school day. This varied quite a bit across countries, with students in some countries spending hardly any time on devices for leisure during the school day, and others spending an average of more than two hours.

In countries where students spent a lot of time using devices for leisure during the school day, test scores plummeted between 2012 and 2022. In countries where they spent less time, test scores merely slid. Thus there was a significantly larger decline in scores in the countries where students spent more time using devices for fun during school hours (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Scores on standardized tests of math, reading, and science for 15- and 16-year-olds in 36 countries, by low or high use of electronic devices for leisure during the school day. Note: Controlled for GDP per capita. Source: Twenge (2025) using data from PISA.

The consequences of device use aren’t just academic – they are also social and emotional, because device use has displaced students talking to each other during lunch and breaks. In countries where students spend more time using devices for leisure during the school day, the percentage of students who agreed “I often feel lonely at school” rose steeply, with the increase much less pronounced in countries with less leisure device use during school (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Feelings of loneliness at school among 15- and 16-year-olds in 36 countries, by low or high use of electronic devices for leisure during the school day. Note: Controlled for GDP per capita. Source: Twenge (2025) using data from PISA.

These results show the twin impacts of the leisure use of devices during the school day: Declines in test scores and increases in feeling lonely at school. They are another piece of evidence suggesting that schools should restrict students’ use of smartphones from bell to bell – not just during class, but also during lunch, breaks, and passing periods. A school where students are talking to each other is less lonely. I recently visited a school with a bell to bell no phone policy, and students are now talking, playing cards, and “bedazzling” (had to look that up!) with each other instead of being endlessly absorbed in their phones.

Of course, phones are only part of the problem. The next step is to lock down laptops and tablets so they, too, aren’t being used for social media and entertainment during the school day. Or, especially for younger students, it may be time to go back to paper and pencil – old-school, yes, but with the bonus of no binge-watching YouTube videos during chemistry class. Some states are considering bills outlawing or restricting the use of devices for elementary school students — a welcome step.

Sticking with the status quo means lower test scores and more lonely students — not the outcome any of us want.

p.s. I worked with some truly wonderful undergraduates on the PISA project, which at times seemed endless due to the complexity of the tables (data collected over 22 years across 36 countries). My heartfelt thanks to Spencer Deines, Ellah Fessenden, Lauren Gramse, Julia Lima, Elisa Ruiz, Siri Sommer, and M’Lise Venable. (With a special shout-out to M’Lise’s cats for their starring role).

elaine April 17, 2026

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Generation Tech

Janresseger: Heritage Foundation Strategizes and State Legislatures Propose Laws to Deny Free Public Schools to Undocumented Children

elaine — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:52:14 +0000

Janresseger: Heritage Foundation Strategizes and State Legislatures Propose Laws to Deny Free Public Schools to Undocumented Children

For weeks, as we have been watching the tragedy of ICE invading schoolyards to round up immigrant students and their parents and send them off to warehouse detention centers, there are also structural legal barriers being promoted by anti-immigrant advocates to curtail the right of undocumented immigrant students to public schooling. At least three state legislatures are considering laws to force public schools to collect immigration data on their students and perhaps, as happened decades ago, to ban the right to free public schooling for those children. In addition, the Heritage Foundation continues strategizing about how to undermine federal legal protection by stimulating someone to mount a legal challenge to the 1982, Plyler v. Doe decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Plyler v. Doe decision overturned a 1975, Texas law denying the allocation of state funding to school districts to pay for the children of undocumented immigrants. After the public schools in Tyler, Texas began charging immigrant families annual tuition of $1,000 per child, a lawsuit challenged the Texas statute, a lawsuit which eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1982, decision in Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court declared the Texas statute unconstitutional.

Defining the public purpose of our system of public schools, accessible to all children, Justice William Brennan wrote: “A Texas statute which withholds from local school districts any state funds for the education of children who were not ‘legally admitted’ into the United States, and which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment… (T)he Texas statute imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents’ conduct nor their own undocumented status. The deprivation of public education is not like the deprivation of some other governmental benefit. Public education has a pivotal role in maintaining the fabric of our society and in sustaining our political and cultural heritage: the deprivation of education takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and poses an obstacle to individual achievement.”

Brennan defines principles that have long been the foundation of our nation’s education system: the guarantee of free public schooling to prepare every child to achieve and to prepare all children to contribute socially, economically, intellectually and politically as part of our democracy.

The National Immigration Law Center adds that a federal court has interpreted the Plyler decision as banning school districts from collecting data on students’ immigration status and reporting out that information: “(T)he Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that laws requiring reporting on the immigration status of students can violate Plyler. Similarly, the Department of Education has issued guidance that this kind of data collection is unnecessary and may be illegal if it is done ‘with the purpose or result of denying access to public school on the basis of race, color, or national origin.’ ”

Education Week‘s Ileana Najarro reports that the Plyler v. Doe decision “remains binding federal law, even as the Heritage Foundation… published a policy document on February 17 (2026) calling on states to intentionally enact laws or rules restricting free public education for undocumented students and calling on the highest court to overturn the landmark decision.” At the same time, Education Week updated its map of the states that have passed laws to affirm the Plyler decision by protecting the rights of immigrant students (Illinois and Massachusetts); proposed a law to protect the rights of immigrant students (New York); defeated laws to to undermine the rights of immigrant students (Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, and Indiana); and are now considering laws to undermine the protection of the rights of undocumented immigrant students (New Jersey, Tennessee, and Ohio).

In testimony presented on November 18, 2025 in the Ohio bill’s 3rd hearing before the Ohio House Government Oversight Committee, the Ohio Education Association’s President, Jeff Wensing presented powerful testimony explaining Ohio House Bill 42 and vehemently opposing the proposed law: “House Bill (HB) 42 would require multiple state agencies, including the Department of Education and Workforce (DEW), to collect and report data on the citizenship and immigration status of the people they serve. Specifically, for K-12 public schools, the bill requires that local school districts report the following data: the number of students who are U.S. citizens or nationals, the number of students who are not citizens but are ‘lawfully present,’ broken down by immigration category, and the number of students who are ‘not lawfully present’ in the United States. DEW must then report this data to the Governor, who in turn must submit a statewide report to the General Assembly and post it on a public website.”

