tultican

By Thomas Ultican 5/19/2026

Recently both the New York Times and the billionaire propaganda rag ‘The 74’ ran articles about the National Assessment of Education Progress’s (NAEP) declining scores. For more than a decade reading and math scores have been declining and the authors of both articles postulated that the cause is either social media or the demise of test and punish federal education policy or both. This view was originally put forward this May in a report from the Education Recovery Scorecard titled “From Education Recession to Education Recovery.” Neither proffered answer is likely a bullseye and the falling scores are less meaningful than they appear.

Calling it an “education recession” is a red hearing. Professor Paul Thomas called it “yet another oversell.” This verbiage is an attack on public education and indicates this is not a serious study.

NAEP is often called the national education report card, but it suffers from the common affliction of standardized testing. For years, anyone paying close attention has known that education testing operates in such a noisy arena that it cannot reliably identify good schools or teachers. The only student variable correlated with higher test results is family wealth. When statistical studies of standardized testing data are made, there is only one factor that has an r-value greater the 0.3 (weakly correlated) and that is family wealth which has an r-value of 0.9 (highly correlated).

People and organizations the report cites for various kinds of help taint this work. They include Brown University economist Emily Oster who gained notoriety for her call to put the kids back in school at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020. She was followed by Josh Bleiberg of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education and Nate Mulkus from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The Carnegie Foundation of New York, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Joyce Foundation and the Gates Foundation were all thanked for funding.

These supporters and contributors have a history of promoting NCLB style testing oversight and punishment. In 2014, The Washington Post wrote that under CEO Arthur Brooks, AEI had emerged as “the dominant conservative think tank,” becoming more influential than the Heritage Foundation. Over at Media Bias – Fact Check, they rate AEI as having a right bias and medium credibility. Tim Knowles at Carnegie Corporation has been working to replace public schools with students at computer terminals earning proof of skills badges. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Joyce Foundation and the Gates Foundation all supported NCLB and school privatization.

NCLB and The Test Score Decline

Whan NCLB first arrived, there were no consequences but by 2005 schools were being threatened with shutdown and having all of the staff fired. As the threats became real and schools were shuttered (all in poverty areas because poor students had poor test results) school administrators and teachers started desperately trying to save their jobs and schools. By 2010, curriculum had been narrowed significantly and there was test prep going on throughout the school year and within a few weeks of the testing window, all students started taking practice tests.

A dive into how test results were being evaluated, revealed students who had just barely failed on previous exams were the best target for score improvements. These students were often pulled out of regular classes to participate in special test preparation classes. It had nothing to do with helping them but was solely to save the school and jobs.

Schools held assemblies to pump the kids up to do well on the tests. The high school kids knew that the testing meant nothing to them and were much harder to motivate. 

One major issue with NCLB testing was escalating passing scores became impossible to achieve. In fact, by 2014, the law required 100% of all students to be proficient which was a statistical impossibility. This ludicrous requirement brought the whole thing down when wealthy neighborhoods started having their schools threatened.

Test preparation did bring higher scores but undermined authentic education.

The Obama administration was force to give schools across the country waivers and on December 10, 2015, NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act. Removing the draconian NCLB rules meant schools could concentrate more on education than testing.

As a result, test preparation reduced significantly and authentic education was enhanced. I believe this is the major driver of today’s falling test scores and is clearly a good thing.

Social Media Not Likely the Villain

Smartphones are ubiquitous from middle school on. However, as a teacher, I did not experience a big problem with them in class. Because my classroom was also a science lab with many electrical outlets, sometimes I would have a dozen phones charging during class. From time-to-time students would look at their phones but a simple reminder from me was all it took for the phone to be put away. Of all class disruptions, I found smartphones a minor problem.

The National Bureau of Economic Research studied the of effect of smartphones on students. They concluded, “For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero.” 

The big problem I saw undermining student learning was the internet. I taught math and science. By 2013, almost every physics and chemistry problem was on the internet as were step by step solutions to all math problems. To learn math, physics or chemistry students need to struggle with solving problems. With the answers and solution steps on line, striving to learn was severely undermined. I was receiving the most beautifully written homework assignments I had ever seen followed by declining test scores.

