The reckoning is here. The UC San Diego report is a warning about the consequences of a decade of magical thinking in education policy and p
By: Robert Pondiscio
Published: Nov 12, 2025
When professors at one of the nation’s top public universities start warning that their students can’t do middle-school math or write a coherent paragraph, the rest of us should pay attention. A new faculty report from the University of California–San Diego describes a “steep decline in the academic preparation” of entering freshmen.
Between 2020 and 2025, the number of UCSD students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold—from under 1 percent to roughly one in eight. The university has been forced to redesign remedial math to cover elementary-school material and create an entirely new course to reteach high-school algebra and geometry.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but…what did you expect?
Every force in American education has been working toward this moment. Covid was catastrophic, but the rot began long before. The UCSD report attributes the collapse to “the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.” That last phrase is a euphemism for low-income, minority youths whose interest K–12 education’s love affair with “equity” is intended to serve. But the report exposes how intellectually bankrupt that impulse has become—as if we can get students to and through an elite university by force of will and noble sentiment rather than the hard, cumulative work of academic preparation.
The University of California’s “test-blind” experiment has been a disaster. When UC’s Board of Regents eliminated the SAT and ACT in 2020, it left admissions officers relying almost entirely on high-school grades, which were functionally meaningless. Among students placed into Math 2, UCSD’s most remedial course, one in four had earned a perfect 4.0 in high-school math. Grades told admissions officers next to nothing about whether an applicant could actually do the work.
At the same time, UCSD dramatically expanded enrollment from schools covered by California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)—public schools where more than 75 percent of students are low-income, English learners, or foster youth. By 2024, a third of UCSD’s entering class came from LCFF schools—more than any other UC campus and roughly double the systemwide average. These students now make up more than half of those in remedial math courses, and in some years as much as 68 percent.
The UCSD faculty report is admirably blunt: “Admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students and straining limited instructional resources.” The professors who wrote this report deserve enormous credit for saying aloud what the broader education establishment will not: we are setting students up to fail.
And UC San Diego is hardly alone. Even Harvard University—the world’s most selective college—recently opened remedial math and writing classes. When Harvard must reteach algebra and composition, it tells you how deep the rot runs.
National Assessment of Educational Progress scores show reading and math achievement at their lowest levels in decades. The students now struggling in college were in middle school when classrooms shut down. Those who missed their foundational years—the ones who never mastered basic literacy or numeracy—are still in middle school today. The worst is yet to come.
Economist Eric Hanushek estimates that the learning loss suffered by this generation will cost the United States more than $90 trillion in future economic output—about six percent of GDP every year for the rest of the century. The average student will earn eight percent less in lifetime income than peers who graduated just a decade ago. This is not merely an educational failure; it is an economic calamity and a civic one.
But the deeper crisis is moral. We have persuaded ourselves that to pursue excellence is to perpetuate inequity, that holding students to high standards is unfair, that success can be achieved by adjusting expectations rather than meeting them. The UCSD report exposes the folly of that thinking. “Equity” without preparation is cruelty disguised as compassion. It delivers opportunity in name only, while denying students the knowledge and skills they need to thrive.
No one should take pleasure in UCSD’s predicament. The faculty are doing what they can—expanding tutoring, creating bridge programs, and building early interventions—but the scale of the problem dwarfs their capacity to fix it. As the report puts it, “our capacity is not limitless. We can only help so many students, and only when the gaps they need to overcome are within reach.” That is not an abdication of equity. It is an acknowledgment of reality.
The reckoning is here. The UC San Diego report is a warning about the consequences of a decade of magical thinking in education policy and practice. We replaced rigor with rhetoric, and the bill has come due.
On July 9, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters announced that a number of people — many of them key figures in righ
John Whitehouse at MMFA:
On July 9, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters announced that a number of people — many of them key figures in right-wing media — would be rewriting the social studies curriculum in the state.
The list includes right-wing hosts with ties to Walters like Steve Deace, Dennis Prager, and Stacy Washington. Also included is Kevin Roberts, the head of The Heritage Foundation, which has organized Project 2025.
Walters announced an “executive review committee” to revise Oklahoma’s social studies curriculum. Members include Dennis Prager, Robert Pondiscio, David Barton, Kevin Roberts, Everett Piper, John Dwyer, David Goodwin, Mark Bauerlein, Steve Deace, and Stacy Washington. [Oklahoma State Department of Education, 7/9/24]
After implementing a mandate that the state’s public schools teach the Bible, Walters claimed that right-wing commentator and pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, who has promised to “embrace Christian nationalism” and previously ran for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma, encouraged him to implement such a policy last year. [Media Matters, 7/8/24]
Walters has approved PragerU Kids — which is widely criticized for pushing right-wing propaganda, such as including distorted histories about slavery in its history lessons — as curriculum for Oklahoma public schools. In one supposedly educational video, for instance, a cartoon version of Fredrick Douglass describes slavery as a “compromise to achieve something great.” [MSNBC, 9/7/23; Media Matters, 9/8/23; NBC, 8/10/23]
Dennis Prager is an anti-LGBTQ pundit who has hosted The Dennis Prager Show since 1999. In 2009, he founded the conservative nonprofit organization PragerU, which publishes short videos on political and international issues.
David Barton is a pseudo-historian and Christian nationalist well-known for spreading the idea that the country was supposed to be a Christian nation. Barton is the founder of WallBuilders.
Kevin Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank leading Project 2025.
Steve Deace is a host for BlazeTV who has made many anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ remarks.
Stacy Washington is a commentator, radio host, and Air Force veteran who has appeared in many right-wing outlets. She was formerly a host of a program aired on American Family Radio, the radio arm of extreme anti-LGBTQ group American Family Association, before the network culled much of its programming and its dedicated Urban Family Communications network.
Right-wing indoctrination artist Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Schools Ryan Walters announced that he is having a team rewrite the state’s social studies curriculum, with many of its names right-wing media figures such as Everett Piper, serial history revisionist David Barton, indoctrination mill head Dennis Prager, and pundit Steve Deace.
