News & Comment

Since No Child Left Behind became law, schools where there are lots of poor kids have been turned into brutal testing factories, where the focus is on raising test scores rather than raising children. Even so, the test scores inexorably reflect the economic disadvantages of poor communities, as parents each year continue to receive the federally-mandated letters telling them their schools are failing.  Some parents shake their heads and shrug off the letters because they know their child’s teacher is doing the best she can.  Others get frustrated and angry.  And yet most of these parents do not know that Karl Rove and his little band of Texans created NCLB with their dismay and frustration in mind, in order to replace public education, or to “blow it up a bit,” as former Assistant Secretary of Education Susan Neuman told Time Magazine in 2008. read more »

Let's take a trip deep into the magic kingdom of "Laissez Fairyland" and prostrate ourselves before the infallible and inscrutable force known as the free market. While this awesome deity cannot be seen, the high priests of free-market fundamentalism insist that we mere mortals must simply have faith that its mysterious workings are always in our best interest. Yeah, sure, your holiness. We saw how well that worked out for us wandering pilgrims after you true believers deregulated Wall Street, which then crashed on our streets. Well, get ready. Free-market purists want us to have another ungodly religious encounter with their omnipotent deity. Looking at America's trillion-dollar student debt crisis, these spiritualists had a burning-bush revelation. read more »

I may not look like it, but I am a modern-day serf. Saddled with thousands of dollars of student debt – debt that has been stripped of all consumer protections and is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy – I am part of a screwed generation. Earlier this year, the collective student loan burden in the United States passed the $1trillion mark. Analysts are increasingly referring to a student loan bubble that could result in a crisis similar to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. A bad job market for recent graduates and skyrocketing education costs have greatly exacerbated the problem. And among the nation's elite, there is a terrible sense of denial about just how bad the younger generations have it – old white guys in Congress believe we're merely lazy and entitled, having not had the good grace to be born into families with trust funds. It's a class war, and the middle class is losing. read more »

The “Overton Window” is not a new kind of low-glare, high-insulation windowpane. Identified by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Overton Window refers to the boundaries of the limited range of ideas and policies that are acceptable for consideration in politics at any one time. In other words, the Overton Window is the “box” that we are constantly exhorted to think outside of, only to be ignored or punished if we succeed. The debate about K-12 educational reform in the U.S. is an example of the Overton Window at work. For a generation, almost all of the debate about improving American schools has been limited to minor variations on two themes. read more »

This year's students are the workers of five or 10 or 15 years from now. There's an obvious statement for you, but it's one that is too rarely considered in discussions of education policy as hedge funders and corporate billionaires try to claim the mantle of doing what's right for kids, implying or saying straight out that teachers are too self-interested to represent kids and should be left out of the discussion altogether. The fundamental question is this: If you don't trust Wall Street or the Walton family to do what's in your best interest as an adult in the American workforce, why would you trust them to do what's in the best interest of the next generation of workers? read more »

The ongoing fiasco of Bobby Jindal’s “let the parents decide” voucher program in Louisiana is finally beginning to get some national media attention, for the simple reason that its logic is carrying it in directions that horrify its strongest proponents and intended beneficiaries. So down plunges the Pelican State into the political and constitutional thicket of how to shovel money to conservative evangelical schools without looking too closely at what they are teaching, while at the same time keeping away schools that conservative evangelicals hate and fear. read more »

Now that our "do nothing" Congress is finally set to "do something" to stop interest on student loans from doubling, I think I’ve finally figured out what motivates conservatives on education in general, and conservative opposition to student loans in general. Conservatives are fighting to save our children - your children, my children, America’s children - from a fate worse than collective bargaining. Conservatives are fighting to save America’s youth from being "overeducated." Say what? "Overeducated"? What does that even mean? I used to think it meant having more education than available jobs require; like the students graduating off a cliff, into a market where most of the jobs being created are low wage jobs, as jobs in the middle of the income and skill spectrum are hollowed by the recession. In other words, I used to think "overeducated" was the flip-side of "underemployed." Then, Rush Limbaugh set me straight. read more »

Never mind "class warfare." Generational warfare continues apace, this time in the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which echoed the conservative message to young (and older) Americans struggling with student debt: Drop dead. read more »

Collection agencies do not make condolence calls. I understand this, believe me. But there are certain events in life during which people deserve to be treated with more than standard human decency. (Yes, I realize I'm pretending that treating people with human decency is standard these days. Humor me.) A death in the family — especially the death of a child — is one of those times. Or at least it used to be. The story of Francisco Reynoso's struggle to pay off his dead son's student loans, while dealing with collection agencies in the midst of his grief, suggests that times are changing. And not for the better. read more »

I was remiss in not writing earlier about Mitt Romney’s big K-12 education initiative, which basically just involves taking all the existing federal money spent for this purpose and tossing it out there as a hand grenade designed for the destruction of public schools. While the Obama administration has committed itself (to its own political peril) to the standards-and-accountability movement aimed at using federal dollars to leverage measurable improvements in low-performing public schools—a movement once championed by Republicans—Romney is moving in the opposite direction, proposing to turn over all those highly conditional taxpayer dollars to parents for use however and wherever they want, with zero accountability for results other than via abstract market forces. The primary beneficiaries, of course, will be private schools that will pocket public subsidies and do whatever they choose. read more »