My school district bought every student an I-pad and then replaced those with Google laptops. Most veteran teachers were having students store these devices under their desks or in backpacks during class. They were giant distractions that in total were a waste of money but teachers found a work around.

Propaganda Not Reporting

The New York Times article was sort of balanced but they reported the Education Recovery Scorecard report with no push-back. One of their first quotes came from AEI’s Matt Mulkus who stridently claimed, “I cannot be more emphatic: This is an enormous problem that’s not getting enough attention.” And the Times does not provide any counter to this statement or question the report’s use of “education recession” in its loaded title. However, compared to ‘The 74’ their article is very reasonable.

In its lead sentence, ‘The 74’ states, “The United States entered a “learning recession” in 2013 that it has struggled mightily — and thus far ineffectively — to escape, according to a report unveiled Wednesday by a group of respected social scientists.” Nothing in this statement is supported or fair, but that is the way billionaire funded propaganda functions.

Harvard economics professor, Thomas Kane, one of the creators of Scorecard, is paraphrased, “student achievement illustrates not merely the enormity of the loss, but also the impressive progress that preceded it.” If there is any real loss it is certainly not enormous.

Another quoted expert is Doug Lemov, former charter school teacher and administrator, who wrote the TFA training guide Teach Like a Champion. ‘The 74’ claims Lemov’s book is a “reference text for educators around the world.” Outside of the privatized charter industry, I am not aware of any schools using Lemov’s book.

Most trained professional educators find his teaching theories regressive. Jennifer Berkshire published a post by Layla Treuhaft-Ali under the title “Teach Like its 1885.” Layla wrote, “Placed in their proper racial context, the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of the Hampton Idea, where children of color are taught not to challenge authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite.”

So here it is. A phony study financed by billionaires is reported to the public by the New York Time and the billionaire propaganda rag ‘The 74’. The reality is decreasing test scores do not indicate much and certainly not an “education recession.” This is simply another billionaire financed attack on public education.

By Thomas Ultican 5/4/5026

‘The 74’ was created by billionaires in 2015 to accelerate privatizing public education. Lately, wealthy people have been buying established media with excellent reputations. These acquired media of course do not exclusively concentrated on education like ‘The 74’ but they do cover it. Last November, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined Democrats for Education Reform (DEFR) President, Jorge Elorza, to write an opinion piece in multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. It promoted Trump’s new voucher program and on April 30^th, ‘The 74’ carried an interview with Duncan also promoting that same legislation.

In the last 100 years, the two main groups championing vouchers are the super wealthy and racists not wanting their children in school with “those people.” The late John Walton of the Walmart clan — the richest family in the world — campaigned continuously for vouchers but every time he got them on a ballot the public rejected them. Vouchers have still never won a public vote. After Brown vs the board of education in 1954, southern states enacted vouchers to create schools for white kids only.

In 2025, the most corrupt President in the history of the United States pushed through his “Big Ugly Bill.” Its tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are paid for by reducing social services and significantly lowering support for medical costs. Lurking in the bill was also the Heritage foundation’s attack on public education know as “tax-credit scholarships.” It is the first ever federal education voucher program which caused Betty Pringle, President of the National Education Association, to declare, “This bill will devastate our schools and communities—all to finance massive tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.”

Sadly, America truly has become the land of billionaires against workers.

Voucher Support is NOT about Better Education

In a Time magazine article, Professor Josh Cowen wrote:

“Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.”

In a lame attempt to refute this data, Corey DeAngelis of the University of Arkansas complained that the Indiana study was non-experimental, as it compared voucher students to those remaining in traditional public schools. Because of the difficulties in creating experimentally designed voucher studies only the DC study was experimental and it is not likely to be repeated.