See Also:
LGBTQ Nation: Oklahoma’s head of education hires Christian Nationalists to revise social studies currciculum
The math curriculum is cobbled together from different sources: an off-the-shelf curriculum called TERC; Contexts for Learning, a “conceptual math” approach pioneered by Catherine Fosnot, an education professor at City College of New York; and “a variety of things we found on the Internet,” according to Stacey Gershkovich, who oversees math at Success. EdReports.org, an independent nonprofit that reviews curricula, has rated TERC poorly, reporting that it “does not meet expectations” for alignment to Common Core standards or for classroom usability. Gershkovich is unconcerned. “We kind of scrap it for its parts,” she explained to me.
[...]
An unintended and largely unrecognized consequence of the lack of an established curriculum in this country is the profound effect it has on how teachers spend their time. American classroom teachers spend a prodigious amount of time cobbling together lessons from scratch. A 2016 study by the RAND Corporation revealed that virtually every ELA teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers and 96 percent of secondary school teachers—draws on “materials they created or selected themselves.”
Among elementary school teachers, 94 percent report turning to Google to find ELA lesson plans and instructional materials; 87 percent search Pinterest. The numbers are virtually the same for math. The default curriculum in American education, at least in elementary and middle school, is simply stuff teachers find on the Internet.”
Critical race theory took over in two ways: first gradually, then suddenly
By: Robert Pondiscio
Published: Jul/Aug 2021
We have been inundated of late with alarming stories about the radical transformation of schooling in the wake of George Floyd’s death last summer and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. To mention just a few: We hear of third-graders in Cupertino, California (home of Apple) forced to discuss their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” We read about a New York City principal asking parents to determine which of eight “white identities” best describes them—from “white supremacist” to “white abolitionist”—and seeking their commitment to “dismantling whiteness and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.” And we’ve seen reports of an Arizona state education department’s “equity toolkit” titled “They’re not too young to talk about race!” which recommends that white parents “can and should begin addressing issues of race and racism early, even before their children can speak.”
The daily drumbeat suggests there has been a violent leftward lurch in public education in the past year, but is it really something new? Critical race theory and “anti-racism” came to dominate K–12 education in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
From the nation’s founding through the mid-19th century, education theorists from Benjamin Rush to Horace Mann hewed to the notion that a republic cannot long remain ignorant and free—hence the need for free and universal public education. From these founding ideals of citizen-making, Americans drifted over time to see education as serving chiefly private purposes, even if it also advances the commonweal. We expect schools to help our children get along with others and prepare academically for college and career, and to otherwise shepherd them toward a fruitful adult life. But as a profession, education has a long history of seeing schools as agencies to promote whatever was on the mind of “progressive” reformers of the era—from abolition, temperance, and turning immigrants into assimilated English-speaking citizens over a century ago, to promoting bilingualism and raising awareness of climate change more recently. As the education-reform veteran Chester E. Finn Jr. observes, “schools have long seemed like a swell place for adult causes to try to enlist kids.”
Education’s present focus is identifying and correcting racial inequity. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the current racialized view of American K–12 education and its outcomes is the exclusive project of classroom radicals and doctrinaire race and gender-studies theorists. A generation of teachers, administrators, and policymakers has been trained, encouraged, and even required by law to view their work through the lens of racial disparity. The “woke” revolution roiling our schools, with its Manichean view of oppressors vs. oppressed, is an overnight development that has been decades in the making. “Wokeness” on college campuses seeped into teacher training decades ago, while university schools of education have long seen themselves as an instrument for remaking society along lines more congenial to social justice activists.
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Let’s start with California. Over the past two decades, its test scores, which once led the nation, have flagged. Its long-standing dominion over textbook content, which came about because of the sheer size of the state’s student population, has faded thanks to technology-driven changes in the publishing market. But now it has once again become a K–12 bellwether owing to the adoption by the state’s board of education in March of a controversial ethnic-studies curriculum. For now, that curriculum is voluntary, but not for long. A law that would have required every student in the state to take and pass a one-semester ethnic-studies course in order to graduate was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom last year, but it has been reintroduced and is widely expected to pass. Many districts are moving forward anyway. Ethnic studies will be a graduation requirement in Los Angeles schools starting with the 2023–24 school year. Fresno, the state’s third-largest district, will require two semesters of ethnic studies starting this fall.
California’s “model curriculum” was met with intense debate and criticism when the initial draft was released in 2019. The state’s department of education received over 21,000 comments on the document, most criticizing it as one-sided or prejudiced. Jewish groups insisted the curriculum didn’t accurately reflect the American Jewish experience, and contained anti-Semitic lessons and ideas, including references to Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Since then, activists, advocates, and angry Twitter mobs have waged war over subsequent drafts, arguing over which groups and people deserved greater representation, and which offensive or misleading portrayals should be massaged or removed.
But these battles, however earnestly fought, betray a fundamental misunderstanding about what gets taught, and how difficult it is to keep inaccurate and even pernicious ideas out of American classrooms. Curricula are not handed down to teachers on stone tablets. Indeed, they are seldom, perhaps never, taught as written. What gets in front of students in most American classrooms is largely up to teacher discretion, making it nearly impossible to control—or even monitor—the content of children’s education or the ideals and values being valorized by their teachers. If the many factions battling over California’s model curriculum did so believing the fight would determine the shape that ethnic studies will take in classrooms, they were almost certainly mistaken.
Nearly every teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers, 96 percent of secondary-school teachers—draws upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts, according to a RAND Corporation study. Google and Pinterest are the two most common sources of curricular materials cited by teachers. Nearly three out of four social-studies teachers in a separate RAND report agreed with the statement “Textbooks are becoming less and less important in my classroom.” Materials that teachers “found, modified, or created from scratch” make up the majority of what gets taught. Only one in four secondary-school social-studies teachers cited resources “provided by my school or district” as composing the majority of what they use in class on a given day.
Moreover, all this curriculum curation, creation, customization, and tinkering is not regarded as a flaw, but a feature of classroom practice. Teachers are trained to “differentiate instruction,” adapting or supplementing the curriculum to make it more engaging, accessible, or challenging based on the needs of individual students. Academic standards like Common Core mostly dictate the “skills” students are expected to demonstrate; they are largely silent on the specific content kids should learn. These practices and habits weigh heavily on the use of controversial curricula, whether officially “adopted” or not. Outsiders assume far more top-down control over classroom content than actually exists.