OEA’s Wensing elaborated on the reasons Ohio HB 42 is obviously unconstitutional under Plyler v. Doe: “Ohio’s Legislative Service Commission (LSC) has already identified serious constitutional concerns with this approach. LSC’s bill analysis notes that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plyler prohibits states from denying undocumented children access to K-12 education, and it points to an Eleventh Circuit decision striking down an Alabama law that required public schools to collect and report students’ immigration status for data reporting… ‘Plyler rights’ require that no child should be turned away from school, or made afraid to attend school, because of where they were born or the papers their family does or does not have. Right now, Ohio’s policies respect those rights….”

There is, however, a further twist to the threat posed by the state laws being proposed today to eliminate immigrant students’ rights. The Heritage Foundation is pursuing the goal of using these new laws as tools to get the Plyler v. Doe decision itself overturned. As part of a long legal strategy, the Heritage Foundation has been pressing states to pass laws that would explicitly violate Plyler v. Doe by requiring school districts to collect and publicly expose data about students’ immigration status and to pass state laws that would violate the rights of undocumented immigrant students.

The proposed Ohio House Bill 42 is one of those explicitly unconstitutional laws supported by the Heritage Foundation. If it were to pass, not only would it undermine the rights of some of our state’s most vulnerable public school students, who, as Justice Brennan explained, are not responsible for their parents’ decision to emigrate to the U.S., but also, the bill’s sponsors could help the Heritage Foundation and its allies recruit plaintiffs who would sue to protect the state law by getting today’s U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision that that makes Ohio’s proposed HB 42 unconstitutional.

elaine April 16, 2026

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Janresseger

10th Period: State Data: Ohio Spent More on School Privatization Last Year Than Public Schools in Many Communities

elaine — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:20:08 +0000

10th Period: State Data: Ohio Spent More on School Privatization Last Year Than Public Schools in Many Communities

This is getting ridiculous.

Ohio lawmakers and governors have so overvalued failing Charter Schools and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies that in some communities state taxpayers are paying more to educate students in privately run schools than local public schools1.

Columbus — Ohio’s largest school district — is the poster child for this phenomenon. Last school year, Ohio sent Columbus City Schools $166 million to educate the district’s 41,587 students. Meanwhile, the state sent $328 million to pay for the 30,085 students enrolled in Charter Schools and private schools.

That’s right.

The state paid these privately run schools in Columbus (and online) nearly double what they paid kids in the state’s largest public school district.

That’s obscene.

But it’s not unique.

There are 26 Ohio school districts where the state’s sending 75 percent or more of the amount of funding to privately run schools than students in the public schools. On avergae, the state is sending 20 percent of the funding it sends to students in public schools to failing charter schools or to subsidize the unconstitutional private school voucher program.

What else do you notice? It’s not just big urban districts like Columbus and Cleveland where you’re seeing this phenomenon. Rich districts like Westlake, Revere and Rocky River are witnessing this too. Even little Put-in-Bay has more money going to privately run schools2 than the local public school district. In fact, the phenomenon is most pronounced in wealthier suburban districts3.

Look at the state’s wealthiest districts. Even though barely 10 percent of the students in those districts on average attend failing Charter Schools or have parents who receive unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies, the state is sending about 40 percent of the revenue it sends to the district to those privately run schools.

But, of course, the districts hurt most emphatically by this phenomenon are the state’s eight major urban districts — Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown. On average, those districts see the state send 80 percent of the money they receive for their own students to largely unaccountable, privately run schools.

Once again, this overvaluation of privately run schools in Ohio helps explain why the state now spends about half the share of the state’s budget on the state’s 1.5 million public school students as it did in 1975.

Truly alarming.

Perhaps politicians in this election year should be asked how they’re going to fix this?

Seems like a fair question to me.

1 And it’s probably worse than what I’m reporting here. That’s because this analysis only includes payments made to Ohio Charter Schools and the EdChoice, Cleveland and EdChoice Expansion programs, which subsidize private school tuitions for mostly wealthy adults like Les Wexner. I did account for cost differences between the online and site-based Charter Schools, as well as the different per pupil costs in EdChoice and EdChoice Expansion. Cleveland’s per pupil amount is only a few dollars less than EdChoice. I am not including tuition subsidies for the special education and autism vouchers ($264 million total) because the state’s school options spreadsheet combines those two programs and their costs are so wildly divergent that parsing them out is near impossible. Nor am I including administrative cost reimbursement ($75 million), auxiliary services ($164 million), or busing costs that privately run schools receive as well.

2 I know charter school people will lose it over this characterization of their schools being privately run. However, every time that a teacher’s union has tried to organize in a Charter School, the National Labor Relations Board asserts jurisdiction. Why does that matter? Because the NLRB oversees organizing efforts in the private sector, not the public sector. So the NLRB found tat Ohio charter schools are private, not public, employers. Several years ago, the state forced all organizing efforts to go through the State Employment Relations Board (SERB) after Charter School teachers in Cleveland went through the NLRB to get their certification. But not because they’re actually publicly run schools. Charter School advocates want to pass off their schools as public. Which they are not in the most important ways.

3 Always feel the need to point out that these district types are determined by the Ohio Department of Education, not I.

elaine April 15, 2026

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10th Period

Second Breakfast: The Broken Record

elaine — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:25:00 +0000

Second Breakfast: The Broken Record

I was amused to read Dan Meyer’s account of the recent AI+Education Summit at Stanford, particularly the remarks made by the university’s former president, John Hennessy, who asked the audience if anyone remembered “the MOOC revolution” and could explain how, this time, things will be different. The panelists all seemed to assert that -- thanks to “AI” -- the revolution is definitely here. The revolution or, say, a tsunami -- the word that Hennessy used back in 2012 when he himself predicted a sweeping technological transformation of education -- a phrase echoed in so many stupid NYT op-eds and pitch decks. Dan recalled the utterance, but no one else seemed to -- at least no one on stage or in the audience seemed to have the guts to turn to Hennessy (or any of the attendees or speakers, many of whom were also high on the MOOC vapors) and call him on his predictive bullshit.

As Dan correctly notes,

Look — this is more or less how the same crowd talked about MOOCs ten years ago. Copy and paste. And AI tutors will fall short of the same bar for the same reason MOOCs did: it’s humans who help humans do hard things. Ever thus. And so many of these technologies — by accident or design — fit a bell jar around the student. They put the kid into an airtight container with the technology inside and every other human outside. That’s all you need to know about their odds of success.

