This article by Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg tells the story of how he became an “education warrior.”
Pasi is one of the best-known education gurus in the world. He is an articulate advocate of a “whole child, child-centered” view of education. He believes in the power of teachers. He has stood strongly against standardized testing, incentives, punishments, and markets throughout his career.
He is one of my personal heroes.
Brian Brady is the grandson of Marion Brady, a progressive educator who has been critical of typical school subject-based curricula for many decades. Benjamin asks questions that his grandfather Marion has asked and puts them into the context of the 21st century, where information is easily accessible but hard to put into context as “knowledge.”
Brian has done his grandfather proud, as folks used to say.
The crisis is no longer information. It is orientation.
My grandfather Marion Brady is 99 years old. For most of his life he has been asking a single question that feels larger now than when he first asked it:
What is worth learning?
Not what is easiest to test.
Not what breaks neatly into standards and benchmarks.
Not what helps institutions sort children into rows, percentiles, and predictions.
What is actually worth learning?
It sounds like a school question. It is not. It is a civilizational question.
If you take it seriously, it does not just expose the limits of school. It exposes the limits of the world school was built to serve.
Modern education was designed for an industrial age. Its task was not wisdom, but coordination, standardization, and legibility. It divided knowledge into subjects, time into periods, children into age groups, achievement into grades, and called that order an education.
For the world that built it, this made sense. Industrial society needed people who could move through prearranged sequences, follow instructions, tolerate fragmentation, and mistake compliance for progress. School served that machine well.
The problem is that the structure remained after its justification expired.
And still we teach as if reality itself were divided into compartments. Math at nine. History at ten. Science after lunch. Literature here. Economics there. A little civics. A little technology. Each subject kept in its lane as though the world itself respected those borders.
It does not.
Life does not arrive in subjects.
A financial crisis is not economics. It is psychology, history, incentives, propaganda, institutional failure, and fear operating at once. Illness is not biology. It is money, labor, family, bureaucracy, grief, and mortality arriving together. Loneliness is not merely a private feeling. It is architecture, technology, work, romance, status, community, and meaning breaking down in a recognizable pattern.
Reality is not modular. It is entangled.
That is part of why so many people leave school with a disappointment they cannot quite name. They did what they were told. Learned the material. Passed the tests. Moved through the sequence. Then they entered adult life and discovered that reality does not present itself as a worksheet.
It presents itself as consequence.
That is the betrayal inside modern schooling. Not that it teaches facts, but that it too often mistakes fragmentation for understanding. Students are given pieces without pattern, procedures without orientation, answers without structure. They are trained to perform knowledge before they are taught how to organize reality.
For a long time, institutions could hide this weakness by controlling access to information. That was the old bargain. Sit still. Absorb the fragments. Repeat them back. We will certify that you know something.
That bargain is collapsing.
Information is everywhere. Explanation is instant. Summary is on demand. Generation is cheap. If education is merely the transfer of information, then large parts of the inherited model are about to be exposed by machines with humiliating ease.
This does not make my grandfather’s question obsolete. It makes it unavoidable.
What is worth learning when information is cheap?
The crisis is no longer information. It is orientation.
The central problem is no longer whether a person can retrieve facts, generate prose, summarize an argument, produce an image, or assemble code. The machine can assist with all of that. The deeper problem is whether a person can judge what is worth knowing, what is worth building, what is worth preserving, what is worth resisting, and what kind of intelligence a civilization should trust itself to become.
The machine is a tool. A powerful one. A dangerous one. Not because it thinks for us in some dramatic science-fiction sense, but because it amplifies whatever confusion already exists upstream.
The machine can generate almost anything. It cannot tell us what is worth becoming.
A culture that cannot answer questions of value will use powerful tools to accelerate its own disorientation. It will confuse fluency with understanding, output with insight, scale with wisdom, optimization with purpose. It will become more capable and less clear about why any of that capability should exist.
That is why my grandfather’s question now reaches far beyond school.
What is worth learning?
A person should learn how systems behave. How incentives bend institutions. How language hides power. How metrics deform the things they claim to measure. How technology reshapes attention, memory, and desire. How emotion alters perception. How to distinguish causes from symptoms. How to think across domains, across timescales, and across consequences. How to remain inwardly free inside environments built to colonize thought.
These are not luxuries. They are survival skills.
And they are difficult to teach inside the model we inherited because they do not belong neatly to any single subject. They live between subjects, across domains, inside relationships and consequences. They require synthesis, context, pattern recognition, and judgment.
That is the real educational question now.
Not how to cram more content into the pipeline.
Not how to optimize test performance.
Not how to produce students who can generate the approved answer in the approved format.
How do we cultivate minds that can actually perceive reality?
That was always the deeper force inside my grandfather’s work.
What is worth learning?
In an age of infinite information and machine generation, it may be the most important question we have.
Certain words have been censored from government documents, most especially those that refer to diversity, equity, and inclusion, meaning race, ethnicity, gender, and LGBT status.
The New York Times has kept a running list of “forbidden” words. The list does not include the exhibits that have been removed at public museums, public libraries, National parks, and other public institutions.
As President Trump seeks to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents.
Notes: Some terms listed with a plus sign represent combinations of words that, when used together, acknowledge transgender people, which is not in keeping with the current federal government’s position that there are only two, immutable sexes. Any term collected above was included on at least one agency’s list, which does not necessarily imply that other agencies are also discouraged from using it.
The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents viewed by The New York Times. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.
In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban. Additionally, the presence of some terms was used to automatically flag for review some grant proposals and contracts that could conflict with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
Some of the Trump regime’s efforts to censor history have been reversed. For example, it lost its fight to remove the Gay Pride flag from the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village in New York City.
The New York Times reported:
The Trump administration has agreed to officially restore the Pride flag that was removed from the Stonewall National Monument in New York’s Greenwich Village.
The move marks a reversal by the Trump administration, which had the flag removed back in February. It comes on the heels of a lawsuit brought by several nonprofit groups against Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the National Park Service and others. The agreement to restore the flag settles the lawsuit.
The National Park Service said it removed the flag under guidance from the Department of Interior, which had said non-agency flags could not be officially displayed on flagpoles managed by the National Park Service.
The court agreement says it will no longer be subject to the political whims of whoever is in power.
“The whole reason why the flag belongs at Stonewall is because it is such a big part of the history of the LGBTQ community and the struggle for equality. Stonewall itself is obviously such a part of that history and all along what we asserted was that the flag itself was a representation of that history,” attorney Alexander Kristofcak said.
Advocates say the ruling could have a national impact at other places where the Trump administration has sought to combat diversity initiatives. For example, the Trump administration removed an exhibit on George Washington’s ownership of slaves from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
But in February 2026, a federal judge ordered the restoration of the Philadelphia exhibit.
Politico reported that Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote a “withering opinion” in which she compared the Trump administration’s stance to George Orwell’s 1984. It was an effort, she said, to eliminate the truth by an administration that did so because it could. No, you can’t, she ordered.
Today, I read Robert Reich’s commentary on a remarkable event: A bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges asked Federal Judge Kathleen J. Williams to reopen the case that culminated in a deal between President Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had been Trump’s personal lawyer before the 2024 election.
