Archive | June, 2026

Crisis for Public Education and Democracy

19 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/18/2026

A new report from the Network for Public Education (NPE) documents the ongoing demolition of public schools. For more than a century, public education has provided the means by which the diverse American public became naturally homogenized. At the same time, they have made the US’s vast population the most well-educated people on the planet. For not easily understood reasons, over the past 40-years, the ultra-right and the uber-rich have been attacking America’s public schools.

The NPE conclusion to their report — “Public School in America; Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools” — states:

“This report tells a clear and troubling story. Across the country, statehouses are making deliberate choices — choices that defund neighborhood schools, strip teachers of dignity and professional standing, leave vulnerable children without protection, and redirect billions of public dollars to private alternatives that are too often beyond public control. These are not accidents of policy or the unintended consequences of well-meaning reform. They are the predictable results of an ideological campaign, decades in the making, whose architects have been candid about their ultimate goal: the elimination of public education as Americans have known it.” (NPE Report page 26)

Report Basis

Carol Burris, the director of NPE, led this report. She is a former New York city school principal and has been conducting research on the state of America’s public schools for more than a decade.

To ensure an objective finding, Carol and her team developed a set of four standards each weighted with different point totals. The maximum points possible were 102.

The expansion of privatization and student protection was set to 58 points. For this evaluation, charter schools and vouchers deducted from the totals for various reasons. For example, states lost 2 points if they had a voucher program that does not require accreditation for private schools. States also lost 2 points if they allowed multi-school charter authorizations based on a company having one school receiving a charter contract.

The student protection part of this standard was concerned with how school privatization laws protected students. States lost 2 points if they had a voucher program that allowed discrimination based on religion or if LGBTQ students were not protected.

Conditions for Teaching and learning were valued at 24 points. States were evaluated on the existence of laws banning discrimination and if those laws protected all students. They also looked at student teacher ratios and corporal punishment rules. 

School funding was given a total of 16 points. It ranks statehouses based on how responsibly they fund public education — evaluating both the adequacy and equity of school financing — and on whether they pay teachers a living wage.

Protection for homeschooled students was given 4 points. The homeschooling segment is America’s fastest growing and some states do not require any homeschooling information. Most states with homeschooling rules require that schooling instructors have education qualifications but often that simply means possessing a GED. (NPE Report page 7)

Nebraska with 87.5 points and Vermont with 82 points were the only two states that scored more than 80 out of the 102 possible points. They were awarded an A. The B range was pegged between 64 and 79 points with 13 states in that range. Another 13 states with scores between 50 and 63 received a C. Six states with scores between 40 and 49 received a D and 17 states with scores below 40 were assigned F. Florida had America’s worst score at 14. (NPE Report page 9)

The NPE report lists state scores from highest to lowest in the following table. (NPE Report page 10)

An Observation from the Report

School choice programs generally increase segregation with vouchers enabling outright discrimination using public money. The publicly financed discrimination against gay students is difficult for me to understand. I grew up on a ranch in Idaho where we routinely had homosexual animals appear in our herds. This happened often enough that it was clearly not a rare event. I always believed that homosexuality amongst humans was naturally occurring and also not a rare event. So, when I see bullies or benighted people attacking the LGBTQ community, I am repulsed.

NPE highlighted Dayspring Christian Academy a voucher school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The school states it “retains the right to refuse enrollment to or to expel any student who engages in sexual immorality, including any student who professes to be homosexual/bisexual/transgender or is a practicing homosexual/bisexual/transgender, as well as any student who condones, supports, or otherwise promotes such practices (Leviticus 20:13, Romans 1:27).” Not only are gay people discriminated against but anyone who does not join in the bigotry is also to be expelled. Remember, public tax dollars are paying for this. (NPE Report page 11)

I looked up their references and they both have similar wordings. Leviticus 20:13 says, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them has committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” This thousands of years old statement is meanspirited and heartless. Plus, I might point out, most gay men do not “lieth with a woman.” These ancient religious texts have symbolic value but should never be interpreted literally. It is sad that some Christians use the Bible as an excuse to discriminate and even worse that the public is forced to pay for it.

