First, a confession. Since Florida’s Angie Nixon shocked her state, and the world, with her upset primary win, I’ve come down with a fierce case of Angie-mania. While deadlines languish, I’ve been watching her in action in clips like this, this, and especially this. But here’s something that you may not know about Nixon. As a state rep, she’s been a vocal opponent of unregulated school vouchers in Florida, a position that helped power her unlikely primary victory. Go back a few years to when the Florida GOP was making vouchers available to even the wealthiest Floridians and there was Nixon predicting exactly what would happen:

Our local public schools are an investment we all make to create a brighter future for students and our communities as a whole,” Nixon said. “But Florida’s GOP leadership is legislating publicly funded discrimination in education, leading to a new era of segregation. This bill will give handouts to wealthy families by redirecting public tax dollars to institutions with zero oversight and accountability while defunding public schools that serve over 90% of our students.

Nixon, by the way, offered several amendments to that universal voucher bill, including one that would prevent Floridians earning more than $1 million per year from qualifying for a voucher and another that would keep participating schools from discriminating against students. Big surprise - her amendments were rejected. But Nixon, who has shown a real knack for understanding the concerns of her constituents, was on to something. It turns out that even voters who like the idea of school choice think that it makes sense to rein in the sorts of vouchers-gone-wild programs that are now the rule in Florida and beyond.

Mom Populism

Nixon isn’t the only Democrat who has figured this out. This summer I embarked on an ambitious reporting project as part of a story I wrote for The New Republic. I set out to interview as many Democrats who’d flipped state legislative seats as I could. (Since Trump returned to office, there’ve been 30 such flips—31 as of last week.) I kept noticing that education seemed to figure prominently in these campaigns, yet often went unnoticed in media reporting. Vouchers, specifically opposition to unregulated voucher programs, turn out to be major theme. Show me a candidate who flipped a formerly GOP seat, or is running competitively in a red state, and I’ll show you a critic of vouchers.

Texas isn’t the only state where education has emerged as a potent issue for Democrats. As of March 2026, in the 30 state legislative races where Democrats have flipped seats since Trump returned to office, public education was often a central issue. It’s not hard to see why. As the GOP has shifted sharply in favor of private school vouchers, Democrats are increasingly running against candidates who no longer believe in public education at all, even as constituents in both parties still have kids in the local schools. Ascendant populist Democrats are also tapping into anti-billionaire fury as they campaign against vouchers. And with affordability top of mind in nearly every election these days, Democrats are effectively linking issues like school budget cuts and teacher pay to voters’ broader economic concerns.

As I’ve been arguing on this page and elsewhere, school vouchers, which function as a kind of reverse Robin Hood education policy, taking from the poor, rural and working class and redistibuting to affluent families, are preposterously ill-suited to our populist moment. Add in the fact that the most passionate advocates for vouchers are actual billionaires and you can see why Democrats might get somewhere by running against them. But the intentional defunding of public education that’s happening in so many states also overlaps with voters’ affordability concerns. As I heard from multiple candidates, nothing says ‘affordability crisis’ like a school that can no longer keep the lights on or a teacher who can’t afford to stay in the profession.

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I call the candidates in my piece ‘mom populists,’ in part because their campaigns are so focused on education. (And note that their ranks include plenty of dads too.) But they also turn out to be particularly skilled at understanding the hopes, fears and concerns of the voters they represent or seek to represent. In Texas, for example, Gina Hinojosa has done a masterful job channeling the bipartisan fury over Gov. Greg Abbott’s education legacy, one that includes, not just the new $1 billion school voucher program, but school district takeovers and the state’s increasingly aggressive involvement in every aspect of education. As one previous Abbott supporter and three-time Trump voter told me about his decision to support Hinojosa, “I’m as red a Republican as they come, but I have to do something different.”

Particularly striking to me was that these mom populists talk about the purpose of public education differently than we’ve been hearing from Democrats for the last few decades.

[A]gain and again, I heard the strains of an emergent “mom populism,” from male and female candidates alike, making an argument for public schools as a vehicle for collective economic uplift. Notably, these Democrats are not claiming that education alone can lift kids out of poverty, or that sending more kids to college is the way to address inequality—an argument that has proved to be a political trap for the party. Instead, candidates often pair their defense of public schools as institutions that benefit working-class kids with populist calls for higher wages and more worker power. When it comes to issues like school vouchers, the influence of teachers’ unions, and college-for-all, these mom populists are departing dramatically from the prescription offered by centrist Democrats, and they’re winning as a result.

Winners and Losers

Now, at this point you may be wondering to yourself: ‘why haven’t I heard anything about these candidates who are attracting Republican voters and independents by standing up for public education?’ Good question! While Rob Sand, who is running for governor of Iowa and Texas’ Gina Hinojosa have attracted some ink over their respective criticism of school vouchers, the issue rarely merits national coverage. You have to dig deep into local reports to discover that, say, Pennsylvania’s Brandon Dukes, who just flipped a Western PA seat held by the GOP since the 1990’s, made 1) public education one of his top issues, including 2) “Requir[ing] transparency and accountability in programs that claim to provide school choice for low-income students.”

You may also have noticed that the pro-public education messaging that is powering so many candidates to victory, and/or fueling their competitive campaigns, is wildly at odds with the other story being told by certain Democrats about education right now: our schools have failed, we need to return to high-stakes testing, we need to get tough on teachers unions, Blue state governors need to opt into to Trump’s federal voucher program… Adopt these positions, insist the likes of Arne Duncan and DFER’s Jorge Elorza, and Democrats can win back fickle voters.

Except that if there is evidence of Democrats running and winning on what I think of as ‘centrist school scolding,’ I have yet to see it. There are plenty of candidates touting the Mississippi miracle, especially the idea that states can do more with (a lot less), but they are almost always Republicans. Perhaps the best test case for Team Scold was the candidacy of TFA alum and San Jose, CA mayor Matt Mahan, who ran for governor of California as a Rahm Emanuel style school reformer. He finished with less than four percent of the vote.

When I interviewed Emanuel this summer, I asked him about Mahan’s failure to launch and whether it speaks to something larger regarding voters’ lack of interest in education reform. He did not have an answer, nor did he particularly appreciate the question. Our conversation went downhill from there, hitting its nadir when I proposed a hypothetical match-up between a Tucker Carlson-like candidate rallying disaffected working-class voters and the downwardly mobile college educated vs. Rahm Emanuel, selling the same story about school improvement and ‘you earn what you learn’ that Democrats have been peddling for decades. The interview ended soon after.

My story “Why Democrats Must Embrace a “Mom Populist” Education Agenda,” is in the September issue of The New Republic. You can read all 6,000 words of it here!

Did you know that nearly 1,900 public schools sit within a mile of an existing data center or a future facility that’s been approved? Shout out to the 74’s Linda Jacobson for her eye-opening coverage of how the tech industry’s voracious need for power is now butting up against the nation’s schools and the youngsters who attend them. Jacobson draws on forth-coming research from Brown University that found that—wait for it—attending school near a giant buzzing data center causes math scores to drop. (No word yet on whether tutoring from Sally the humanoid robot can boost said scores…)

I’ve spent much of this past summer interviewing people across the country about how opposition to data centers and tech overreach in its various guises is also a public education fight. The conversations have been illuminating and inspiring, shedding light on why the revolt against data centers is proving to be so politically potent, and how it is merging with the broader, parent-led backlash against ed tech. (Sorry Sally!)

Unlikely allies

Much has been made of the uniquely bipartisan nature of opposition to data centers. My favorite recent description comes via this terrific report from Wisconsin and Michigan by tech writer Jasmine Sun, who cites an organizer marveling at the wondrous solidarity of it all:

I’m watching MAGA people coming together with Democratic Socialists and Native American female leaders, healers, and water protectors, and they’re all using words that none of them really recognize, and no one’s getting offended.

And in parts of the country where the school culture wars have raged with particular ferocity, the fight against data centers is bringing together Moms for Liberty types with public school advocates. It turns out that nothing focuses the mind like a plan to locate a massive Microsoft data center right next to the school athletic fields. (Looking at you northwest Indiana!) As a local activist told me, one of the loudest voices against the project formerly led the charge to remove books from school libraries. Dousing the flames of the school culture wars may turn out to be yet another unintended side effect of the rush to hyper-scale AI infrastructure.

Meet the ‘Mom Populists’

Data center foes have been cleaning up at the polls, but there’s a subset of these candidates that hasn’t gotten enough attention. Call them the ‘mom populists,’ they’re campaigning on opposition to data centers AND fierce support of public schools. In Texas, Gina Hinajosa is mounting a serious challenge to Gov. Greg Abbott with the argument that Abbott is essentially selling off the state (and its schools) to the highest bidder. (Check out this brand new Hinojosa ad to see exactly what I’m talking about.) In Kansas, Cindy Holscher, a public education advocate dating back to the Brownback era, won the Democratic primary for governor after campaigning on a moratorium against data centers. But Francesca Hong may be the most interesting example. Long before she got tripped up by old Tweets and a love/hate relationship with Thanksgiving, she was doing something novel for a political campaign: listening to voters, which is how she ended up adopting the position on data centers that would propel her campaign. In a single, pithy slogan, she distilled ‘mom populism’ down to its essence: “tax the rich, fund our schools and stop AI data centers.”

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The Voucher/Data Center Connection

If you’re in, say, rural Texas, the sudden proliferation of hyperscale data centers and their gas turbine friends feels awfully familiar. Just a couple of years ago, you got a controversial voucher program, ushered into policy thanks to a flood of out-of-state money. The anger over vouchers has not abated, by the way, and is a big part of what’s making Gina Hinojosoa such a threat to Gov. Greg Abbott. And if the latest news that 70 percent of vouchers went to kids already attending private school isn’t helping, neither are the visuals of Big Bend National Park being bulldozed.

In some states the overlap between vouchers and data centers shades comical. Byron Donalds, now the official GOP contender to replace Ron DeSantis, is both the Education Freedom candidate and the favorite pick of Big Data. But the dynamic is the same in all of the states where universal school vouchers and hyperscale data centers live side by side. Jasmine Sun’s description of the big money push to expand the latter sounds an awful lot like the big money push to expand the former.

It looks like Big Tech cheating the system, engaging in cronyism and bribery, throwing money bags at politicians and hoping the dollar signs substitute for a positive case.

All Aboard

Sun ultimately concludes from her conversations with data center opponents that the anti-democratic nature of back-room data center deals is what is giving the movement its explosive force. Which is why I’m thrilled to see that school boards are beginning to express their opposition to data centers. A bold prediction from yours truly: we are about to see a wave of school board activism on this front. What has been a trickle of boards so far expressing opposition to these facilities in communities like Mountain View, California and Palm Beach, Florida will expand exponentially as 1) data centers increasingly land near public schools and 2) the sort of bipartisan opposition I described above shows up at school boards. And while some will argue that this is yet another example of elected boards prioritizing politics over student achievement, they will be wrong. Whether we’re talking about health impacts on kids from air and noise pollution, or tax incentives that drain funds away from public schools, school districts can and should take a stand on this issue.

One Big Cause

My adopted home state of Massachusetts is mostly too compact and regulated for the sorts of massive data centers/gas turbine combos that are powering such resistance elsewhere. (My apologies to Westfield, where a $4 billion facility is in the works, and Lowell, where the largest data center in the state hulks over a residential neighborhood.) What we do have an abundance of are parents who are in revolt over AI and ed tech. This summer I had the pleasure of connecting with the folks behind Reconnect Malden, a community alliance that seeks not just limits on ed tech in schools but less dependence and more real-life connections for adults. (Note: listen for them on a forthcoming episode of my podcast, Have You Heard.) It turns out that a whole lot of people share this sentiment—another reason why the movement against data centers has taken off the way that it has. Community organizer Saul Levin summed this up in a recent episode of Tech Won’t Save Us better than I ever could.

I think the way that the tech industry has in a basically unregulated fashion done whatever they want with our daily lives and dependence on devices and and is now jamming AI into literally every application and every single thing we do is is really something that people know. And so they’re like, ‘you know what? Even if this data center doesn’t pollute our water, it still is upholding the use of tech to kill people abroad and to distract my kids in school at home. This is not worth some amount of money that you’re going to come offer me in a back deal back room deal.

This page has been noticeably quiet in recent weeks, but I’ve got a good excuse. I’ve been hard at work, reporting a forthcoming feature about the relationship between Democrats and education. In a word, it’s complicated. And yet as I’ve been interviewing candidates across the country, including Democrats who flipped seats in districts that Trump won, a story has begun to emerge that is wildly at odds with what we keep hearing from pundits and education reform advocates who are desperate to get the Obama-era school fixing, teacher-bashing band back together.

The candidates I’ve been talking to are smartly centering an impassioned defense of public education as part of an affordability agenda. They’re forcefully opposing vouchers and tapping into the rising backlash against ed tech. Finally, they’re avoiding the ‘college for all’ trap that has left broad swaths of the working class feeling looked down upon by Dems. You’ll be able to read my full report in the September issue of the New Republic, but here’s a taste of what I’ve learned so far–about why the education issue is powering some campaigns and sending others floundering.

Let’s start with vouchers

Find me a Dem who flipped a seat in a district that Trump carried, or is running competitively in a red state, and I’ll find you a voucher opponent. As Matt Barnum reports for Chalkbeat, Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa, has made calls to rein in that state’s off-the-rails voucher program the centerpiece of his campaign, an issue that is even more relevant after GOP primary voters went with the guy who runs an “unconventional” private school in Kansas, that he cofounded with Charles Koch’s son Chase. The choice of a Christian Nationalist voucher extremist seems like a gift to Sand, but it also highlights the weirdness of the political argument being made by the likes of Democrats for Education Reform. As I’ve chronicled on this page, there is a forceful, and deep-pocketed, effort underway to push Democrats to embrace Trump’s voucher plan. Except that opposition to vouchers turns out to be among the best ways for Democrats to win over disaffected Republican voters.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

“[T]he Democratic edge on education has dwindled.” Repeated endlessly in op-eds and ‘thought pieces,’ this lament is a reform standby. (For a fun activity, take this version, exhumed from the time machine circa 2014, and swap out the old policy faves with the latest edition.) Whatever the era, the logical conclusion is that in order to regain the now dwindled edge, Democrats should run as education reformers, armed with tough talk about test scores, standards and teacher accountability. Except that judging by the measurable performance of reform candidates, none of this appears to resonate with voters at all. Rahm Emanuel has been grabbing plenty of headlines but has “failed to gain much traction,” as the Washington Post noted this week, a somewhat sunny gloss on the fact that he still mostly fails to register in national polls at all. Then there’s Matt Mahan, the TFA alum and mayor of San Jose, who also ran as a Democrat for governor of California. An unreformed reformer, Mahan thrilled the reform crowd with his nods to Mississippi and talk of ‘educator excellence,’ but with voters he was a complete flop.

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Your kids are dumb (and you’re not so smart either)

School-fixing moderates turn out to be a uniquely poor fit for our pitch-forked moment. (Mahan, by the way, was the Silicon Valley fave and, coincidentally the only Dem in the race to oppose the proposed billionaire’s tax.) But there’s another reason why these candidates are flailing. Remember when Arne Duncan made his infamous remark about suburban parents being unhappy with the Common Core because the tests revealed “their kids aren’t as brilliant as they thought they were”? I do! Arne would characterize this as the time he “infamously jammed his foot in his mouth,” but he accidentally pulled back the curtain on something fundamental about education reform. Beneath the talk about grades, standards and the ‘honesty gap’ runs a familiar theme about young dum dums and their oblivious parents. (See also references to kids these days as “the lost generation” or ‘cognitively impaired.’) At a time when the right is leaning hard into the mantra that ‘parents know their children best,’ and that education should flow from this premise, reform scold-speak lands with a particular thud.