The “settlement” between Trump and Blanche handed over $1.776 billion to a commission controlled by Trump, and in another part of the “settlement,” Blanche agreed that neither Trump nor his family members would be audited by the Internal Revenue Service.
The retired judges said that Trump and Blanche may have deceived the court and perpetrated a fraud.
Judge Williams agreed to investigate and gave Trump and Blanche until June 12 to respond.
I can’t overstate the importance of Judge Kathleen Williams’s decision on Friday to reopen Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S.
She said she wants to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception,” and she ordered Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”
The “deception” and “fraud” Judge Williams refers to were allegedly carried out by Trump and his Justice Department.
This is a big deal.
Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.
The judges’ brief is also a big deal. They call it a motion for relief from judgement or order or, alternatively, “leave to appear as amici curiae by thirty-five former federal judges.”
I don’t recall a similar instance of 35 former federal judges filing such a motion or amicus (friend of the court) brief.
In it, the judges argue that the parties’ — Trump and the Justice Department’s — so-called “settlement” agreement was made to circumvent the court ‘s possible finding that the case presented no actual controversy, since Trump is on both sides of it.
This, they conclude, constituted a fraud on the Court.
I wanted to read the brief by the 35 judges. I did. You should read it too. It is linked in the next paragraph from Reich’s post.
Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.
Read it yourself. The judge had previously raised the question of whether Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit was genuine, since he seemed to be suing himself. Had the case gone to trial, she might have tossed it, since there were not two genuine adversaries.
The parties decided to withdraw their lawsuit and quickly reached an agreement that was highly beneficial to Trump (the slush fund and freedom from audits).
The former judges smelled a rat and took the unprecedented step of joining together to petition Judge Williams.
Alan Feuer and Andrew Duehren wrote in The New York Times today:
A federal judge in Miami reopened President Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S. in a striking turnabout, saying that she wanted to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception.”
The ruling by the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, on Friday to revive the case shortly after closing it was a significant blow both to Mr. Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department. After the president withdrew the suit, senior department officials released a pair of extraordinary agreements that settled the case by establishing a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of government “weaponization” by Democrats.
The deal also conferred lucrative tax benefits on Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses.
Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to bring the case back to life and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.
The former judges said that Mr. Trump’s settlement agreement raised serious questions about his “candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system.”
Before she closed the case, Judge Williams, an Obama appointee, had in fact questioned whether the lawsuit presented an actual conflict that she could adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was on both sides of the suit, bringing claims against a federal agency that he controlled. When she closed it, she noted there was no “settlement of record,” but shortly after, the Justice Department released its agreement foreclosing the action.
In her brief but stern order on Friday, Judge Williams said that she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr. Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies. If she succeeds in moving forward with her inquiry, it could ultimately result in questions being asked of the Justice Department leaders who signed the agreements to settle the suit — chief among them, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Stanley Woodward Jr., the No. 3 official in the department.
In her order, Judge Williams asserted that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in any case before her, and ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”
She also wanted Mr. Trump’s lawyers to respond to the question of whether he had colluded with his own government to settle the case “to avoid judicial scrutiny.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Judge Williams pointed to reporting by The New York Times that described how the I.R.S. had prepared a 25-page memorandumoutlining defenses against the suit that the Justice Department did not take up in court.
Lawyers for the former judges hailed Judge Williams’s decision.
“The judges and their counsel greatly appreciate the seriousness with which the court is addressing these grievous allegations,” said Norman Eisen, who represented the former judges for the nonprofit group, Democracy Defenders Fund. “We stand ready to work with the court as it investigates this matter.”
Mr. Eisen was joined by the law firms Platkin and Susman Godfrey.
In their filing this week, the former judges claimed that Mr. Trump had improperly used his suit against the I.R.S. as a way to obtain “unlawful private benefits” for himself and his family, and to create a fund that would dole out taxpayer money “without constitutional or congressional authority.”
They also argued that the president had tried to shield the deal from judicial oversight by rushing a settlement and “short-circuiting” Judge Williams’s ability to examine its terms.
The $1.8 billion fund has faced separate legal headwinds. A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily blocked the Trump administration from taking any further steps to set it up or disburse money from it. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including many Republicans, have also been critical of the fund, which upended G.O.P. plans to pass a party-line bill funding immigration enforcement efforts last week.
Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, first sued the I.R.S. in January, claiming they were owed at least $10 billion because a former contractor at the agency had leaked their tax returns (and hundreds of others) during the president’s first term in the White House. The Trumps claimed that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent the contractor, Charles Littlejohn, from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.
Mr. Trump’s suit, as I.R.S. officials laid out in their memo and other lawyers have noted, had clear legal flaws. Potential defenses against it include that it was filed after the statute of limitations, and that it incorrectly faulted the I.R.S. for the actions of Mr. Littlejohn, previously a contractor employed by Booz Allen Hamilton. But the Justice Department never made an attempt to contest Mr. Trump’s suit. No government lawyer entered an appearance in the case.
That has fueled criticism that the deal the Justice Department struck with Mr. Trump was not a genuine attempt to avoid a loss on the merits to the president in court, but instead a scheme to provide him and his political allies with public benefits.
In a footnote, Judge Williams questioned the provision granting Mr. Trump, his family and their businesses immunity from I.R.S. scrutiny of tax returns they had already filed. She wrote that the audit protection may run afoul of Justice Department rules requiring legal settlements to directly relate to the issues in the suit.
She also noted that only Mr. Blanche signed the audit provision. The separate, nine-page agreement laying out the $1.8 billion fund was signed by Mr. Woodward and Frank Bisignano, who is serving as the chief executive officer of the I.R.S., a newly created role that is not subject to Senate confirmation.
Here is NPR’s summary.
Today was a good day for those who believe in the rule of law. Three decisions halted–at least temporarily–Trump’s intention to make unilateral decisions, consulting no other authority, disregarding the law to impose his will.
In one court decision, a federal judge in D.C. ruled that Trump’s name must be removed from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and that the proposed renovation and closure of the center requires further study.
In the second, a federal judge in Virginia halted the creation of Trump’s slush fund for his allies, at least temporarily. Even Republicans were appalled by the idea that a president could unilaterally obtain control of nearly $2 billion to distribute to alleged victims of his choosing, without any oversight.
In the third, a federal judge in Florida reopened the case that led to the creation of Trump’s slush fund, questioning whether fraud was committed.
In the first decision, as reported by Julia Jacobs and Zach Montague of The New York Times, Federal Judge Christopher R. Cooper directed the Kennedy Center to remove Trump’s name from its title. He
determined that the board’s decision to add Mr. Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center violated a law passed by Congress in 1964 that made “crystal clear” the institution was to be named for former President John F. Kennedy.
“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” the judge wrote in a 94-page opinion. He ordered that the 18 letters added to the center’s front portico be removed within two weeks.
The center’s board of trustees, a vast majority of whom are allies of Mr. Trump, voted in December to add the president’s name to the performing arts center. Less than a day later, new lettering was added to the building’s marble facade, which now reads: “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Roma Daravi, a spokeswoman for the center, said that it would appeal the ruling, signing her statement as the “Trump Kennedy Center Vice President of Public Relations.”
