The Schools Are Failing (Again)

What’s behind the latest round of public education panic?

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.

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?

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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