Stop trying to make Mississippi happen

As I’ve written here, there is much to be learned from the success of Mississippi (and insisting that any increase in achievement must be a scam doesn’t exactly aid the cause of public education.) But a big part of what excites what’s left of the bipartisan education reform coalition about the ‘Southern Surge’ is that these states spend so much less on education than their blue-state counterparts, thanks in large part to the weakness/nonexistence of teacher unions. When candidates, blue and mostly red, run on ‘make [insert state] more like Mississippi,’ voters likely hear something along the lines of ‘we’re spending too much on your kid’s education’–a sure loser of a message. For a fascinating real-world example, the recent special election in Michigan is illustrative. Firefighter Chedrick Green ran an inspiring campaign that centered public education as a centerpiece of an affordability/worker power agenda. His GOP opponent ran on school choice and making Michigan more like Mississippi, including eliminating universal free school lunch. Spoiler: the race, which was regarded as an bellweather for the midterms, was a blowout…

Almost everybody hearts unions

Speaking of unions, political scientist Michael Hartney is out with fascinating new research on the attitudes of Democratic voters towards teachers unions. He finds that while GOP views have remained consistent–and consistently negative–over time, Democrats have grown steadily more supportive of teachers unions, which they now view “not simply as education interest groups or mere political allies, but as progressive bulwarks against Donald Trump and the Republican Party.” In recent months, Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, DFER’s Jorge Elorza, and Matt Yglesias have all made the same case that in order to attract swing voters and win back disaffected Democrats, the party needs to go harder at teachers and their unions. Concludes Hartney: “The fundamental challenge for these Democrats, however, is that the electorate they hope to persuade has changed. Put simply, today’s Democratic voters are much closer to the very interest groups these reformers hope to confront.”

Everybody hates standardized testing

Read enough of the impassioned calls to return to the times when school reformers called the shots, and you’ll discern a familiar tale. Back when the nation’s foot was planted firmly upon the accountability gas pedal, things were going great. And then came [insert specific actor and complaint here.] So all we have to do is go pedal to the metal once more, right?? Except in the real world, where no one has ever heard of EduWonk or the Fordham Institute, pols of both parties are competing feverishly for the title of who hates testing more. Case in point: Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott claims to have eliminated the state’s standardized test. Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who is making this a real race, talks up her opposition to testing constantly–because it’s a position that reflects overwhelming public sentiment in the Lone Star state. In fact, listen closely and you’ll hear an anti-testing, anti-school closure, anti-state-takeover, anti-corruption argument emerging that speaks to Texans across party lines.

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Bucking the backlash against ed tech

As I’ve written on this page, the divide over how to respond to AI is a key fracture among Democrats. Think of it as pitchforks vs. school books. The ascendant left populist wing of the party is calling for taxing billionaires, while the heirs to Clinton-era centrism are singing a familiar tune about endless retraining, digital badges and, above all, preparing youngsters for what’s left of the jobs of the future by fixing the schools. Alas, the fast-moving backlash against big tech–data centers, AI, screens in schools–puts the centrist in a tricky spot, because he likes the part where youngsters are being tested and remediated constantly, and thrills to the possibility of Khanmigo living up to its press release potential. Then there’s the inconvenient reality that the backlash against edtech is also a backlash against standardized testing. Consider, for example, the grassroots parent revolt against the much loathed iReady, now used by one-third of students across the country. The iReady pitch, as NBC’s Tyler Kingkade notes, is essentially the pitch for education reform: endless data collection, personalization, test score increases.

And lest you think this is merely a US conundrum. Here’s British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledging to crackdown on AI chatbots while also making them the centrepiece of his inequality narrowing, gap closing agenda.

The ‘college for all’ trap

There may be no trickier subject for Democrats to navigate these days than college. Flash back to 2009 and Obama was instructing everyone in the land to commit to at least one year of secondary education–in response to the collapse of the financial industry! Within four years, he was hemorrhaging voters without college degrees, setting in motion our present-day calamity. Fast forward to the present and the party seems finally, maybe?, to be reckoning with the fact that embracing ‘college for all’ as THE path to economic mobility has alienated vast swathes of the country. And yet the decades-long habit of selling college as the “way to punch your meal ticket,” as one would-be 2028 contender contended recently, is hard to break. Meanwhile, populist Dems are making the case that kids who want to be able to go to college should be able to, without ending up shackled by debt. But they’re also running on worker power and strengthening unions, a key difference from their centrist counterparts.

Moderate, schmoderate

In my conversations with Dems who flipped seats in Trump districts, a distinct pattern has emerged. The GOP’s sharp rightward shift, particularly on education, created an opening for them, not just to rally members of their own party but to appeal to disaffected Republicans. Which is why I find the loud calls from the party’s ‘combative centrist’ wing for Dems to retake the middle by, say, embracing school vouchers or merit pay for teachers so puzzling. Join me, if you will, on a quick and instructive field trip to Sioux City, Iowa where Democrat Caitlin Drey flipped a seat last year, breaking the GOP’s supermajority as a result. Republicans released attack ads showing her with pink hair and painting her as “kooky”–a charge Drey embraced, if indeed fully funding public schools, clawing back state voucher money, and making child care and housing more affordable were kooky. I have another word to describe the popular policy agenda that powered Drey’s decisive victory over a far-right opponent: ‘moderate.’

Broken business

Finally, a shout out to my beloved who has the fortitude to occasionally listen to Tucker Carlson for our family. He recommended that I listen to this endless interview to get a sense of how skillfully Carlson is tapping into the backlash against elites, billionaires and ‘college for all.’ Listen closely and you’ll hear him trying to stitch together a coalition of working class voters without college degrees and the swelling ranks of the downwardly mobile college educated. Immigrants took the jobs of the first group, he rails, AI is coming for the jobs of the second. Carlson’s goal is to harness the rising populist rage and yoke it to xenophobia. Whether he is successful will depend upon whether someone emerges with a powerful counter message. Spoiler: any pol who thinks that a sales pitch grounded in ‘access,’ ‘innovation,’ ‘competition’ and ‘achievement’ will defeat the likes of Tucker Carlson is a fool. Do Democrats understand this? We’re about to find out…

Reader: one of the few developments that gives me genuine hope these days is the fast-moving backlash against all things edtech. Uniting the oddest of bedfellows across partisan lines, and tapping into a broader frustration with what’s been called the “enshittification” of, well, everything, this emerging movement feels as potent as it does unpredictable. Let’s take a look, shall we?

The backlash is here—and it’s potent

First, let’s set the stage. “The Ed-Tech Backlash is Here,” as a recent EdWeek story put it. For a glimpse of what it looks like, let’s start in New York City where, just this week, parent opposition stymied the opening of what would have been the first AI-themed high school in a district that has been notably “bullish on the future of artificial intelligence in education and its potential benefits.” As for the parents? Not so much. As public education advocate extraordinaire Leonie Haimson observed: “The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years.” And NYC isn’t the only place where parents are forcing tech rollbacks. As tech writer Natasha Singer reports, Team Backlash is notching impressive wins, including in LA, the first district to restrict student access to YouTube, eliminate digital devices entirely through first grade, and limit screen time for older kids.

Odd bedfellows

Quick! Which cause now unites Hugh Grant, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Oprah Winfrey? If you answered “getting screens out of schools,” you’d be correct. But the unusual allies I’m more interested in aren’t media moguls, right-wing showboats or rom-com heartthrobs (Will Thacker!!) What’s so interesting about this fast-moving movement is that “pressure is coming from every direction,” as the Boston Globe’s Christopher Huffaker reported this week about Massachusetts.

[P]arents in Scituate, the teachers union in Melrose, cost-conscious administrators in Arlington. The Melrose teachers union, for example, is calling for device restrictions as part of contract negotiations that make paper the default option for testing and reading assignments. In Winchester, one School Committee member is calling for a recently formed technology committee to consider banning personal laptops in certain grades. And Northampton elementary school parents are worried about the use of YouTube videos in place of teacher-led story time.

This is about more than just screens

First, let’s pause here momentarily to acknowledge that “parents are worried about the use of YouTube videos in place of teacher-led story time” may be the most depressing education-related sentence you’ll read today… Now back to the main event. As is so often the case when we’re fighting over school in this country, there’s something larger at stake here. As my podcast co-host, education historian Jack Schneider observed in our recent episode about Silicon Valley’s vision for schools, people are also objecting to the way in which edtech turns schools into ‘black boxes’—privatized and proprietary.

 When the size of that black box is getting bigger and bigger inside our schools, it suggests to us that that a larger and larger share of this thing that is technically ours is not ours any longer to inspect or understand or adapt or control.  And I think that people are sensitive to the fact that when you look all around our society, what used to be ours is increasingly theirs.

This is also about standardized testing

Of course, the erosion of community influence over schools didn’t arrive with Chromebooks, which is exactly Jack’s point. Think about, say, the Common Core, which united similarly strange bedfellows against the Obama Administration’s attempt to redefine school through federal standards and tests. Which brings us to a lesser discussed aspect of the backlash vs. edtech: the near universal loathing of standardized tests. As the Globe concedes, “[f]or certain purposes, schools have few alternatives to screens. Most standardized tests, including the state’s MCAS exams beginning in Grade 3, are taken on computers.” Add in the test prep and the practice tests and for an awful lot of students, tests-on-screens are school. Indeed, much of the enthusiasm of education reformers for edtech was that it enabled students to be tested constantly. And while the ‘discourse’ among pundits, policy makers and hot takers is all about returning to the glory days of high-stakes testing, in the real world, politicians spar over who hates the tests more.

Billionaires and budget crunches

The grassroots revolt against tech in schools arrives at a particularly vulnerable time for public education. Voucher programs, including the new federal program, are on the march. Enrollment is dropping, thanks to a demographic cliff. And rising costs are putting a squeeze on school district budgets. With layoffs and school closures happening just about everywhere, expensive edtech programs and the companies and tech moguls who profit from them make an increasingly juicy target. “We’re seeing this decrease in school funding, statewide, and we’re seeing districts making cuts to staff,” Leslie Means, head of the teachers union in Melrose, Mass. told the Globe. “We’re continuing to see the ed-tech industrial complex get rich.” Not that long ago, Means would have come across as just another left-wing union leader who hates capitalism. No longer. Antipathy towards tech ceos is on the rise, and so is the appetite for taxing tech billionaires and their companies. This, by the way, is a big part of what gives the edtech backlash its potency. When teachers and parents say ‘enough,’ they’re not just reacting to excessive screen time or the arrival of Khanmigo, but to big tech domination more generally.

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Don’t forget the data centers

I certainly haven’t, and neither should you, because the backlash to these electricity and water sucking literal black boxes is another grassroots revolt that is bringing together unlikely allies and upending politics. The question is will the opposition to data centers and the movement against edtech begin to overlap? My bold prediction is ‘absolutely,’ based on the fact that we already see signs of a convergence. In Virginia this week, public education advocates released a big report documenting the financial toll that tax credits for data centers have had on the state’s public schools. (Spoiler: the giveaway to data centers cost the state more than $1 billion, of which nearly $300 million would have gone to schools.) And in Texas, which will soon surpass Virginia as the largest data center market in the world, water rates are skyrocketing, even as water supplies dip dangerously low. Rising anger regarding what the Texas Observer describes as the “grim costs” of the data center boom feeds into already simmering public resentment over the willingness of GOP officials to sell off the state’s goods—including its schools—to the highest, most connected bidder.

A walled garden for me, grimy screens for thee

Atop my reading pile is the new book by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The authors argue that Muskism represents a new form of capitalism in which the techno-elite occupy a sort of walled garden, while the rest of us scrum for scraps. As always, I’m interested in the implications for education. Musk himself attempted (and has so far failed) to launch a STEM school. But the best example of the walled-garden vision for schools may be the illegal school compound operated by Musk’s fellow tech titan and education disruptor Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg has been denounced after a school he and his wife established for children from low-income families in East Palo Alto announced in April that it will be shutting down, leaving students and their parents confused and angry. But it turns out that a mile away, behind a high wall of hedges, the billionaire and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were running a private school out of a house at their Palo Alto compound for two of their daughters and a dozen other children. And they were doing it in violation of city code.

The anti-tech movement now sweeping schools is also a movement against Muskism, with its vision of “fortress futurism” in which the welfare state is stripped for parts and technology is employed to entrench social hierarchy. At least some of the activists who want to free kids from the tyranny of screens understand that public education stands in stark contrast to the walled garden—a hedge-rowed enclave for me, a grimy screen for thee… A new reason to fear and loathe Musk, his Silicon Valley fellows, and their Trumpian allies arrives seemingly everyday. The fast-moving backlash to edtech serves as a hopeful reminder that they haven’t won yet.

I was in Florida recently to speak on the damage that vouchers have done to public schools when a local friend made a comment that I often get from my red state pals. You’re so lucky to live in a state that’s free from this crap. Acting on my 2026 resolution to be less of a downer (how’s that going??) I kept myself to myself, resisting the urge to deliver a semi-screed on the looming threat posed by the federal voucher program. And I reflected, once again, upon the irony that even as the GOP increasingly confronts the fallout from voucher programs, creating an opening for Democrats, the pro-voucher wingette of the Democratic Party is trying to muscle blue state governors into embracing Trump’s signature education policy.

What’d I miss?

First, a quick recap. Buried in the 1000 page behemoth known as the One Big Beautiful Bill was the nation’s first-ever federal voucher program. Long a conservative pipe dream, notwithstanding those on the right who staunchly opposed the idea as federal overreach, the new voucher program gives tax-payers a tax credit of unprecedented generosity if they donate to a so-called scholarship granting organization. I’ll get into more on how this will and won’t work below, but the key detail for the purposes of this post is that governors must opt into the bill in order for their states to participate. So far 27 have signed up, leaders of red states all, save for one Jared Polis, the outgoing governor of Colorado. And while the pressure on Democratic governors so far has come from Republican-controlled legislators in states including Kansas and Kentucky, the voucher express is now rolling into blue states.

Which brings us to a recent event that convened, among others, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, edupreneur Kevin Chavous, and a who’s who of Massachusetts education reform and philanthropy leaders, all rallying around a message for Governor Maura Healey: “sign up for vouchers—for the kids.” For a full play-by-play of the gathering, read every word of this write up by veteran journalist (and longtime friend of yours truly) Yawu Miller. As Miller notes, while the messaging was both muddled and deeply misleading, the new Massachusetts Educational Opportunities Coalition reflects impressive organizing.

The National Parents Union is spearheading the local coalition which aims to pressure Gov. Maura Healey to adopt the tax credit program. So far, the group counts 124 organizations in support, including The Pioneer Institute, The Boston Foundation, the Lynch Foundation, 45 individual Catholic Schools, 18 Montessori Schools, 13 Jewish day schools, the umbrella organizations supporting those types of schools and dozens of YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs.

Bad timing

A key part of the sales pitch for bringing vouchers to Massachusetts is that the cause is bipartisan. Which made it all the more awkward that on the very day of the coalition’s debut, 32 Democratic senators, including both Massachusetts senators, dropped a bill to repeal the federal voucher program on the grounds that it will 1) decimate public schools and 2) explode the federal deficit. In a hard-hitting op-ed, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly warned that universal vouchers had “broken” his state. And while the Wall Street Journal was quick to paint Kelly as a toady of the teachers unions, the bill’s co-sponsors include among them some famously choice-y Democrats: Cory Booker and Michael Bennett. Bennett, by the way, is running to replace out-going Colorado Governor Jared Polis, to date the program’s lone blue backer. (Contrary to claims on the coalition’s website, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein has not opted his state into the program.)

Overselling, undertelling

The story told at the Massachusetts event was that this is free money that the state and its children will lose if the governor refuses to opt in. Also, these aren’t vouchers but scholarships that will benefit low-income kids by giving them access to tutoring, after school programs, special education services and something vaguely defined as “tuition assistance.” We’re in pretty serious pinocchio territory here as these are most definitely vouchers, and the income eligibility, pegged at 300 percent of the median area income, means that a family of four in Boston, earning nearly $500,000, will be eligible—kind of a strange definition of ‘low-income.’ But it’s the fallacy of omission that’s working overtime here. You see, because the US Department of the Treasury, which will oversee the program, has yet to release the regulations, the hard sell about the program being “new resources for students” is based on the worst kind of wishful thinking. Moreover, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey and other blue state govs are being pressured to opt their states in without basic info about the program—like, will students who use vouchers be protected from discrimination? And, can states request data to evaluate the success of the program? Who knows????