A good example of the “choose your own adventure” nature of curricula and instruction is the New York Times’ hotly debated 1619 Project, a conscious bid to “reframe” the conception of America from a democratic republic founded in 1776 to a “slavocracy” that began with the arrival of the first Africans in 1619. It put forth several widely discredited ideas as fact, including that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery, and the claim of provocateur Nikole Hannah-Jones that “for the most part…black Americans fought back alone” against racism. The Wall Street Journal quoted Civil War historian James McPherson, who criticized the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”
Given these charged assertions, intense and acrimonious debate, and the 1619 Project’s dour view of American history, one might expect school boards, districts, and schools to exercise care and caution before formally adopting it for classroom use. And this appears to be so. A vanishingly small number of school districts has expressly authorized it for use in their schools, including Chicago, Buffalo, and Newark, New Jersey. However, the website for the Pulitzer Center, which partnered with the Times to produce a free and downloadable 1619 Project curriculum for K–12 classrooms, says it’s in use in all 50 states. There is no reason to suspect that the Pulitzer Center is exaggerating its claim to have “connected 4,500 classrooms…with the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her collaborators.” It’s a telltale glimpse of how controversial materials find their way into American classrooms. Teachers are doing what teachers do: searching, sampling, looking for lessons and readings on a given day to engage students, differentiate instruction, or launch a classroom discussion. It is impossible to know with any confidence the conditions under which selections from the 1619 Project are being introduced or discussed, what other readings are also assigned, or if any opposing points of view are offered. The classroom is a black box. Teachers, either individually or in grade-level or subject-matter “teams,” decide for themselves what gets read, discussed, and put in front of children—with little if any oversight.
Compare California’s ethic-studies “model curriculum” with a more familiar example: the Advanced Placement, or AP, program. It is commonly assumed that the course content of an AP class is the same, regardless of where it is taught or by whom. However, the College Board (which administers the AP test) issues only curriculum “frameworks.” There are no mandatory sequences of lessons, texts, and assignments. The standardized end-of-course AP exam creates an incentive to follow the framework so that students can earn college credit with a passing score. No such normalizing pressure would exist in California. There is no reason to expect any two ethnic-studies classes offered anywhere in the state—or any state—to be the same or even similar. Without the restraining effect of a single final exam, it will fall entirely to the attitudes, beliefs, and discernment of individual teachers—and in some cases their whims and prejudices—to fulfill ethnic-studies requirements, with no clear and reliable visibility for parents, taxpayers, and other “stakeholders.”
California’s effort is the most far-reaching ethnic-studies initiative, but it’s not unique. When he was Connecticut’s education commissioner, Miguel Cardona—now Joe Biden’s secretary of education—oversaw the creation of America’s first state-mandated ethnic-studies course, which Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute derided as “an intellectually shoddy exercise in ideological indoctrination.” Cardona’s Department of Education cannot impose an ethnic-studies mandate on the states, but Eden speculates that Cardona “could advocate for it from the bully pulpit of his Cabinet-level position and use other levers at his disposal, most notably the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, to advance critical race ideology in K–12 schools.” In many instances, he would be preaching to the choir: At least eight other states, including Texas, Virginia, Vermont, and Oregon already require schools to offer some form of ethnic studies as an elective, with more on the way.
The immense variability of the quality and content of schooling between and within states, districts, and schools, even across the hall in the same school, is an unintended consequence of how America organizes and runs public education—and one that contributes to the challenge of influencing (or even knowing) what gets taught. Other nations’ school systems tend to be more pluralistic than those in the U.S., with all manner of schools, even private and parochial schools, eligible for government support. But unlike many other countries, the U.S. lacks a national curriculum. The words “school” and “education” do not even appear in the U.S. Constitution. The result is 13,000 American school districts, each under state and local control.
But the crazy-quilt variability of public education is in one significant way still quite surprising. The tradition of “academic freedom” that protects classroom speech and course content in higher education generally doesn’t apply to K–12 public-school teachers. Courts have repeatedly affirmed that local school boards wield nearly complete power to set curricula. In the eyes of the law, public-school teachers are considered “hired speech.” In 2007, for example, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a former Indiana teacher who claimed to have lost her job because she criticized the impending Iraq war in ways that upset students and parents. “The First Amendment does not entitle primary and secondary teachers, when conducting the education of captive audiences, to cover topics, or advocate viewpoints, that depart from the curriculum adopted by the school system,” a three-judge federal appeals panel said unanimously. Such decisions should, at least in theory, inhibit teachers from introducing controversial material without proper vetting or from being overtly opinionated on sensitive subjects.
It is no defense for teachers to claim, as they often do, that they are expressing their personal views in solidarity with students. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, a California math teacher earned tens of thousands of Twitter “likes” and retweets when he asked with anguish what he was supposed to say to his students if Kavanaugh was confirmed. Some wondered why a math teacher would feel compelled to raise the subject at all. Joshua Dunn, a political-science professor at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, describes such displays as an unacceptable form of “moral grandstanding” by teachers. But the well-established limits on teacher speech and conduct have not inhibited a significant number of educators who are inclined to view moral grandstanding as not a problem in teaching, but rather the point.
Heather Levine, an English teacher in Lawrence, Massachusetts, ignited a social-media firestorm last year when she tweeted that she was “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” She is part of a movement called #DisruptTexts, which describes itself as “a crowdsourced, grassroots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon” and to “aid and develop teachers committed to anti-racist/anti-bias teaching pedagogy and practices.” When a writer with the Wall Street Journal contacted her about it, Levine huffed that she found her inquiry “invasive.” When the piece criticizing #DisruptTexts appeared, she took to Twitter again to complain that she had been named and her tweet had been quoted “without my knowledge or consent”—suggesting the degree to which she assumed complete control with no public scrutiny, even of words she wrote online for all the world to see. The decision to drop Homer, she explained, was simply a choice made by her school’s ninth grade team. “It was not a blanket school or district-wide decision and any teacher, including myself, would still be more than welcome to teach from the text,” Levine wrote.
It would obviously be impractical for school boards to weigh in on every instructional decision made in the schools they oversee. But given the weight of court decisions and divisive debates over curricula, simple prudence would seem to suggest a minimal level of professional awareness that potentially controversial instructional decisions might require some level of approval or authorization from a school administrator or district supervisor. Levine’s what’s-the-big-deal explanation was intended to reassure. But it raises more questions than it answers. Where do teachers get the idea that they have the right—even the duty—to “disrupt texts,” challenge the canon, or engage in vocal “allyship” with their students?