“We are confident that on appeal the court will uphold the board’s will to recognize President Trump’s historic contributions to our nation’s cultural center,” she said.
The judge’s order came in response to a lawsuit by Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, who is an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board. She objected to both the renaming and the plans to close the institution, which her lawyers argued was in fact a decision “designed to hide their embarrassment about declining ticket sales.”
Judge Cooper found that the board had been “derelict” in considering the possible consequences to programming when shuttering the center, as well as its legal responsibility to maintain the center as a memorial to the slain president. His order did not make any specific directives for reinstating programming as the board reassesses its renovation plans.
Ms. Beatty said in a statement celebrating the ruling that “the Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump.”
In a parallel ruling in a separate lawsuit on Friday, Judge Cooper, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, stopped short of blocking the center from beginning renovations after preservationist groups said they had been undertaken without the required permits.
While that coalition of groups had argued that the administration appeared intent on remaking the center in Mr. Trump’s image, and potentially demolishing the structure entirely, Judge Cooper found that possibility too remote for now. But he warned that he would re-evaluate if the facts on the ground changed, saying there was a “paucity of concrete details as to the project’s scope.”
“If the work is, say, more transformative than present testimony suggests or requires permits that the center has yet to acknowledge or secure, the court’s legal analysis might look substantially different,” the judge wrote.
After shunning the Kennedy Center in his first term, Mr. Trump has staged a wholesale takeover of the institution in his second. He stocked the center’s board with loyalists, who installed him as chairman, ushering in a period of upheaval as many artists boycotted the increasingly politicized institution.
In Mr. Trump’s social media post on Friday, he indicated that he was now interested in giving up responsibility for the Kennedy Center, writing that he had instructed the Commerce Department to “transfer this failing Institution” to Congress. It was not immediately clear what he meant; the programming is run through a nonprofit, but Congress allots federal funds to maintain the building.
Jeff Mason of Bloomberg News noted Trump’s petulant rant that he would turn the performing arts center over to Congress but questioned whether it was legal to do so:
Trump, in a social media post, decried the judge’s ruling and said he would be “working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.” The center was previously governed by a bipartisan board of trustees, which Trump last year purged and filled with allies who installed him as the chair.
“I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution,” Trump said. The president said lawmakers “would have the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management.”
It’s unclear if that arrangement is permitted under current law. According to the Congressional Research Service, the center is considered an offshoot of the Smithsonian Institution that operates independently. It receives funding from Congress to maintain its facilities, and money had already been set aside for the renovations.
In the second decision, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked Trump’s $1.776 billion fund for his allies.
Zach Montague of The New York Times reported:
The brief order by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia prohibits the government from establishing the fund or processing disbursements at least until a hearing is held in June in a pending lawsuit challenging its legality.
The order came in a case brought by a group of individuals and entities who say they have faced partisan attacks by the Trump administration but who say they expect to be excluded from accessing the fund.
The halt provided the first meaningful, if potentially temporary, roadblock to efforts to compensate the president’s political allies since plans for the fund were formalized this month. At least two other lawsuits challenging the fund have also been filed in the District of Columbia and in California, and a number of lawmakers, including prominent Republicans, have publicly objected to its aims.
The federal judge who was supposed to hear Trump’s suit against the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service before the parties reached an out-of-court settlement to establish the $1.776 billion fund opened a new front in the debate about the legality of the fund.
Judge Kathleen M. Williams reacted to an extraordinary letter addressed to her by 35 retired federal judges.
Alan Feuer of The New York Times reported:
A bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges on Wednesday asked the judge who oversaw President Trump’s remarkable lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service to reopen the case and conduct an inquiryinto whether the hasty deal to resolve it could be challenged as an act of fraud.
The move by the former judges was one of an increasing number of legal efforts to attack the validity of the two extraordinary benefits that emerged from the agreement last week: a $1.8 billion fund that could compensate allies of Mr. Trump who claim they suffered “weaponization” at the hands of the federal government and the conferral of lucrative tax benefits on the president, his family and his businesses.
The motion by the former judges, filed in Federal District Court in Miami, was a direct appeal to Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who closed the I.R.S. case last week after Mr. Trump voluntarily dismissed his suit. It asked her to bring the matter back to life under a rule that permits her to set aside a judgment she had made and examine the terms of the deal that appeared to have been reached in a plan to avoid that sort of scrutiny.
“The purported ‘settlement’ that was publicly disclosed after this court dismissed this matter raises profound questions about the parties’ candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system, which threatens to undermine confidence in the administration of justice,” lawyers for the former judges wrote.
Politico wrote that Judge Williams responded to the judges’ letter by announcing that she was considering opening an inquiry into the lawsuit and to inquire whether it was a frivolous and fraudulent ploy to create the fund.
A federal judge is demanding answers to allegations that President Donald Trump defrauded her court by filing a lawsuit against the IRS as a pretext to reach a settlement that resulted in a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to make payouts to his political allies.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams launched the inquiry Friday, after closing the lawsuit on her docket last week. The Miami-based Obama appointee cited a request by 35 former federal judges who urged her to reopen the case to determine whether Trump’s effort amounted to “serious misconduct” and an abuse of the court system.
Earlier this year, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns by a private contractor in 2019 and 2020. The lawsuit immediately triggered questions about conflicts of interest: How could the Justice Department and IRS now controlled by Trump appointees defend against a lawsuit brought by their boss?
But before the lawsuit advanced, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche revealed that a settlement had been reached. Instead of a payout to Trump, the settlement would result in the establishment of the nearly $1.8 billion fund to make payouts to people described in the settlement as victims of government weaponization.
It’s the latest wrinkle in a developing scandal that has drawn bipartisan outrage on Capitol Hill, multiple lawsuits aimed at blocking the “anti-weaponization” fund and demands for further investigation by government watchdogs and courts.
Judge Williams did not reach a decision, but it is notable that she is seriously considering reopening the case in which Trump was essentially suing himself. Before the parties reached a settlement, Judge Williams questioned whether there were two adversaries in the case. Was it simply a means for Trump to turn the Department of Justice fund for people who were wrongfully prosecuted into a fund for his allies?
More than 600 faculty in STEM fields at the University of California signed a letter asking for the restoration of the SAT or ACT for students who want to major in STEM fields, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. They complained that too many students enroll in STEM classes without adequate preparation.
Absent a test requirement, the faculty said, too many severely unprepared students were choosing STEM majors, where they were certain to fail.
It calls on university leaders to reinstate the requirement that applicants for STEM-intensive majors submit SAT or ACT math scores. In 2020, under legal pressure and equity concerns, the system eliminated that requirement and urged public colleges to start accepting more students from impoverished high schools. Critics said the testing requirement unfairly favored privileged students and wasn’t the best predictor of college success.
“The SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it,” the letter, which was distributed by faculty members in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley but signed by faculty members systemwide, said.
“Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome. An admissions process that ignores foundational readiness does a disservice to the most vulnerable students.”
Without standardized-test results or other reliable readiness measures, it’s hard to know which students are actually prepared for STEM majors, the letter says.