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Truth in advertising

For a more candid look at what Trump’s voucher program is really about, let’s head over to the American Federation for Children, the school choice lobby shop established by Betsy DeVos, which recently announced the creation of a national ‘scholarship granting organization’ or SGO—these are the entities tasked with handing out the voucher cash (less a 10 percent 'cut’). And accompanying the new AFC SGO, to be run in partnership with voucher vendor Odyssey, is a $10 million advertising campaign to educate taxpayers about the generous new write off, and parents about their new education options. Now perhaps I’ve grown cynical from my years of writing about this stuff, but I highly doubt that the hearts of DeVos et al are pounding over the chance to provide kids in under-resourced schools with enrichment opportunities. The income eligibility is so high, they note approvingly, that 90 percent of all K-12 students in the US are now eligible for private school vouchers.

Another clue as to what’s really going on comes to us courtesy of a fascinating new profile of ED chief Linda McMahon in the New Yorker. That we now have a federal voucher program turns out to reflect the handiwork of Texas oil billionaire slash “theo-oligarch” Tim Dunn, who used McMahon’s think tank, the America First Policy Institute, to take Texas’ controversial voucher program, which he also spearheaded, national.

At the institute, McMahon ceded policy to others. Before launching the group, she and Rollins visited Texas to enlist the billionaire oilman Tim Dunn as a founder. Dunn isn’t well known nationally, but he is the most powerful man in Texas; in 2023, ProPublica reported, two-thirds of all campaign donations to the state Republican Party came from his political organizations. Dunn has expressed the view that Christians should dominate society. Texas’s first Jewish Speaker of the House has said that, in a private meeting, Dunn told him that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied this.) For years, his main political project was legislation that siphoned public-education funds to private schools via vouchers. “I call him a theo-oligarch,” Glenn Rogers, a former Republican state representative, told me. Rogers is deeply conservative, but, like many rural Republicans, he was a public-education supporter. Dunn targeted him, and in 2024 he lost his seat. “He desires to eliminate public education and replace it with a private-education system that uses his version of the Christian religion,” Rogers said.

The Death of Education Reform

The Massachusetts voucher coalition is ostensibly led by the National Parents Union, the six year old organization that was started as a counterweight to the teachers unions. But beneath the NPU staffers’ cheerleading at the roll-out rally could be heard a distinctly queasy note. Now, whatever you think about NPU’s somewhat murky origin story, the group’s polling of parents routinely offers genuine insights. Take, for example, this recent survey that found that “the ‘school choice’ parents are willing to support comes with a robust set of conditions centered on fairness, accessibility, and accountability, conditions that existing voucher and ESA programs fail to meet.” Note that the federal program is also lacking these conditions, by design, putting NPU in the awkward position of having to sell the Trump voucher program as something other than what it is. (That’s why, as Yawu Miller reports, the group’s lobbyist urged activists to sell the plan as benefitting public school students.)

I suspect that real driver of this bus is Democrats for Education Reform or DFER, specifically its cretinous chief, Jorge Elorza. If you’re thinking, “cretinous is a rather strong word choice, Jennifer,” take a sec to read up on the misogynistic behavior in which this gentleman appears to traffic. Did you get to the paragaph where the former staffer who is suing DFER claims that she became the target of Elorza’s wrath after questioning his decision to “join a Koch-funded right-wing coalition that seemed contrary to the organization’s best interests and mission”? As the New York Times reported this summer, DFER’s decision to embrace the Trump voucher program has caused a deep split within its ranks. Despite the addition of high-profile new supporters, including Arne Duncan and Netflix honcho Reed Hastings, the group appears to be in free fall.

Lessons learned

DFER’s pivot was on vivid display at the Massachusetts voucher coalition coming out party. Tasked with sounding the alarm about the dire state of the nation’s public school was Kevin Chavous, the president of Stride K12 Inc, the for-profit virtual school behemoth so mired in poor-performing, cash hoovering scandal that it had to change its name. If Chavous seems like an odd choice to wave the student achievement banner, consider that the Trump voucher program doesn’t actually have anything to say about student achievement.

As for Arne Duncan, who recently joined DFER as a “senior fellow,” a sinecure from which he’ll be proffering sage advice on the Democrats’ education strategy, count me as not all that surprised by his trajectory. A decade ago, Duncan touched down in Massachusetts as part of a last-ditch effort to sell a ballot initative that would have dramatically expanded charter schools at the expense of public schools. I went to hear him deliver the closing pitch for Question 2 in his trademark ‘fast folksy’ style, replete with anecdotes about students who really didn’t care what kind of school they attended as long as they achieved.

The ballot question went down in flames, despite a huge money advantage for Team Charter, a stinging defeat from which Massachusetts’ education reform community has never recovered. That loss, by the way, is a big part of why these same folks are now embracing private school vouchers, a cause even more deeply unpopular than charter school expansion. Ten years later, they’re back, armed with another pig and plenty of lipstick.

The tea leaves we’ll be reading today, reader, are actually tealevél. That would be the Hungarian word for the symbolic remnants at the bottom of the cup. Hungary, as you may have heard, was the site of a world-shaking election over the weekend, as voters rose up, about as close to en masse as you can get, and said szia to Victor Orban, Hungary’s strongman prime minister for the past 16 years. There are lots of reasons to be heartened by the results, not the least of which is that the brand of ‘illiberal democracy’ Orban promoted across the globe seems to be running out of steam. But it is the role that education as an issue played in the stinging rebuke of Orban and his party that is the subject of this post. Because even if you don’t know your paprikash from your halászlé, the trajectory of education in Hungary—what voters there just rejected—will feel like familiar fare indeed.

First: a quick review for those of you who may not share my fascination with (or the American right’s obsessive interest in) Hungary. While Orban has often been referred to as ‘Trump before Trump,’ he was also doing education culture war long before the GOP in this country caught the fever. Here’s the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg on how Orban became a model for the likes of Ron DeSantis et al.

More than any other politician, Orban showed conservatives worldwide how to use government power to wage the culture wars. He crushed a prominent liberal university, banned “homosexual propaganda” in schools — a forerunner of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law — and engineered the takeover of major media outlets by his allies.

While there are some very key differences—Hungary’s ruling party banned homeschooling, for example, under a controversial education reform law in 2019—the similarities are glaring. Just as the Trump-era GOP has imposed strict limits on what teachers can teach and students can learn, prioritizing so-called patriotic education, education under Orban became a propaganda tool. There’s even a voucher connection, as Hungary has diverted funds away from the country’s public schools and towards church schools. A full decade ahead of us on the ‘education freedom’ road, Hungary has ended up consigning its most vulnerable children to what remains of the public schools, starkling limiting their future options as a result.

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But when voters had a chance to weigh in, they said nem köszönöm. As Peter Magyar, Orban’s opponent, astutely understood, the combination of stripping schools and teachers of funding while also turning education into a vehicle of propaganda is deeply unpopular. In rallies he held all over the country, including in deeply conservative rural regions, Magyar focused, not on abstract debates about authoritarianism, but on healthcare, education, infrastructure, and corruption. He also pledged a major investment in public schools, the decrepit state of which served as a handy reminder of what’s happened to Hungary’s economy during 16 years of Orbanism. As this gentleman, a one-time supporter of a far-right party who campaigned for Magyar, neatly summed it up: “They have stolen everything.”

From Tatabánya to Tulsa

Back in this country, something similar has been playing out. Last week, voters in Missouri, Wisconsin and Oklahoma went to the polls for local school district elections, handing defeats to several high-profile conservative slates and candidates.

In Missouri’s Francis Howell School District, three Democratic‑backed candidates swept school board races, removing the board’s last conservative member following a campaign centered on book bans and LGBTQ‑inclusive policies. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a conservative incumbent lost to a Democratic‑backed challenger following controversy over anti‑immigrant and anti‑LGBTQ remarks. Similar dynamics played out in suburban Wisconsin districts, including parts of Waukesha County, long considered a Republican stronghold.

“We got our butts kicked,” reflected one GOP official. True that, but I much preferred the reading of the electoral tea leaves provided by Jonathan Collins, co‑director of the Politics and Education Program at Columbia University. These elections provide a “clear signal that the American public wants to see real, material quality of life improvements,” Collins said in an interview with Newsweek. “Nothing better represents America’s aspirations for tomorrow than schools.”

If you’re wondering what a handful of local schoolboard races have to do with the ousting of a Hungarian strongman, the answer is ‘more than you might think.’ These particular races all belong to the category of what we might call the OG culture war takeover strategy. In Tulsa, for example, voters ousted the last Ryan Walters-aligned board member (remember him?), electing instead a candidate who pledged to “focus on strengthening public education, not tearing it down.” Tulsa voters, by the way, didn’t just reject the MAGA vision for schools, they approved a massive investment in the future. In Waukesha, Wisconsin, the GOP used the school culture wars to try to nationalize local elections, with the goal of turning a reddish county redder still. Not only were they stymied at the school board level but thanks to the backlash they inspired, the largest city in this Republican stronghold now has a Democratic mayor.

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There are plenty of tea leaves for us to read here, including that voters are sick to death of the education culture wars and the candidates who continue to fan their flames. Another is that if your goal is to restore some sanity to our politics, organizing around local public schools is the ideal place to start. As I was reminded by my friend Ashley Daly, who has been part of a pro-public education coalition in Tulsa since 2022, this kind of organizing takes an immense amount of work, including convincing people to run for office, but the payoff is huge. “What’s really beautiful is that the people running are just our neighbors. They’re parents and they just want to show up for our community and for kids. They’re just normal people who were like, ‘this is needed. I’m gonna do it.’” If this feels familiar, by the way, it’s because this is precisely the path followed by the New Hampshire Democrat who recently flipped a seat in that state.

Perhaps the most important lesson, though, and one that holds true whether you’re in Tatabánya, Tulsa or Tarrant County, Texas, is that the ability to strongarm controversial policies into law is not the same as popular support for said policies. In Hungary, Orban proved extraordinarily effective at using the power of the state to wage culture war, including driving a top university campus into exile. On this side of the pond, red state governors have succeeded in enacting one unpopular education policy after another, most notably, redirecting funds for public schools to private religious schools. And as I’ve been pointing out relentlessly, the backlash to school vouchers keeps showing up at the polls, and is shaping up to be a major factor in the midterms. (See, for example, Iowa, where GOP candidates for governor, a race that’s now considered a toss-up, are sparring over whether private schools should have to accept all kids.)

Ultimately, gerrymandering and strong-man domination weren’t enough to keep Orban in power as Hungary’s economy foundered and the public rebelled against overt corruption and grift. Conservative pols in this country should read the Hungarian tea leaves as a cautionary tale. But it’s the results of last week’s school board races that should really make them sweat.

One of the many clashes right now over the direction of the Democratic Party involves public education. How should candidates running with a D next to their names talk about public schools? According to hot takes like this one and this one, Democrats’ best shot at success, including winning back voters who’ve abandoned the party, is to run as ‘disruptors of the status quo,’ going hard at teachers unions, embracing vouchers, standardized testing and merit pay. And yet even a cursory look at some of the candidates who’ve been flipping seats, turning red districts blue, reveals a very different strategy.

As I wrote last month, public education was at the very center of Taylor Rehmet’s upset win in Texas, with the candidate tapping into deep frustration with the GOP’s hostility to public schools. Today we’re headed to New Hampshire, site of another recent Democratic flip. A few weeks ago, Bobbi Boudman won a special election in a deep red part of the state—a race she lost two years ago by nearly 14%. The outcome has the New Hampshire GOP feeling understandably skittery about the midterm elections, but it also challenges the ‘combative centrist’ position that Democrats should run against public schools. I talked to Boudman about her win, and what lessons she thinks her scenic corner of Lake Winnipesaukee holds for her party.

Jennifer Berkshire First of all, congratulations! And lest readers get the impression that this was some kind of out-of-the-blue win, we need to start with a bit of backstory here. You actually ran for this seat back in 2022 and 2024 and lost each time. What made the difference this time around?

Bobbi Boudman I think that the big difference was that the things I had said were going to happen have all happened. I kept telling people about what school vouchers were going to mean for our local public schools and our local property tax bills. I’d tell them: “This is what our legislators are doing to us. We’re going to start feeling this.” Well, we finally felt it. It went from theory to reality.

Jennifer I’m not sure people outside of New Hampshire are aware of the intensity of the attacks on public education in the Granite State. Bring us up to speed.

Bobbi It’s more than the schools. Our legislature has a dismantling agenda. They’re going after our unions and trying to rip apart the municipal structures that we depend on, like the people who plow the roads at 3AM during a snow storm. But the schools are the number one target. The gentleman I ran against previously, Glen Cordelli, actually proposed legislation that would have dissolved our school districts without replacing them with anything. That was the moment when I realized that I had a choice. I could either, you know, keep sending emails to my friends and complaining behind the scenes about was going on or I could step up and try to do someting about it.

My opponent this time around immediately came out for getting rid of public schools. I think there are even some quotes out there of him equating public schools to training Ted Bundys. He’s part of what I think of as the ‘break everything faster movement.’ I never mentioned my opponent’s name once during my campaign, by the way.

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Jennifer One thing that really stands out to me about your campaign is that you made a point of steering clear of ideology. Not only did you not mention your opponent’s name, you also made a point of running this race so that it wasn’t about Donald Trump.

Bobbi That’s right. I didn’t run against Trump because many of my voters are actually Trump supporters. Rembember, Republicans send their children to public schools too. People who identify as MAGA send their children to public schools. So that was nowhere in my messaging. I ran a race on issues, not party or ideology. And I never attacked, because when you’re out there and you’re a voter and someone is running on the party ticket and all you hear them say is “oh, the Democrats did this” or “the Republicans did that,” you feel like they’re attacking you. I know I felt like that when someone would start shouting at me about something that Gavin Newsom did in California. My response is “well, what does that have to do with me standing here wanting to help our public schools or help workers in New Hampshire get a fair wage?”

Jennifer Property taxes are a huge issue in New Hampshire because of the way the state funds—or rather, doesn’t fund—its schools. When you talk about the ‘break everything faster’ movement, shifting more and more of the burden onto individual tax payers in hopes that at some point they’ll just say ‘enough!’ seems like a big part of it. And yet your message about school funding and what’s happened to taxes in New Hampshire seemed to resonate with voters. What’s your secret?

Bobbi I think a big part of being able to flip this seat was the fact that I am local and I understand our local issues and I understand our local pains. Our property values have doubled, not because of inflation but because there’s been an artifical inflation of our land values. So it’s very easy for me to talk to one of my neighbors who might have an ‘R’ next to their name and say: “Hey, you know, my house doubled, did yours?” or “My land doubled in value, how about yours?” That’s when the conversation happens, because it’s at a local level. I walk them through what’s happened to revenue and taxes in New Hampshire, how they phased out the interest and dividends tax just as school vouchers were being phased in. We’ve got the state and the federal government taking away funds that used to go to our local school district, and all of that is now on our property taxes because that’s the way our tax system here works.

Jennifer There’s been an intense effort by Republicans in New Hampshire to make public education a partisan issue. I’m thinking, for example, of a bill this session that would punish teachers who engage in vaguely defined “leftist indoctrination”—just the latest in a long series of attempts to demonize teachers and schools. Your win seems to show that, at least at the local level, that strategy may be backfiring.

Bobbi Back in 2023, after our state representative went all in on book banning, I filed what we call a warrant article—that’s the New Hampshire version of direct democracy—asking local voters to prevent the use of town funds for the removal of books from schools and library. It passed by 72 percent, which tells you something. I ran for office because my elected representative wasn’t representing me, but an agenda of Christian Nationalism and Free State libertarianism. And I think a lot of voters around here feel like they’re not being represented. When I talk to people in this community about their concerns, the top issues are the needs of seniors and the needs of our children. This is an older community and the needs of those residents are absolutely not being met in Concord. And then also our children graduate and they leave because they have to. We’re leaving our children behind and we’re not creating, a future where our next generation can live here, work here, and thrive here.

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Jennifer I want to go back to something you said earlier, about how voters in your community were able to see that you’d been right with your ominous predictions about the impact of school vouchers. While I can attest to the uniqueness of your part of New Hampshire, the very things you were worried about—the cost of vouchers, the decline of state funding, rising property taxes—are coming to pass all over the place. This feels to me like a real opportunity for Democrats.

Bobbi It definitely became real for people in a way that it wasn’t before. When my opponent would talk about school choice, people are starting to understand what that means: you’re saying you’re going to get rid of the choice of the children to have, you know, programs in school, like AP classes or our tech school, where studets all come together, not just from our school district but from the surrounding towns. I tell people that the $51 million a year that New Hampshire taxpayers are now spending on school vouchers could go towards new technology programs for the kids in our public schools. I have a 21-year-old son who had to leave the state and go to tech school in Northern Maine. Now he has to live in Maine because he’s a wind turbine technician. He’s in a job of the future, just not in New Hampshire.

