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Christian Nationalists and Texas Public Schools

By Thomas Ultican 10/26/2025

In September, the fifth largest school district in Texas, Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD), adopted Bluebonnet Learning’s program of instruction. Three of the nine board trustees voted against the adoption, calling it “state-sanctioned indoctrination.” Their concerns were well founded.

Bluebonnet uses Biblical passages in its lessons. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) contracted with Public Consulting Group in Boston to create the new curriculum. Public Consulting Group subcontracted with curriculum writers including Texas Public Policy Foundation, with radical Christian nationalist billionaire Tim Dunn serving as vice president on its board, and Hillsdale College, a rightwing Christian college and charter school organization from Michigan. TEA also hired a conservative educational publishing company co-founded by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to provide content for the state’s proposed program. But so far, the state has refused to identify the authors who transformed Amplify’s program into the Bible infused Bluebonnet curriculum.

TEA has made adopting Bluebonnet attractive. FWISD estimates that implementing Bluebonnet will cost nearly $2.4 million, however, TEA is providing $60 for every enrolled student so the districts expects to receive $4 million from the state. In addition, the Amplify reading lessons required staff to create content, but Bluebonnet creates the content for them.

Many people believe the real reason FWISD adopted Bluebonnet’s lessons is an attempt to placate Mike Morath, TEA commissioner of education. One of FWISD’s schools, Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade, failed the Texas Starr Testing for a fifth straight year. This triggered a state law requiring Morath to take some form of action. His options include taking over the district and replacing its elected leaders.

Reverend Mary Spradlin of Pastors for Texas Children said the adoption of Bluebonnet looked like a move by the district to placate TEA Commissioner Mike Morath. She added, “If you feel like you must adopt it to avoid a takeover, we’ve already lost control.” Reed Biltz, governance chair of the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County, also opposed the adoption saying it looks like taking a bribe from TEA. Bilz noted, “The league opposes threats to basic constitutional rights.”

TEA Strips Democratic Rights in Fort Worth

Today’s (10/23/2025) Fort Worth Report announced, “Fort Worth ISD’s nine locally elected trustees are out as Texas officials stepped in Thursday after years of poor student outcomes.” Whether you believe FWISD Superintendent Karen Molinar’s claim that adopting Bluebonnet had nothing to do with a threatened state takeover or believe the opposite claims, it makes little difference now. The Report headline reads, “Texas takes control of FWISD in state’s second-largest public school intervention.”

Morath wrote, “Since the campus earned its fifth consecutive unacceptable academic rating in that year, the school’s subsequent closure has no bearing on, and does not abrogate, the compulsory action the statute requires the commissioner to take.” The commissioner was not required to get rid of the elected school board; that was his choice.

This is the same reason that the Houston ISD was taken over. One school in a high poverty community did not reach the designated cut scores on Texas Starr testing five years in a row.

Like all standardized testing, the Starr results only correlate strongly with family wealth. In FWISD, 85% of the students are either Black or Hispanic with 83% listed as economically disadvantaged. In Texas, this kind of data means a community’s democratic right to elect their school leaders will likely be stripped. Now the state’s largest and fifth largest school districts, which are in heavily democratic communities, have been taken over by the Christian nationalist running TEA.

Besides creating Bluebonnet, Texas political leaders are taking other measures to force Christianity into public schools. New state laws require displaying the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms. Gov. Greg Abbott also signed legislation in June that allows districts to offer a daily, voluntary period of time to pray and read the Bible or other religious texts. A 2023 law allows districts to hire chaplains as counselors.

Why has driving Protestantism into public schools become a state agenda?

Billionaire Dollars Driving Christian Nationalism

A year ago, Propublica published “A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start.” The article begins by telling the story of former Texas state representative Glenn Rogers. It would be hard to imagine a more conservative legislator, but he got crosswise with Billionaire oilmen and hardcore Christian nationalists Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. Rogers believes two of his votes caused the problem. He voted against vouchers and voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of their most powerful allies.

In 2023, Hours before the Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach Ken Paxton in May, a well-funded supporter of the attorney general issued a threat to his fellow Republicans. A vote to impeach Paxton, Jonathan Stickland wrote on Twitter, “is a decision to have a primary.”

Stickland was the leader of Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee that has donated millions of dollars to far-right candidates in the state. It is a key part of the constellation of political campaigns, institutions and dark-money groups that West Texas oil tycoons, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, have lavishly financed in their long-term crusade to push Texas to the extreme right. KSAT in San Antonio claims, “Over the past 20 years, Dunn and the Wilks brothers have sunk nearly $100 million into a sprawling mix of nonprofits, political campaigns, think tanks, fundraising committees and websites to advance their far-right religious, economic and anti-LGBTQ+ views.”