The odds of success are non-existent. There will be no “AI” tutor revolution just as there was no MOOC revolution just as there was no personalized learning revolution just as there was no computer-assisted instruction revolution just as there was no teaching machine revolution. If there is a tsunami, it’s not technological as much as ideological, as the values of Silicon Valley -- techno-libertarianism, accelerationism -- are hard at work in undermining democratic institutions, including school.

The history of failed ed-tech startups and ed-tech schools is long, and yet we’re trapped in this awful cycle where investors and entrepreneurs keep repackaging the same bad ideas.

There was another story this week on Alpha School, this one by 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg: “’Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School.” Back in October, Wired documented the miserable experiences of students, forced into hours of repetitive clicking on drill-and-kill software under incessant surveillance. Maiberg’s reporting, in part, expands on this, as he writes about the goal of building “bossware for kids” -- that is ways to identify “enhanced tracking and monitoring of kids beyond screentime data.”

But much of Maiberg’s story examines the use of technologies to build the “AI curriculum” touted by the school’s founders. Not only does Alpha School’s reliance on LLMs for creating curriculum, reading assignments, and exercises mean these materials are littered with garbled nonsense, but the company seems to also be scraping (i.e. stealing) other education companies’ materials, including those of IXL and Khan Academy, for use in building their own.

While I deeply appreciate Maiberg’s reporting here -- I am a huge fan of 404 Media and am a paid subscriber because I think investigative journalism is important and necessary -- this story is a huge disappointment because it does not push back at all on the underlying ideas of Alpha School. Indeed, this is precisely the problem that keeps us trapped in this “ed-tech deja vu” -- the one that has, just in the last couple of decades, recycled this same idea over and over and over again (funded and promoted, it’s worth noting, by the very same people -- the Marc Andreessens and Reid Hoffmans and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world): Rocketship Education. Summit Learning. AltSchool. And now Alpha School.

Maiberg suggests in his story (and more explicitly on the podcast in which he and the publication’s other co-founders discuss the week’s articles) that Alpha School’s idea of “2 hour learning” is a good idea. But I think that claim -- the school’s key marketing claim, to be sure, before, like everyone else, it started to tout the whole “AI” thing -- needs to really be interrogated. Why are speed and efficiency the goal? These are the goals of the tech industry’s commitment to accelerationism, yes. These are the goals for a lot of video games, where you grind through repetitive tasks to accumulate enough points to level up. But why should these be something that schools embrace? Why should these be core values for education? Does learning -- deep, rich, transformative learning -- ever actually happen this way? (And what else are we learning, one might ask, when we adopt technological systems and world views that prioritize these?)

Let me quote math educator Michael Pershan at length here:

I keep coming around to this: the interesting innovation of Alpha School is not their apps or schedule or Timeback but their relationship to core academics. This is a school that believes that the “core” of schooling should be taken care of as quickly and painlessly as possible so that the rest of the day can be opened up to things that actually matter. Most schools don’t do this! We instead tell kids that history is a way of understanding ourselves and others. Math, we say, can be an absolute joy, full of logical surprises. We tell kids that a good story can open up your heart and mind.

Alpha doesn’t. They aim to streamline and focus on the essentials for skill mastery. Maybe they are showing you can learn to comprehend challenging texts without reading books. Maybe a math education composed of examples and (mostly) multiple choice questions is, in reality, all you need to ace the SAT.

If it turns out they’re succeeding at this, it’s because they’re trying.

And maybe, one day, Alpha or someone else will crack the code for good. It then will be possible to get all students to grind through the skills and move on. With all that extra time, schools will find better things for kids to do than academics. And maybe, at some point, we’ll ask, what’s the point of grinding through things we don’t care about? Do we really need to become great at mathematics when machines can do it? How important is it really to learn how to read novels or fiction? Maybe, one day, this is how books disappear from schools for good.

The schools like Alpha School, AltSchool, Summit, and Rocketship are all strikingly dystopian insofar as they compromise, if not reject, any sort of agency for students; they compromise, if not reject, any sort of democratic vision for the classroom. School is simply an exercise in engineering and optimization: command and control and test-prep and feedback loops. There is no space for community or cooperation, no time for play -- there is no openness, no curiosity, no contemplation, no pause. There is no possibility for anything, other than what the algorithm predicts.

(Kids hate this shit, no surprise. They want to be human; they want to be with other humans, even if tech-bros try to build a world that’s forgotten how.)

Or rather, most kids hate this shit. There are a few who embrace it because if they play the game right, they reckon, they too can join the tech elite. Case in point, yet another profile of Cluely founder Roy Lee, this one by Sam Kriss in Harper’s: “Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking.”

I find this insistence from certain quarters that “there is no evidence that social media harms children” to be pretty disingenuous. There’s a lot of evidence -- plenty of research that points to negative effects and sure plenty that points to positive effects of technology, so it’s a little weird to see efforts to curb kids’ mobile phone and social media usage as just some big conspiracy for Jonathan Haidt to sell more books.

Mark Zuckerberg took the stand this week in a California court case that contends that Meta (along with other tech companies such as TikTok and Google) knowingly created software that was addictive, leading to personal injury -- and for the plaintiff in this particular case, leading to anxiety, depression, and poor body image.

That the judge in the case had to chastise Zuckerberg and his legal team for wearing their “AI” Ray-bans in the courtroom just serves to underscore how very little these people care for the norms and values of democratic institutions.

We see this in the courtroom. We see this in the media. We see this in schools -- from Slate: “Meta’s A.I. Smart Glasses Are Wreaking Havoc in Schools Across the Country. It’s Only Going to Get Worse.”

We see this in the billions of dollars that the tech companies plan to funnel into elections this year to try to ensure there are no regulatory measures taken to curb their extractive practices -- $65 million from Meta alone.

What on earth would make you think that tech companies -- their investors, their executives, their sycophants in the media -- want to make education better?

Inside Higher Ed reported this week that the University of Texas Board asked faculty to “avoid ‘controversial’ topics in class.” There weren’t any details on what this meant -- what counts as “controversial” -- or how this might be enforced. (Meanwhile in Florida, college faculty were handed a state-created curriculum and told to teach from it.)

We are witnessing the destruction – the targeted destruction – of academic freedom across American universities. This trickles down into all aspects of education at every level.

And to be clear, again, my god, I'm a broken record too: this is all inextricable from the rise of “AI,” from its injection into every piece of educational and managerial software. The tech industry seeks the monopolization of knowledge; they seek the control of labor – intellectual labor and all labor, “white collar” and “blue collar” is intellectual labor. They worship speed and efficiency, not because these values are democratic, but precisely because they believe they can make us bend our entire beings towards their profitability.