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We should not assume that all, or even most, of America’s nearly 4 million classroom teachers are closet activists or social-justice warriors determined to indoctrinate impressionable children in the woke catechism of the radical left. They are merely doing what they have been trained, encouraged, and habituated to do at every stage of their careers, starting in ed school.
University schools of education enjoy a near-monopoly on teacher training and credentialing in the U.S. By the time the American Educational Research Association issued its comprehensive review of teacher education in 2005, it reported that “over the last decade or so conceptualizing teaching and teacher education in terms of social justice has been the central animating idea for education scholars and practitioners who connect their work to larger critical movements. Advocates of a social justice agenda want teachers to be professional educators as well as activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society.” Remember: That report came out 16 years ago. So if critical race theory is new to you, it means you haven’t set foot in a college of education in the past 30 years. When I received my own master’s degree in elementary education 20 years ago, my portfolio was judged in part on how well my work demonstrated a “commitment to social justice” as a disposition expected of teachers who can become “agents of change.” In the early 20th century, George S. Counts, the intellectual forefather of critical pedagogy and among the most prominent education thinkers of his time, was proposing that teachers and schools “dare to build a new social order.”
This social reordering and change agentry is not the exclusive hobby horse of the progressive left. The activist conception of the teaching profession actually dovetailed with the agenda of the education-reform movement, beloved by many conservatives, which was at the peak of its power, prestige, and moral authority in the first decade of this century. Union-free charter schools staffed by earnest and hard-charging Teach For America corps members who were determined to attack and reverse the “soft bigotry of low expectations” made media darlings of high-performing charter schools like KIPP and Success Academy. Movies such as Waiting for Superman helped build bipartisan support for the reform agenda of charter schools, standardized testing, and teacher accountability. The 2002 federal No Child Left Behind Act explicitly made “closing the achievement gap…especially the achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students” a matter of national urgency.
Writing in National Review in 2015, the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess described the bipartisan détente that allowed the reform agenda to set the tone for public education for most of this century: “Conservatives embraced education as the foundation of an opportunity society and a path to eventually shrinking the welfare state. Liberals approached schooling as a way to address poverty.” To forge this consensus, “conservative reformers made several key concessions,” Hess wrote. “They accepted a massive increase in federal authority, an expansion of race-conscious accountability systems, and a prohibition on talk of parental responsibility and the virtues of the traditional family.” Liberal reformers gave up less ground. “They mostly toned down their demands for new public programs and took care not to accuse their conservative allies of bigotry,” Hess observed.
In sum, professional education emphasizing social-justice imperatives and more than two decades of public policy aimed at gap-closing had racialized K–12 education long before “critical race theory” became a buzz phrase and a political football. If you are under age 40 and work in an American school—public, private, or charter—you likely have no professional memory of a time when ending racial inequity was not the primary focus of your field. The anodyne language of “anti-racism” (who isn’t opposed to racism?) merely lands as the latest effort in a decades-long effort to improve education outcomes for students of color, among the least likely to have received a rich and rigorous education, or to have been launched from their K–12 public school on a path to equal opportunity, upward mobility, and fair and equal treatment in civil society. Teachers cannot have failed to learn that among their profession’s most solemn obligations is to close the achievement gap. Until recently, that has meant some combination of higher standards, testing, improved teacher quality, rich and rigorous curricula, or enhanced school choice for low-income families, among other favored programs and policies.
Ibram X. Kendi, the leading figure in the “anti-racism” movement, is not interested in closing the achievement gap. Neither is he concerned with raising achievement among black and brown students—at least by any measure known to social science. “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies,” insists the author of How to Be an Antiracist. Neither is it merely the tests that are racist; no, it’s the achievement gap itself. “To believe in the existence of any sort of racial hierarchy is actually to believe in a racist idea,” Kendi writes. “The achievement gap between the races–with Whites and Asians at the top and Blacks and Latinos at the bottom–is a racial hierarchy. And this popular racial hierarchy has been constructed by our religious faith in standardized testing.”
Even by the standards of testing critics, who are legion, this is a remarkable assertion. Forget our long obsession with gap-closing and teaching for social justice. The mere belief in the existence of an achievement gap is transmuted into racism. “Our faith in standardized tests causes us to believe that the racial gap in test scores means something is wrong with the Black test takers–and not the tests,” Kendi writes. But this is poor scholarship at best, and at worst a deliberate falsehood. The vast weight of education policy, practice, and reform efforts has rested on precisely the opposite assumption: that there is nothing wrong with black test takers. The presence of measurable disparities in student achievement has been broadly viewed by generations of education reformers as evidence of systematic failure: of teachers, schools, and districts. These are adult failures all. The children are blameless.
Denying the existence of such gaps or casting even the discussion of them as racist has proved to be too much even for some progressives. Writing in the Washington Post, Matthew Yglesias noted: “The fact remains that if African American children continue to be less likely to learn to read and write and do math than White children, and less likely to graduate from high school, then this will contribute to other unequal outcomes down the road,” including the ability to organize politically and effectively navigate the world beyond school. “Stigmatizing the use of test scores and grades to measure learning undermines policymakers’ ability to make the case for reforms to promote equity,” Yglesias concluded, including “combating racially biased low expectations among teachers.”
Alas, high expectations for black and brown children are now an object of suspicion. In 2019, New York City Department of Education leaders attended a workshop where they were told that values such as hard work, individualism, objectivity, and “worship of the written word” were hallmarks of “white supremacy culture.” Under Cindy Marten, Biden’s pick for deputy education secretary, San Diego’s effort to become “an antiracist school district” prohibits teachers from factoring into students’ grades their classroom behavior and whether or not they turned in assignments. The pernicious effects of this line of thought were unintentionally revealed by a white high-school student who told a local TV station that inequities are so strong that it’s “not fair of us to put forth policies that only cater to the students that are able to meet these requirements.”