Jennifer Any advice for candidates who want to pull-off an upset win like you just did?

Bobbi I think my opponent thought that he only needed to run for two and half months and that would do it. But I’ve been running for this seat for 18 years. When I’m subbing in the local schools or handing out food at the food bank or, taking pictures at local community events or sewing costumes for theater, that’s all building your base. You’re building friendships and community. I also got comfortable standing up for what I believe in. Believe it or not, I used to be an introvert. When I started showing up and speaking out at school board meetings during the pandemic, I was terrified. That’s sort of where it all began, with me standing up alone for years. And now when I stand up, 50 people stand up with me. We have a weekly non-partisan gathering called Wolfeboro Area Peaceful Protest where people come out and hold signs for what they believe in. I started showing up with a sign that that says “Support Our Public Schools.” Well, lots of people are holding that sign now.

According to this handy dandy Washington Post search tool, I’m at high risk of being replaced by AI. As a writer (bad), a woman (worse), and no longer in my first blush of youth (also bad), I turn out to be at the top of the ‘must replace’ list. Teaching—another female dominated field—is also highly “exposed,” to use the parlance of the authors. Teachers who work with young kids are especially vulnerable, while high school educators are slightly more protected. Janitors, as is so often the case, will have the last laugh.

If you, like me, spend your days (and nights) taking in ever-more alarming predictions regarding the havok that AI is about to wreak, then perhaps you’ve mused/muttered aloud, and more than once, ‘so what are we supposed to do?’ Know that we are not alone, dear reader. Recent days have brought us not one but two prescriptions for a path forward, both of which run—wait for it—through the schools.

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What’s the plan?

“A Nation at Risk to a Nation at Work” is the work of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a collection of business leaders and education reform luminaries. (I’m using that word in place of the more hurtful ‘has beens.’) They are here to warn us that the nation faces a challenge even more complex and consequential than the OG ‘rising tide of mediocrity.’ But if the future appears dire, the solutions are comfortingly familiar. Data dashboards. Lifelong learning passports. Cradle-to-career-data-systems. Competency-based education. Federally-funded competitive grants. A K-12 scorecard that tracks the ‘honesty gap’ between between states’ definitions of academic proficiency and proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And my personal favorite, a call to redesign high school with workforce skills in mind.

“Turning the recommendations into policy could prove challenging,” notes this EdWeek writer, a kinder way of saying that the BPC’s vision is DOA. And yet the insistence that fixing the schools is the way to counter massive AI disruption is worth paying attention to, because it’s an argument we’re going to be hearing much more of. Earlier this month, Gina Raimondo, secretary of commerce in the Biden administration and the former governor of Lil Rhody, took to the pages of the New York Times to warn of the coming AIpocalypse. “Millions of Americans — from white collar to blue collar, entry level to executive — may soon find themselves jobless and without prospects,” wrote Raimondo.

But where doom-and-gloom types foresee hollowed out cities, Raimondo sees an opportunity to form public/private partnerships and tear down the wall between business and education. On-ramps, bridges, stackable credentials, modular education, innovative programs, tax credits, talent gaps—they’re all here. By the end of the column I was practically rooting for AI.

The honesty gap

As I’ve been arguing ad nauseum on this page and elsewhere, a major, and largely unacknowledged political divide right now is the divide between the old school ‘fix the schools’ centrists and the rising, ‘tax the rich,’ left wing of the Democratic Party. I’d argue that the former group is on its heels, which is why we’re getting so many “combative centrist” takes, arguing that the Democrats’ path to victory necessitates going hard at teachers unions, embracing standardized testing, vouchers and merit pay. While these takes lay out a specific vision for fixing public education (what Obama did but more!), they also represent an attempt to steer the Democrats away from populist left-wing positions like imposing a national wealth tax on billionaires.

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But a time when so many ordinary people have lost faith in capitalism, the case that Americans just need more skills and education to succeed is getting harder to make. The goal of tethering schools ever more tightly to the need of corporations, or its close cousin, the belief that the bosses of today are best equipped to predict the jobs of the future, seems positively farcical. In a recent interview, Chris Hayes described big tech’s business proposition as replacing white-collar workers with machines.

There’s a real sense that the sledgehammer is coming for the part of the economic capitalist American project where people have homes and they take vacations and they send their kids to good schools.

A flurry of new polls back Hayes up, by the way. Data centers are wildly unpopular, which you already know if you’re in a community that’s been targeted for one of these. And messages that address the future impact of AI in bold, populist terms turn out to be more effective at moving voters than just about any other issue. By “bold, populist terms,” I’m talking about policies that acknowledge the profound fear that AI is going to eviscerate jobs and demand that tech companies pay for the damage. What doesn’t move voters is talk of data dashboards, stackable badges and digital learning passports, because they know that in the coming showdown, these will be no match for the sledgehammer.

Another world is possible

I’m old enough to recall the last time we went through a political battle like this. It was over globalization, and the “combative centrists” of that era were making the case that unionized manufacturing workers were relics of an outmoded age. They needed to move on and get retrained for the new knowledge economy, ideally using Individual Training Accounts. (Sound familiar?) This argument turned out to be catastrophically wrong. Retraining never worked, and telling workers without college degrees—more than half of the population—that the collapse of their economic fortunes was their own fault marched us straight into the Trump era. Which makes it all the more ironic that we’re being presented with the same arguments today about how to respond to AI, often by the same people who turned out to be so wrong about globalization: retrain, get a credential in an in-demand skill, stack those credentials, demand transparency about future earnings from universities, become a life-long-learner, get over it, move on, move somewhere else.

“Without solutions, America’s anxiety will become rage — and political backlash will follow, targeting companies that make A.I., businesses that deploy it and politicians who back it,” warns Gina Raimondo. She’s right, but her “solutions” have already failed, reducing K-12 education and much of higher ed to soulless job prep in the process. So what should we do? If you’re goal is to “put a crowbar in the wheels of the machinery”—and I’m quoting Chris Hayes again here—do that wherever you can. Block the data center, demand the moratorium on AI in schools, and tap into the growing backlash from parents across the political spectrum about the big tech take over of our schools.

Back in the day, our protests against globalization weren’t only about rejecting the outsourcing of unionized manufacturing jobs to the lowest-wage countries. We also believed that “another world is possible,” to quote the slogan of the times. And while it has been many years since I marched with the Teamsters and Turtles, sporting a pair of butterfly wings, I still believe this.

Stories about parents rebelling against big tech are everywhere right now. They’re sick of the screens, the hoovering up of their children’s data, and they view AI and its rapid incursion into schools as a menace, not a ‘co-pilot’ for their kids’ education. This is a positive development, in my humble opinion, especially since the backlash against the tech takeover of schools crosses partisan lines. Meanwhile, pundits and hot takers are weighing in, declaring the era of edtech, not just a failure, but the cause of our failing schools.

Which raises a not insignificant question. Now that everyone who is anyone agrees that handing schools over to Silicon Valley was big and costly mistake, how did the nation’s teachers and students end up on the receiving end of this experiment in the first place? And here is where our story grows murky, dear reader. In fact, if you’re old enough to remember the absolute mania around ‘personalized learning’ that took hold during the Obama era, count yourself as fortunate. Because lots of the same influential, not to mention handsomely compensated, folks who were churning out ‘reports’ about our factory-era schools 15 minutes ago, suddenly seemed cursed by failing memories.

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The not-so-wayback-machine

If you need a refresher to summon forth the 2010-era ed tech frenzy, proceed directly to Audrey Watters’ unforgettable write-up: “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.” Watters’ has moved on to a new newsletter and AI refusal, but her once lonely voice as the ‘Cassandra’ of education technology remains as essential as ever. Her tally of “ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas” is studded with now tarnished silver bullets that promised to transform our factory-era schools into futuristic tech centers, making a pretty penny in the process: AltSchool, inBloom, Rocketship, Amplify, DreamBox, Summit… The names have changed or been forgotten but the throughline—a fundamental misunderstanding of schools and teaching combined with the promise of hefty returns—remains constant.

My own introduction to the ed tech hustle came back in 2015. Jeb Bush’s group, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, or FEE, to use its comically apt acronym, came to Boston for its annual convening, to which I said, ‘sign me up!’ Always an early adapter (see, for example, school vouchers in Florida), FEE was also unabashedly pro technology, as I wrote in a story for the Baffler.

It’s one of FEE’s articles of faith that the solutions to our great educational dilemmas are a mere click away—if, that is, the schools and the self-interested dullards who run them would just accept the limitless possibilities of technology. Of course, these gadgets don’t come cheap. And this means that, like virtually all the other innovations touted by our postideological savants of education reform, the vision of a tech-empowered American student body calls for driving down our spending on teaching (labor costs account for the lion’s share of the $600 billion spent on public education in the United States each year) and pumping up our spending on gizmos.

In virtually every session I attended, someone would relate a story about a device that was working education miracles, followed by a familiar lament: if only the teachers, or their unions, or the education ‘blob’ would get out of the way.

False profits

In a recent piece for Fortune, reporter Sasha Rogelberg offers an interesting origin story for the tech takeover of public education. And you don’t need to read past the title to get where she’s going. ‘American schools weren’t broken until Silicon Valley used a lie to convince them they were—now reading and math scores are plummeting.’ I’d make the header even clunkier and add ‘the education reform industry’ to the mix. While the push to get tech into classrooms predates Obama-era education reform (check out Watters’ fantastic history of personalized learning, Teaching Machines, for the extended play version), it was the reformers’ zeal, when married to Silicon Valley’s profit optimization, that would prove so irresistible.

In the last hundred years, the base of the United States economy has shifted from industry to knowledge—but the average American classroom operates in much the same way it always has: one teacher, up to thirty same-age students, four walls. This report from StudentsFirst argues that this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t cut it in the modern world, in which mastery of higher-order knowledge and skills ought to matter more than time spent in front of a teacher—and that what we need is competency-based education. This approach, also known as the “personalized model,” is characterized by advancing students through school based on what they know and can do, using assessments to give them timely, differentiated support, made easier by the introduction of learning technology.

StudentsFirst, the hard-charging school reform org started by Michelle Rhee, has since been eaten by 50CAN, which now advocates for school vouchers, but the fare they offered up was standard. Indeed, here’s a fun activity for you. Revisit any prominent reform group, individual, or cause of that era and you will find the same argument about our factory-model schools, followed, inevitably, by the inevitable pitch for a tech-centric solution.

Race to the Top, Obama’s signature education reform initiative, didn’t just bribe cash-strapped states into overhauling their teacher evaluation systems. It also ‘encouraged’ states to shift their standardized tests online. And Arne Duncan and Obama’s Department of Education actively courted the tech industry, encouraging them to think of schools as a space ripe for disruption. “Many of today’s young people will be working at jobs that don’t currently exist,” warned the XQ Institute, the reform org started by Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Today Powell Jobs presides over the Atlantic, where new panic pieces regarding young, tech-addled dumb dumbs appear seemingly every day.

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Warning signs

My obsessive interest in the intersection of education and politics began back in 2012, when my adopted home state of Massachusetts came down with a serious—and well-funded—case of education reform fever. At a time when red states were crushing the collective bargaining rights of teachers (Wisconsin, anyone?), I was struck by how often reform-minded Democrats ended up repurposing the right’s anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-public-school rhetoric for their own righteous cause. Ed tech sat right smack in the center of this queasy juncture—beloved both by liberal reformers, ensorcelled by press releases promising higher test scores, and by conservatives who liked the idea of spending less on schools by replacing teachers with machines.

Recall, if you will, Rocketship charter schools, whose innovative blended learning model caused the test scores of its students—almost all poor and minority—to go up like a rocket. Richard Whitmire’s fawning 2013 book, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope, is a veritable time capsule of the era. Unlike the fusty Model-T schools of yore, Rocketship schools were tech forward. Students spent a chunk of each day in so-called Learning Labs, taking, retaking or practicing taking tests, a practice that had a measurable impact, especially since 50 percent of teachers’ pay was tied to test scores ascending. All that clicking also translated into dollar signs, wrote Whitmire. “A major cost-saving solution was for students to spend significant time working on laptops in large groups supervised by noncertified, lower-paid “instructional lab specialists.”

Rocketship has since fallen back to earth, in part because of stellar reporting like this from Anya Kamenetz, documenting the chain’s less savory practices. But it’s hard to overstate just how excited the reform world was about this stuff. Next time you hear an edu-pundit bemoaning the take over of kindergarten classrooms by big tech, remember that Rocketship got there first. “[K]indergarten teachers are spending less time making letter sounds,” co-founder Preston Smith told Kamenetz. Reformers couldn’t get enough…

Whodunit?

Investigative reporter Amy Littlefield has an intriguing-sounding new book out in which she uses the model of an Agatha Christie novel to suss out who killed abortion rights in the US. I imagine that taking a similar approach to the question of how big tech conquered public education would end up in Murder on the Orient Express territory. That’s the classic Christie whodunit in which everyone on the train ends up having ‘dunit.’ These days, there is a comical effort underway by reformers to distance themselves from the tech takeover—what train? I’ve never been on a train! But the idea that Silicon Valley had the cure for all that ailed the nation’s public schools was absolutely central to Obama-era education reform.

I’d locate the zenith of the reformer/tech love affair in 2017 when New Schools Venture Fund, a reform org that funds all of the other orgs, laid down a challenge, or rather, a big bet. At its annual summit, backed by a who’s who of fond of tech funders—Gates, Zuckerberg, Walton—NSVF called for big philanthropy to bet big on tech-based personalized learning. “The world has changed dramatically … and our schools have struggled to keep up,” then CEO Stacey Childress warned the crowd. But not all the news was bad. Going all in on education innovation would also pay off handsomely, claimed NSVF, producing an estimated 200 to 500 percent return on investment. And lest parents, teachers and students failed to adequately appreciate the various reimaginings they were in for, NSVF had an answer for that too: a $200 million ad campaign to “foster understanding and demand.”

As I was preparing to type a sentence about how poorly NSVF’s “Big Bet on the Future of American Education” has aged, a press release popped up in my inbox, announcing that Netflix founder Reed Hastings has joined forces with Democrats for Education Reform. “Just as Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive, Hastings believes public education can make the same leap.”

AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it. The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before.

Of course, transforming “a school system in desperate need of reinvention” the way that Hastings reinvented home entertainment will require “governance innovation and political will.” No doubt an ad campaign is in the works too. And yet convincing education ‘consumers’ that school = individualized software is going to be a tough sell, especially as the Great Big Tech Backlash accelerates.

That’s my big bet.

There may be no other issue that national media is as bad on as school vouchers. OK—maybe there are one or two other issues… Again and again, the story of the rapid-fire spread of vouchers is told as one of parents, still angry over pandemic school closures, rising up to demand education ‘options.’ Programs that give state money to private schools are a “darling of conservatives,” we’re told in stories like this one, while Democrats are urged to get on the voucher bus or risk the wrath of their own voters. And yet a decided trend is emerging in which voters are rewarding voucher critics and punishing their supporters. The reality is that a policy that is a darling of billionaire donors and actively redistributes wealth upwards is a spectacularly poor fit for our “top vs. bottom” political moment. It’s also an organizing opportunity.

Government overreach

Let’s start on the right, shall we? In the latest episode of my podcast, Have You Heard, I talk to grassroots conservative activists in Texas who are furious about the state’s new $1 billion voucher program. Where proponents promise ‘education freedom’ and ‘school choice,’ they see something very different: a government takeover of private and home schools. “What the government funds, the government runs,” is a refrain I heard again and again. I encourage you to listen to the episode because the anger of these conservative activists regarding a policy that is now considered a GOP ‘litmus test’ issue has major political implications. Here’s how Lynn Davenport explained it to me:

Heads will roll those who voted for vouchers and sold out their schools and their communities and flip flopped and did the bidding of the governor. I think that there’s going to be a real backlash and people don’t wanna hear it, but they would rather sit at home and let the Democrat win then go vote for somebody who’s betrayed them in that way.

That’s exactly what happened in that special election back in January, by the way, when Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a loud critic of vouchers, won an upset election, defeating a Republican opponent who’d been opposed to vouchers before changing her tune once it came time to campaign, and more importantly, solicit campaign funds.