For those of us who have criticized standardized tests, based on their inherent flaws and their current overuse, this is a reminder that these instruments are valuable for some purposes. In highly competitive fields, like the STEM subjects, it makes no sense to admit college students whose skills are inadequate to the challenge. College professors should not be expected to teach midddle-school math.
Those colleges that choose an open-admission policy are free to do so.
But where the field of study requires a certain level of preparation, students should demonstrate that they are ready and prepared as a condition of admission.
Universities that don’t like standardized tests could offer their own test.
Which brings us back to the opening of the 20th century, when a large number of colleges created the College Entry Examination Board to devise a common test that would demonstrate whether or not students were ready for college.
The Board administered a test each year that assessed students’ knowledge and ability in courses. The “college boards,” as they were known, required full answers to thoughtful questions. They were not standardized and machine-scored. Students were told in advance which works of literature would be assessed and read them to be prepared.
The “college boards” were read and scored by college and high school faculty.
The hand-written exams were replaced by the standardized exams in 1941, on Pearl Harbor day. The leaders of the CEEB sacrificed the old style exams with the onset of the war. It was a move they had wanted to make, to save money and time.
Ever since, we have struggled with the reality that some kind of test was necessary to demonstrate college readiness, alongside the awareness that the standardized tests are biased in favor of students with higher family incomes. They are also biased in favor of students who attended good schools with experienced teachers, advanced classes, and ample resources.
Paul Waldman was a top journalist at The Washington Post who left after Post publisher Jeff Bezos changed the newspaper’s political orientation and initiated staff cuts. Waldman now writes a blog called “The Cross Section,” where this post appeared.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is not just an incredibly rich guy, with a net worth standing at a tidy $43.6 billion. He also fancies himself a thought leader, eager to share his insights on the critical challenges of our age. In particular, he worries about the negative effects of Americans’ skepticism about artificial intelligence. As he wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, “It’s paramount that more people outside Silicon Valley feel the beneficial impact of A.I. on their lives.”
So when he was invited to give the commencement address at the University of Arizona this year, he probably thought this was a great opportunity to explain to young people how important it is for them to be ready to navigate this brave new world, in which nothing they do will be untouched by the technological revolution that has already begun. “That really made me think,” they’d say to each other afterward. “I will take Eric Schmidt’s wise words with me as I embark on my career.”
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the students greeted his rather banal comments on AI with a round of lusty jeers. The same thing happened at other universities when commencement speakers from the business world delivered similar messages about how we’re embarking on “the next Industrial Revolution” and the kids had better adapt whether they like it or not:
I want to congratulate the students at these universities for showing what they actually think about this message, and it’s not because the business titans are completely wrong. There will be dramatic changes because of AI, and people working in a wide variety of industries will have to adapt. But sometimes, when you find yourself in the company of extremely rich and powerful people, there’s a great deal of value in taking a big breath, cupping your hands around your mouth, and shouting “YOU SUCK!”
While social media is a virus that spread across the globe and made our entire existence worse in a remarkably short amount of time, it also allows ordinary people to tell those with great power that they suck. Unfortunately, doing so often has the effect of cooking the brains of those powerful people to an even greater degree than their isolated existences already do.
Take Mark Andreessen, one of the most important figures in Silicon Valley and leader of the firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. A year ago, Andreessen shared with podcaster Lex Fridman why dinner parties and text chats among Valley power brokers are so liberating:
“At least in the last decade, those are like the happiest moments of everybody’s lives,” Andreessen said. “Everybody’s just ecstatic, because they’re just like, ‘I don’t have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth.’”
Who precisely is yelling at Marc Andreessen? Someone on his household staff? His employees at a16z? The aspiring tech bros desperate for him to fund their startups? A server at the Michelin-starred restaurant where he ate dinner last night?
The answer is that there is no one in Andreessen’s actual life who would dare treat him with anything but obsequious deference. No, it’s online where Andreessen is hounded and oppressed.
Under the totalitarian regime that prevailed before Elon Musk bought Twitter, Andreessen explained, group chats were “the equivalent of samizdat,” where for a brief fleeting moment, billionaires could whisper to one another in hushed tones. True, the punishment for being caught uttering forbidden truths in more public forums was not execution or banishment to the gulag, but having a bunch of peasants on social media call you an asshole. Isn’t that just as bad, though? Surely if one of those poor dissidents starving in a Siberian prison camp in 1952 could have looked into the future, they would have said, “My suffering is great, but at least I don’t have to endure getting ratioed on Twitter.”
The horror of being called an asshole pushed Andreessen to become an even more enthusiastic ally of President Trump than he was already becoming. This year, a16z is sinking more money into the midterm elections than any other organization or person, $115 million so farto support Republican candidates who will advocate minimal regulation of AI and crypto (in which the firm is heavily invested).
Even in Silicon Valley, most of the elite don’t spend their time tweeting and going on podcasts. But enough of them do that we have a good window into the culture and thinking of the wealthiest and most powerful business leaders of our day. And what comes through loud and clear is that they’re appalled that we aren’t more thankful for the technologies they are bestowing upon us. They take our money and mine our lives for data, but don’t we realize how glorious the future they’re creating for us will be? Where’s the gratitude?
What they don’t seem to appreciate is that most of the ways people are currently experiencing AI are invasive, threatening, or just stupid and frustrating. For instance, Taco Bell is experimenting with an AI-driven menu board that will “dynamically change the layout, content, and visuals on a car-by-car basis.” You thought you just wanted a menu that was easy to read and understand, but have you considered how great it would be if the AI made judgments about what kind of person you are based on the car you’re driving, then slapped a bunch of crappy graphics on the menu based on some stereotypes it picked up from trawling the internet? Awesome!
When oligarchs like Eric Schmidt tell young people that their lives are going to be shaped by AI whether they like it or not, it’s that kind of crap the young people think of, not the possibility that one day AI will devise a cure for cancer. Perhaps the utopian version of AI will come to pass, but right now that AI future is hypothetical, while the slop is our reality today.
Nobody likes being criticized, and the more highly you think of yourself the less you like it — and while Silicon Valley billionaires are not allnarcissistic sociopaths, lots of them are. We have many means of pushing back at them — electing leaders who approach technology with a healthy skepticism and are willing to regulate it to protect the public, organizing in our communities (as people are doing against data center construction), choosing not to patronize companies that try to jam AI down our throats when we don’t want it. But when you have the chance, it doesn’t hurt to shout “YOU SUCK!” at the wealthy and powerful. They’ve certainly earned it.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, delivered a speech about the role of technology in schooling on Wednesday.
She urged the teaching profession to set limits on technology in the classroom. She understands that some technology propagandists would like to replace the need for teachers. But she recognized that learning is driven by human interactions and that technology has negative effects on children’s attention span and interest in learning.
Randi has given many speeches. This is one of her best. And most important, although I think she’s wrong about “the science of reading,” for reasons I have explained here many times.
This is the full text of her speech:
We are in an era of massive disruption.
Artificial intelligence is triggering seismic shifts in virtually every aspect of society. The affordability crisis is squeezing working- and middle-class families and pushing those living in poverty over the edge. Addictive technology and social media platforms are deepening anxiety and depression—especially among our youth. People with enormous resources and power are stoking division. And the democracy we have built over 250 years is being assaulted from within.