In October 2023, the Texas Tribune wrote, “Nick Fuentes is just the latest white supremacist embraced by Defend Texas Liberty.” The meeting between Defend Texas Liberty’s Jonathan Strickland and the pro-Nazi Fuentes caused such a backlash that Strickland was removed from his post. The political foes of Dunn and Wilks believed this issue would finally undermine their political juggernaut.

Instead, in 2024, Dunn and Wilks materialized large victories everywhere and grew stronger than ever. They defeated long time political foes and set their allies up to take over the state Legislature. According to KSAT, they left no doubt “as to who is winning a vicious civil war to control the state party.”

Too Much Money in Too Few Hands

This year, Texas Republicans finally forced vouchers onto a public that did not want them. In addition to the Christian nationalist money, Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, spent heavily to make vouchers a reality in Texas. Yass is a Jewish boy from the Bronx who co-founded Susquehanna, now a giant options trading and market making company. In the last year, according to Forbes, his net value has more than doubled from $27.6 billion to $59 billion.

Yass and his wife believe in school choice and that is their right. However, their unbelievably large fortune makes their opinion so much more important than those of the rest of us. It is the same with politics in Texas. Dunn and Wilks have such large fortunes they swamp the public’s will. Their lavish spending for Christian nationalism and Jesus in politics is overwhelming the majority of Texans.

This article provides one more piece of evidence making it clear something must be done about the growing menace of oligarchs in America. We need some sort of redistribution of assets in the United States and much higher taxes on the wealthy. The state of economic inequity is a major outcome of the Reagan revolution and it is destroying our democracy.

Tags: Christian Nationalism, education, Farris Wilks, Jonathan Strickland, Ken Paxton, Mike Morath, Nick Fuentes, Tim Dunn

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Categories Justice

Beyond Resilience Katrina at 20

14 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/14/2025

The book “William Franz Public School” is a well documented work that shines a light on the deep racism in New Orleans and especially in its public schools. The title is the school where 6-years-old Ruby Bridges accompanied by federal officers desegregated New Orleans’ schools to the chagrin of the 1,000 plus protesters out front. “The message rang clear; Louisiana’s strong commitment to the education of its White, wealthier children paralleled an equally strong commitment to keep its Black, poor residents uneducated and isolated, and thus economically and politically powerless.” (WFPS 11) That ugly racism still permeates New Orleans which made me question what are their Black residents thinking and feeling. Ashana Bigard’s book, “Beyond Resilience Katrina 20”, brilliantly provides some answers.

Bigard and her family have been in New Orleans forever; she is at least fifth generation. Her large family is a big part of the soul of New Orleans. Ashana takes her readers into the Black community that has refused to be beaten down and defeated by wealthy White supremacists.

After Katrina, the people in power stole the public community schools, fired the mostly Black teaching force and brought in predominantly white kids from Teach for America (TFA) to teach. Ashana shares that story beginning with running from the storm and then fighting against injustice for the last 20-years.

Katrina Arrived

Hurricane Katrina arrived about a week before payday for much of the New Orleans community. Like many others, Ashana and her family had experienced hurricanes before. They really could not afford to travel so they chose to wait it out at home. The storm came through and made a direct hit on the city, it was loud and intense but the next morning things seemed OK.

It was a tough night, but they had successfully ridden out the storm and it was beautiful outside. Ashana decided to walk to the old New Orleans community of Carrollton to check on a friend. Downed trees were everywhere. On the way an old man informed her that if she did not “have a boat in your pocket” she better get out of there because the levees had failed and the water was coming. (Bigard Page 11)

Some people in the community believed the levees had been purposefully blown up. Ashana and her family quickly got it together to load up and head out for Houston where they stayed until New Orleans opened again.

NPE 2025 Photo by Ultican

Back in New Orleans “the fraud was staggering” and media racism was appalling. Ashana noted:

“It seemed like every opportunity afforded to them, the media disparaged us calling us refugees and calling us looters. … White people getting food from stores to help each other … were described as ‘finding food.’ Black people doing the exact same thing were ‘looters’ and criminals who should be shot on sight, despite the fact that they had been left to die with no water, no food for days on end.” (Bigard Pages 32 and 33)

Rebuilding New Orleans

The work force in New Orleans is dominated by the Black community. However, when the rebuild started, local unions were frozen out. Wealthy carpetbaggers were running the show. Ashana sarcastically asks, “how could everybody get their money off the top if they were actually paying people real wages?”

There were no longer community schools that welcomed children or a city that was welcoming to its people. They soon began referring to their children’s schools as “test prep factories” and the kids called them “preparatory prison practice.” The youths of New Orleans named the new Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools “kids in prison practice.” (Bigard Page 34)

Ashana worked at various non-profits as a student, parent and community counselor and advocate. She worked for families and friends of Louisiana’s incarcerated children where family members wanted to understand how their children first came into contact with the legal system.