Perhaps ed-tech is, in the end, simply "optimistic cruelty"; and these cycles that we keep going through are just repeated and failed attempts to replay and harness Ayn Rand's bad ideas, her mean-spirited visions for a shiny, shitty technolibertarian future – one in which children (other people's children, of course) are the grist for the entrepreneurial mill.

More bad people doing bad things in ed-tech:

“Ex-NYPD Official Indicted for Accepting Bribes From Tech Exec in Scheme” reports The City. The company in question here is Saferwatch, which sells panic buttons to schools.
“Epstein ties to former Lifetouch investor prompt Dearborn Schools to cancel photo day.” School photos and the Epstein circle – greeeeaaaat.

(Image credits)

Today’s bird is the pigeon, because yeah, we are still living in B. F. Skinner’s world -- one where people will look you in the eye and say that being “agentic” means handing over all your decision-making to their system, that “freedom” and “dignity” don’t really matter because their brilliant engineering is going to make everything fine and dandy. This time. Really. It’s a revolution. It’s a tsunami. It’s a shit storm.

“Russian Startup Hacks Pigeon Brains to Turn Them into Living Drones.”

elaine April 14, 2026

Source

Second Breakfast

Teacher in a Strange Land: Gifted and Talented Redux

elaine — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:39:34 +0000

Teacher in a Strange Land: Gifted and Talented Redux

I got my master’s degree in gifted education—actually, a master’s in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on identifying and serving gifted students, but whatever. At the time—the 1980s—I was focused on the ‘talented’ part, as a music teacher.

What could I do, I wondered, to better understand and challenge the exceptionally proficient students who showed up in my band room? There had only been a handful, at that time, students who leapt over my pedestrian instruction, right into credible Mozart concertos in the 6th grade, relying on recordings and (this sounds so quaint) library books about the great composers and their style characteristics.

I had many thoughtful conversations with people in my master’s classes, in my building, and fellow band directors (whose advice was generally directed toward private lessons and summer camps–the ‘better teacher/better cohort’ theory). But overall, takeaways on who was gifted and what to do about it were murky.

One person’s budding genius was another teacher’s ho-hum. A lot of it had to do with perceived student effort, and very little was about digging gifts and talents or even preferences and goals out of kids who were content to skate by.

Also, lots of kids who had exceptional natural talent in playing instruments were not so gifted in other areas, and therefore not interesting to the guy teaching Algebra II to 7th graders. Just because you can flawlessly pick up salsa rhythms with all four of your limbs or produce a crystalline high C on the trumpet doesn’t mean you’re… gifted. Or so it seemed.

I’ve written many pieces—here, here, here, here and here, for example—about giftedness. Invariably, they draw nasty comments. It’s very much a tender spot for parents of bright children who worry that their children are not being adequately challenged. Or are ignored by their teachers because so many other kids are struggling or misbehaving. I get it.

But I also know that talents and gifts are randomly distributed across school populations and have to be developed over time, with the cooperation of the identified GT student. I was struck by this quote from a spokesperson for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, reflecting on the mayoral decision not to test kindergarteners to determine who’s gifted:

This administration does not believe in G. & T. evaluation for kindergartners. But that’s not the same as eliminating advanced opportunities across all grades.

My thoughts, precisely.

I recognize that NY City is unique—such a diverse population, so many school options, such hot politicking and parent-pleasing—but I fully agree with the mayor (or his advisor, more likely): Testing five-year olds for giftedness is ridiculous and bound to siphon off disadvantaged kids before they’ve really had a chance to, you know, go to school and learn stuff.

It’s the ultimate, rigged-end game: the outcomes of inequality, right out of the chute. Dividing the herd, yet again. Why? How does that help us?

If I had faith in any test to identify extraordinary, socially useful intelligence, skills, or creativity, I might feel differently. But I don’t. What I do believe is that all children deserve a rich and challenging education, whether a test identifies them as potentially brainy or sub-par. You just never know what role they might play, eventually, in making the world better.

Since more than half of American teens now admit to using chatbots to do “research” that they may not be able to evaluate for veracity, to write and calculate for them, it’s going to get harder and harder to distinguish students who produce genuinely brilliant work from those who are merely good at disguising where that work product originated.

We still need brilliant original work—not to feed the AI maw, but to enlighten ourselves, cure diseases, prevent wars, create peace, to explore, entertain and inspire. We need the indisputably brilliant kid who plays salsa rhythms but forgets to turn in his social studies worksheets for some reason. Because he has gifts to share.

We need a new definition of ‘gifted’—and maybe one for ‘talented’ as well. We need to stop accepting the assertion that machines are helping students learn better than human interaction and judgment. And most of all—we need to stop cutting kids off at the pass, sorting and labeling them when they’re in kindergarten.

Photo:sanbeiji (Creative Commons)

elaine April 13, 2026

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Teacher in a Strange Land

Shanker Blog: When “Success” Leaves Students Behind: How Market-Based Schools Exclude Students With Disabilities

elaine — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:56:25 +0000

Shanker Blog: When “Success” Leaves Students Behind: How Market-Based Schools Exclude Students With Disabilities

As a freshly licensed teacher, I entered the profession hoping to challenge common stereotypes about teaching. I was ready to defy persistent myths of the ‘jaded teacher’ who re-used their lesson plans year after year and taught from their desk chair. So, I sought an environment where teachers taught with rigor and acted as advocates for change. When I encountered a job listing for a national charter school network, it felt like the perfect place to teach: the network emphasized high expectations for both staff and students, all in the name of helping disadvantaged communities beat the system.

Once the school year started, every moment of lesson prep and execution was centered around a single goal: excellence. As the year progressed, the administration increasingly painted certain students as threats to this goal students who struggled to comply with the demanding curriculum and constant test taking. These students—many of whom were multilingual learners and had a learning disability—were many grade levels behind. The strict behavioral regime didn’t accommodate their needs, and they were often in the dean's office instead of participating in instructional time. But when I questioned what we could do to support them, I encountered pushback. They will learn to meet the expectations. We need to focus on the cuspers. Because we were compared to other charters in the district, my leadership wanted to prioritize “cuspers”—students on the verge of advancing performance categories, whose gains would most directly improve accountability metrics—over students who were severely under proficient and therefore viewed as unlikely to advance brackets.