Teachers are no strangers to disruption; we’re often the first responders to it. Time and again, teachers provide stability amid chaos, and the human connection which is at the heart of the student-teacher relationship. We help our students navigate a changing world. But this turbulent moment requires a concerted national response to prepare our young people for life’s opportunities and challenges.
Public education in the United States has always been a state and local responsibility. But the federal government has a unique and vital role to play. When the federal government is doing its job, it helps level the playing field by providing funding and support for low-income students and those with disabilities; it enforces civil rights laws, supports college- and career-readiness programs, and oversees research into the best education practices. But the Trump administration is walking away from those core responsibilities. And by slashing funds children rely on for food, healthcare, housing and mental health services, it is not only undermining students’ well-being: It is threatening the survival of untold thousands.
This administration is actively undermining public education—from its massive new federal school tax credit, to its constant attempts to gut education funding and civil rights, to pushing private school voucher programs that hollow out public schools. It is more focused on erasing history, punishing people with student debt and stripping the Department of Education for parts, than on helping every child thrive. It is certainly not articulating a vision for how to prepare students to succeed in this new world.
It’s not just the president and his fellow Republicans who are to blame. While Democrats are still among the strongest advocates of strengthening public education, too few Democratic leaders speak clearly about the fundamental importance of public education as a national priority. And too many want to resurrect the failures of high-stakes testing, are pushing privatization or are frankly AWOL from efforts to make public schools, which 90 percent of American children attend, the very best they can be.
A Strong Foundation for Students in a Changing World
So today, I present a vision for America’s public schools to provide a strong foundation for our children in this changing world. It’s informed by listening to and learning from parents, educators, students, researchers, and business and community leaders, and by countless school visits here and abroad. It’s one I hope both Democrats and Republicans will adopt.
Whatever the future holds for students, they need:
* A broad base of foundational knowledge, starting with literacy and numeracy skills.
* Curriculum that is relevant, engaging and fosters curiosity, including subjects like the arts, athletics and civics.
* An emphasis on active learning through meaningful projects and opportunities to apply knowledge in ways that connect learning to real life.
* Safe and welcoming classrooms and campuses where young people feel seen, supported and ready to learn. That includes promoting well-being and protecting students from gun violence, immigration raids and bullying.
These basics equip students for the deeper learning and problem-solving that will be crucial throughout their lives. They help make students more confident and more engaged learners. It’s how we promote curiosity and critical thinking and ensure all our students have the agency and persistence they need to confront challenges.
I want to underscore why laying this foundation is urgently needed.
Our students are already feeling the impacts of this disruption. Young people are resilient, but too often, the kids are not all right. A major reason is that they are drowning in tech.
When I started teaching in the ’90s, education technology was just being introduced. School computers were glorified typewriters with no internet connection. Students had to go to the office to make a phone call. In the 2010s, many schools began providing laptops to students; in this decade, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the tech takeover. Today, many school systems provide every student—some as young as 5—with a device. More than half of 11-year-olds have a smartphone ever-ready at their fingertips, soaring to 95 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds. Four in 10 teens say they are online “almost constantly.” The pace of this tech revolution has been blisteringly fast—and kids are getting burned.
As professor and author of “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt, says, cellphones and social media are making our kids sedentary, solitary, anxious and depressed. On top of that, there are growing concerns about the adverse effects of all this tech on students’ cognition, attention and achievement.
Jared Cooney Horvath, a leading neuroscientist, recently analyzed how reading and math trends shifted after state-by-state expansion of education technology. Prior to large-scale digital adoption, fourth and eighth graders’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress had been rising steadily for years. After adoption, the trajectory shifted, often sharply, toward decline.
Correlation is not causation, but Horvath cites research indicating that this pattern appears across states, countries, grade levels, subjects and years. The recently released Education Scorecard, which draws on a huge amount of student data, identifies the same correlation.
And in this era of TikTok and YouTube, which drive rapid shifts of attention, there is growing concern about students’ ability to sustain focus and to persist through challenging learning tasks. In one survey of 3,000 teachers, 88 percent reported that their students’ attention spans were getting shorter.
Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham notes that it’s not that students can’t pay attention, but likely that they are less willing to pay attention. They are so accustomed to the immediate rewards they get online that they find schoolwork comparatively boring. Fortunately, that’s a problem we can deal with.
But before we turn to solutions, we need to talk about artificial intelligence. We are at a crossroads that will define the future of work and society. Without proper oversight and strong guardrails, there will be real dangers to our safety and privacy, to the climate and the very fabric of society.
One thing the AI revolution does not change is the essential purpose of education: teaching students how to think, how to connect, and giving them enough knowledge to do both well.
In fact, the ubiquity of AI makes critical thinking and applying knowledge even more important.
Students need to go beyond memorizing facts and learn how to verify them, challenge them and synthesize them into new ideas. Some of the most valuable skills in the AI age—like problem- solving, communication, collaboration, adaptability and ethical judgment—depend on the ability to apply knowledge. But AI is increasing so-called cognitive offloading; rather than working through a challenge, students can turn to an AI chatbot for an effortless answer.
Research has established that less tech can produce better outcomes. For example, people learn more from hard-copy than digital text and by taking notes on paper. And learning is a deeply human endeavor; the student-teacher relationship produces one of the largest effects in educational research. Yet best practices in education, brain research and the science of learning too often take a backseat to market forces and political influence. The global education technology market was estimated at $187 billion in 2025, and the industry is seeking more. And that’s just ed tech, not all tech.
And they have friends at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The Trump administration has given Big Tech carte blanche. And Melania Trump’s White House stroll with the humanoid robot to tout using robots to replace teachers spoke volumes. So did the responses from teachers wondering how a robot was going to build trust with students or know when someone was having a bad day. There’s no algorithm for that. Students need their teachers—real human beings, not robots and not chatbots.
Remember Michelle Rhee? She couldn’t reduce teachers to algorithms, and Melania Trump will not replace teachers with robots.
I’m not calling for an AI ban or a Chromebook bonfire. What I am calling for is getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms. I’m wary of the dangers of AI, but it is here to stay. We need enforceable guardrails and help to cushion the disruption to people’s lives. But that’s not enough. It is equally essential to make sure educators understand AI and have a say in its use in education and our profession.
That’s why the AFT created the National Academy for AI Instruction last year, to help teachers master AI so that AI doesn’t master them. It’s a training hub designed and run by educators, grounded in trust, safety and people-first technology. It builds on the work our members did starting after ChatGPT was first announced to develop and continuously update the AFT’s “Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools.”
Parents must have a real say, as well. They know firsthand the impacts of social media and other technology on their children. Together with parent groups, we released our “Likes vs. Learning” report with clear principles to keep children safe on social media and protect their privacy. And we continue to work with these groups for policy changes to protect children.
A New Vision to Boost Teaching and Learning in the AI Era
Today I am proposing a 10-point plan addressing all of this, to boost student learning and success in the age of AI:
1. No screens (including online assessments) for students in prekindergarten through second grade, unless there is a compelling reason, such as to most effectively support a student with special needs.