If veteran educators have responded with dismay, even horror, at the tortured logic of “whiteness” as the theory that explains all ills in education, it’s because it threatens to erase, at a stroke, decades of efforts on behalf of minority children. The most improbable triumph of the anti-racist orthodoxy promoted by Kendi and his acolytes has been in schools that until now have been proof points of its emptiness. If any institutions in American education have earned the right in the past 30 years to claim the title as genuinely “anti-racist,” it’s the networks of high-performing urban charter-school networks such as KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and others. KIPP, which runs nearly 250 schools in 20 states, has had unparalleled success in ushering low-income black and brown students to and through college, but last summer, co-founder David Levin issued a public apology for building KIPP on “white supremacy and anti-Blackness.” The network announced it was retiring its trademark “Work Hard. Be Nice” slogan because, Levin said, it “supports the illusion of meritocracy…ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism,” and places a value on “being compliant and submissive.” This was a stunning repudiation of the core values that have made KIPP a magnet for parents of color desperate for an alternative to chaotic and disorderly neighborhood schools where low expectations, for staff and students alike, have been the rule for generations.
The founder of one urban charter network told me recently of his struggle to reconcile the desires of low-income black and brown parents “who are bought into the American Dream, hard work, education, character building, and rigor” with pressure from a vocal group of privileged and progressive teachers who bridle against his schools’ traditional curriculum and high academic expectations. “However, I really don’t know any other way to improve students’ future lives other than a rigorous education,” he said.
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Public education succeeds or fails at one principal task: A school either imparts the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to smooth the transition to a responsible and satisfying adult life, or it does not. In concert with other institutions (families, churches, the military, et al.), an American school can consciously inspire children to play a part in building a more perfect union. Or it can say, in effect, don’t bother. Hardened into orthodoxy, critical race theory insists on the latter. When it demands a place of privilege in our schools, it undermines the very purpose of public education. It is the opposite of welcoming children into the civic sphere; it preaches resistance to it and even its destruction.
To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with ethnic studies, “culturally responsive pedagogy,” or even critical race theory in public schools. No reasonable objection should be made or accepted to the earnest desire for black and brown students—American children—to see their histories and cultures woven firmly into their education. Nor should any excuse be made to elide our country’s painful history of racism and injustices, or to confront places where there remains room for progress. What schools cannot do while maintaining public support and legitimacy is to abide any kind of racial essentialism or insist that children are required to combat “whiteness.” Schools should not seek to impose an ideology that distills all of history and every human endeavor to a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed.
But this grim orthodoxy has been gaining ground in American K–12 education for two generations, and the challenge of dislodging it from schools should not be underestimated. While some states like California weigh ethnic-studies mandates, others, like Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, and New Hampshire, are debating measures “banning” schools altogether from teaching critical race theory and curricula like the 1619 Project. “There is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory,” said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.” Although well-intentioned and reflecting the discomfort many parents feel with regard to what their children are being taught, such measures erode freedom of expression and would be exceedingly difficult to enforce. It is simply not possible to ban a perspective from schools, particularly one that has been embraced for so long by so many educators.
The picture that emerges, finally, is of an education system drifting into conflict with the ambitions of parents for their children and the public purpose of preparing America’s children for productive adulthood and engaged citizenship. However well-intended their motivations might be, individual teachers cannot assume for themselves powers and privileges that are not theirs to assume. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi writes, “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.” Taken seriously, this is a direct encouragement for schools to treat children differently based on their race. Elsewhere he states the remedy to his unusually expansive definition of racism even more directly: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
It is unlikely that ordinary Americans, if they follow this idea where it leads—schools making a virtue of treating children differently based on race alone—will abide sending their children to consciously “anti-racist” schools. The immense disparities in talent and skill of the nation’s massive corps of teachers and the fad-driven nature of education make it inevitable that there will continue to be bizarre applications of its tenets, such as teaching children chants to Aztec gods, teachers calling students not “boys and girls” but “social-justice warriors,” or professional-development sessions aimed at getting teachers to reckon with the effects of their “whiteness.” Adherents may complain that such incidents are a distraction or examples of poor implementation of a subtle and nuanced suite of ideas. But as long as public education runs on tax dollars and public goodwill, the anti-racist “equity” agenda and the broader impulse toward “equality” will continue to be in tension with each other. School-choice adherents see in all this an argument for school choice, but as Bari Weiss has documented, elite private schools have drunk even more deeply of anti-racism pedagogy and curricula than have public and charter schools.
Ultimately, something has to give. The cost of public education is socialized in America; you pay school taxes regardless of whether or not you have children in public school or have children at all. If our schools encourage a belief that the United States is a fundamentally racist country, and that every institution is designed to maintain white supremacy and cannot be reformed, then it inevitably sets schools on a collision course with the society that supports them. Whether it’s a conscious institutional attempt to be “anti-racist” or merely that an intellectual monoculture has taken root among educators, the effect will be akin to an organism devouring its host. No sane nation will long tolerate an institution whose purpose is to set its children against itself at public expense.
The policy debate is over. Now comes the hard part: changing practice.
By: Robert Pondiscio
Published: May 1, 2026
A few years ago, the “science of reading” was still treated in some quarters as a niche movement—something for literacy specialists, cranky traditionalists, and a handful of obsessives who spent too much time fighting the reading wars on the internet. No longer.
Today, nearly every state has passed some manner reading law valorizing “SoR.” Districts have adopted new curricula. Teachers are taking LETRS and other training programs in droves. Cueing and balanced literacy, once dominant in elementary school classrooms, have come under overdue scrutiny and in some cases have been banned by law. Even former skeptics now speak the language of structured literacy, decoding, and evidence-based practice. In that sense, the science of reading has won the argument. But a new Fordham Institute report asks the more important question: Has the science of reading won the classroom? The answer, encouragingly, is somewhat. But only somewhat.
The distinction matters. In education, particularly in education policy, we often mistake policy victories for instructional ones. Winning the debate in conference rooms, legislatures, podcasts, and social media is one thing. Changing what happens between 8:15 and 2:45 in tens of thousands of classrooms is another entirely. The Fordham report suggests we are still in the middle innings of the ballgame at best.
The report is based on a survey administered to a nationally representative subset of K–3 public school teachers in the RAND American Teacher Panel (ATP) in the fall of 2025. The survey asked teachers about which curricula and training materials their schools use and questions such as:
“Do you generally favor the use of phonics (i.e., encouraging students to sound out words) or cueing (i.e., encouraging students to use context clues) when teaching?”