“Where were the arrests happening? Where were the summons coming from?” (Bigard Page 44)

The discovery didn’t take long. Ashana states, “The police inside the schools were arresting children for almost anything.” (Bigard Page 45) Best practices in adolescent development call for supportive environments, recognition of the biological realities of the teen years, and second chances not criminalization and punishment. This new school-to-prison pipeline was a complete abandonment of reason.

What developed in New Orleans was a harsh unforgiving no-excuses approach. This led to high expulsion rates and a 61% graduation rate.

Ben Kleban of College Prep charters told Ashana he would run his schools the way he wanted and if you don’t like it do what I did and start your own school. However, many PHDs, principals and academics from New Orleans applied to start schools almost none of them received a charter. (Bigard Page 54)

Ashana tells the story of counseling a teenage boy, a good student whose grades began falling for no apparent reason. Also he was becoming more and more despondent. After a week of discussion, he finally opened up about being sexually assaulted by a female TFA teacher. Apparently, the teacher succumbed to the adultification of young Black people. The student was blaming himself and tried to protect the teacher saying, “She came from Teach for America: they don’t give them much training.” (Bigard Page 98)

Ashana and her team were brought in to conduct a workshop on trauma: signs of trauma, solutions for trauma and how to deal with trauma in your classroom. Ten minutes into the workshop all 26 of the young White women were in tears. Ashana states:

“They were crying saying they were overwhelmed, suffering from secondary trauma, felt like they were crazy, and they all felt they were doing more harm than good. They had no support and when they went to Teach for America for support, they told them to try harder, and if they weren’t connecting, it was their fault because everyone else was doing a great job.”

The training developed into multiple unscheduled workshops that day as teachers went out and encouraged their colleagues to attend. Ashana says:

“I left the workshop understanding you never know all sides of the story and that there was a second wave of victims, and that was young, hopeful, starry-eyed white young people who thought this would be a great city to live in and a great opportunity and they could come and help out because of the teacher shortage which was caused by the firing of all our teachers and subsequently telling them that they had to take multiple tests to qualify to come back to teach while simultaneously telling young white children they only needed two weeks of training to do so.” (Bigard Pages 119-121)

The Legacy of Racism Lives On

To enroll children into the almost all charter system in New Orleans, parents must use OneApp. It runs the school choice algorithm but strangely only white children get into the best schools, not even if you’re a Black family in the upper middle class do you get a seat. It is common to see white people move to the city and magically get their children into schools with 100 children on the waiting list. Ashana notes, “They didn’t even know the school existed prior to moving to the city, but racism and classism still existed heavily within the new system.” (Bigard Page 268)

Ashana tells black people in New Orleans that poverty is not a moral failing. She says, “We start understanding that we are not broke we are stolen from.” (Bigard Page 318)

I have presented a few highlights in this delightful and insightful book. For me, Ashana’s book offers a rare view into the life of Black people fighting White supremacy and a story of love and family.

Bravo Ashana Bigard!

Tags: Ashana Bigard, Ben Kleban, Charter schools, Education Reform, hurricane-katrina, New Orleans, Public education, racism

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

Public Education Shaped by 19th Century Dispute

8 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/8/2025

Horace Mann, frequently referred to as the “father of public education”, declared that public education should be nonsectarian. He was responding to a dispute in the Protestant community between the Congregationalists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians and other Protestant sects who were threatening to separate from the common schools and form their own parochial systems. Mann countered that schools should restrict themselves to commonly shared Protestant values. He believed such values were the principles of civic ethics necessary for participation in our republican form of government. Katherine Stewart reported, “Representatives of a number of sects immediately and vigorously attacked him, but large majorities agreed with this policy, and it soon became the norm in the ‘common school,’ or public school movement.”

As long as the overwhelming majority of Americans were Protestant, this solution was workable. However, the Catholic community was growing. The 25,000 American Catholics in 1790 represented less than 1% of the population. By 1820, their 195,000 members were 2% of American people. In 1830 they were at 318,000 (2.5%), in 1840 663,000 (3.9%) and in 1850 their ranks grew to 1,600,000 (6.9%). (See “Religion in America; A Political History” By Denis Lacorne Page 64) The Catholics were becoming a bigger group with growing influence.

In his book, “Schooled to Order: a Social History of Public Schooling in America” Professor David Nasaw noted that common school textbooks were filled with racist characterization of the Irish and disdain for the Pope. The Catholic clergy were described as “libertine, debauched, corrupt, wicked, immoral, profligate, indolent, slothful, bigoted, parasitic, greedy, illiterate, hypocritical and pagan.” Catholic parents did not want to expose their children to this and they did not like daily readings from the King James Bible instead of their preferred Douai-Rheims Bible.