That school year taught me a lot about the nuanced and tense views on how to help disadvantaged students succeed in a world of standardized success. However, a broader question stuck with me years after this experience: To what extent do charter and private schools exclude students with disabilities within a highly standardization education system? Existing research confirms that charter and private schools do, in fact, exclude students with disabilities—- not only by discouraging initial enrollment, but also by pushing students out after enrollment.

Due to the rapid expansion of charter schools and the widespread adoption of private school voucher programs in many states, this research is all relatively new. However, one argument that has consistently championed the charter movement is that charter schools perform slightly better than traditional public schools on standardized tests. This stance became less clear as research has muddied reported score growth when accounting for student demographic and location. More recently, political verbiage has shifted to center priorities like educational freedom and parent choice to push for market-based schools. Beyond political rhetoric, this shift raises important questions about the larger costs to public education. Here are three key patterns that demonstrate how market-based schools exclude students with disabilities.

Pre-Enrollment Exclusion: Cream-Skimming and Counseling Out

Prior to charter school enrollment, phenomena like cream-skimming and counseling out are used to discourage or prevent students with disabilities from being admitted. These tactics are often utilized by school administrators or teachers to suggest that their school is unable to provide adequate services that a large public school can. Researchers largely argue that charters employ these tactics because students with disabilities are more expensive to educate and tend to score lower on standardized tests than students without disabilities. Through a qualitative study of NYC’s small and large public schools, researcher Jessica Bacon found a problematic pattern of students with disabilities being pushed from charters to traditional public schools to avoid low test scores.

When Bacon interviewed teachers and administrators at a small charter school, she found that conversations about students with disabilities were often framed through deficit-based assumptions. One teacher described advocating for a student with a learning disability to be transferred out of the school because they couldn’t keep up academically. Despite a robust body of research demonstrating that inclusive settings better support academic growth, the teacher believed the student belonged in a self-contained classroom and convinced the parent to concede (Bacon, 2019, pg. 37). An administrator from the same school further explained that the principal chose not to open any self-contained classes due to what they described as “fear and ignorance,” noting concerns that such programs would attract students who might “take the school down” academically (Bacon, 2019, p. 36). This interaction exemplifies how counseling out is enacted through moral pressure and professional authority, and functions to protect charter schools’ academic standing.

Teachers from the large public high school described the consequences of these practices, explaining that they often absorbed students whom charter schools implicitly discouraged from enrolling. One teacher acknowledged that “a certain amount of creaming is still happening… there are schools still not taking kids across the continuum of disability and need. Certain schools send a message: ‘Don’t come here, we don’t want you’” (Bacon, 2019, pg. 39). As a result of charter schools’ exclusionary tactics, large public schools become responsible for educating a disproportionate number of students with disabilities and are subsequently labeled as failing due to lower academic standing shaped by this unequal distribution.

Structural Barriers in Admissions and Enrollment Policies

A more explicit form of exclusion exists in private schools, which are legally allowed to deny admission to any student, including students with disabilities. Many private schools require academic testing for admission, charge an average annual tuition of around $15,000, and have no requirements to provide data on school performance to parents. In fact, many parents must sign away their rights to federally regulated IDEA protections in order to admit their child to private schools.

Studies show that adequate information is not shared with parents regarding losing their federal IDEA, FAPE, and LRE rights when enrolling for a private school. The National Center for Learning Disabilities found that “many parents participating in school choice programs did not understand the impact their participation had on their IDEA rights” (NCLD, 2024, pg. 15). This pattern opposes the argument that privatization efforts support all families through increased academic performance as the numbers simply don’t represent all students' experience.

Disciplinary Practices and the De-Identification of Disability

Even when students with disabilities are enrolled in a charter or private school, they are disproportionately suspended and deidentified from their initial disability status. New Orleans touted high achievement marks after switching to an all-charter school system but also suspended a third of the city’s special needs students for disciplinary reasons. In Newark, researchers found that being in a charter school led to a decrease in students keeping their IEP services after 2-3 years. Gilmour et al. studied Newark’s charter enrollment for students with disabilities, using models to measure the casual effect of charter enrollment and receiving an IEP (Gilmour et al., 2022). They found that enrolling in a “participating charter school led to a statistically significant decrease in the probability that a student who at entry was receiving special education services still had an IEP two or three years later” (Gilmour et al., 2022, pg. 15). These findings support a broader pattern suggesting that charter schools are likely to deidentify students with disabilities, which contributes to the earlier mentioned under enrollment findings in the field.

Implications

Exclusion of students with disabilities has been proven to occur before enrollment, during enrollment, and while a student is enrolled in market-based schools (Barnard-Brak & Schmidt, 2018; Bacon, 2019; McKittrick et al., 2019; Gilmour et al., 2022; NCLD, 2024). This exclusion happens implicitly in charter schools with cream-skimming, and explicitly in private schools with exclusive admissions processes. Within these systems, teachers often become unintended agents of exclusion because of the systems’ sole focus on academic achievement. In charter schools, teachers must conform with academic pressures, which results in very negative implications like segregation (Bacon, 2019). This pressure to conform may be related to the phenomenon of students being deidentified from their disabilities after being enrolled in a charter school (Gilmour et al. 2022) which takes away their mandated support and could affect their future opportunities (Dudley-Marling & Baker, 2012).

In private schools that face no IDEA regulation, “private schools can change or eliminate a child’s services without notifying parents— and at any time” (NCLD, 2024, pg. 12). This further exacerbates families’ confusion regarding what services they are entitled to receive, while private schools benefit from their enrollment through high tuition costs. In short, although market-based schools frame themselves as offering parental choice and academic excellence, they often narrow families’ options and weaken the legal protections available to students with disabilities.

Rethinking Educational Success in a Standardized System

The most troubling aspect of market-based schooling is the advertised premise that it improves academic outcomes for all students. These findings not only suggest that students with disabilities are being excluded from charter and private schools nationwide, but that their exclusion is an integral part of improving academic scores and leaves many families confused about their student’s rights (Dudley-Marling & Baker, 2012; Bacon, 2019; McKittrick et al., 2019). While there are short term solutions to these exclusions, like setting up equitable enrollment preferences and ensuring transportation for students, the long-term solution must prioritize all students' education access over some students’ academic performance.