In other words, the GOP has managed to alienate one part of its base—the small-government Republicans who are opposed to what they see as handouts and entitlements. But at the same time, the increasing hostility towards public schools—the unhinged rhetoric used to make the case for vouchers—has turned off the moderates that the party still needs to win elections. And that combo could spell big trouble. Hollie Plemons, a long-time GOP precinct chair in north central Texas, told me that her fear is that Republican voters will end up “just walking away from the voting process altogether, which is terrifying.”

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Feeling blue

And it’s not just Texas. One of the most surprising election results came from North Carolina, where the Republican head of the state senate is on the cusp of going down to defeat. The race is being characterized in the media as an example of anti-incumbent fever, but this is also a story about anger over school vouchers. Phil Berger, the most powerful legislator in the state, is a darling of the school choice lobby, which showered him with cash to try to keep him in office. His challenger, Sheriff Sam Page, describes vouchers as a hand-out to the wealthy and has called for prohibiting private schools that receive state funds from raising tuition. That was enough to make him a target for the school choice lobby, including this guy, who accused Page of “siding with Randi Weingarten and the radical left teacher unions against President Trump and North Carolina parents.” Republican voters in rural Rockingham county apparently saw things differently…

Meanwhile in Arkansas, voters said ‘no thanks’ to Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ attempt to primary legislators who’d been insufficiently toady-ish on school vouchers and a controversial prison project. Democrats hope that that bodes well for their pick to challenge Sanders, State Senator Fred Love, who is running as opponent of both vouchers and the prison.

Bottom vs. top

While the media, pundits and ‘hot takers’ have struggled to articulate what just happened, my favorite explanation comes from James Talarico, who by this point no longer requires an introduction. “[T]he biggest divide in our politics is not left vs right. It’s bottom vs. top.” Talarico, of course, rose to statewide prominence in Texas with his fiery critiques of school vouchers as a billionaire-bought policy, something that national reporters keep forgetting to mention. Today, the most exciting candidates running under the D label are economic populists. And to a one, they understand the potency of vouchers as a political issue. “Texan’s tax dollars should be used to support and improve our public schools, not to subsidize the private education choices of the wealthy,” was the rallying cry of yet another progressive populist, Junior Ezeonu, who won a surprise victory this week.

But what’s so fascinating is that grassroots conservatives, like the ones I interviewed, talk in strikingly similar terms. They see vouchers as a failure of democracy, with billionaire donors and super PACs replacing ‘we the people.’ They are convinced that their elected officials no longer represent them—they’re “bought,” is a lament I heard again and again. And when they criticize their party’s new ‘litmus test’ issue, they’re told to sit down and shut up.

“Voters reject vouchers—again!” was the title of a study that came out this summer, analyzing the stinging electoral defeats of ballot questions that went before voters in Kentucky and Nebraska in 2024. While the school choice lobby has been wildly successful in knocking out Republican resistance in state after state, the authors noted, “overcoming legislative roadblocks” was probably the easy part. “No similar mechanism exists for overcoming opposition among the mass public.”

We’re starting to get a glimpse of what that means.

If there is one topic I get asked about the most it is the so-called Mississippi Miracle. “Is it all that?” a non-education obsessed friend wrote recently. “If I have to read another story about the Southern Surge I’m going to puke,” another pal chimed in. “Got anything for me?” Alas, I do not. If you are hoping for a debunking, this is not the post for you. I’ve been writing about education for long enough that I know how unusual sustained progress is. To channel my friend Karin Chenoweth, author of the outstanding Districts that Succeed, while pundits may be too quick to proclaim that Mississippi and Alabama ‘have it all figured out,’ (8th grade reading scores are still terrible), insisting that any increase in achievement must be a scam doesn’t exactly aid the cause of public education.

And at a time when Republicans have gone all in on private school vouchers, it’s actually pretty inspiring that Mississippi remains one of the few red states that has fended these off. In fact, when the GOP made yet another attempt to bring vouchers to the Magnolia State earlier this month, a panel of state senators rejected it unanimously–after 84 seconds of deliberation. To which the chair of the Mississipp Democratic Party responded with the kind of ringing defense of public education that can be so hard to find among Dems these days.

Our public schools are the cornerstone of every community in this state, and this unanimous rejection sends a clear message: Mississippi will not abandon the students and families who depend on quality public education—no matter how much out-of-state money tries to buy our legislators.

The poverty problem

As someone who spends a disturbing amount of time musing, or as some would say, obsessing, over the intersection of education and politics, what concerns me is the partial nature of the story being told about Mississippi et al. In news story after column after post, we are sternly instructed to ‘gather behind Mississippi’s banner.’ And yet that banner–which until 2020 was the actual Confederate Flag–represents some unsavory realities that takers, pundits and pols glance right over. What does it tell us that states that remain the very worst places for children are being held up as policy exemplars for the rest of the country? It tells us quite a bit, as a matter of fact.

“When Americans start fighting over their schools, you can be fairly sure of one thing: it probably isn’t really about school,” someone once wrote. OK–that someone was me. The point being that just as our fights over, say, books or bathrooms aren’t really about books and bathrooms, the overselling of the Mississippi Miracle isn’t just about the best way to improve reading instruction. As I’ve been arguing on this page and in various places, the deeply-held American belief that we can educate our way out of poverty has crashed upon the shoals of our chasming inequality. ‘Just go to college’–the Dems’ policy prescription for four decades–is losing out to ‘tax the rich’ as the left populist wing of the Democratic party ascends. Not unsurprisingly, these shifting political tides have prompted a furious backlash from centrists for whom faith in the ‘fixing’ power of education is akin to a religion.

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The power of the Mississippi story is that it offers proof that the centrists have been right all along. Poverty persists because of bad schools, bad teachers etc. Improve these and kids will go onto college and cease to be poor. (It really is this simple.) Critics of this line of reasoning (like me, for example) can then be mocked as “pessimistic leftists” for believing that “even attempting to shrink the gap between rich and poor students is a fool’s errand,” as this opinionator opined recently.

Cheerleaders for the Southern Surge tend to skate right by what seems like a fairly key question. Why are there so many poor kids in these states? Why are they so poor? And why has childhood poverty here persisted for so long? Big questions, yes, but even a cursory glance at history provides an answer. Kids in states like Mississippi and Louisiana live in deep poverty by design. Mississippi, for example, has built into its constitution language making it exceptionally difficult to raise taxes in order to fund schools and other services. Did you know, for instance, that the Magnolia State enacted the nation’s very first supermajority requirement back in 1890? The rationale was straightforward: to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War by disenfranchising the state’s black voters and making public spending for schools and other services (for black people) more difficult to secure.

After 1965, the south saw a surge of support for these supermajority requirements, with one state after another blocking future tax increases and the further transfers of wealth from the white propertied classes to poor residents. Now perhaps you’re thinking, ‘but that was the Ole Miss! The new Miss is all about lifting kids out of poverty by improving the quality of the state’s schools.’ Except that the new Miss recently abolished a major revenue source for public education: the income tax, leading city leaders like the mayor of Canton, Dr. William Trully, to warn of a looming disaster for low income residents.

I ask the Mississippi Legislature to give serious consideration of how poor people, poor whites and poor black in your community are going to survive because there’s no exit strategy.There’s no salvation. There’s no path.

Meanwhile, the state’s visionaries now have their sights on eliminating property taxes, a target since the days when white landholders officially reigned supreme. In other words, even as we read fawning story after fawning story about how Mississippi is the new land of education opportunity, the state is enacting policies that will guarantee, not just that children stay poor, but that more children become poor. So the next time you read a take that cheers how little Mississippi spends on education, know that there is an ugly reason for that lack of investment.

Spare the rod

By now the story is so familiar that it practically writes itself. Blue states went soft, argued Nicholas Kristof recently, adding his voice to an already crowded choir:

We succumbed to the idea of lowering standards in hopes of improving equity. With warm and fuzzy hopes of reducing race gaps, for example, Oregon reduced graduation requirements and San Francisco for a time stopped teaching algebra to eighth graders. Some schools embraced “equitable grading” practices such as refusing to give zeros, ending penalties for turning in assignments late and allowing repeated retakes of tests.

The Southern Surge states, by contrast, go hard at the kids. The secret sauce to their recipe for success, notes Kristof approvingly, is “no excuses.” (Yes, we’re doing this again.) But here too, the cheering section skips over the ingredients that are somewhat, well, less palatable. Did you know, for example, that Mississippi still allows—and makes enthusiastic use of—corporal punishment, a practice that falls literally on a particular demographic of children? One analysis found that while the practice of 'three licks with the paddle’ has been stamped out in most of the country, the schools where it is still practiced are disproportionately congregated in Mississippi.

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Or take the practice of holding kids back if they’re unable to pass a third-grade reading test. It’s exactly the sort of get-tough-on-the-kids (and their parents) policy that thrills pundits, and yet its consequences for kids later in life can be devastating. “Early Grade Retention Harms Adult Earnings,” is the title of a recent study which found that while third-grade retention boosts test scores, the kids who are held back end up 1) less likely to graduate from high school 2) more likely to go to jail and 3) earning significantly less by age 26. While Southern Surge boosters were quick to point out that the study is based on Texas rather than Mississippi, what’s key here is how a harmful unintended consequence turns out to be indistinguishable from all of the intentional ways that Mississippi entrenches poverty.

Right to work for less

There’s another reason why the Mississippi model makes the hearts of a certain class of pundit go pit-a-pat: the weakness of unions in the south. The antipathy to unions, and teachers unions in particular, is familiar terrain, now being trotted out as fresh thinking in op-eds like this one. But here too, the case for going hard at teachers unions for resisting the education reform flavor of the moment leaves out the ugly backstory. Unions are powerless to non-existent in the south because of the right-to-work laws adopted in the 1950’s in an effort to keep wages low and workers, especially Black workers, weak.

That history is the reason why workers in the Southern Surge states have the lowest median wages in the country. It’s also why there is so little social mobility in these states. The relative strength of unions in a community, by the way, turns out to be among the strongest predictors of whether kids will move up the economic ladder. The weakness-by-design of unions in the South is a big part of why social mobility in this part of the country are so low.

Some years ago I interviewed a brilliant young scholar named Melissa Arnold Lyon for an episode of my podcast, Have You Heard. Like so many academics who end up studying education, Lyon started out as a teacher. In our conversation, she described how disorienting it was to hear education reformers rail against teachers unions as obstacles to ‘fixing’ schools and lifting kids out of poverty when she’d grown up in Tennessee, where unions were rarely mentioned, but child poverty was endemic. And at the non-union charter school in Texas where she taught, teachers, were in her words, treated really poorly, leading to sky-high levels of staff turnover.

That apparent disconnect between grinding reality and shimmering union-free sales pitch spurred Melissa to conduct one of my all-time favorite research projects. She assembled a massive historical database that compared states where teachers unions were strong vs. states that intentionally kept them weak. And low and behold, the latter states also had the weakest social safety nets. Teachers, it turns out, don’t just advocate on their own behalf but on behalf of a broad range of progressive policies, including higher school funding, higher minimum wages and more generous welfare policies. Keeping their unions weak by design turns out to be a very effective block against virtually any kind of economic redistribution.

The other Southern surge

Six years ago, something pretty amazing happened. Child poverty was cut in half, plunging to record lows. The cause was not improved phonics instruction or LETRS training for teachers but the expansion of the Child Tax Credit during the pandemic. Throughout the same southern states that we’re now reading so much about, the impact was particularly dramatic, cutting the number of kids living in poverty by as much as half. Alas, once the expanded CTC expired, poverty soared in those same states. That’s a Southern Surge that’s also worth paying attention to.

If you need a bit of inspiration, might I suggest that you spend some time perusing a few stories about the walkouts by middle and high school students that are sweeping the land. Among the most under-covered developments right now, these grassroots protests are bubbling up, well, everywhere. Here’s Nebraska, here’s south Florida, here’s Oklahoma, here’s Baltimore, here’s Utah, here’s Kentuckiana, which, admit it reader, you did not know was really a place. While some of these events have been part of coordinated national protests, most appear to reflect what activists referred to, back in the day, as a ‘prairie fire,’ moving swiftly from school to school.

As for why these students are protesting, I’ll let them explain it. Here’s El Paso, TX junior Sophia Gutierrez, on why she organized one of the walkouts:

It’s heartbreaking to see what ICE agents are doing to students, to kids, to mothers, to fathers across the country. And I’m just so disappointed in the country. Seeing how our democracy is under attack is making me feel hopeless. But these protests have reignited something in me and my peers.

In other words, these students feel exactly the way that so many of us do, and they’re determined to do something about it. There’s also a strong sense that students have to take action because adults are failing to meet the moment. “If an older generation cannot recognize those truths, then let it be the younger generation that takes a stand, makes the right decisions and shows them,” explains Jack McNally, one of hundreds of students in Carmel, Indiana—that would be two hours-ish north of Kentuckiana—who walked from their high school to city hall to protest ICE.

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The kids are all right

I’ve been thinking a lot about student protests of late, thanks to an amazing new history of teen activism. The work of scholar Aaron G. Fountain Jr., High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America is a first-of-its kind exploration of the teen-led high school movement that swept the country during the 60’s and 70’s. You can hear my interview with Fountain in the latest episode of my podcast, Have You Heard. As Fountain observed recently:

High school students are organizing politically in ways reminiscent of their counterparts more than 50 years ago. When people think of student activism, they typically picture college campuses. Yet, during the 1960s and 1970s, teenagers built social movements that intersected with broader grassroots struggles and responded to both local and national issues.

Another key overlap between today’s student walkouts and the protests of yore? The freakout by adults, who insist that students are being manipulated by other adults, aka ‘outside agitators.’ As Fountain uncovered by submitting more than 1,000 information requests, student activists back in the day were routinely surveilled by the FBI, local police departments, and military intelligence units. The spying often commenced at the request of the activists’ own parents, like the North Carolina mother who penned a missive to J. Edgar Hoover, warning that the student group her 17-year-old was involved in was likely a Communist front. (Hoover, by the way, got right on it.)

Fast forward to the present and the accusations that student protestors are under the influence of some indoctrinating force are a staple of the right-wing outrage machine. Texas Governor Greg Abbott was quick to lay blame, first at the feet of the state’s teachers, threatening teachers who “facilitate walkouts” with investigations and even the loss of their teaching licenses, then on entire school districts, which now face a loss of funding if the walkouts continue. The deep-pocketed conservative advocacy group, Defending Education, has even identified the devious entity that is secretly pulling the student activists’ strings: the climate change org known as the Sunrise Movement. Spoiler: the group’s ‘real’ agenda is every bit as nefarious as the one that J. Edgar Hoover was out to unmask sixty years ago:

Activists say they’re “fighting fascism,” but their aim is something else entirely: dismantling Western cultural norms and eroding the institutions that hold society together — like orderly conduct and meritocratic standards. The leftist playbook is clear, cold and alarmingly effective.

Not just ICE

One of Fountain’s most insightful observations is that the surge of high school activism in the 60’s and 70’s was never just about the issues themselves: civil rights, racial segregation, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Students were also pushing back against what they saw as the oppressive nature of schooling in America. And the harder adults sought to restrict the students’ political activities, the more the activists questioned whether the Constitution and democracy applied to them. Fountain’s book is filled with vivid examples of students in unlikely places pushing for more freedom within their schools, but I’m going to cite a more recent case. Here’s 17-year-old Angel Chavez questioning Governor Abbott’s efforts to keep Texas students like him from protesting:

It’s really just disheartening to see everything that’s happening and see that just because we’re a minority, they think they could shut our voices down. Just because we go to public school, they think that there’s a new way that they can stop us from speaking out. I’m not a political science major, but this feels unconstitutional.

Students today have reasons-a-plenty to protest. They’re on the receiving end of book bans, limits on what they and their teachers can discuss in school, and restrictions on what kinds of organizations they can join. As Jack Schneider and I document in our book, The Education Wars, Gen Alpha is also the first generation to experience a roll back of their civil rights. Then there is the ‘discourse,’ which has taken a sharply anti-student turn. To quote my recent post: “The kids are dumb and getting dumber. They can’t add or read the books they are no longer assigned, rousing themselves from their stupid stupors only to demand extra time on tests or another (now meaningless) A.” And don’t forget students’ refusal to protest, something their elders were bemoaning just months ago.

