By Thomas Ultican 8/24/2026

Big technology oligarchs are pushing their dangerous not-ready-for-prime-time artificial intelligence (AI) products into America’s schools. Their relentless drumbeat says don’t miss out because all schools need to implement AI tools now. Why the big rush? Technology writer Audrey Watters explains, “I mean, other than the desperate need of the tech sector to prove that the trillions of dollars invested in this endeavor will soon show some profit and that – unlike crypto and Web 3.0 – this isn’t just some giant fraud being perpetrated so executives can buy more private islands.”

Be assured, Audrey knows what she’s writing about. In fact, famed education historian, Diane Ravitch, claimed, “Audrey Watters is one of the best–maybe the very best–writers about Ed-tech.”

In her discussion of AI in education, Audrey is clearly not a fan with reasons. She shouts, ‘“AI” may be one of the biggest threats to teaching and learning, to epistemology and pedagogy that society has ever faced.” Prolific writer, Corey Doctorow, is in agreement with Audrey when he declares:

“AI is alarming for many reasons: it’s a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster.”

Both writers highlight the danger to epistemology which examines the nature, origin and limits of knowledge. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth and justification. Doctorow and Watters are concerned that AI perverts this branch of philosophy.

Watters has shared:

“When we talk about AI in education, we talk less about what automation and algorithms can do and more about what they will someday be able to do, what we’d like to see the classroom become. What we talk about when we talk about AI in education: …  Science fiction. Myth. Made-up histories and made-up futures.”

AI in Education

For decades, purveyors of technology have targeted education as a profit center. They have tried to sell putting kids at screens instead of hiring expensive teachers and they promote using tech for tutoring. The sector has produced an endless stream of applications designed to control schools and educators. AI is just another feeble technology pointed at students and schools. Professionals in the education sphere are not impressed.

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), spoke extensively about AI in a May speech to the National Press Club in Washington. Weingarten proposed a near total ban on computer screens for second grade and younger students. She also called for banning student-facing AI in elementary school, arguing that children need to build foundational skills which are undermined by algorithmic shortcuts.

Weingarten shared a concern about research showing that in a survey 88% of teachers reported student attention spans were shrinking. She pointed to online platforms like TikTok and YouTube as causative. Randi noted work by cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham’s suggesting students are not incapable of focusing, but are increasingly unwilling to do so when schoolwork feels dull by comparison to their online lives.

Last year, the AFT announced $23 million in funding from Open AI, Anthropic and Microsoft for a National Academy of AI Instruction to train up to 400,000 educators. The new entity will train teachers “on how to use AI tools for tasks like generating lesson plans.” University of Mississippi researcher, Mark Watkins, described this announcement as “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for.” However, teachers for the most part have gotten no AI training and this is an effort to fill that void.

After being quiet for more than a year, the Trump administration has finally provided guidance about AI and ed-tech in general. The vacant US Surgeon General’s office sent an advisory urging families and schools to reduce children’s screen time. It suggested that schools limit their computers to computer labs, invest in physical textbooks and “prioritize pen-and-paper curricula, hands-on activities and social activities for all grade levels.”

Sadly, the education department followed up with a totally unreasonable attack on America’s teachers. Education Department Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse responded to Weingarten’s allegation about the administrations lack of leadership on AI, not by addressing her statement, but by attacking the union. Newhouse’s bogus polemic presented with no foundation stated, “If there’s finally going to be an honest conversation about the damage done to American students, it should begin with the teachers unions’ enthusiastic support for a federal bureaucracy that has spent over $3 trillion only to watch student outcomes decline, along with their relentless push to keep schools shuttered during COVID,” NAEP data does not show a decline and while students were less likely to get sick than teachers, it was still a frightening problem; so, yes many teachers were worried.

AI in Education Dangers

Local parent organizations in New York City are calling for an AI moratorium in that city’s schools. They point to a growing opposition to AI and “to evidence that it represents substantial risk to student privacy, cognitive development and skills, critical thinking, creativity, mental health, and the environment.”

AI in school turned into a hyper-plagiarizing issue when ChatGPT became ubiquitous in classrooms. Mass plagiarization has left, educators, administrators and students grappling with AI policies and ethics.

A recent Rand Corporation study says, “As of December 2025, 67 percent of students endorsed the statement “The more students use AI for their schoolwork, the more it will harm their critical thinking skills”

A Brightly analysis says, “The biggest risk of AI tools in education is security.” Students have little understanding of how much personal data is being harvested. In addition, psychologists and educators believe computer interfaces are stopping the development of critical thinking and social-emotional learning. Children lose natural creativity which is replaced by dependence on digital tools.

There are also clear ethical concerns with AI. Its answers come from tainted sources which are often violent and sexually derived. These sources are informed by racism, misogyny, homophobia, nationalism, antisemitism, etcetera which come from the internet. AI is even trained on child pornography. The AI well is poisoned.

The Center for Universal Education at Brookings posted a major AI study this January. A key takeaway stated:

“Ultimately, we find that at this point in its trajectory, the risks of utilizing AI in education overshadow its benefits. This is largely because the risks of AI differ in nature from its benefits—that is, these risks undermine children’s foundational development, for example, when trust between students and teachers is diminished—a current risk of AI implementation—the benefits of AI-enriched teaching and learning materials cannot be fully realized. Understanding the distinction between enriched and diminished learning experiences is an important first step toward mitigating AI’s risks and harnessing its benefits in education.” (Page 12)

Conclusion

Like all new technologies, AI has potential to contribute to society but it also has potential to do harm. A lot of the information about AI is hype from billionaires. In the introduction to their book The AI Con, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna write:

“We are writing now, in late 2024, from the inside of what feels like the height of the AI hype bubble. As we say on the podcast: each time we think we’ve reached peak AI hype—the summit of bullshit mountain—we discover there’s worse to come.”

If you have not read these brilliant ladies’ book, it is not too late.

The bottom line is that in many cases we are being lied to about AI. It does have risks and its adoption into education needs to be slowed significantly.

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.” 

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.”

“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.”