Conclusion

While it is true that the NPE report is awash in data and facts making it somewhat tedious to read, it is only 28 pages of statements and 16 pages of appendix. I encourage everyone to read it and see how far right-wing ideologues and their billionaire funders have come toward ending public education in America. It is a crisis that must be met or our democracy and the American way of life will be ended.

The report quotes Tiffany Justice, founder of Moms for Liberty, when a ProPublica reporter asked the then visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation what percentage of children should be in public schools? She replied:

“I hope to get to zero. If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America would be a better place.” (NPE Report page 6)

This is the position of the radical-right. Conservatives and liberals alike should be alarmed.

In 2009, Diane Ravitch finished writing her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. In it she discussed the “billionaires boys’ club.” On page 278 she states:

“Since I concluded my book in November 2009, I discovered that the billionaire boys’ club extends far beyond the big three foundations I wrote about in Chapter 10: Gates, Broad, and Walton. It includes super-rich individuals from Wall Street and the high-technology sector who have decided to have a go at reforming public education, …”

What most of us did not appreciate at the time is that what these ultra-wealthy were after was monetizing, privatizing and ending universal free public education.

In 2018, NPE held a convention in Indiana. Ravitch opened that gathering stating, ““We are the resistance and we are winning!” Teacher bloggers across the country were destroying the billionaires on social media and their education agendas were stymied. Then COVID happened. During that time Facebook made major changes to how it distributed posts. Soon bloggers like me who would have thousands of readers suddenly only had a few hundred. Many effective education bloggers just gave up.

Today, we have a billionaire President running the Heritage Foundations education agenda playbook. For the first time in American history the federal government in sponsoring vouchers and his billionaire secretary of education is dismantling the department. Public education is facing a crisis.

If you value democracy, community and public schools, it is time to go to the ramparts and fight off the “billionaire boys’ club.” 

ACT and SAT – Sophist Wastes

9 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/9/2026

STEM educators at the University of California (UC) are calling for re-implementing standardized testing for enrollment. This move would be great for the people cashing in on students and for maintaining elitism. However, it is financially harmful to families and undermines equity. Multiple research efforts show that high school transcripts and GPA (Grade Point Average) — which are not profit drivers — provide superior information to standardized testing.

In 2020, the UC system stopped requiring SAT or ACT testing data for enrollment. At the time both the LA Times and the San Diego Union posted articles opposing this move. The San Diego Union stated:

“UC admits students to campuses based on 14 criteria but bases systemwide eligibility on only two — test scores and high school grade point average. 
Looking at those two criteria, the task force found SAT scores to be a better predictor of UC performance than GPA because grading standards differ across schools and teachers.”

This finding of the University of California’s Task Force on Standardized Testing is surprising. Many studies have found the opposite. A 2014 study of 123,000 students sponsored by the National Association for College Admission Counseling was performed at 33 schools including Wake Forest, Bowdoin and Smith. The schools all made SAT or ACT test score submittals optional for student applicants. It is believed that those who did not reveal scores likely had significantly lower scores. However, the college GPAs and graduation rates were almost identical between the two groups. “Students with strong high school grades generally performed well in college despite poor test scores.”

A 2020 study of 55,000 Chicago public schools conducted by the University of Chicago found that GPA was a much better predicator of both freshman year grades and graduation rates compared to ACT testing. According to the lead author of the study, Elaine Allensworth:

“GPAs measure a very wide variety of skills and behaviors that are needed for success in college, where students will encounter widely varying content and expectations. In contrast, standardized tests measure only a small set of the skills that students need to succeed in college, and students can prepare for these tests in narrow ways that may not translate into better preparation to succeed in college.”

Similar research performed in 2022 at the University of Tennessee and another 2022 effort at the University of Iowa showed testing not to be as predictive as GPA. A faculty report at Purdue noted that SAT scores are really weak in predicting graduation and claimed if you added the other factors, they might even turn up negative. Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost of Oregon State University, referred to admissions testing as pseudo-academic factors that add “almost nothing to an admission officer’s ability to predict an individual student’s academic performance in college.”