In looking at the DC voucher study, the Center for American Progress published “The Highly Negative Impacts of Vouchers” by Ulrich Boser, Meg Benner, and Erin Roth. The Introduction to their study states:

“How bad are school vouchers for students? Far worse than most people imagine. Indeed, according to the analysis conducted by the authors of this report, the use of school vouchers! — which provide families with public dollars to spend on private schools! — is equivalent to missing out on more than one-third of a year of classroom learning. In other words, this analysis found that the overall effect of the D.C. voucher program on students is the same as missing 68 days of school.”

Clearly, public policy supporting vouchers to improve education is untenable. So why are billionaires like Trump, DeVos, Koch, Dunn, and others campaigning to institute education vouchers? Koch and Trump seem to believe that they should not pay taxes in support of people who need to pay their own way and see vouchers as a path to ending publicly supported schools. People like DeVos and Dunn are Christian nationalists who believe America belongs to Christians and non-Christian are not real Americans. To them, public education is a non-Christian religion competing with Christianity.

Selling Rich Guy Propaganda

In March, Arne Duncan signed on as a senior fellow for DEFR and claims to have been on four or five panels at the annual ASU+GSV conference. The ASU+GSV yearly gathering is where titans of the digital universe gather to discuss how to end public schools and replace them with “Skills-Based Credentialing.” Forbes magazine called the conference “the Davos of Education.” They are calling for replacing grade level classes by putting children and also adults at computer screens earning credentials as America’s primary mode of education.

 In her book Slaying Goliath Diane Ravitch described the formation of DFER:

“In 2005, several hedge fund managers – Witney Tilson, Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, John Petry and Charles Ledley – launched Democrats for Education Reform at a posh party on Central Park South in Manhattan, where the inaugural speaker was a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. DEFR, as it is deceptively called, was founded to support school privatization by making strategic campaign contributions. Inspired by DFER, charter schools became the pet passion of Wall Street.” (Page 38)

As a new fellow at DEFR, Arne Duncan is still selling the spoiled milk of his days as Obama’s Secretary of Education. When George W. Bush made test-based accountability central to evaluating the nation’s schools plus narrowed their scope to math and English, a major consequence was the destruction of wonderful schools in poor communities. Despite the growing evidence that test-based accountability was harming public education, Duncan became a big proponent of evaluating schools with standardized testing. Today, that is still the method he uses to judge schools.

His argument for why Democrats should embrace Trump’s voucher program is based primarily on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) testing declines since 2013. Duncan says, “You saw last year’s NAEP results, which were devastating, but I just don’t see the sense of urgency out there.” It is not in his economic interest to notice that the first few years of testing saw dramatic growth in scores as schools learned to take the exams and then hit a pinnacle during his leadership. As the narrow and punish theory of education was enhanced, as he pushed education technology and as the science of reading was supported by billionaires, NAEP scores started slowly declining.

The 2024 NAEP results are nothing to celebrate but certainly are not a crisis. Since the 2019 testing window, all schools experienced a major COVID-19 disruption and in its aftermath a serious spate of absenteeism arose. Even Duncan noted, “I think the chronic absenteeism rate in Chicago is 41%; just think of four out of 10 kids missing a month or more of school every year!” Since the 2013 all-time high average NAEP scores for 4^th grade reading of 222, the average score has dropped to 215 or by 7 points. Likewise, 4^th grade math average has dropped 5 points, 8^th grade reading has dropped 10 points and 8^th grade math dropped 11 points.

With average scores of well over 200 points, these drops are not large but do seem to indicate a problem. However, many people believe standardized testing is not actually useful for measuring learning because of the large amount of error inherent in education testing. The only known factor well correlated to NAEP outcomes is family income, the wealthier the family, the higher the score. Duncan’s claim that the latest NAEP testing results are “devastating” is laughable.

Opinion

Almost 20 years ago, Rupert Murdock noted, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone …” For more than thirty years, extremely wealthy people, after those billions of education dollars, have been spending to privatize and undermine public education. They have created phony think tanks, phony graduate schools and propaganda based media. Vouchers are a major tool for destroying the public system. Vouchers remove funds from public schools and the authors of voucher-legislation work to insure they are given as little oversight as possible. Billionaires like the President of the United States do not care about people not in their social circles. They are what Minnesota Governor Tim Walz calls, “greedy bastards.”