Perhaps the most important lesson from High School Students Unite! is on the impact of student protests. As Fountain documents, teens helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War and led a grassroots movement in support of desegregation. They transformed their own school districts and successfully pushed for expanded student rights. In the process, they learned that action and solidarity are contagious, and that the adults who try to shut them down or shut them up are fighting a losing battle.

The teens who are walking out of school right now are learning these same lessons. And unlike the Vietnam era, when the public was broadly hostile to student protestors, today’s activists start out with the public overwhelmingly on their side. According to a recent poll, 59% of Americans say that the protests against ICE are legitimate; among college graduates, that number rises to 73%. As one political analyst observed, this is the stuff of landslides.

When students in Dekalb County, Georgia planned a walkout last month, they expected 50-100 of their classmates to join in. Instead, 2000 students participated. Organizer Sinnit Siye said students were initially scared to protest, for fear of being targeted by ICE or other enforcement groups:

I saw my friends who were feeling afraid, who were just not feeling okay coming out here. They came out here. Nearly the entire school was here. People who said they were too scared to come, they came because of the numbers.

In case you missed it, Texas experienced a political earthquake this weekend as Democrats handily won a state legislative special election in a district that Trump carried by 17 points. I look at what just happened, why it matters, and why support for public education was so key to the Democrat’s long-shot win.

What just happened?

First: a quick recap. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a veteran and union leader, absolutely trounced his opponent, conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss, becoming the first Democrat to win District 9 since 1991. And it wasn’t just the failure of GOP voters to show up, despite multiple eleventh-hour appeals from Trump himself, that sealed Wambsganss’ fate. According to pollster Ross Hunt, the self-described “ultra MAGA” candidate lost because she was rejected by independent voters along with plenty of Republicans. And while the GOP was quick to declare the results of the race meaningless–Rehmet and Wambsganss will face off again in November for a spot in the state senate, which won’t reconvene until 2027–the loss is just the latest in a string of defeats for the increasingly unhinged right in populous Tarrant County. As my fave columnist Bud Kennedy tartly observed, “[y]ou could say Saturday’s election made Trump and MAGA 0-1 in Texas. Or made the Tarrant County Republican Party 0-13.”

No surprise here

While the Democrat’s flip of this seat was treated as a ‘Texas stunner’ by much of the media, yours truly wasn’t all that surprised. For one thing, as I wrote about last year, Rehmet nearly won the race outright back in November, despite spending just $68K vs millions shelled out by his GOP opponents and their deep-pocketed PACS. For another, Rehmet ran as an economic populist and an ardent defender of public education–in other words, exactly the sort of candidate that Democrats need if they are to succeed at, well, anything. And that support of public education was absolutely key here as the GOP’s education extremism alienates growing swathes of the electorate. Let’s break it down, shall we?

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Backlash to the backlash

The name Leigh Wambsganss may be unfamiliar (and unpronounceable) to you, but I’m betting that you’re well acquainted with her employer: Patriot Mobile. That would be the right-wing Christian wireless provider that orchestrated takeovers of various Texas school boards, stacking them with Christian nationalists and MAGA faithful. (For more on this, check out Mike Hixenbaugh’s terrific book They Came for the Schools). Those efforts proved remarkably successful, that is until local parents got a close-up view of the activists’ book-banning, culture warring agenda. Then came the attempt last year to split the Keller district into two, cleaving the wealthier city of Keller from its larger, lower-class suburban bits. The backroom maneuver, which Wambsganss helped engineer, backfired spectacularly, alienating local parents, along with voters who typically ignore school board politics.

Vouchers are (still) roiling Texas

There is a fitting irony to the timing of Rehmet’s victory, which came at the tail end of the annual privatization lovefest known as School Choice Week. As I’ve been writing here and elsewhere, school vouchers remain deeply unpopular in Texas, not just among public school supporters but among grassroots conservatives. If you still don’t believe me, consider that Wambsganss herself was among the conservative activists who opposed Greg Abbott’s voucher plan, a position she was forced to “forget” in order to activate the big money spigot which funded her campaign. While Wambsganss was tied up in knots trying to explain where she stood on public education, Rehmet’s position couldn’t have been clearer: “He supports fully funding public schools and ending voucher schemes that drain them.” When the editor of the Current Revolt, a conservative news outlet, surveyed attendees at Wambsganss’ election night party about why they thought she’d lost, they specifically mentioned her flip flop on vouchers. In other words, had she run as a voucher opponent, she’d likely have done better.

Partisan revolt

When voters gave the heave ho to culture warring school board candidates last year, they signalled their exhaustion with the politicization of public education. Rehmet tapped into that frustration to great effect. I’m going to quote again from his campaign website because the language is refreshingly clear: “Taylor will stand with teachers, parents, and students to invest in neighborhood schools, protect public education from privatization, and keep extremist politics and religious ideology out of the classroom.” And voters responded to this vision vs. the increasingly unhinged rhetoric of Steve Bannon, who set up a Texas wing of his War Room podcast in order to boost Wambsganss’ candidacy. (As my beloved stated after tuning into a recent episode, “I can’t #$%@ believe that Bannon is trying to get everybody worked up about Sharia law.”)

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Wake up, Dems

Rehmet’s win also comes at a time when national Democrats and their pundit pals are trying to reclaim the mantle of ‘school fixers.’ Recent weeks have brought us a deluge of fawning stories about Rahm Emanuel, including the comically titled “Rahm Emanuel has a plan to fix schools and the Democratic Party. Will it work?” I can answer that! If you’ve forced yourself to consume pablum like this, this or this, then you know that Emanuel’s recipe for his party’s success is to embrace the kinds of education reforms–standardized testing, cutting funds to schools where kids don’t show up–that thrill party elites, donors and influencers, while leaving parents and voters cold. (Ironically, the recent state takeover of the Fort Worth ISD, justified by rhetoric that could have come from a Rahm press release, appears to have been another factor in Rehmet’s win.) Notably, Rehmet ran as an education candidate, but not of the Rahm variety. Instead, he made the case that support for public education is central to a populist economic agenda, one in which workers earn more because they have more power.

So what happens next?

Back in 2019 I traveled to Texas and spent a week motoring around the multi-laned spaghetti junction known as the Metroplex. I was at work on a podcast about how the GOP’s sharp turn against public education had triggered a backlash, particularly among suburban voters, that was upending state politics. Alas, as is so often the case, I was right too soon. And yet the rejection of culture war candidates and the ongoing backlash to school vouchers convinces me that my initial sense was correct. Meanwhile, the hostility to public education that has proved such a turn off to voters in Texas is now party policy in virtually every red state. When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis weighed in on Rehmet’s win, warning that “a swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed. Republicans should be clear-eyed about the political environment heading into the midterms,” I wondered if he was talking about his home state. Perhaps even more than Texas, Florida has become a testing ground for just how far GOP pols can go towards kneecapping their public schools before they start paying a price among suburban voters.

The opposite of populism

This week also marked the official rollout of the federal voucher program, a $5 billion dollar tax credit smuggled into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. As I argued last year, the sneaky maneuver not only circumvents the will of Trump’s own voters but enriches the very wealthy and decimates public budgets in the process. That vouchers are among the most glaring examples of just how ‘faux’ is the GOP’s brand of populism is obvious. And yet that contradiction seems lost on many Democrats who are all too eager to jump on the voucher bandwagon.

It was a Texas teacher who opened my eyes to the anger over vouchers on the populist right. Brett Guillory, who taught welding in Houston, caught my attention when he proclaimed on Twitter that “vouchers aren’t MAGA. Not even close.” I ended up interviewing him for a podcast episode about conservative opposition to vouchers, a conversation that evolved into a genuine friendship. Brett saw vouchers as classic Robin Hood in reverse, redistributing wealth from the working and middle class to the wealthy. I learned an incredible amount from Brett, who passed away from cancer last month. While he’d started out as a fierce Trump fan, he grew increasingly critical of the president in the last year of his life. As he liked to say “Trump is a fraud and vouchers are the proof.” And yet Brett had a fundamentally optimistic view of where our politics are headed. During one of our last conversations he told me that a political earthquake was coming.

Corporations and politicians are working together for the elite in order to get around the Constitution. And I think those corporations are so powerful, so money, the super PACs, they own our reps. Our reps do not listen to us. They do whatever these large corporations, these super PACs, and the wealthy elites want them to do, like Tim Dunn and Farris Wilkes out in West Texas. They control the Texas Republican Party. I think the political landscape over the next four years, I believe, is going to change drastically. I really do believe that because I think more and more people are waking up to our enemy is: the billionaires that are controlling everything.

Taylor Rehmet’s victory this weekend shows us that Brett was onto something.

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

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

America’s oldest pastime

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

Nobody knows anything

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

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Neoliberalism is gone (but not forgotten)

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

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

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

Human capitalists vs. the chainsaw

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

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

Race science is back

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

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

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

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Too many of the wrong kids are in college

Several years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote an op-ed in which we argued that the GOP was using education culture war to appeal to vastly different constituencies, including rural voters enflamed over CRT and litter boxes and affluent moderates obsessed with getting their kids into elite institutions. Alas, our bleak prediction about the realigning power of this emerging coalition turned out to be premature, but only in the K-12 world. Today, the powerful backlash movement that is upending higher education is based on just such an unlikely coalition, united in the belief that there are too many of the wrong kids in college. As one wry observer noted on X: “Half the education posts are like ‘my kid has a 5.3 GPA and invented $5 insulin and got rejected from DeVry’ and half are ‘60% of freshmen do not know enough math to read the numbers on their classroom doors.’” Or how about this one? “The Atlantic is Fox News but for high SES liberals worried their kids spot at a UC will be taken by some Latino kid from the Central Valley.” Touché! As Trump et al continue to expand the definition of “wrong kids” [immigrants, non-white students, protestors, poor students, women], affluent parents with an eye on the Ivies, not to mention the pundit class, are proving all too willing to play footsie with them.

Billionaires gonna billionaire

Here’s a question for you, reader: what was your favorite example of a billionaire purchasing state-level education policy in 2025? Mayhaps it was hedge funder Ken Griffin’s purchase of the state legislature in Florida. Or hedge funder Jeff Yass’ purchase of Texas governor Greg Abbott. Or maybe you prefer a more bespoke intervention, like when billionaire Lauren Overdeck rented mobile billboards to warn New Jersey parents that their kids aren’t that smart. The bad news is that there are roughly a billion billionaires, seemingly all of who are focused on public education, namely ushering it into its grave. The good news? The growing public hostility to oligarchs is casting a suspicious light on their policy preferences, not to mention upending our politics. “Lately, once the money of the private-jet set enters a campaign, the stink of the oligarchy sticks to the campaign and the candidate can be attached as a corporate tool,” notes writer Virginia Heffernan. Heffernan was referring to the Seattle mayor’s race, where a Democratic Socialist upset a candidate backed by wealthy interests, but the same dynamic was at work in the recent Denver school board contest.

Recent polls have indicated that Americans overwhelmingly believe that the rich have too much political power. Majorities of Americans also say the federal government should try to reduce wealth inequality, and that billionaires should be taxed more. Alas, because billionaires now control the cable channels, social media platforms, newspapers etc, you will be hearing endlessly about their favored school choice policies in the months ahead, and why they’re taxed enough already. But know that a growing number of Americans, across party lines, aren’t buying what they’re selling.

Covid broke the pundit brain

Late last year, the new, and unapolagetically centrist publication, the Argument, released some “surprising” polling to the effect that COVID had not in fact broken the Democratic Party. The column, which was supposed to be about “the lingering harm from the Democratic Party’s response to COVID-19,” conceded that policies, including school closures, had not in fact alienated voters. And yet the data picture showing the absence of fury over school shutdowns has been clear for several years now, so why was this guy surprised? My theory has long been that COVID broke pundits’ brains, rendering them highly susceptible to dubious narratives about education. Because journalists, opinionators etc were angrier over school closures than the general public and most parents, they repeated, ad nauseum, what were essentially political arguments—about voter behavior, support for school vouchers, and the Democrats’ lost ‘edge’ on the issue of public education. That actual voters kept disproving these claims had little impact on the pundits. Fast forward to our current public school panic and the same hot takers who penned 10K posts about Democrats and school closures have moved on—to grade inflation, to waxing nostalgic over No Child Left Behind, and to proffering forth zombie centrist education reform pablum as though it’s fresh thinking.

No education reform enemies to the right

In 2016, James Carville (him again!) touched down in Colorado to address a gathering of Democrats for Education Reform. They were nursing their wounds after a dismal election performance, and Carville came armed with a stern warning. If education reformers wanted popular support then they needed to avoid demonizing teachers and to choose their political allies carefully. “[T]here are a lot of shoddy operators out there, a lot of education flim-flam people who make money off these children and don’t care about them,” Carville told the DFER-ites.

If you are an obsessive follower of all things MAGA, as I am, then you are no doubt familiar with the expression ‘no enemies to the right,’ or NETTR. (See, for example, Heritage’s Kevin Roberts making room for white nationalist Nick Fuentes in the ‘big tent.’) But NETTR also has an equivalent in the education reform world. The crumbling of the bipartisan education policy consensus has left DFER and other reform-minded orgs desperate for new friends, and all too willing to allie with the bad actors Carville warned about a decade ago. Today, of course, DFER has a new policy priority—school vouchers—not to mention lots of new friends. “There are a lot of people who claim to be in your sphere who are not in it,” Carville cautioned the school reformers in his party, urging them to steer clear of vouchers. “[W]e have got to be very careful of that.”

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The most telling explanation for what’s really motivating the Trump Administration’s break up of the Department of Education came, not in the form of official statements or op-eds, but in an event seemingly far removed from K-12 schools. On the same day that Linda McMahon et al were cheering the almost realization of a decades-long conservative dream, Trump himself convened a gathering of McDonald’s owners and operators. His remarks were classic ‘lame-duck’ era Trump—bloated, incoherent, enraged. Then, at last, he got to the meat of the matter. The minimum wage, he told the fast-food franchisees, is too high. “The minimum wage thing you’ll have to be talking about, you’re going to have to fight,” he said, referring to California, where, thanks to years of protests and organizing, fast food workers now earn at least $16.50 an hour.

What’s the connection between the president’s inchoate ramblings and the six new “partnership agreements” that effectively dispurse the Department of Education’s billions in grant programs across other agencies? The largest federal funding stream for K-12 schools, including the Title I money for schools that serve low-income communities, will now be housed at the Department of Labor. If you’ve been paying attention to Trump’s now ten-month-long siege on the federal government, the DOL ranks only slightly below ED as a target of right-wing enmity. Earlier this year, the administration sought to cut the department’s budget by one third, and as of today, DOL is no longer able to carry out one of its core functions: tracking the nation’s unemployment rate.

Back in 2022, writer John Ganz explained the right-wing backlash brewing among tech oligarchs as the product of an ideology he called “bossism,” a belief system as simple as ‘bosses on top.’ Strip away the faux populism and it’s increasingly clear that ‘bossism’ is at the root of nearly every move that Trump and his cabinet of billionaires make. Workers have too much power and need to be put in their place. Hierarchy is natural and good, and every American institution, including schools and workplaces, should reflect that. One of the administration’s first moves was to reverse a policy that kept corporations from paying disabled workers less than the paltry federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Remember the scene of Pete Hegseth tightening the screws on the bronze placque proclaiming ‘Department of War?’ The Trump-era Department of Labor, the new home of K-12 education, might better be thought of as the Department of the Boss.

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Workforce prep, all the way down

“If we consider K-12 education as really preparation for adult life, preparation to enter the workforce, nowhere is it better housed than at the Department of Labor that thinks about this night and day,” was how one senior ED official justified the move. Except that the workforce that students are being prepared to enter is one where bosses belong on top. While one education pundit was quick to dismiss the K-12’s new home as a ‘nothing burger,’ that Trump believes the workers who make the actual burgers earn too much tells you everything you need to know.

I recently came across a fascinating paper about how programs that immerse students in work-based learning, a growing trend across the country, also inculcate them in the brutal logic of the marketplace. At BizTown, for example, operated by Junior Achievement, elementary students visit a simulated town where they learn to operate banks, manage restaurants, write checks, and vote for mayor. “Students are able to connect the dots between what they learn in school and the real world,” reads the promotional material. Not to mention the “indestructible loop of work and consumption that defines the real world,” adds writer Anya Ventura in a rather more skeptical take.