Berkley’s Saul Geiser wrote a paper explaining the error giving rise to the University of California Task Force’s surprising conclusion. The paper’s abstract states:

“One of the major claims of the report of University of California’s Task Force on Standardized Testing is that SAT and ACT scores are superior to high-school grades in predicting how students will perform at UC. This finding has been widely reported in the news media and cited in several editorials favoring UC’s continued use of SAT/ACT scores in university admissions. But the claim is spurious, the statistical artifact of a classic methodological error: omitted variable bias. Compared to high-school grades, SAT/ACT scores are much more strongly correlated with student demographics like family income, parental education, and race/ethnicity. As a result, when researchers omit student demographics in their prediction models, the predictive value of the tests is artificially inflated. When student demographics are included in the model, the findings are reversed: High-school grades in college-preparatory courses are actually the stronger predictor of UC student outcome.” (Emphasis Added)

Behind the Testing Advocacy

College Board reports that in 2024, 1.97 million students took the SAT. This was a 3% increase over 2023. That means that with just this one product they took in $100 million. They also sell test preparation materials and tutoring. Testing at this company is generating a large cash flow which pays many big salaries that are not counted as profits. So of course, companies like College Board like this business.

However, the reason for 600 stem educators in the UC system calling for testing to be resumed is not so obvious. Their joint letter stated, “An admissions process that ignores foundational readiness does a disservice to the most vulnerable students.” Berkeley math teacher Zvezda Stankova is noted as a lead organizer of the movement. She described a spring 2023 Calculus II class as being eye opening and stated:

“Something had changed drastically. The bottom was taken out, and there were 25 to 30% of the students who were in free fall. There was nothing you could do for them. They were just not prepared.”

If these students were in Calculus II, doesn’t that mean they passed a Calculus I class the previous fall at Berkeley? That indicates that either their Berkley teacher in the fall just passed them along or Stankova is a terrible educator. It does not indicate that their weakness was not discovered because they did not take the SAT.

The STEM faculty at University of California San Diego (UCSD) provided about 200 of the 600 signatures of UC faculty calling for the testing requirements to be reinstated for admission. The latest data provided by the UC system says that the new admits GPA at UCSD was greater than 4.11 and at Berkeley it was greater than 4.15. It is beyond my comprehension how students with this kind of success in high school are not succeeding.

Since high school grades are the gold standard predictor of success in college, the complaints of the UC educators make little sense.

Harry Feder Executive Director and Akil Bello Senior Director at Fairtest.org put together a report refuting the New York Times calling for a returned to mandatory SAT testing for college admissions. An early claim in their paper states:

“The SAT is an extraordinarily effective self-validation mechanism for an elitist ‘meritocracy’ to continue to perpetuate itself. It is designed to maintain the existing class structure.”

They conclude their report:

“[D]ata indicates requiring the test will turn away so many more otherwise qualified disadvantaged applicants. One can only conclude that the real motivators of the test requirement crowd are: a) keeping their alma maters “elite” (and all the coding that comes with that); b) enrollment management or c) economic self-interest.”

One of my favorite quotes about elites comes from Oregon States Jon Boeckenstedt:

“Maybe–just maybe–the term “elite” means “uncluttered by poor people.”  And maybe that’s the problem?”

Conclusion

I agree with Saul Geiser, former UC admissions official, when he stated that the SAT is “a poor fit for America’s public universities.”

I don’t believe this but maybe the COVID disruption in education caused some holes in the recent math students at these universities. It seems much more likely that there is a hidden agenda and these stellar students matriculating to the UC did not actually collapse.

I earned a mechanical engineering degree from San Diego State University and did graduate school at UCSD. After working in Silicon Valley, I returned to San Diego to become a teacher. I would be completely shocked if my top scoring AP physics students did not do well at a UC but I do know from my experience that lower-level math teachers at junior colleges have superior instructors to those I observed on a UC campus. Maybe the COVID disruption did more to harm teaching at the UC than it did to harm the performance newly admitted students.

Nobody disputes that the SAT does an excellent job correlating with family wealth but as the authors at Fairtest wrote, “The tests hurt the chances of far more poor and underrepresented students of talent than they help.”  When SAT and ACT data are compared to other application data, they are redundant and not predictive.

SAT and ACT testing are expensive and provide virtually no benefit to universities.

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