Before we go on, a little background on these two Bibles. The Douai–Rheims Bible is a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English made by members of the English College, Douai, in the service of the Catholic Church. The New Testament portion was published in Reims, France, in 1582, and the Old Testament portion was published twenty-seven years later in 1610 by the University of Douai. The Latin Vulgate is a translation of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts, accomplished in 382 mainly by Saint Jerome.

The King James Bible is an Early Modern English translation sponsored by King James I of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611. The source material for the translation includes the Latin Vulgate plus Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts.

Although very similar to each other there are some differences. However, early 19^th century bigotry trumped all differences. In her study of 19^th century textbooks, Ruth Miller Elson showed that anti-Catholic propaganda was a staple of allegedly disinterested lessons on non-religious topics. In history, they learned “the Roman Catholic religion completed” the Roman Empire’s “degeneracy and ruin.” Lessons in patriotism taught that the founding fathers would never “have bowed to papal infallibility, or paid the tribute to St. Peter.” Evan textbooks that commended tolerance in matters of religion were “full of the horrible deeds of the Catholics.”

Maybe it is not so shocking how violent the Catholic-Protestant dispute became. One of the deadliest episodes in early American history occurred in 1844 when Protestants and Catholics took to the streets of Philadelphia. After two weeks of rioting, twenty-five people laid dead in the streets, more than one-hundred were wounded and dozens of homes as well as two churches were torched.

In 1859, a watershed moment occurred in Boston involving a ten-years old student, Thomas Whall. He refused to read the Ten Commandments at the beginning of his morning class at Eliot School, a Boston public school. Young Whall refused based on the fact that these Commandments were from the King James Bible. By this act he was breaking Massachusetts law. The principal “whipped” him on the hands with a rattan stick until his fingers were bleeding and Whall fainted. He would not yield. Whall’s fellow students followed his lead and refused to obey. Hundreds of them were expelled. (Lacorne Page 72)

After Whall’s father sued the principal for using excessive force, Judge Sebeus Maine found for the school and its principal. He said that Thomas’s refusal threatened the stability of the public school, “the granite foundation upon which our republican form of government rests.”He indicated the readings were free of dogma; it was all done objectively with no inappropriate comments. Therefore, there was no violation of freedom of conscience. (Lacorne Page 73)

Katherine Stewart reported:

“This incident led Catholic leaders to conclude that public schools could not serve their community. In response, they launched a movement to create Catholic parochial schools in Boston and across the nation.”

No Compromise

The disdain and prejudice against Catholics was deeply ingrained in Ohio. University of Cincinnati’s former writing coach, Deborah Rieselman quotes associate history professor Linda Przybyszewski:

‘“It was very respectable then to be anti-Catholic,’ notes Przybyszewski. ‘Neighborhoods were often segregated. In 1844, after Cincinnati newspapers carried stories of anti-Catholic riots on the east coast, a group of men threw sticks and rocks at a house occupied by Catholic clergy, according to a German priest who had immigrated to Cincinnati.”’

“Even the Rev. Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, was a vocal opponent of Catholics. Considered a progressive thinker because he was a black abolitionist and the founder of a Cincinnati seminary, Beecher preached a ‘papal conspiracy theory’ that Catholics would take over the West.”

An Anti-Catholic Cartoon

In 1869, a fierce political and legal battle erupted in Cincinnati, Ohio. For some time there had been discussions on the school board about the possibility of uniting the public schools and the Catholic system. There were more than 12,000 students in the Catholic parochial system. One of the keys to the new plan was that there would be no Bible reading in classes.

Ohio State History Teacher, Harold M. Helfman, wrote:

“The bitter clash between those maintaining pro-Bible and anti-Bible viewpoints was to drive both groups into positions of no surrender; their mutually hostile attitudes were to be seized upon by societies, editors, lecturers, ministers, and politicians bent on stirring up latent anti-Popery passions. The board of education’s action was destined to be the focus of a public opinion which plunged Cincinnati into a boiling caldron of fear and bigotry.”

Top legal minds in Ohio fought this battle out in the courts with the Ohio Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Board of Education and their no Bible reading plan. In a subsequent election, most of the board members who voted for the plan were reelected. Unfortunately, the attempts to unify the schools systems were ended by the associated vitriol.

The anti-Catholic bias in America was deeply held by many Protestants; lasting a long time. During the Presidential election campaign of 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon, former President Harry Truman was asked about the influence of the Pope on Kennedy. He cracked, “It’s not the Pope I’m afraid of, it’s the Pop.” Kennedy became the first Catholic ever elected President of the United States.