These patterns suggest that while existing research has informed efforts to reduce opportunity gaps for students with disabilities and support their parents within the current system, systemic change remains essential to remediate these gaps. Future research should compare similar states to one another and engage in longitudinal studies that track the effects of enrollment discrimination on students with disabilities over time. Ultimately, future market-based education policy must account for the students of disabilities and their families who are disadvantaged by these schools, as well as the broader consequences of exclusion, unequal access, and the prioritization of short-term academic gains over equitable education for all.

Market-based, neoliberal education reforms have commodified students in a way that moves the symbolic educational goal post from access to performance. Because of this shift, students with disabilities do not have the support to succeed in charter or private environments. These researched patterns necessitate a consideration of the standardized system of success the education system relies on. If public education is meant to serve all students, we must redefine success beyond narrow metrics and ensure that students with disabilities are given access, support, and opportunity to succeed.

elaine April 10, 2026

Source

Shanker Blog

Curmudgucation: What Really Really Limits School Choice

elaine — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:37:23 +0000

Curmudgucation: What Really Really Limits School Choice

EdChoice, formerly named for its patron saint, Milton Friedman, in a recent post tackles a real question-- What Really Limits School Choice? They do not, however, come up with real answers.

Martin Lueken and Nathan Sanders tip off from a Michigan study that looked at a study of Michigan's Tuition Incentive Program, a program that was supposed to make college scholarships available to students who grew up in low-income households-- and yet only 14% of eligible students used the scholarship. Lueken and Sanders (who do not link to the actual study) blame "bureaucratic friction, unclear rules, and poor communication," and from there jump to the idea that these same "implementation challenges" also get in the way of K-12 choice programs.

Bureaucracy, they argue, makes it hard for folks to take advantage of choice programs. It's the friction of all the confusing processes, informational missing links, and missed communications. They are not wrong, although they would do well to look at the number of choice schools that deliberately use that kind of bureaucratic friction to keep Certain People from getting into their school. Success Academy is a well-documented example of a school that uses bureaucratic friction to filter out families that they don't want to serve. They sort of get the idea:

Administrative hurdles can quietly limit who benefits from choice. Complicated application forms, documentation requirements, narrow enrollment windows, or poor outreach can all dampen participation—especially among families with less experience navigating state programs.

Yes-- but it's the schools themselves creating most of these hurdles, and they're doing it deliberately. And that's before we even get to the business of voucher school tuition inflation, where the school bumps up tuition costs enough that the school is no more affordable to Certain Families than it ever was.

The authors point to an "awareness gap" for choice programs, a problem of marketing and PR that keeps parents from knowing that the program even exists. So part of their fix is essentially better marketing. Advocacy groups, think tanks, private schools and churches could do more "outreach" to get the word out.

States could also follow the lead of Florida by allowing funds to be spent on a "choice navigator" to help you find your way through the education marketplace. They also want more timely payments, clearer lists of allowable expenses, and more certainty about the program's future.

Most of this bumps up against the real factors that limit school choice, but Leuken and Sanders either don't see it or want to say it. I give them credit for skipping the classic arguments, which claimed that "entrenched interests" and those terrible teacher unions and misguided legislators are creating all the barriers to choice.

No, when it comes to limits on school choice, the same thing has always been true-- the call is coming from inside the house.

It is charter and private schools the erect bureaucratic barriers, economic barriers, and "we'll reject your child if we feel like it" barriers, and "pro-choice" legislators who pass the laws that allow them to do it. School choice-- the idea of every child having a selection of schools from which they can pick the one that best suits them-- is pushed by a whole lot of people who don't really want to see it happen. Some of these folks are only interested in finding a way to get taxpayer dollars funneled to private Christian schools, and some would prefer a system in which everyone was responsible for their own kid's education and nobody else had to pay to educate Those People's Children.

In short, what really limits school choice is that it's a policy pushed, promoted, and instituted by people who don't really want school choice.

If we really really wanted school choice, we would require all schools that wanted to accept public dollars to also accept any and all students who applied. We would fund vouchers so that they covered admission at any school of the student's choice, no matter how expensive. We would make every school that accepted taxpayer dollars accountable to those taxpayers; we would have a certification process that provided the same certainty of quality that we get from the USDA stamp on beef, so that families could exercise their choice with confidence.

But because the choice systems we've got prioritize the interests the owners of these education-flavored businesses over the interests of the actual students, we get a "choice" system with a whole assortment of restraints and obstacles not to the businesses, but to the families.

Would better marketing and PR help? Well, it would give the choice schools a bigger pool to choose from, and I'm sure they'd like the chance to have even more students to box out.

But if EdChoice wants to get rid of the limits on school choice, they should start by talking to their own people.

elaine April 9, 2026

Source

Curmudgucation

The Reliable Narrator: Research Highlights “Science of Reading” Fails Equity, Teacher Autonomy, and Social Media Discourse

elaine — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:17:51 +0000

The Reliable Narrator: Research Highlights “Science of Reading” Fails Equity, Teacher Autonomy, and Social Media Discourse

I am currently reading two engaging and often challenging novels—Roberto Bolano’s huge 2666 and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Bagdad.

As an avid reader, writer, and teacher of literacy for over 42 years, I am deeply moved by stories, and both of these novels are engaging because they weave stories together while also forcing the reader to critically engage with the act of story telling itself (especially in Saadawi’s monstrous recreation of the Frankenstein myth).

As a writing teacher I seek to foster in my students not only an awareness of the power of story—the importance of vivid details and the narrative mode—but also the ethical implications of the stories we choose to tell as well as the stories we choose to ignore.

In public discourse, however, we are at the mercy of how traditional and social media portray complex and important topics.

Media creators who are successful are vividly aware of the power of story, and my fields of education and literacy, regretfully, suffer the brunt of compelling but misleading stories across all types of media. For media creators, compelling stories often trump accurate and credible stories.

Ironically, at the foundation of the current reading crisis labeled the “science of reading” (SOR) is a podcast, Sold a Story, that research is gradually exposing for being the mechanism for selling a story that is not credible and is in turn causing more harm than good (except for those profiting off the story).