“Which statement do you agree with more? Reading comprehension depends on a set of generalizable skills…[or] Reading comprehension depends on what students already know about the topic and the specific vocabulary used in a text.”
“A student in your class is having trouble reading an unfamiliar word during small-group instruction. In your opinion, what should a teacher do first?”
In many ways, the survey shows significant movement in the right direction: Most teachers now favor phonics over cueing. Many report having received recent training aligned to the science of reading. Widely respected programs like UFLI and CKLA are gaining traction. Teachers themselves often describe recent shifts toward phonics and explicit instruction as overdue and beneficial. This is no small thing. Frankly, it would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago. (Thanks, Emily Hanford!)
But the report also finds that only half of teachers describe their approach as fully structured and explicit. One in three still report using a “balanced” approach that includes discredited and deleterious methods such as leveled texts and “cueing.” And nearly one in five say they take an “eclectic” or “immersive” approach not necessarily including phonics.
The report’s most troubling finding may be what we might think of as a high-poverty paradox: Teachers in disadvantaged schools report more training and materials aligned with the science of reading than teachers in affluent settings, yet demonstrate weaker knowledge and commitment to it. It could be that the teachers in these settings started from a lower baseline and are still getting caught up, not that their training has been low-quality. In any case, as Amber Northern and Mike Petrilli note in their foreword to the report, the gap portends “dire consequences for poor students should it persist.”
If the science of reading has not fully won the classroom, one reason might be it has not yet won ed schools that prepare the people who work in them. The Fordham report contains a devastating finding: Teachers who rely on their preservice training know less about the science of reading than those who learn it on the job. Worse, teachers who report learning about the science of reading in their preservice programs demonstrate lower knowledge of it. Read that sentence again.
This is not a minor implementation hiccup, it’s an indictment. It suggests that the institutions responsible for preparing teachers may be miseducating them at scale about the most foundational skill they are expected to teach.
This is not a trivial problem, it strikes at the foundation of reform. If teacher preparation programs are sending candidates into classrooms with a weaker grasp of reading science than they acquire later on the job, policymakers cannot treat this as business as usual. State leaders and education agencies must make strengthening preservice training an urgent priority and wield the power they hold over accreditation and licensure to ensure that new teachers enter the classroom ready to teach reading effectively from day one.
Even if we fix teacher preparation, however, the problem does not end there. It is equally important that schools and districts adopt high-quality curricula, like UFLI and CKLA. The Fordham report suggests that teacher knowledge is reinforced—or undermined—by the materials teachers use every day. Teachers using curricula more closely aligned to the science of reading demonstrate stronger understanding of reading science, while those relying on materials associated with balanced literacy tend to show weaker knowledge. Said differently, curriculum is not just a delivery mechanism for instruction; it shapes a teacher’s knowledge about his or her subject.
Speaking of curriculum, it seems to me that states should go further than simply requiring that teacher candidates “learn about” the science of reading. They should ensure that new teachers have been trained to do the work—planning lessons, delivering instruction, diagnosing errors, and supporting students—using high-quality, science of reading-aligned materials. That means tying accreditation and licensure to demonstrated proficiency in teaching specific curricula—not just familiarity with theory. If teaching is to be doable at scale, teachers should enter the classroom already fluent in the tools they will be expected to use.
Fordham’s report pairs nicely with the lessons of Mississippi, which were the subject of an AEI webinar I recently hosted. Mississippi is often described as a miracle, which implies mystery, luck, or divine intervention and flatters our appetite for dramatic stories while discouraging learning. But what happened in Mississippi was not a miracle, it was a marathon. Rachel Canter, whose recent paper framed it that way, attributed the state’s remarkable turnaround to two decades of policy coherence, implementation support, accountability, stronger standards, coaching, training, and persistence. Kymyona Burk, the state’s former literacy director, described the painstaking behind-the-scenes work: monthly meetings, common messaging, clear expectations, troubleshooting, follow-up, and making sure districts actually participated. Kelly Butler of the Barksdale Reading Institute emphasized something reformers too often ignore: Teacher knowledge had to be built systematically, not assumed.
One detail from the webinar has stayed with me: Mississippi officials would regularly review lists of which districts were sending teachers to literacy training, and if a district wasn’t participating, they picked up the phone and called the superintendent. That may sound mundane, but it’s not. It’s what seriousness and accountability looks like in practice: Someone notices an issue and follows up. Behavior changes and outcomes follow. Contrast this with the way that too often we think about reform: pass a bill, announce an initiative and funding, hold a press conference, and assume the field will absorb it (or worse, assume the capacity already exists to execute), as if a school is a smartphone receiving a software update.
The first phase of reading reform was winning the argument against bad ideas. Mission (mostly) accomplished. The next phase is harder: building systems where good ideas can survive contact with reality and resistance. That means better teacher preparation, curriculum selection, and coaching. It means less initiative churn and more consistency, follow-through and patience.
The science of reading may have won the argument. The classroom is where it still has to earn the victory.
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This isn't some esoteric issue. Poor and disadvantaged students in particular can substantially change their prospects by being correctly taught how to read, being taught proper math and English, and being held to high standards of attendance, homework and test completion. Moreso than any stupid "racial equity" programs which only serve to bolster how virtuous activists feel about themselves.
Pondiscio: When most Americans lack the reading skills to judge competing claims in critical debates, they are at the mercy of others.
By: Robert Pondiscio
Published: Sep 26, 2025
Pondiscio: When most Americans lack the reading skills to judge competing claims in critical debates, they are at the mercy of others.
“Don’t take Tylenol,” President Donald Trump urged pregnant women in a packed White House press briefing Sept. 22, claiming a link between acetaminophen use and autism. Within hours, experts pushed back. One Reuters headline put it bluntly: “Trump links autism to Tylenol and vaccines, claims not backed by science.”
Who should we believe?
A friend of mine, a young mother, vented her frustration on Facebook. “In today’s day and age it’s not hard to spend a bit of time looking at the sources,” she wrote. That sounds plausible — until you actually try it. Evaluating competing scientific claims is hard work. It requires the ability to parse complex studies, distinguish correlation from causation, weigh evidence and spot bias.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: As the latest round of 12th-grade NAEP results makes clear, this kind of independent evaluation is simply beyond the reading comprehension ability of most Americans.