Then there is the rural ‘microschool’ in North Carolina where students run an Airbnb with the help of a local real estate group. Modeled on the red-hot (albeit, rife with red flags) edu-trend that is Alpha School, students learn core subjects in the AM. The rest of the day is spent on subjects that sound great in the abstract—entrepreneurship, logistics, business strategy and marketing—but boil down to ‘projects’ like furnishing the rental unit and creating guidebooks for guests. “[W]orking on the rental unit will impart valuable insights to the students and will provide market feedback about how well they are performing, based on whether the rental outperforms other nearby Airbnb listings,” explained a school district official. Also, the students’ work will be unpaid, which may be the most important real-world lesson of all.

AI, whether we want it or not

Did I mention that the Airbnb microschool is also a ‘a beachhead for artificial intelligence-based instruction’? Speaking of AI, barely had officials finished toasting the dismantling of the Department of Education when Trump himself called on Congress to keep states from regulating AI, or as he put it: “Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the ‘HOTTEST’ in the World, but overregulation by the States is threatening to undermine this Major Growth ‘Engine,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. An earlier attempt to essentially nullify state laws on AI, including laws covering the use of AI in schools, collapsed this summer. Now it’s back, as GOP leaders, at Trump’s urging, will try to sneak language that effectively bans state AI regulations into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

This week, I had the pleasure of hearing independent journalist and scholar Audrey Watters speak. Watters, if you are somehow unfamiliar with her brilliant work, describes herself as the Cassandra of education technology; she’d hoped to hang up her shingle and move on from edtech, then came AI. Audrey came to Yale, where I’ve been teaching a course on the politics of public education, to speak to students about why Silicon Valley’s vision for the classrooms of the future turns out to be the exact same vision that education ‘disruptors’ have been pedaling since the Soviets launched the satellite known as Sputnik into the skies.

The students in attendance, who are on the receiving end of a constant AI sales pitch, were rapt. Then Audrey began to talk about AI and labor, and the energy in the room noticeably crackled. “People say robots are coming for your jobs, or AI is coming for your jobs,” but that’s not accurate, she explained. “Technology doesn’t have agency. Management is coming for your jobs. Bosses are coming for your jobs.” Then there is the the labor that stands to be ‘disrupted’ by AI in schools, the largely female workforce in the schools. As Audrey reminds us, “Teachers unions are the largest union in this country. So when we talk about AI disrupting education, we have to consider that this also about disrupting one of the few remaining strongholds of labor power.”

I’ll be turning Audrey’s talk into a podcast so that you can hear her wisdom for yourself, but there was one bit that I won’t be able to capture on audio. As a parting gesture, Audrey showed off the striking tattoos she sports on each forearm: lines of poetry turned into the ones and zeroes of binary code. On one arm is a line from Lord Byron’s “Song for the Luddites,” the 18th century textile artisans who resisted, at times violently, the mechanization of their craft. The oft-caricatured Luddites, Audrey reminded us, were not against technology, but against the exploitation of workers and ordinary people. “They were resisting losing their jobs to the machine.” On her other arm can be found Walt Whitman’s imploring command from “Leaves of Grass: “resist much, obey little.”

Resisting much, by the way, is exactly what we’re about to see when it comes to the forced “partnership” between AI companies and schools, the skids greased by the federal government. I’m guessing that versions of this recent letter from parents and teachers in Malden, Massachusetts, furious that the local schools are considering ‘integrating’ AI tools, will soon be popping up across the land. The highlight of the letter is the analogy drawn between AI and another once-transformative invention: asbestos.

Yes, it had some remarkably promising characteristics – fireproofing! – and had some real utility in science, research, and industrial applications. But a profit-driven industry bullied us into inserting it everywhere; into our homes and schools and public spaces, before we really understood the risks. This resulted in decades, if not centuries, of illness, injuries, deaths, and the astronomical financial burden of trying to remove the stuff.

Thrown to the wolves

Back to what’s left of the Department of Education and, at last, to the end of this post. One of the most striking things about this week’s announcement that most K-12 programs will be migrating to other departments was the downplaying by top officials of ED’s significance. “We are a pass-through agency for grants that are authorized and appropriated by Congress,” said one official, echoing a claim made by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. After years of being told that the department is to blame for everything from the collapse of reading scores to the rise of litter boxes in schools, now we’re hearing that ED does nothing at all.

It was heartening, then, to hear even Republicans sounding dismayed over ED’s dismantling. Pennsylvania Representative Brian Fitzpatrick objected to the premise that the department’s core offices could just be parceled off to other entities. “They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow and succeed on equal footing.”

Whether this push back ultimately amounts to anything remains to be seen. It is voters who will have the final say on the significance of this particular ‘nothing burger,’ and here the signs are more encouraging. In the wake of the Democrats’ romp in this month’s Virginia election, the Wall Street Journal interviewed voters who backed Trump in 2024 but changed teams this time. One of them was the father of a first grader who switched parties out of fury over government cuts to the program for autistic kids in which his son was enrolled. “They’ve thrown him to the wolves,” the dad told the reporter.

Resist much, obey little.

Democrats won everywhere this week, and public education played a surprisingly central role in powering their success. Here’s a look at what went down, why it matters, and what happens next.

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School Board Sweep

I’m old enough to recall when Steve Bannon declared that “[t]he path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.” Which is why it feels so significant that candidates endorsed by the conservative culture warriors at Mom’s for Liberty fared so poorly this week. Whether they actually lost 31 out of 31 contested races, as the Political HQ alleged, is unclear (and at odds with M4L’s version of events). But what is clear is that the pattern of poor performance at the polls we’ve seen in election cycle after cycle appears to have held once again. In state after state, boards that have been consumed by controversies over book bans, religious prosthletizing and attacks on LGBTQ students saw voters say ‘enough.’ The good news: our most recent round of school culture warring may at last be winding down. The bad news: Moms for Liberty is adjusting accordingly. As Laura Pappano noted in her coverage of the group’s recent summit, running for office is out, while suing school districts under the expanded powers granted to parents via the Supreme Court’s Mahmoud decision is most definitely in.

Party Like It’s 2015

While the rebuke of conservative school board candidates was the big local election story, the attempted comeback by education reform candidates–pro charter school, anti teachers union, pro accountability–deserves some attention too. Take Denver, for example, where 11 candidates were vying for four seats on the seven-member school board. The contest had a decided throwback air to it, with the same dark money groups that have devoted millions to the cause of ‘portfolioizing’ urban school districts, making another run. But as voters seemed to have noticed, it’s not 2015 anymore, or even 2023. Dark money, particularly the kind linked to billionaires, is a growing turn off for voters, and at a time when the Trump Administration is gunning for public schools, including those in Denver, the sales pitch for education reform is falling flat. As one of the winning candidates explained to Chalkbeat, the election results reflected the ‘state of the world.’ “People don’t have food right now. They’ve seen so much on a global and federal level and they’re worried about their kids. They know they can trust teachers.”

Lone Star Surprise

The local GOP may be fond of proclaiming that Texas’ Tarrant County is the largest red county in America (or perhaps the reddest large county?), but the results of this week’s special election told a different story. The race to fill a vacant North Texas Senate seat, in a district which voted for Donald Trump by over 17 points last year, was nearly won outright by an out-of-nowhere Democrat: union leader and veteran Taylor Rehmet. One eye-popping detail from the contest: Rehmet spent just $68,000 vs millions shelled out by his opponents and their deep-pocketed PACs. Rehmet ran as an economic populist and ardent defender of public education–in other words, exactly the sort of candidate this page has been rooting for. He’ll now go head-to-head with Leigh Wambsganss, the chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider,” not to mention a taker over of school boards. Look for Texas’ controversial school voucher program to be a major issue in the race. Rehmet wants to end the program, while Wambsganss, who once opposed vouchers as government overreach, now supports them.

No Miracle in Mississippi

First, a brief digression. If you needed proof that the ‘Mississippi Miracle’ has jumped the shark, allow me to proffer up this excruciating podcast discussion on whether feminism has ruined the workplace, where Mississippi is cited as proof of something having to do with the innate differences between men and women. Anyway, back to Mississippi where Democrats flipped three legislative seats this week, breaking the GOP super majority in the state Senate for the first time in thirteen years. Which got me wondering, how do Democrats in Mississippi talk about the state of the state’s schools, given that so much of the sales pitch outside of Mississippi centers on its relatively low level of spending? Alas, their upset victories appear to have been fueled at least in part by demands to increase school spending. Here’s Senator-elect Johnny Dupree, pledging “to protect and expand funding for public education—not cut it under the guise of tax breaks for the wealthy.” And Justin Crosby, who flipped Mississippi House District 22, made fully funding the state’s schools and protecting teacher pay his top issue. In other words, as I argued on this page recently, the miracle looks a little different from the inside.

The Educated Precariate Arrives

Call them Park Slope populists or the emergent coalition of the precariate, voters who are both highly educated and struggling to survive financially officially arrived as a political force this week. Which led to consternation among certain conservatives about the right’s inability to speak to this constituency. (See, for example, Fox’s Jesse Watters mocking Zohran Mamdani’s voters as women who majored in southeast Asian feminist literature when they should have gotten a degree in finance or the hard sciences, or economist Stephen Moore insisting that college leads to socialism.) But here’s the thing. Centrist Democrats have nothing to say to this constituency either. Presidential aspirant Rahm Emanuel wants to rally the nation around a vision of restoring the American Dream, “one student, one opportunity at a time.” As Jack Schneider and I wrote last year, this message fails utterly with voters who followed the Democrats’ prescription for success, but continue to struggle economically. The big question, one that I’ll be exploring on this page and elsewhere in the months to come, is what do Mamdani and other left-wing populists have to say about education? The answer so far seems to be ‘not much.’

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Can We Please Stop Talking About Glenn Youngkin Already?

Since Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in Virginia in 2021, I have churned out roughly a bazillion words, making the case that 1) the media has misunderstood the role education and parents’ rights played in Youngkin’s win and 2) that the unlikely coalition he assembled, of disaffected affluent parents and rural voters, has never been replicated. Good thing that’s over! As polls like this one indicated in the leadup to the vote, Virginians trusted Democrat Abigail Spanberger over her opponent on the precise issues that supposedly powered Youngkin’s victory four years ago. While Winsome Earle-Sears hammered relentlessly on trans issues, specifically in schools, and ran as the candidate of school choice, voters were left cold. That even Virginia turned out not to be ‘Virginia’ is instructive, or it should be. As the New York Time’s Nate Cohn concluded in his 2025 election ‘take’ piece, this week’s Virginia outcome didn’t matter as much as Glenn Youngkin’s win…

Conventional Wisdom Takes a Hit

It wasn’t just in Virginia where the media consensus on education took a hit. Perhaps we can finally retire the baseless insistence that Democrats have lost their edge on education as an issue. As for the smart kid chorus that Dems must embrace school choice in order to be competitive at the polls, we got a real-life test of that claim too, as GOP candidates in both Virginia and New Jersey ran as supporters of vouchers. Jack Ciatterelli’s plan to fix New Jersey’s education system included making it more like Mississippi and Florida. In fact, all sorts of claims that we’ve heard repeatedly over the last few years came up short at the polls. Barely had Ezra Klein put the finishing touches on his latest 25K word column for the NYT, pronouncing that Democrats had moved left on education and lost ground with Asian American voters as a result when Asian American voters turned out to be Mamdani’s single largest block of voters. This despite Mamdani ‘declaring war’ against gifted and talented education programs in NYC. Then there’s the opposition to teachers unions that supposedly helped power Trump’s re-election. Union-backed candidates romped last week, and this poll helps explain why.

The Education/Populism Connection is Potent

Did you hear about that resounding vote by Coloradans to fund free school lunch for all students by soaking the rich? The specifics of the two ballot measures are complicated, but essentially they limit income tax deductions for the state’s wealthiest residents, and allow the state to redistribute revenue that otherwise would have been returned to voters under the spending handcuffs known as the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. So a win win, and a great example of how the populist mood of the country can be channeled for good.

Democratic Centrists Aren’t Going Anywhere

The day before voters went to the polls, Arne Duncan made an appearance in the Washington Post, urging Democrats to support the federal school voucher program that was included in the federal budget behemoth. None other than Betsy DeVos showed her approval, praising Duncan’s willingness to set politics aside and put kids first. Right. So what exactly is going on here? Chicago’s Fred Klonsky thinks that Arne is fronting for Rahm Emanuel, testing the waters for his old pal’s presidential run, and the return of the sort of bi-partisan school reform agenda (choice! testing! Mississippi! getting tough on teachers!) that makes a centrist’s heart pound. That this agenda is a wild mismatch for the moment and mood of the voters makes little difference. In fact, as we’re likely to see in the months ahead, the more left-wing populism, with its demands for income redistribution, is ascendent, the harder centrist Democrats are going to cling to the notion that education is the path to individual prosperity.

Nth Time is the Charm

Earlier this year, I featured a group of parent activists in the small Pennsylvania burg of Souderton on my podcast. Since the pandemic, they’d been attempting to break the conservative stranglehold on their local school board, getting a little closer each time. Well, this week finally made the difference. The slate of candidates, Democratic newcomers, swept all four open seats, defeating the board’s current president and VP and cutting into the GOP’s 9-0 majority. A huge shout out to Corinne DeGeiso, Alexandra Wisser, Rosemary Buetikofer and Andrew Souchet and the “Souderton Area for Responsible Leadership” team for their victory. As you can hear for yourself on this episode of Have You Heard, “All Politics is Local,” these candidates really understand that local politics hinges on persuasian. It’s time consuming and messy, but the story of Souderton tells us, once again, that it’s possible.

The honor of the tallest water slide in the land, if not the world, belongs to Disney’s Blizzard Beach in Orlando. Alas, the 120 foot tall ‘Summit Plummet’ is not the slip-sliding descent that stars in this post. My slippery slope refers, of course, to the dawning realization among GOP pols in Florida, Texas and Tennessee that the school vouchers that are the party’s pet cause have been going to support Islamic schools. Faster than you can say Islamaphobia, ‘news stories’ with breathless headlines like “Taxpayer-Funded Sharia: Florida’s School Choice Program Is Rapidly Building a Parallel Islamic Power Structure,” began to ricochet around the Internet, amplified by the likes of MAGA influencers like Laura Loomer. Before long, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeir was wondering whether the state’s $5 billion universal voucher system, which incentivizes parents to attend private religious schools on the state’s dime, should be a little less universal.

While our descent down this particular skiddy decline took a bit longer than the 7-8 second 120-foot freefall that is the Summit Plummet, the slipperiness of the slope should come as a surprise to exactly no one. Revisit Oklahoma AG Gentner Drummond’s opposition to to a proposed Catholic charter school in that state, for example, and you’ll find him warning of a ‘floodgate,’ as in ‘once you start funding certain religious schools with public money, all kinds of religious schools will want the cash, including schools that you don’t like.’ As Gentner, a Republican with an eye on the governor’s office, put it, “[T]omorrow we may be forced to fund radical Muslim teachings like Sharia law.”

Roiled anew

When I last visited the topic of red state voucher programs in posts like this one and this one, I was making the case that the short term success of school choice proponents in states including Texas and Tennessee had come at a serious political price. In brief, these are controversial programs, unpopular with voters, including among a broad swath of the right. Which is why the latest flap about vouchers funding so-called sharia schools matters. Plenty of conservative voters were already mad about vouchers, and angry with the politicians who, in their minds, foisted these expensive new entitlement programs on them, doing the bidding of out-of-state billionaires and their “globalist” agenda in the process. Now that anger is intersecting with rising hostility to Muslims on the right.

For a glimpse of what I’m talking about, and why it matters, let’s head to Tennessee, site of a recent, hotly contested GOP primary election to fill the seat left by departing US Congressman Mark Green. Amid a crowded field, the grassroots conservative fave was Jody Barrett, a rural Republican who was among the few GOP legislators to vote against school vouchers last year, a position he continues to tout. (Here’s Barrett on the eve of the election, warning that vouchers,. in addition to “going to schools teaching sharia law,” are subsidizing the wealthy in Tennessee.)