As late as 1887, the school day still contained “sacred song,” “the literature of Christendom” and “faithful and fearless Christian teachers,” according to a speech that Cincinnati superintendent E.E. White gave to the National Education Association that year. In 1957, my second grade teacher in King Hill, Idaho read a verse to us from the King James Bible every day.

During his second term, US Grant called on states to prohibit “the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets” and ban “the granting of any school funds or school taxes . . . for the benefit or in aid, directly or indirectly, of any religious sect or denomination.” Grant concluded, “No sectarian tenets shall ever be taught in any school supported in whole or in part by the State, nation, or by the proceeds of any tax levied upon any community.”

James Blaine, a former Republican House Speaker with his own 1876 presidential ambitions, jumped at the political opportunity. He introduced a constitutional amendment seeking to codify Grant’s proposals. Although some argue that these provisions reflect a long and admirable history of separation of church and state advanced by the founders, others maintain that these provisions reflect hate and anti-Catholic bigotry that peaked in the 1870s with the national proposal.

Blaine’s amendment failed in the Senate but has been adopted into the constitution of 37 states. In 2020, the Supreme Court discussed the Blaine amendments in Espinoza vs. Montana. In their decision they the court described the Blaine amendments as being “born of bigotry.” This decision has significantly undermined prohibitions of tax dollars going to religious schools.

Thoughts on Protecting Schools and Children

There is little doubt that running multiple tax supported education systems is less efficient and more expensive. However, if that is what people want; it is doable. Unfortunately, many voucher schools and charter schools are not being held accountable. If we are to have these multiple systems, they must all adhere to public education standards and accountability. That means no discrimination and no turning away undesirable students. No anti-LGBTQ rules, no religious tests and no student academic qualifications when accepting tax payer money.

Tags: bible, Harry Truman, history, James Blaine, Katherine Stewart, religion, Thomas Whall, Ulysses Grant

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Categories education

Billionaire-Financed Education Propaganda

29 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/29/2025

September 9^th, propaganda rag, ‘The 74’, published a classic example of anti-public education flummery, “COVID Worsened Long Decline in 12th-Graders’ Reading”. That long decline is a drop of nine points on a 500 point scale, but if the y-values on a line chart are manipulated it does look like a long decline. Starting with the 1994 data instead of the 1992 data that drop becomes 6 points, all of which occurred after science of reading was widely forced into classrooms starting about 2013. Whatever the cause for mildly declining reading scores, the article offers hair-on-fire analysis from pro-billionaire sources.

The 2024 math results had a 7-point decline from the highs; however 12^th grade math data has only been gathered since 2005.

Professional Analysis – Really?

George Bush and Ted Kennedy gave us the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act which significantly expanded the role of the federal government in education. Its philosophy of test and punish substantially increased the pressure to score well on testing. Since the only variable that higher test scores correlate with is family wealth, the high stakes meant that several outstanding schools in poor neighborhoods were destroyed. Another pernicious outcome of NCLB was the narrowing of curriculum.

‘The 74’ turned to a person deeply associated with NCLB, former US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, for expert comments.

Near the conclusion of the Bush administration, Michelle R. Davis shared:

“Spellings, who has been working on education issues for Bush since the 1990s and his days as a Texas governor, is the person who from the very beginning has had to make NCLB work. She was a key architect of the law, arguably Bush’s most significant domestic accomplishment and a grand experiment for Republicans, who traditionally thought education should be left to the states.”

George Bush and Margaret Spellings at her Swearing in

In reality, NCLB was a major disaster and its testing ideology still harms schools. The big fallacy at its foundation is that error and variability are so rampant in standardized testing the scores are meaningless. An Ouija board would be just as accurate.

‘The 74’ reports that Spellings believes the last several administrations have squandered the power of the federal government and weakened its ability to push improvement. They quote her saying, “When you take your foot off the gas and stop using federal leadership, federal imperative around these performance issues, it shows up.” She claims the Every Student Succeeds Act, implemented by President Obama, was “less Muscular” than NCLB and asserts, “We know how to use the federal role in smarter ways to the benefit of kids, and we stopped doing it.”

In 2010, Diane Ravitch who had supported NCLB wrote the book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” revealing her conclusion that she had been wrong. A book review by the anti-testing organization Fair Test stated:

“The book’s central chapter on NCLB describes, with exceptional clarity, the law’s flawed assumptions and failed prescriptions. She appropriately lambastes the goal of 100% proficiency, quoting her conservative friends Chester Finn and Frederick Hess saying the goal is ‘comparable to Congress declaring that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014.’ The important difference, she writes, is that ‘If pollution does not utterly vanish….no public official will be punished.’ The chapter concludes, ‘Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.”’