To make sense of the Tylenol–autism debate — or any competing claims purporting to be scientifically sound, you need to do far more than skim headlines. You must:
Comprehend dense scientific language — including technical terms, qualifiers and statistical nuances.
Distinguish types of evidence — a correlational study versus a randomized controlled trial, or anecdotal accounts versus peer-reviewed findings.
Compare conflicting results — noting sample size, methodology and limitations.
Evaluate credibility and motives — is the claim coming from trial lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, advocacy groups or independent researchers?
Synthesize across sources to form a tentative, reasoned judgment.
These are advanced literacy skills. They align closely with reading levels that the National Assessment of Educational Progress labels as Proficient and Advanced. At those levels, readers can not only understand text, but critique it, integrate ideas across multiple sources and evaluate rhetorical effectiveness.
By contrast, readers at the Basic level can generally summarize explicit information in a single text. Those Below Basic struggle to do even that. But neither Basic or Below Basic readers have what it takes to effectively weigh competing claims — and that’s two-thirds of Americans. They can’t reconcile conflicts, judge evidence or detect bias. They may read the words, but they can’t test the arguments.
Some critics urge caution before declaring a reading emergency. Paul Thomas, for example, has argued flatly that “there is no reading crisis,” pointing to the way NAEP defines its benchmarks. Diane Ravitch often warns that “schools in crisis” narratives are exaggerated. In doing so, she has cited Tom Loveless, a former Brookings scholar who has been careful and consistent in reminding readers that scoring as Proficient on NAEP is not the same thing as reading at grade level. Loveless has done valuable service in clarifying that the NAEP benchmark represents mastery of challenging subject matter, not minimum competence.
That distinction is real, and it deserves to be respected. Basic does not mean illiterate. A student scoring at NAEP Basic can generally follow directions, read newspapers and function in daily life.
The Tylenol controversy neatly illustrates what’s at stake. It may not be accurate to say two-thirds of Americans can’t read. But it is accurate to say that two-thirds of Americans don’t read well enough to independently evaluate the kinds of competing claims undergirding the autism debate and myriad other contemporary issues and controversies: the reality and causes of climate change, the long-term risks and benefits of artificial intelligence, the trade-offs in energy policy between fossil fuels and renewables, the economic and public-safety arguments surrounding immigration and trade, or Is crime so out of control that we should call in the National Guard?
That’s a real cost. Reading at only a Basic level leaves you unable to parse complex evidence, weigh competing arguments or judge credibility. You live instead in a state of intellectual second-class citizenship — with no option other than to defer to authority or rely on third parties, forever vulnerable to those whose political or financial interests may or may not align with your own.
To be clear, even advanced readers rely heavily on intermediaries — journalists, trusted experts, institutions — to help navigate scientific and policy debates. That’s normal. None of us can be experts in everything.
But the difference is choice. A strong reader can lean on intermediaries but also push back, double-check or seek alternative explanations. Basic readers have no such option. Their skepticism leads to cynicism or blind faith. They must either trust or reject the messenger wholesale.
That condition is what we might think of as literacy dependence. It means millions of citizens live in an intellectual state where their capacity to evaluate evidence is outsourced entirely to others. They are, in effect, governed not just politically, but epistemically.
Literacy dependence does more than limit independence: It actively aids and abets cynicism and partisanship. When you lack the ability to evaluate evidence for yourself, you are almost axiomatically dependent on the views of others — political figures, interest groups, media outlets — whose motivations may not mirror your own.
This dependence has consequences:
Partisanship fills the gap. When people can’t evaluate claims, they default to tribal cues: which side said it, which identity group it affirms.
Misinformation thrives. Simplistic, emotive narratives spread more easily than nuanced explanations, and those unable to interrogate them are more vulnerable.
Legitimacy erodes. When people don’t understand the reasoning behind policies — whether vaccines, climate action or economic trade-offs — they may dismiss them as elite impositions.
Inequality deepens. Those with higher literacy become a narrow class of people capable of evaluating evidence. Everyone else lives in dependence.
So let’s be clear: Yes, NAEP Proficient is a high bar. It’s wrong to equate it with grade level. But that doesn’t mean there’s no crisis. Because in a society where evaluating arguments is the lifeblood of citizenship, Basic is not enough. Functional literacy is not civic literacy. The problem is not whether you can read. It’s whether you can reason.
The tension between public education as a civic institution and education as a vehicle for social justice is difficult to resolve. It doesn’
By: Robert Pondiscio
Published: Jun 19, 2025
The tension between public education as a civic institution and education as a vehicle for social justice is difficult to resolve. It doesn’t arrive as a policy change. It enters quietly, through teacher training programs, professional development, and curricular “recommendations.”
Another day, another curriculum controversy. This time, it’s in Philadelphia.
In a report for The Free Press, Frannie Block reveals that the city’s school district has created a controversial eleventh-grade world history course and other social studies materials with assignments and lessons that encourage students to reinterpret U.S. and world history through the lens of systemic injustice and activism. Students are asked to select a song to replace the national anthem after reflecting on racism and, when studying the Civil War, to understand that “racist attitudes played a foundational role in the formation of American identity.” Other lessons frame westward expansion and the Cold War in terms of American supremacy and racial exclusion, encourage students to view U.S. foreign policy through the lens of racism, and describe wartime propaganda as creating a manufactured sense of national unity. A unit in world history teaches that economic inequality shows “the need for systemic changes and equitable economic policies.” The unit examines “the intersections of climate justice, economic justice, anti-fascism, and human rights.”
The most important line in Block’s piece, however, is also among its most easily overlooked. This curriculum is not required for Philly teachers, merely “recommended,” she writes, “which means they have the power to decide whether to follow it in their classrooms.”
There are two ways to respond to this. You might choose to be reassured. At least the district isn’t mandating the content. No one is forcing teachers to use it. But this invites a second thought, potentially more urgent and troubling: Hold on a second. Who gives teachers—public employees with prodigious influence over a captive audience of other people’s children—the license to choose such a politically charged curriculum? And how were school district personnel empowered in the first place to create such an aggressively political curriculum at taxpayer expense? What democratic process or recognized public authority gives them this permission? Philadelphia’s social studies materials were not created surreptitiously. Block quotes Ismael Jimenez, the district’s director of social studies curriculum, who said, “Every child should walk into a classroom and feel the revolution stirring in the air because that’s what real education is: liberation with a syllabus.”