2. No student-facing AI in elementary schools—not only to prevent harm, but to build children’s skills like relationship-building and persistence. All other student-facing AI, including digital literacy efforts, must be supervised by educators. And until at least age 16, there should be a total ban on so-called “social companion” chatbots, computer programs that simulate human relationships.
3. Redesign schooling so active learning, including project-based, experiential and career-connected learning, is the norm across all grade levels. That means redesigning accountability as well.
4. Ensure students have a solid foundation in literacy, numeracy and civic engagement.
5. Focus on well-being, so that students and their families have their basic needs met and students are prepared to learn, as community schools do so successfully.
6. Protect intellectual property and academic freedom, and support educators to understand, effectively use and make classroom-based decisions about technology integration.
7. Establish a new gold standard for safety and privacy for the use of AI in schools. Providers that cannot meet these requirements should not be eligible to serve K-12 education.
8. Establish an independent research consortium to build a strong knowledge base for effective education practices that can be sustained and scaled. The research should include the effects of AI, screens and technology on students, and should not be paid for by the industries whose products are being researched.
9. Ensure adequate funding of education by states and the federal government. This means reversing the trend of disinvestment since the Great Recession and targeting funding to level the playing field and promote opportunity for all students—and not letting AI and vouchers further defund public education.
10. A “tech tax” on Big Tech’s earnings and on some business operations, to ensure they pay their fair share for the adverse and disruptive consequences of this technology on American families, such as workers being displaced by AI.
Ten points. To ensure our students are prepared for the future, we need a “devices-down, eyes-up, hands-on” strategy.
John Dewey was a pioneering advocate of learning by doing. He believed the most effective
We are on the threshold of a staggering shake-up of society. Who will pay for this massive AI disruption? The 16,000 workers estimated to lose their jobs each month? Retirees whose spiking energy bills eat up more of their fixed incomes? Who will pay for the harms to the environment—from toxic waste to greenhouse gas emissions to grid strain to water shortages that threaten to make our taps run dry? A tech tax would ensure that Big Tech companies pay their fair share for the adverse consequences of AI. The tax could be on earnings, some business operations, hardware or data processing.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the steepest upward transfer of wealth in modern history. Tech titans are amassing mind-blowing wealth, while ordinary people are paying enormous costs for living in the AI age. Tech kingpins and corporations can afford to pay a fair tech tax; workers, communities and the earth can’t afford for them not to.
The guardrails and other protections that can help cushion the disruption are vital. The safety and privacy concerns are obvious, as is (or should be) the need to protect intellectual property and academic freedom for faculty and so many others. The federal government must update intellectual property laws to protect human-generated work, and employers must protect workers’ intellectual property in contracts they negotiate with AI companies.
The AFL-CIO has proposed a bold AI agenda to harness the benefits of technological change while preventing the annihilation of countless workers’ jobs. We support our federation’s recommendations.
No less an authority than Pope Leo this week warned that AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few. Leo condemned the use of AI in warfare, and he underscored that teaching and learning are human endeavors. He wrote that schools offer what “the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.”
That vision underscores key aspects of our devices-down, eyes-up, hands-on 10-point plan. Some of what I’ve laid out is already starting to take hold.
Take the bans on phones during the school day, which we support and which 31 states have implemented. What are educators seeing? That kids are noticeably more engaged, and hallways and lunchrooms bustle with chatter and laughter again now that students aren’t heads-down, eyes on their phones.
One year into its bell-to-bell cellphone ban, Dallas schools are seeing a 24 percent increase in library book checkouts. Imagine if kids started reading whole books again.
After years of promoting classroom technology, last month the Los Angeles Unified School District initiated a sharp reversal. Screens are prohibited for students in kindergarten and first grade, and usage is capped for older students.
Several countries that pioneered the shift to ed tech are reversing course after precipitous drops in student achievement. Sweden is shifting back to printed textbooks and limiting screens. In Estonia, research showed that higher screen time for young children was associated with diminished language skills; they’re calling for more human-to-human interaction. And Italy has returned to emphasizing handwriting, paper materials and traditional teaching methods.
And now at least some Trump officials, like the acting surgeon general, are issuing warnings that too much screen time for children is a public health concern.
Intentional or not, all this tech has been a huge experiment on kids, and experiments can go wrong.
We need to take stock so we can do what we know is right. But teachers, parents and school districts cannot manage the tech juggernaut on our own.
And yet, with this administration, we are on our own. I’m not a detective, but I see some clues that there’s a connection between the Trump administration’s laissez-faire approach to addressing the harms of technology and the tech titans who are funding the president’s ballroom, presidential library and political action committees.
Laissez-faire doesn’t cut it, given the shockwaves AI is setting off. That is why, in the absence of federal legislation, we are working through our AI Academy to negotiate a gold standard that sets out industry best practices for safety and privacy in the use of AI in schools. We are seeking a binding agreement between America’s K-12 schools and any provider that offers AI-driven services to educators or students. Companies that refuse to abide by such a standard must be prohibited from working in our schools.
Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic—our partners in the AI Academy—have agreed in principle to our overarching tenets and standards. But as any negotiator knows, it’s not done until it’s done.
Our 10-point plan also calls for a research consortium. It simply does not make any sense for the 50 states, or the 13,000 school districts in the U.S., to each research the most effective reading strategies, or how much and what type of screen time is appropriate for children at various ages.
It does make sense for the federal government to do this—as our country has done historically in healthcare, science and, at times, education—but the Trump administration refuses. It has decimated the research arm of the Education Department. It has even refused to distribute $289 million appropriated by Congress for education research.
We need deep research to guide us to scalable and sustainable solutions. So why not launch a research consortium, independent from politics and industry? Maybe it’s a brand-new entity with pooled public and philanthropic funding. Or maybe it’s the Institute for Education Sciences, as President George W. Bush originally conceived, giving contracts to high-quality researchers and projects. I’d put the impact of screens, tech and AI at the top of that list.
Research already attests to the value of engaged and active learning. It’s a pedagogy we know works, especially when students are solving real-world problems and receiving meaningful feedback.
And in the AI era, it is more important than ever.
John Dewey was a pioneering advocate of learning by doing. He believed the most effective education was about not just imparting information to students but also actively engaging students with their environments and real-world situations.
Today this learning goes by many names: active, project-based or experiential. Whatever we call it, it works. And it needs to be the way every student can learn, in an age-appropriate way in every grade.
This does not replace the need for a broad foundation of knowledge starting with literacy and numeracy. But today, students need a new set of basics built on the ability to think critically, communicate, collaborate and apply knowledge.
When so much information is only a prompt away, acquiring trustworthy knowledge is just the first step. To be useful, that knowledge must be applied. Still, successful application of knowledge is just the second step. To really prepare young people for complex challenges, our true goal is to have students who can work together and problem solve. They must be able to pool their collective knowledge, strengths and perspectives, because today’s problems are greater than each of us, but they are not greater than the sum of us.
So the crux of this 10-point plan is what this will look like at the school level. What happens when we put devices down? What does “eyes up, hands-on” really mean?