Another expert source quoted by ‘The 74’ is Robin Like, Director of the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). Founder Paul Hill’s acolyte, Robin Lake, says these latest results are “frustrating.” She claims, “[T]hat if we don’t change course, things will be very bad — and things are very bad.”

In 2021, for mysterious reasons, this Bill Gates financed organization left the University of Washington for new digs at Arizona State University.

The sky is falling rhetoric is common for CRPE. Founder Hill was a member of Brooking’s cadre of researchers convinced that American public education was failing. Furthermore, they shared a general agreement that market based business principles were central to fixing schools and declared teachers unions and governance by locally elected school boards must be overturned if education was to be saved.

Much of the “research” done by CRPE undermines public education and promotes its privatization.

Lake worked on “Doing School Choice Right” funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. CPRE listed two salient goals for their study:

“Create models for how school districts can oversee public schools in multiple ways—including direct operation, chartering, contracting, and licensing private schools to admit voucher students. This study is conducted in partnership with the National Charter School Research Project.”
“Examine issues involved in moving toward pupil-based funding, particularly technical, legal, and regulatory barriers.”

These themes are central to CRPE’s education ideology.

Billionaire Who Motivated ‘The 74’s’ Article

The article ends with two disclosures. (1) “This article was published with the support of XQ Institute” and (2) “The Future of High School Network and The 74 both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.”

The Future of High School Network has one purpose and that is to end the Carnegie unit. More than receiving financial support from the Carnegie Corporation it is owned and founded by the corporation. EdTech leaders want to get rid of the Carnegie unit in order to institute their kids at screens education schemes.

The Carnegie unit is a minimum requirement creating a nationwide agreed-upon structure. It does not control pedagogy or assessments but insures a minimum amount of time on task.

Writer Derek Newton wisely pointed out in Forbes:

“Cheating … is so pervasive and so easy that it makes a complete mockery of any effort to build an entire education system around testing.”

“But because of the credit hour system, which is designed to measure classroom instruction time, it’s still relatively hard to cheat your way to a full college degree.”

Laurene Powell Jobs is famous for having been married to technology genius and Apple founder Steve Jobs. She is a billionaire and co-owns Atlantic magazine. Jobs studied economics and political science at University of Pennsylvania and received an MBA from Stanford; has no education training. In 1997, she founded the Emerson Collective which promotes impact investing and she is board chair of The XQ Institute.

Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs is a leader in the AI-revolution in education. Her Amplify digital lessons liberally apply AI and her XQ Institute is working to integrate AI into classrooms. Edward Montalvo, XQ institute’s senior education writer has claimed:

‘“The future of AI in education is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about reshaping our approach to teaching and learning in a way that is as dynamic and diverse as the students we serve,’ XQ Institute Senior Advisor Laurence Holt said. … Through AI, we can also transcend the limitations of the Carnegie Unit — a century-old system in which a high school diploma is based on how much time students spend in specific subject classes.

“Changing that rigid system is our mission at XQ.”

Turns out Laurene Powell Jobs is a typical arrogant billionaire who thinks because they are rich they must be brilliant. With no education background, she is angling to revolutionize public education with harmful technology. She has no clue about the damage being wreaked.

Tags: Diane Ravitch, George Bush, Laurene Powell Jobs, Margaret Spellings, Robin Lake, Ted Kennedy

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Categories education

Shocking GOP Effort to End Public Schooling

21 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/21/2025

This year, state legislators have proposed in excess of 110 laws pertaining to public education. Of those laws, 85 were centered on privatizing K-12 schools. Republican lawmakers sponsored 83 of the pro-privatization laws. Which begs the question, has the Grand Old Party become the Grifting Oligarchs Party? When did they become radicals out to upend the foundation of American greatness?

The conservative party has a long history of being anti-labor and has always been a hard sell when it came to social spending. However, they historically have supported public education and especially their local schools. It seems the conservative and careful GOP is gone and been replaced by a wild bunch. It is stupefying to see them propose radical ideas like using public money to fund education savings accounts (ESA) with little oversight. Parents are allowed to use ESA funds for private schools (including religious schools), for homeschool expenses or educational experiences like horseback riding lessons.

A review of all the 2025 state education legal proposals was used to create the following table.

In this table, ESA indicates tax credit funded voucher programs. There have been 40 bills introduced to create ESA programs plus another 20 bills designed to expand existing ESA programs. Most of 2025’s proposed laws are in progress but the governors of Texas, Tennessee, Idaho and Wyoming have signed and ratified new ESA style laws. In addition, governors in Indiana, South Carolina and New Hampshire signed laws expanding ESA vouchers in their states.

None of the 16 proposals to protect public education or 3 laws to repeal an existing ESA program were signed by a governor or passed by a legislature.