To state the matter mildly, it’s unlikely that a majority of Pennsylvanians agree with that vision for their schools, or that they would endorse revolution at public expense within a school district staffed by government employees.
This forces us to confront a seldom-examined tension that is baked into the culture of teaching and the structure of public education. Education is widely assumed by Americans to be a politically neutral government service focused on impartially equipping students with knowledge and skills they need to be independent and productive adult citizens. Yet many teacher preparation programs explicitly train educators to “teach for social justice” and commit to challenging systemic inequities. And those commitments are situated within a professional culture that is uniquely well-suited to advance them, if teachers are so inclined.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, no category of public employee enjoys more freedom, flexibility, or insulation from democratic oversight than teachers. A bus driver cannot choose to drive for social justice, disregarding his assigned route; a police officer cannot patrol a different beat if he perceives a more urgent need in a different neighborhood. By contrast, teachers—and those in their states and local districts who develop materials for classrooms—possess almost unlimited authority to shape what students read and hear by choosing texts, guiding classroom discussions, and selecting resources to reflect their educational priorities or philosophy. Those unfamiliar with classroom practice (and even some inside) assume that public education is a top-down enterprise: states, districts, or school boards choose a curriculum, and teachers robotically deliver officially sanctioned lessons. It’s simply not so. The vast majority of classroom teachers create, customize, or simply download teaching materials from the Internet with no meaningful oversight or controls for fairness, accuracy, or quality.
To be clear, there are good reasons for teachers’ operational flexibility. It enables educators to differentiate instruction, respond to local contexts, and craft lessons that resonate with students. Done well, it reflects professionalism and skill. But there is no limiting principle. It is only when controversies like this one in the City of Brotherly Love erupt into public view that we’re forced to reckon with the conflict between public education’s status as an ostensibly neutral government function and the field’s conception of itself as anything but neutral.
Nor is this a new or novel tension. Twenty years ago, a comprehensive American Educational Research Association (AERA) review observed that “conceptualizing teaching and teacher education in terms of social justice has been the central animating idea for education scholars and practitioners who connect their work to larger critical movements.” In that framing, the teacher is not merely a professional educator, but also an activist committed to diminishing the inequities of American society. So, too, are some number of the “education scholars” who participate in curriculum development.
That’s why examples like the one Block highlights are not aberrations. They’re inevitable. When public school teachers are not encouraged to see themselves first and foremost as public employees and state actors, when they regard themselves free agents, and when ideologically charged materials are promoted without oversight or democratic vetting, the results are predictable. No board votes. No public hearings. Just quiet diffusion of politically-charged content from central office to classroom, and a professional culture—not universal, but not uncommon—that has been acculturated to see politicization not merely as uncontroversial, but appropriate and even a professional requirement.
To be sure, this could work in the opposite direction just as easily. The same permission structure that allows teachers and central-office mandarins to build lessons around the 1619 Project or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States also allows them to select PragerU or materials from 1776 Unites as they do every day and uncontroversially.
The louder debates over “book bans” and anti-DEI legislation often dominate headlines. But those controversies, for all their heat, are more visible and easier to adjudicate. The tension between public education as a civic institution and education as a vehicle for social justice is harder to resolve, precisely because it is stamped on education’s DNA. It doesn’t arrive as a policy change. It enters quietly, through teacher training programs, professional development, and curricular “recommendations.”
Public schools are among our most important civic institutions, essential to both individual opportunity and democratic life. But they cannot be both a core government service and a platform for personal or political expression. The tension between those roles has been allowed to fester unexamined for too long. The result is a steady erosion of public trust—not because Americans don’t value education, but because they can no longer be certain whose interests it serves. If schools want to reclaim that trust, they must first be clear-eyed about the role they play. And then act like it.
The irony of hyper-privileged New Yorkers paying nearly $60,000 a year for their children to learn they are the undeserving beneficiaries of a broken system need not be dwelled upon here.
Ryan Finlay is a brave young man. A senior at the elite private Horace Mann School, Finlay last week published a pointed but measured essay describing the aggressive political bias that’s dominated his education on the Bronx campus, where generations of famous and well-connected New Yorkers, from Jack Kerouac to Eliot Spitzer, have matriculated or sent their children.
Faculty “feel obligated to open students’ eyes to the inequality that surrounds them,” Finlay explained, but that takes the form of “continuous pressure in the classroom to embrace visions of wholesale societal reform.”
The message, hammered relentlessly into students’ heads at Horace Mann, is that “the system is broken, unable to be reformed, rotten to the core, and deserving of demolition,” he wrote.
The irony of hyper-privileged New Yorkers paying nearly $60,000 a year for their children to learn they are the undeserving beneficiaries of a broken system need not be dwelled upon here. Finlay’s essay breaks the self-imposed conspiracy of silence that has largely shielded top private schools from criticism from within.
…
This explains how the parent body of these schools can be sloppy with C-suite executives and boldface names from media, film and television who grow unaccountably meek and humble in the face of private-school admissions officers and headmasters despite their aggressive, Type A personalities in every other facet of their lives. Finlay’s very public essay is a tacit rebuke to parents, like those at the exclusive Dalton School, who penned an open letter complaining that “love of learning and teaching is now being abandoned in favor of an ‘anti-racist’ curriculum” but were too timid to sign their names to the seven-page complaint.
Wealthy parents can afford to purchase billboards anonymously demanding elite private schools teach their kids “how to think, not what to think.” But they cannot afford to put at risk their children’s shot at the Ivy League, so they sit and seethe, lest their children be deemed not a good fit and “counseled out.”
The more troubling picture Finlay paints is of a drifting and deeply anti-intellectual institution. It’s a devastating strike at the heart of another story affluent parents comfort themselves with: that the obscene price they pay for elite private school is not about protecting their privilege. Given the chaotic state of public education, there’s simply no other way for children to get a rich and stimulating education. But Finlay makes clear, the object of social justice-related curricula at Horace Mann “is not for the material to be challenged, but absorbed without question.”