Here are three relatively recent open-access publications that highlight SOR failing equity, teacher autonomy, and social media discourse:

Dimensions of Equity in the Science of Reading Research: A Systematic Review of Actual, Artificial, and Absent Up-Takes of Equity
JaNiece Elzy-Palmer, Alexandra Babino, Tee Hubbard

Abstract
The Science of Reading (SoR) movement is positioned as a pathway to equity in literacy development, yet little is known about how equity is defined and enacted within SoR scholarship. This systematic review examined 36 peer-reviewed studies published between 2014 and 2024 that addressed both SoR and equity. Using a framework of nine equity dimensions, we analyzed how equity was conceptualized and operationalized across this body of research. Findings reveal that only 17% of screened articles (36/211) engaged with equity dimensions in substantive ways. Analysis showed that equity was primarily conceptualized through access (n = 69) and opportunity (n = 83), with most studies giving limited attention to race, power structures, and the systems that uphold inequities. SoR research primarily focused on three student groups: emergent bilinguals, “struggling” readers without disabilities, and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, while largely employing race-evasive language such as “diverse” or “struggling students.” By contrast, actual uptakes of equity, though limited, were most often found in international contexts where inclusion and representation were embedded through culturally and linguistically responsive adaptations. These findings highlight a persistent disconnect between SoR’s equity claims and its research base, underscoring the need to integrate transformative justice approaches so that equity efforts move beyond access and opportunity toward systemic change in literacy development.

Teacher Autonomy in Text Choices for Elementary Reading Instruction
Allison Ward Parsons, Kristin Conradi Smith, Margaret Vaughn, Holly Klee, Leslie La Croix, Jane Core Yatzeck

Abstract
Reading in elementary school is central to supporting student reading development. However, a gap exists in current research regarding the types of texts that teachers select for reading instruction and the instructional contexts in which that reading occurs. Teachers’ autonomy to select texts and activities for reading instruction is complex and not well understood. In this exploratory study, we surveyed a stratified sample of elementary teachers (n = 1250) in the United States to understand their perceptions of autonomy surrounding text use. Chi-squared analysis results raise questions of autonomy, access, and equity, particularly regarding digital text usage in younger grades and schools with fewer economic resources. Discussion highlights the differences in teacher autonomy regarding text use across school demographics and instructional contexts. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

The Science of Reading on Social Media: TikTok Content Creators’ Discourse Patterns and Bodies of Knowledge
Lindsey W. Rowe, Sarah Jerasa, Heather Dunham, C. C. Bates, Tobi Pirolla, Meghan J. Malloy

Abstract
The Science of Reading (SOR) has become a public discourse with educational stakeholders, impacting legislative policy, reading content, curricula, and pedagogy across schools. Public engagement in this movement has transpired on social media, including TikTok, where viral content often promotes narrow or binary viewpoints through an authoritative discourse. Using a digital ethnography and walkthrough method, we collected and examined 156 TikTok videos on #ScienceofReading to address the following research questions: (1) What categories of SOR content are present on TikTok? (2) What are the common narrative trends and bodies of knowledge used to promote the SOR conversation on TikTok? Analyses found that SOR-related TikToks fell into four categories: (1) professional content knowledge, (2) direct demonstration, (3) resources and materials, and (4) identity formation. Furthermore, close analysis of all videos related to professional content knowledge gave insight into the narrative trends used by content creators to convey claims (plain speak, stop/start, brain research, rhetorical question, I used to… now I…), as well as the bodies of knowledge content creators drew on to make these claims (research, SOR, theory or scholar, deep personal experience, no source). Finally, implications are discussed for how this public discourse can shape policies that will ultimately impact schools, classrooms, and literacy instruction.

Related
Thomas, P.L. (2025, Spring). Crisis as distraction and erasure: How SOR fails diversity and urban students. Journal of Literacy and Urban Schools (1), 6-23. https://theliteracyandurbanschoolsjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/1…

Thomas, P.L. (2025). Breaking free of the “war,” “crisis,” and “miracle” cycles of reading policy and practice. In T.A. Price & M. McNulty (eds.), Public spaces, politics, and policy: historical entanglements with irrational momentism (pp. 93-112). Bloomsbury.

Thomas, P.L. (2025, July 28). There is no literacy crisis in the U.S. Here’s what’s really happening. The Washington Post. https://wapo.st/474j758

Thomas, P.L. (2025). Navigating (another) reading crisis as an administrator: Rethinking the “science of reading” movement. Journal of School Administration, Research and Development, 10(1), 38-48. https://ojed.org/JSARD/article/view/6706

Thomas, P.L. (2024, November). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: For all ELA teachers, “the time is always now.” English Journal, 114(2), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114221

Thomas, P.L. (2024, September). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The media continue to misread teaching reading and literacy. English Journal, 114(1), 14-19. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114114

Thomas, P.L. (2024, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516

Thomas, P.L. (2024, March). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The long (and tedious) history of reading crisis. English Journal, 113(4), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113421

Thomas, P.L. (2023, November). Everything you know is wrong: The “science of reading” era of reading legislation. Perspectives and Provocations, (11), 1-17. https://drive.google.com/file/d/12fAfLV1pCh7ZXV-UFsTftFd7y_MLSK-O/view

Compton-Lilly, C., Spence, L.K., Thomas, P.L. & Decker, S.L. (2023). Stories grounded in decades of research: What we truly know about the teaching of reading. Reading Teacher, 77(3), 392-400. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2258

elaine April 8, 2026

Source

The Reliable Narrator

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Few Americans Question Use of Computers in Classroom Lessons

elaine — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:52:29 +0000

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Few Americans Question Use of Computers in Classroom Lessons

I pulled two paragraphs from Daniel Buck’s recent historical analysis of the digitizing of U.S. public schools that I believe need highlighting in Americans’ continuing love affair with technology in general, and specifically, the widespread use of laptops, tablets, and cell phones in the nation’s classrooms (see here).

Buck believes that U.S. educators should be leery, even skeptical, of using computer devices in lessons, and that teachers and school districts should demand evidence from vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google that their devices and software are “improving academic outcomes.”

Here’s one paragraph from his analysis:

Most importantly, school boards and state policymakers need to hold tech vendors to a far higher standard. If signing another software contract or purchasing another gadget for every student, the school should (my emphasis) consider the return on investment. Vendors should provide, and schools should demand, clear evidence of the efficacy of their products from outside analysts. Even if the products are effective elsewhere, policymakers should consider whether the investment will prove fruitful for their specific school or district. If the vendors’ products are not improving academic outcomes, the solution is simple: Terminate the contracts.

Note the four “shoulds” in the above paragraph. Yet, the fact of the matter is that the folks who sell computers and software seldom offer proof of effectiveness for the simple reason that they lack “clear evidence of efficacy of their products….”

None. Nada. Zip.