It means prioritizing active learning through meaningful projects—which can range from students creating an eco-friendly garden, to planning and budgeting for a school event, to developing a policy solution to a local issue and presenting it to town officials, to keeping a diary from the perspective of a historical figure. From play for our littlest ones, to debate for older kids, to music and art for all—this is meaningful learning.
When I was a civics teacher at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., my students and I delved into all sorts of lessons—about the Bill of Rights, efforts to change the Constitution such as the women’s suffrage movement, and lessons about street law. They memorized plenty of important information. But where they really shined was in applying their knowledge and in collaborating with each other, like in “We the People” debate competitions.
This kind of learning is the opposite of drill-and-kill, of students memorizing and regurgitating content. And active learning is the antidote to cognitive offloading—that is, outsourcing thinking to AI.
Where active learning is the norm is career and technical education. CTE is learning by doing. It prepares high school students for both higher education and in-demand career pathways. They do this in places like Thomas A. Edison CTE High School and the Harbor School in New York, RioTECH in New Mexico, the New Lexington School District in Ohio, and the countless other great career-connected learning programs I have visited. Students engage in programs from skilled trades to healthcare to advanced manufacturing. They take part in internships and work-based learning, they receive industry certification in their areas of study, and many earn college credits.
I recently had an incredible full-circle moment. In 2016, Westinghouse Academy in Pittsburgh was threatened with closure. The AFT, through our Innovation Fund, gave the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers a grant to work with the district to start an emergency medical services program at Westinghouse. I recently returned to Westinghouse; today it’s thriving and offering students pathways into firefighting, law enforcement and EMS.
CTE students build things. They troubleshoot and fix things. They work in teams. They can explain what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. No wonder they have great job prospects, whether or not they go to college.
This is why the AFT is such an evangelist for career-connected learning. More than 90 percent of students who concentrate in CTE graduate, and about three-quarters of them continue their education after high school. This pedagogy prepares students as much for college as it does for career. Let’s make it the norm for all students.
The rethinking of teaching and learning I have described today must be accompanied by a rethinking of the accountability systems we use to measure our students’ progress.
Career-connected education and other types of active learning are suited to assessment by doing—via portfolios, capstone projects or performances, or by living civics the way I taught my students.
But for schools to integrate active learning, accountability systems have to be designed to assess such learning—and to incentivize it. No Child Left Behind’s best legacy was to highlight systemic disparities in our extremely diverse country. But the standardized, narrow content assessments it relied on don’t help with this challenge. On their own, standardized tests are of little use for school improvement, much less for the teaching and learning of individual students.
For more than 25 years, the New York Performance Standards Consortium has been a shining example of rigorous, relevant assessment at the school level. More recently, the School Superintendents Association has been working to help districts measure what matters. The bipartisan reauthorization of federal education laws led by Sens. Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray was a good first step in giving states the freedom to pursue this. And now, more than 20 states haveframeworks for their graduates to measure something meaningful beyond test scores. But there is much more to be done if we are to have assessment and accountability systems that measure and support the active learning I think we all want for our young people.
Addressing Student Well-Being and Investing in Students and Schools
Well-being and readiness to learn go hand in hand with active learning, starting with creating an environment that is safe and welcoming.
Brain science tells us that kids can’t learn unless they feel safe, and unless school is a welcoming environment where they feel they belong. Students can’t learn if they are hungry, or copingwith stress from home, or don’t have a home. One way to support student and family needs is through community schools, which connect services and activities to the school itself. Like the Oyler Community Learning Center in Cincinnati, a long-established community school that has continuously evolved to meet the needs of its community. The nearby Oyler House community center has tackled the local housing crisis by working with banks, developers and Habitat for Humanity to get families into homes. It has an onsite health center that provides students and the community with mental and physical health services. The school’s graduation readiness program has helped it achieve among the best graduation and college acceptance rates in Ohio.
This is why I keep repeating the same proposal I made in my first speech as AFT president, 18 years ago—a vast expansion of community schools. Since then, the AFT has supported more than 1,000 community schools.
The results speak for themselves. Multiple studies show that community schools reduce chronic absenteeism, improve discipline rates and increase academic achievement—including robust outcomes for students of color and English language learners. And community schools produce among the best returns on investment in the research record—an average of $7 to $15 for every $1 spent. And they are places that students, educators and families want to be.
Speaking of investment, over the past 20 years, study after study has shown that money matters in education, and it matters a lot; investment in schools improves student outcomes, while funding cuts hurt those outcomes. Yet 42 states devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 public schools than they did in 2006, representing a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars. This disinvestment is particularly acute in states such as Arizona, Florida and Texas, where recent voucher expansions will exacerbate the cycle of underfunding and underachievement. And it’s worse in higher education.
We must stop the runaway train that private school vouchers are becoming. Vouchers have produced some of the largest declines in student learning in the research record. They take vital funding away from students in public schools. And they divert taxpayer dollars to wealthy families and familieswhose children never attended public schools. These facts are well-established by independent research. But voucher proponents are not deterred.
Florida’s voucher program, for example, diverts $5 billion in public tax dollars from kids in public schools each year. The state already ranks among the bottom 10 for per-student spending. Our Florida affiliate recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s voucher program, including the fact that the state has not held nonpublic schools to the same standards and oversight.
At the federal level, Trump’s school tax credit could cost taxpayers more than $50 billion a year.
That’s double what the federal government spends on helping poor kids and students with disabilities.
I’ve covered a lot of priorities today. But these aren’t the only things we should be doing.
This should go without saying, but we need to follow best educational practices everywhere, such as the science of reading. That includes learning from consistent top performers like Massachusetts and New Jersey, and from the more recent successes in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Another given is that we must increase educators’ salaries, which remain woefully low. That includes the assistants and aides who are the backbone of helping students with disabilities. And we must reduce class sizes, which remain incredibly high.
Supporting the public schools that 90 percent of America’s students attend should be a bipartisan priority. We have tried to engage President Trump and his secretary of education. Last December, I sent the president a letter suggesting that we work together on an area I believed we both prioritized—CTE. He didn’t bother to respond.
The Urgent Need to Revitalize and Reimagine Public Schools to Help All Students Thrive
I wish this administration cared about this crucial moment for our children, but it doesn’t, and we can’t wait. The vision I’ve laid out today still can be realized in every district in every state across our country. And the AFT—and America’s educators, healthcare workers and public employees— will be willing partners with anyone who will join us in helping our students thrive during this transformational moment.
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation, public schools remain—as the founders argued—essential to forging a pluralistic, unified nation that is stronger tomorrow than today. Indeed, I just wrote a book about this. By bringing together children of different races, religions, languages and cultures, public school classrooms are laboratories of democracy that forge bonds and bridgeour differences—if we support and nourish them.
The 10-point plan I laid out today is grounded in what I’ve witnessed firsthand over the last three decades. The plan addresses the enormity of the tech earthquake, dealing with screens and student-facing AI; creating an enforceable privacy standard for the use of AI in schools; calling for deep,classroom-relevant research in education; insisting on protections for intellectual property andacademic freedom; and demanding a tech tax to compensate the country for the consequences.