Fighting in the Courts

June 13^th, the Wyoming Education Association (WEA) and nine parents filed a lawsuit challenging the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act, Wyoming’s new voucher program. The suit charged:

“… the program violates the Wyoming Constitution in two key ways. One for directing public dollars to private enterprises, which the lawsuit says is clearly prohibited. The second for violating the constitution’s mandate that Wyoming provide ‘a complete and uniform system of education.”’

On July 15, District Court Judge Peter Froelicher granted a preliminary injunction against the state’s universal voucher program. He wrote, “The Court finds and concludes Plaintiffs are, therefore, likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the Act fails when strict scrutiny is applied.” The injunction will remain in effect until the “Plaintiffs’ claims have been fully litigated and decided by this Court.”

Laramie County Court House

Last year, The Utah Education Association sued the state, arguing that the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program violated the constitution. April 21^st, District Court Judge Laura Scott ruled that Utah’s $100-million dollar voucher program is unconstitutional. At the end of June, the Utah Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of Scott’s ruling. However, the decision seems well founded.

The Montana Legislature, in 2023, established a statewide Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program. It allows families of students with disabilities to use public funds deposited into personal bank accounts for private educational expenses. In April this year, Montana Quality Education Coalition and Disability Rights Montana brought suit to overturn this program. In July, the Montana Federation of Public Employees and the organization Public Funds Public Schools joined the plaintiffs in the suit. The legal action awaits its day in court.

At the end of June, the Missouri State Teachers Association sued to end the enhanced MOScholars program which began in 2021 funded by a tax credit scheme. This year in order to expand the program; the states legislature added $51-million in tax payer dollars to the scheme. The teachers’ suit claims this is unconstitutional and calls for the $51-million to be eliminated.

Milton Friedman’s EdChoice Legal Advocates joined the state in defending the MOScholars program. Their July 30^th message said, “On behalf of Missouri families, EdChoice Legal Advocates filed a motion to intervene as defendants in the lawsuit brought by the Missouri National Education Association (MNEA) challenging the state’s expanded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program, known as MOScholars.” It is unlikely EdChoice Legal Advocates are representing the wishes of most Missouri families.

In South Carolina, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that its Education Trust Fund Scholarship Program was unconstitutional. The lawsuit was instituted by the state teachers union, parents and the NAACP. The program resumed this year after lawmakers revised it to funnel money from the lottery system instead of the general fund.

The South Carolina effort has been twice ruled unconstitutional for violating prohibitions against using public funds for the direct benefit of private education. Legislators are proposing funneling the money through a fund that then goes to a trustee and then to parents, who then use it for private schools.

Sherry East, president of the South Carolina Education Association stated:

“We just don’t agree, and we think it’s unconstitutional.”

“We’ve already been to court twice. The Supreme Court has ruled twice that it is unconstitutional. So, we don’t understand how they’re trying to do a loophole or a workaround. You know, they’re trying to work around the Constitution, and it’s just a problem.”

The South Carolina fight seems destined to return to the courts but they have vouchers for now.

Last year in Anchorage, Alaska, Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman concluded that there was no workable way to construe the state statues in a way that does not violate constitutional spending rules. Therefore, the relevant laws “must be stuck down in their entirety.” This was the result of a January 23, 2023 law suit alleging that correspondence program allotments were “being used to reimburse parents for thousands of dollars in private educational institution services using public funds thereby indirectly funding private education in violation … of the Alaska Constitution.” Alaska has many homeschool students in the correspondence program.

Plaintiff’s attorney Scott Kendall believes the changes will not disrupt correspondence programs. He claims:

“What is prevented here is this purchasing from outside vendors that have essentially contorted the correspondence school program into a shadow school voucher program. So that shadow school voucher program that was in violation of the Constitution, as of today, with the stroke of a pen, is dead.”

The Big Problem

GOP legislators are facing a difficult problem with state constitutions prohibiting sending public dollars to private schools. The straight forward solution would be to ask the public to ratify a constitutional amendment. However, voucher programs have never won a popular vote so getting a constitutional change to make vouchers easier to institute is not likely.

Their solutions are Rube Goldberg type laws that create 100% tax credits for contributing to a scholarship fund. A corporation or individual can contribute to these funds and reduce their tax burden by an equal amount. Legislators must pretend that since the state never got the tax dollars it is constitutional. Lawyers who practice bending the law might agree but common sense tells us this is nonsense.

The big problem for the anti-public school Republicans is voucher schools are not popular. They have never once won a public referendum.