What happened to Barrett is instructive. The same dark money groups that swamped the state in order to get vouchers passed spent millions in an effort to defeat Barrett. Indeed, in the waning days of the contest, President Trump himself was forced to weigh in, endorsing Matt Van Epps, the establishment candidate who would ultimately triumph. Van Epps now faces off against Democratic candidate Aftyn Behn, who is running to “Feed kids. Fix Roads. Fund Hospitals” and just may have a long-shot chance to flip the district.

Meanwhile, the restive energy on the right towards the GOP establishment shows no signs of abating. Consider, for example, the race to replace Tennesee Governor Bill Lee. While Senator Marsha Blackburn considers herself the GOP favorite, self-styled grassroots conservatives clearly haven’t gotten the memo. Monty Fritts, who is running on a platform of ‘less government, more liberty,’ is promising to suspend the state’s voucher program, which he calls both unconstitutional and fiscally irresponsible. The fallout from the voucher program is also reverberating through state-level races. Gary Humble, founder of the influential conservative group Tennessee Stands, who is challenging the Senate Majority Leader, says that he’ll “work to limit and strictly budget voucher programs.”

It’s essential to note that these are right-wing candidates. Humble is pledging to govern from a “biblical world view,” while Fritts doesn’t think that “foreign children” aka undocumented students should be able to attend public schools. What’s key here is that these conservative challengers are taking on what they regard as “the celebrity establishment and the entrenched political class,” for whom school vouchers are a top priority. As huge new programs come on line in states like Texas, look for a similar split within the GOP to disrupt the state’s politics.

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Misreading the tea leaves

The arrival of Halloween makes this the perfect time to dig up a dead body, by which I’m referring to the endless autopsying of the Democratic Party and its most recent defeat. This week brought yet another round of postmortems for the embattled Dems. I will dwell upon just one of these, Deciding to Win, whose authors include a former Massachusetts charter school advocate and a young man who graduated from college this year. Among their many recommendations is that Democrats should run on issues that poll well, including expanding school choice, vs. issues that poll poorly, including eliminating tracking in schools and equalizing public school funding nationally, neither of which, to my knowledge, any candidates are actually running on.

That sound you can hear, dear reader, is a resounding chorus, all in agreement that Democrats must ‘moderate’ in order to win back voters, including on K-12 education, returning to the winning combo of choice, accountability, and hostility to teachers that won them the White House in eras Clinton and Obama. Except that 15 minutes spent in the still-roiling red states I’ve been describing should be enough to make one seriously question this take. For one thing, some of the most popular Democrats in the land are red state governors who opposed school vouchers—see, for example, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, or Roy Cooper, the outgoing governor of North Carolina who is running for Senate.

Then there are the Democratic challengers who are siezing on school vouchers as an example of the corrosive influence of billionaires on state politics. Listen to Senate candidate Nathan Sage in Iowa, for example, as he accuses the GOP of tearing down public schools, “brick by brick, while treating our public school teachers like dirt. They are underfunding our public schools and diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to private schools and the billionaires behind them.” Or James Talarico in Texas, who points to school vouchers as evidence that billionaire mega-donors have bought the state, as he told Joe Rogan. Or Gina Hinajosa, who is challenging Governor Greg Abbott. In her campaign launch video, Hinajosa declared that “Our fight right now is against the billionaires and corporations who are driving up prices, closing our neighborhood schools and cheating Texans out of basic health care.”

There is a reason why these candidates are so focused on billionaires and school vouchers. Not only did mega-donors essentially buy their favored education policy in one red state after another but anger over their outsized influence is both deep and bipartisan in nature. In other words, running on expanding school choice as part of a “Common Sense Renewal of the Democratic Party,” as the Deciding to Win bills their strategy, makes zero sense.

Back in Tennessee, David McIntosh, who heads up the Club for Growth, yet another deep-pocketed pro-voucher group, penned an op-ed, celebrating the triumph of ‘school freedom’ in the special election. In McIntosh’s telling, vouchers were the defining issue in the contest, which is why voters chose a candidate who didn’t run on them. “The Tennessee results prove that the Republican Party is now the party of school freedom,” concludes McIntosh. “You cannot call yourself a conservative and oppose it.”

The influencers, donors and the elites who dominate both parties have concluded that school choice is the only choice. Whether voters agree will be a defining question in 2026 and beyond.

As for the ‘why’ behind these particular cuts, Trump was quick to offer an explanation. “These are Democrat programs that we disagree with.” A staffer at Housing and Urban Development described the layoffs and loss of funds as “the nail in the coffin of the Great Society,” adding, “They finally figured out how to do what not even Reagan could.”

I’d like to add another rationale for the administration’s moves, especially as they pertain to education: the putrescence of race science that hangs over virtually everything that Trump and his allies are up to. Why the constant references to low-IQ individuals—a standard Trump insult? Why the obsession with so-called “bad genes”? And above all, why the disproportionate attacks on programs and policies that make the country a more equal place?

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Historian Quinn Slobodian, author of a fantastic recent book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, provides some essential answers. Slobodian argues that race science, with its noxious claims that ‘biology is destiny,’ comes roaring back during periods of social change. He traces today’s obsessive focus on IQ back to the social tumult of the 1970’s and the revolt against ‘political correctness’ in the 1990’s. Regardless of the time period, the argument for race science is remarkably consistent: since destiny is baked into the genetic pie, what’s the point of costly public policy interventions, public education chief among them?

And while this is admittedly a grim topic, the history that Slobodian excavates so skillfully in his book offers a bit of encouragement. Not only has race science been discredited again and again, forcing its adherents back under their assorted rocks, but the idea of ‘biology as destiny’ is deeply at odds with the egalitarian impulse that still runs pretty deep in our national veins, believe it or not. In other words, there’s a reason why the Trump administration has been savaging services to kids with special needs under cover of darkness.

Questions or ideas for future episodes? Drop me a line here.

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If you’ve been following the breathless coverage of the Mississippi Miracle, you may have noticed a distinct ‘told ya so’ theme. Not only have students demonstrated impressive academic growth, but said improvement has occurred on the cheap, and in a state where unions are weak or non-existent. In other words, the Mississippi story is inconvenient for the likes of public education advocates like yours truly. Alas, that is not the subject of this post. Instead, I’ll be focused on the inconvenience of the state’s academic improvement for the Mississippi GOP, which is orchestrating an altogether different version of the ‘Southern Surge,’ a sort of reverse leap backwards aimed at returning the Magnolia State to the pre-Civil Rights era.

Let’s start with vouchers, shall we?

We shall, because even as the virtual ink was still drying on the latest round of ‘make like Mississippi—or else’ posts, the school voucher lobby was descending upon the state. That’s because unlike many of the states that make up the Old Confederacy, Mississippi defied the deep pockets and political bum rush that has delivered universal vouchers across the South over the past few years. Credit deep unpopularity among the public, impressive organizing by groups like the Parents’ Campaign, and resistance among some GOP holdouts, a number of whom worried aloud that draining money from the state’s barely-funded public schools would drive a stake in their progress. But that was last year.

While vouchers remain as unpopular as ever among the public, expanding ‘education freedom’ is a top priority for the state’s political leadership, including Speaker of the House Jason White and Governor Tate “Tater Tot” Reeves, who is said to be planning to call a special session of the legislature in order to get a voucher bill passed. Which is how we ended up with a brigade of ‘experts’ appearing before the newly-formed House Education Freedom Committee. The all-star cast featured self-styled free-market edupreneur and Trump ally Erika Donalds, school choice scholar Patrick Wolf and two different representatives of the US Department of Education, including Project 2025 authoress Lindsey Burke.

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Although voucher proponents no longer have much to say about academic achievement, Mississippi’s academic success put this crew in a bit of a bind. After all, the product they’re pitching is aimed at destabilizing the state’s schools en route to eliminating public education altogether. Also, aren’t all ‘government schools’ always already failing by definition? Which is why the voucher-ites arrived in Jackson armed with the message that young Missippians have made no progress over the past 50 years, as Burke claimed. A card-carrying member of the Koch group, Americans for Prosperity, made the same argument, telling school choice skeptics at an event that Mississippi’s progress is an illusion.

Back to the future

“Why on earth would we adopt the failed policies that are taking other states backward?” asked Parents’ Campaign executive director Nancy Loome recently. I can answer that. For a glimpse of both the ‘why’ and the ‘where’ behind the push to bring vouchers to Mississippi we need only visit the state’s not-so-distant past, revisited here in this thorough—and thoroughly alarming—review by historian Steve Suitts, aptly subtitled “the past is the future.” As Suitts makes clear, Mississippi and other Southern states are carrying out a classic bait-and-switch, first selling voucher programs as a boon to low-income students or, unbelievably, as a civil rights cause, even as they erect a separate system of publicly-funded private schools.

The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but four of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.

For a deeper dive on school segregation in Mississippi and the ferocious drive to protect and expand it, I highly recommend Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s epic and highly-relevant-for-today, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. Let’s just say that whether it’s patriotic education, instilling conservative values in the youth, or the effort to keep youngsters from accessing materials that promote racial tolerance and ‘communism,’ we’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well.

Which brings me to the main point of this post. Mississippi’s upward academic trajectory is now battling the backward trajectory of the state’s own history. If you still don’t believe me, let’s discuss another recent policy development that out-of-state miracle chroniclers seem oblivious to: the elimination of the state income tax. Estimated to cost the state roughly one-third of its entire general fund budget once fully implemented, going tax free will, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “put enormous strain on essential services in the poorest state in the nation.” Now, combine the loss of income tax with looming cuts to federal funds upon which Mississippi and its schools are highly dependent and you can see the problem. Schools here, already at the bottom of the funding heap, with teachers among the worst paid in the country, are about to see funding evaporate.

This too has an ugly precedent. Go back to the turn of the twentieth century, and you’ll find Mississippi going to extraordinary lengths in order to get out of having to pay for public education, part of a larger effort to weaken the political power of the state’s Black residents.

White policymakers — particularly in Mississippi — used highly restrictive property tax limits and supermajority requirements to weaken school funding in Black communities, disempower Black residents, and shift the tax base to more inequitable revenue policies like sales taxes. Mississippi shifted its tax base from white property owners to poorer Black households in 1932 through the advent of the modern sales tax. Black people, with substantially less income, kept paying just as much as their white counterparts, if not more, and contributed significantly toward funding white-only schools while their own schools deteriorated.

So what happens next?

For a preview, we need head no further than Florida, which barely a decade ago was the toast of school reformers for achieving the last education miracle—rising student achievement done on the cheap, all while school choice options bloomed like a summer red tide. Alas, the miracle turned out to be mostly a mirage, as the academic gains young Floridians achieved in fourth grade disappeared when they hit eighth grade—chronicled to devastating effect by edublogger and former school board member Billy Townsend. These days, the miracle is a distant memory, as Florida’s ballooning universal voucher program consumes, not just the state’s public schools but Jeb Bush’s legacy. Indeed, when the most recent “Nation’s Report Card” showed that Florida’s reading scores had hit a 25-year-low, now former state education chief Manny Diaz Jr. seemed to argue that all of the good test takers were now taking vouchers to attend private schools.

Alas, Florida continues to rule on the only metric that really matters: the Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom ranking. Florida topped the annual Report Card, along with the likes of Arizona, Idaho and Arkansas. Mississippi, by the way, came in at a distant 17, dropping six spots from the previous freedom tally. While Mississippi may be the toast of school fixers, not so much for the folks at Heritage, which dinged the state for spending too much on its schools relative to its ‘ROI’ on NAEP scores. Fortunately, there’s a path forward—or rather backward.

If you’ve been following my work for a while then you know that I’ve long made a point of seeking out people with whom I disagree. As a humorous blogger poking fun at the excesses of education reform, I traveled all over the country in order to meet up in person with my online adversaries—charter school advocates, school choice superfans, conservative school fixers. I learned a lot and struck up some genuine friendships along the way.

That now feels like a long time ago. As our political climate grows more toxic, I’ve found it more and more difficult to sustain these relationships. My conservative friends aka sparring partners now number in the low single digits. Which is why when a prominent conservative influencer asked me to come on to his podcast recently I leaped at the opportunity.

Jeremy Wayne Tate, as you are perhaps aware, created something called the Classical Learning Test, an alternative to the ACT and the SAT which Tate and his ilk view as corporatized, politicize pablum. An empassioned booster of the conservative cause du jour, classical education, Tate also hosts the Anchored podcast, the episodes of which typically contain the word ‘classical.’

Now, Tate and I do not have much in common. He’s prone to bold declarations like “I think CS Lewis and GK Chesterton were right about everything,” “I think Western civilization is awesome,” and “I don’t think men can have babies.”
My previous appearance on his pod to discuss A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the book I wrote with education historian Jack Schneider, was mostly a sparring match. This time was different, because we were discussing a topic we’re both passionate about: the liberal arts, specifically the liberal arts in prison education. As you can hear for yourself, there is a remarkable absence of enmity in our conversation. Tate was eager to know about what it’s like to teach in a prison, I was eager to share the stories of my incarcerated students whose lives have been transformed, even saved by what Tate et al would refer to as the ‘great books.’

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What’s the point?

At one point during our discussion, Tate made a reference to what’s gone wrong with public education in this country. If you’re guessing that he called out teachers unions, or ‘wokeness,’ or too little school choice you’d be incorrect. Tate argues that the purpose of education has been reduced to workforce preparation and little else—a view I happen to share.

I spent several weeks this summer at work on an essay for the Baffler, elaborating on a development on the right that has gone relatively unnoticed. While public school defenders have been focused on school vouchers and book bans, a growing, and influential chorus of conservatives has been making the case against what we might call ‘education by corporation’—the whole idea that the main purpose of education is to prepare kids for jobs. They’ve soured on STEM and think standardized tests measure the wrong thing. “What if you are creating workers who don’t love their country for a future economy that doesn’t exist?” asked Pete Hegseth, who, before he was leaking war plans in group chats wrote a book urging parents to flee the public schools in favor of classical Christian education.

Much about what these guys (and it always seems to be guys) are arguing is contradictory, even bonkers. In his recent book Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage honcho Kevin Roberts accuses public schools of churning out students who manage to be both corporate drones AND Marxist revolutionaries, “ideal cogs in a globalist, Uniparty economic system,” as he puts it. Yet however nonsensical such claims may be, the critique of schools as overly focused on job training is worth reckoning with.

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In a sharp piece this spring, writer and teacher Annie Abrahms bemoaned the fact that the the strongest push for K–12 curricula that get kids into serious literature is coming from the right. Reading in too many public schools has been reduced to decontexulized passages, noted Abrahms. And for all the talk of Common Core being no more (or of our schools being run by Marxist lunatics), the corporate view of education that the standards embody entirely shapes public education. In her survey of state standards, Abrahms turned up one dreary example after another. In Pennsylvania, starting next year, kindergarteners will be learning about the importance of having entrepreneurial traits, while middle schoolers will be schooled on how to market themselves as job candidates. In New York, elementary school kids are encouraged to make dioramas showing a person on the job. Their older counterparts will be preparing to re-market themselves in the event that they lose the jobs they’re training for.

Where’s the vision?

My Baffler essay ends on what counts as a hopeful note these days — that with AI expected to wipe out of the jobs, we may have no choice but to replace ‘learning for earning’ with learning for learning’s sake. I was joking, sort of, but I was also expressing exasperation with the absence of any vision at all from the Democratic Party regarding the purpose of public schools beyond the training and testing rhetoric that we’ve been sold for three decades now. As I was preparing to write this piece, an old friend called to share with me a story. He works for an organization that advocates for public schools and had recently been part of a discussion with a candidate who was seeking an endorsement. The conversation turned, inevitably, to why public schools matter. The candidate’s response was, essentially, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’

“Neoliberal Education Reform Paved the Way for Right-Wing ‘Classical Education’” argued writer Nora De La Cour in a 2023 that I’ve returned to again and again. She was making the same case I am, that the right is offering a vision of education that is explicitly positioned as an alternative to soulless workforce development. We may be uncomfortable with the focus on patriotism, western civilization, or outright religiousity in classical education, but what’s key here is that the goals—of cultivating wonder in children, encouraging students to get lost in the magic of storytelling and to wrestle with profound questions—are compelling to all kinds of parents, not just those on the right.

“The Left should articulate our own robust narrative about schools that do more than train future workers,” concludes De La Cour. “We need schools that honor and nourish our shared humanity.”

Agreed.