We need a relentless, intentional focus on what our young people need: greater literacy, numeracy and civic engagement, and active learning that excites and engages them—all while ensuring theirsocial and mental well-being and ability to form healthy relationships. Devices down, eyes up, hands-on.
Parents want their kids to be engaged and well-prepared. Young people want school to be relevant and interesting. Employers are desperate for talent. And America is crying out for a unifying vision.
America’s teachers—as they always have—are doing noble work; they’re showing up every day to helpyoung people realize their potential and build our collective future.
Today’s students will be the ones who heal, help and lead us. They will be the environmental stewards, the innovators, the artists, the first responders and the teachers of tomorrow. The other side is trying to exploit the current crisis to destroy public education and pluralism as we know it. We have a different vision: to revitalize and reimagine public schools so every one of our students can harness their future and build the country they dream of.
The editorial board of The Dallas Morning News is conservative. But it is not MAGA. It does not traffic in lies and conspiracy theories. It adheres to a basic standard of civility, the kind that enabled members of different parties to compromise and occasionally agree on bipartisan legislation. Not now, but not so many years ago.
This is the editorial board’s view of the primaries on Tuesday.
Well, that was telling.
Given a choice between John Cornyn, a man who spent his career governing as an honest, deeply conservative representative, or Ken Paxton, a man whose personal and professional dishonesty is so manifest that the mother of his own children can’t endorse him, Texas Republicans said, “we’ll take the second guy.”
It somehow gets worse. Given the choice between Jim Wright, an experienced railroad commissioner who openly favored the oil and gas industry, or Bo French, a conspiracy-mongering bigot, Texas Republicans said, “give us the bigot.”
We would set up the same comparison for the Texas attorney general runoff between “MAGA” Mayes Middleton and Chip Roy, except we wouldn’t know who to compare as the better of the two. Both debased themselves as lickspittles of the president while doing all they can to drive division against immigrants, Muslims and any other group they could demonize to stir fear and hatred as a path to power.
What happened Tuesday night in Texas tells us so much about what the deep base of the Texas Republican Party has become. It should shock every person of good conscience and be an awakening for conservatives who still believe this party and its current leadership can serve the traditions of independence and liberty that Texas was founded upon.
Because it’s Ken Paxton’s Texas GOP now. It’s Trump’s Texas. Remember that Paxton is the man Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick saved from what looked like certain conviction in an impeachment trial right after a $1 million donation and $2 million loan from West Texas Christian conservatives flowed Patrick’s way. This is the man whose top deputies, people who devoted their lives to movement conservatism, decided he was so corrupt they abandoned their careers to alert law enforcement. This is a man who pretends to be the moral authority of this state even after his wife filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.” Read that as infidelity. That’s your Texas Republican Party now.
Regular readers of this page hopefully know a few things about us by now.
We seek to support a thoughtful conservatism grounded in limited government, the expansion of free enterprise, the power of capital to lift people into wealth, the fundamental importance of faith and family to living a good life, a belief in an ordered society where laws are respected and enforced from the border to Main Street, and a strong suspicion of movements that would upend the traditions that have defined our country and our common humanity for generations.
We hope for a democracy where good, if imperfect, people with different points of view are elected, take office and find ways to work out their differences through compromise that respects both the majority’s will and the minority’s rights.
We believe the founders of our nation and our state would have wanted nothing less. That was the sort of natural freedom they sought to enshrine, a freedom rooted in the protection of individual rights and the promotion of shared responsibility for democratic norms and a basic decency toward one another.
The people who are being elected to represent Republicans in this state cannot represent that sort of conservatism. They cannot represent the values that a majority of Texans believe in.
Don’t take our word for it. Take theirs. Paxton and Middleton have told us repeatedly where their loyalty lies. It is not to the people of the state they seek to represent. It is to a man who governs not on the basis of conservative principles but on his daily whims. This is the fundamental promise these candidates have made to Texas voters. We will do whatever President Donald Trump tells us to do.
John Cornyn tried to play this game. We can’t help but believe he will spend a lot of days in regret for what the end of his political career looks like. He did all he could to appease the president’s ego, and it wasn’t enough. So many good conservatives have had to learn the hard way that it is never enough. He will take and take until there is nothing left.
We try to imagine one of the men who founded this state, one of those who rode into Texas when it was still a wild and dangerous land where people had the thought that, if they could survive, they could prosper. We try to imagine the sacrifices along the way, the hard winters and blistering summers. The decision to fight for independence from Mexico. The stubborn streak of self-reliance and persistent belief that Texas is still, somehow, its own place.
None of that squares with who these men are. The men who won the GOP’s nomination Tuesday night are not their own men. They are, by their own admission, wholly servile. It is their entire political identity. The tough talk veneer goes only as far as Trump will let them go. There is nothing in them that is independent, that is their own, that is Texan.
We know that most of the people who cast their ballots for Paxton, Middleton and French don’t give a fig what this page says. So many of them long ago tuned out people who still insist on asking questions, who see places for compromise, who believe our neighbors who might be a little different from us are still our neighbors, deserving of our respect and love.
There is a word for what happened in this state Tuesday, and that is shameful.
Texas deserves better than people who truck in lies and bigotry. But that’s what we got.
Where we go from here is hard to say.
My observations:
If there are enough old/fashioned, principled Republicans and independents, Texas has a good chance of turning blue. At the top of the Democratic ticket are two excellent candidates: James Talarico for the U.S. Senate and Gina Hinojosa for Governor.
Texans need fresh leadership. It needs leaders who have not been bought by oil money and White Christian nationalists. It needs leaders who want to solve problems, not engage in bigotry and culture wars.
Talarico would bring a fresh air of honesty and candor to D.C. and a deep commitment to improving the lives of working people and those in need. Hinojosa has the same commitment to helping those who need help and a passionate commitment to public schools. Her own children are public school students. Like many states, Texas has underfunded its public schools and its teachers. Hinojosa understands that Texas needs to educate all its children well. That’s at the top of her agenda.
Talarico and Hinojosa have a chance to change Texas. They represent youth and the future.
Florida, under the thumb of its rightwing extremist Governor Ron DeSantis, has had a hard time hiring a new president for its state university.
Last year, the search committee selected Santo Ono, the president of the University of Michigan, as its candidate. However, the university’s Board of Governors voted against the nomination of Ono because of his work to diversify the University of Michigan, which was contrary to the anti-DEI policies that DeSantis championed.
Now the search committee has selected Stuart Bell, the president of the University of Alabama, to be the president of the University of Florida.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that rightwingers are outraged by the choice of Bell. They contend that Bell is a proponent of DEI.
Under Bell’s decade-long tenure at the University of Alabama, Black and Latino enrollment doubled after he launched an aggressive diversity campaign in response to a series of racist incidents…
Opposition to Stuart Bell’s nomination to be president of the University of Florida grew this week with several prominent conservative activists, a Trump appointee, and a U.S. senator weighing in.
Activists from the Manhattan Institute argued that Bell is an ideologue who during his tenure as president of the University of Alabama discriminated against white people in his efforts to diversify the student body and faculty.
Even the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon suggested that the University of Florida should pick a different president, not Bell, tainted by DEI.
Diane Ravitch's blog 