Actually, why would these behemoth corporations offer evidence of their effectiveness, that is, improving student’s academic performance in 2025? These devices have become accepted much like public utilities such as electricity, water, and gas that consumers use daily and pay for monthly. They have become the warp-and-woof of daily life. They have become necessities.

No district administrator, teacher, or parent needs research evidence to justify buying a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone for their schools, classroom, or children just as no research evidence is needed to prove that one must eat to survive. That train has left the station.

For those administrators and teachers who might consider relying less on devices in classrooms, Mr. Buck offers up another meager solution:

Another remedy would be a move away from one-to-one computing. If teachers had to reserve computer labs or Chromebook carts again, it would incentivize a more judicious approach to technology use. Teachers would have to ask: Why do I need computers? How will they actually enhance this learning activity? Or are they more trouble than they’re worth?

Sure, veteran teachers in their 40s and 50s remember computer labs and carts in schools but those labs and carts were then signs of scarcity. No scarcity now. There is abundance of machines; every teacher, every student has access to a device at home or at school.

So, the questions that Buck recommends teachers should ask are, well, trifling. Those questions (and “remedies”) that Buck offers are relics from an earlier age. Even in those earlier decades, Apple, Microsoft, and Google seldom offered evidence of their devices’ effectiveness in “improving academic outcomes.” Their representatives took it for granted even then that these devices would raise test scores.

Today, using laptops and tablets in classroom lessons is as normal as saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the third grade and smelling Lysol in the school’s bathrooms.

Whether they accelerate, confound, or impede student learning, much less academic achievement, is largely unknown, remaining an unanswered question for 2026.*

____________________

*Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, offers school administrators, teachers, and parents advice in managing devices in school. See “Beware the Laptop That Ate the Classroom,” in The New York Times, November 16, 2025.

elaine April 7, 2026

Source

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cloaking Inequity: My Open Letter to Governor Whitmer About Vouchers

elaine — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:44:11 +0000

Cloaking Inequity: My Open Letter to Governor Whitmer About Vouchers

Dear Governor Whitmer,

I urge you not to opt Michigan into the federal school voucher program created under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. My research, along with a substantial body of national and international evidence, shows that voucher programs drain public resources, weaken civil rights protections, and destabilize the public education systems that serve the vast majority of students.

Over the past two decades, I have studied school choice, privatization, and accountability systems, and the evidence is clear. Voucher programs do not consistently improve academic outcomes and, in many cases, lead to declines in student achievement. In “Remarkable or Poppycock? Lessons from School Voucher Research and Data” (Vasquez Heilig et al., 2014), we found that voucher programs frequently fail to deliver promised gains while increasing stratification. Similarly, in “Are Vouchers a Panacea? Data from International Implementation” (Vasquez Heilig & Portales, 2012), we documented how large-scale voucher systems have produced greater segregation and uneven quality rather than systemic improvement. These findings are consistent with research across multiple states where voucher expansion has resulted in negative or neutral academic effects.

I have also examined how market-based reforms shape access and equity. The evidence shows that when public dollars are redirected into private systems, students are not treated equally. In “Separate and Unequal? The Problematic Segregation of Special Populations in Charter Schools Relative to Traditional Public Schools” (Vasquez Heilig et al., 2016), we found that school choice systems can exacerbate exclusion for students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and other historically marginalized groups. Likewise, “The Politics of Market-Based School Choice Research: A Comingling of Ideology, Methods and Funding” (Vasquez Heilig, Brewer, & Adamson, 2019) highlights how privatization policies often prioritize ideology over equitable outcomes. Private institutions receiving public funds are not bound by the same civil rights protections, transparency requirements, or accountability structures as public schools.

There are also well-documented concerns about fraud, waste, and misuse of public funds. Weak oversight has been a persistent feature of voucher programs. In my review of privatization claims in “Bigger Bang, Fewer Bucks?” (Vasquez Heilig, 2018), I found that promised efficiencies often fail to materialize, while public dollars are redirected without sufficient accountability or public benefit.

The federal voucher proposal raises an additional concern. Because it relies on tax credits for private donations, it reduces federal revenue that supports essential programs such as Title I and IDEA. This creates a long-term disinvestment in public education while subsidizing private institutions that are not required to serve all students. As I have argued throughout my scholarship, education policy is never neutral; it reflects decisions about who is included and who is excluded from opportunity .

This is not simply a question of school choice. It is a question of public responsibility. Public schools are the only institutions legally required to educate every child. Voucher programs shift public dollars into systems that can and do exclude, stratify, and segment students along lines of race, class, disability, and language.

Several states, including New Mexico and Oregon, have already declined participation after reviewing the risks. Michigan should do the same. Opting into this program would commit the state to a model that weakens public education while offering no clear evidence of improved outcomes.

Michigan has made meaningful progress in strengthening its public schools and expanding opportunity. Participation in a federal voucher program would undermine that progress. The research is clear: vouchers are not a pathway to equity or excellence. They are a shift away from the public systems that anchor democratic opportunity.

Public funds belong in public schools. I respectfully urge you to reject participation in the federal voucher program and continue investing in the students and communities that depend on Michigan’s public education system.
Sincerely,

Julian Vasquez Heilig
Professor of Educational Leadership, Research, and Technology

Send your own letter here: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/urgent-action-tell-gov-whitmer-to-oppose-trump-voucher-scheme?source=direct_link&

References
Vasquez Heilig, J. (2018). NEPC Review: Bigger bang, fewer bucks? National Education Policy Center.

Vasquez Heilig, J., Jez, S., LeClair, A. V., & McMurrey, A. (2014). Remarkable or poppycock? Lessons from school voucher research and data. Texas Center for Education Policy, University of Texas at Austin.

Vasquez Heilig, J., & Portales, J. (2012). Are vouchers a panacea? Data from international implementation. Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, University of Texas at Austin.

Vasquez Heilig, J., Holme, J., LeClair, A. V., Redd, L., & Ward, D. (2016). Separate and unequal? The problematic segregation of special populations in charter schools relative to traditional public schools. Stanford Law & Policy Review, 27(2), 251–293.

Vasquez Heilig, J., Brewer, T. J., & Adamson, F. (2019). The politics of market-based school choice research: A comingling of ideology, methods and funding. In M. Berends, A. Primus, & M. Springer (Eds.), Handbook of research on school choice (2nd ed., pp. 335–350). Routledge.

elaine April 6, 2026

Source

Cloaking Inequity