Tags: Adolf Zeman, Laura Scott, Peter Froelicher, privatization, Sherry East, vouchers

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Categories education

AI is More Con than Reality

9 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/9/2025

The tech-industry bestowed name, “Artificial Intelligence (AI)”, is a head-fake; there is no intelligence, just algorithms. Sales are based more on fear of missing out than efficiently-usable machines. The authors of “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want” have some tongue in cheek renaming suggestions: ‘“mathy maths’, ‘a racist pile of linear algebra’, ‘stochastic parrots (referring to large language models specifically)’ or Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (aka SALAMI)”. (Page 5) These witty writers are Dr. Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, and Dr. Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and lecturer in the school of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

While working in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I wrote quite a bit of code automating friction testing in hard drives. The maximum forces occurred when drives started up. About fifty test drives with sensitive gauges were used to test 50,000 or more start-stops. Once the testers were setup, it was all automated with friction data being stored in files and when the test finished, the files would automatically be uploaded to a database which would graph the data and create a report. I thought it was really cool but the only intelligence involved was mine and the creators of the database. It was a set of algorithms and nothing more; that is all these “racist piles of linear algebra” are.

Large Language Models (LLMs)

The texts produced by LLMs are plausible on almost any subject, but this is highly misleading. The models consist solely of extensive information about what sets of words are similar and what words are likely to appear in what context. The outputs look just like something a person might have written and we humans naturally interpret it by imagining the mind behind the text. Unfortunately, there is no mind and it is important for us to let go of that imaginary mind we conceive.

The authors label LLMs like ChatGPT “synthetic text extruding machines”. (Page 31) Like plastic extrusion, LLMs force language collections through complicated computer algorithms to achieve a product that looks like language. However, there is no human thinking behind it.

LLMs and their cousins, synthetic image machine, are based on massive data theft and wanton energy use. The backbones of synthetic extruding machines are data centers which consume enormous amounts of energy. It is estimated that they will consume 1,580 terawatt-hours a year by 2034. A terawatt hour is the equivalent of a billion kilowatt hours. That amount of energy is the same as the total amount of energy predicted to be consumed by the world’s most populous country, India. (Page 159)

In 2016, the largest tech companies in the world signed on to the Paris climate accords. Google said they planned to be net-zero emissions by 2030 and Microsoft announced plans to be net-negative and remove all of the carbon it had produced since its founding in 1975. Now the companies are admitting they will dramatically miss their climate pledges because of these “racist piles of linear algebra.” (Page 160)

In addition to being energy gluttons, text and image extruding machines are water hogs. For every 5 to 50 prompts ChatGPT generates, about two cups of water are consumed. The large amounts of PFAS (“forever chemicals”) used to manufacture microchips is another environmental issue. “Synthetic text extruding machines” are an environmental disaster, but for billionaires it is all about profits. (Page 157)

Bender and Hana observe, “Today’s synthetic media extruding machines are all based on data theft and labor exploitation, and enable some of the worst, most perverse incentives of each of these attendant fields.” (Page 135)

Boosters and Doomers

At the 2023 eighth Insight Forum, which was closed to reporters and the public, Senator Chuck Schumer asked the participants what was the probability of doom. It is unknown what the precise answers were but Jared Kaplan, co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, and Aleksander Madry, head of Open AI preparedness, have both spoken about “catastrophic risks” if a model grew a mind of its own. Some of the participants spoke about the myriad benefits while others seemed to harbor existential fear. Bender and Hana label these groups Boosters and Doomers. (Page 1 and Page 138)

From the authors’ perspective, Booster and Doomers are on two sides of the same coin. One sees extrusion machines as leading to a world of abundance while the other fears a dystopian hellscape. “Neither depicts the real harms of actually existing automation, at best dismissing them as less important than the imaginary existential threats.” (Page 139)

Oddly, almost all AI Doomers think AI development is a good thing. Bender and Hana suspect a few Doomers are not being honest:

“But for some of them, it’s not really about trying to save humanity, but rather a running of the con: the supposed danger of the systems is a splashy way to hype their power, with the goal of scoring big investments in their own AI ventures (like Musk and Altman) or funding for their research centers (Like Bourgon). (Page 141)

Modern Eugenics

There are claims that machines will gain an advanced level of “general intelligence”. However, there is not an accepted definition of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). Companies like OpenAI just avoid the question. Microsoft’s “Sparks” paper contains a preliminary definition of AGI. A prior version of the paper was published in a 1994 Wall Street Journal article signed by 52-psychologists. It proffered, “The consensus group defined intelligence as a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.”

This was written in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book, “The Bell Curve”, which argues that there are significant differences between the inborn intelligence of different racial groups, and that those differences are due to genetics. A bastardized use of Alfred Binet’s work on intelligence testing was employed by three eugenicists, Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes. They created tests biased towards middle-class white Americans and that bias persist in IQ testing to this day. (Page 35)

Bender and Hana state, The paradigm of describing ‘AI’ systems as having ‘humanlike intelligence’ or achieving greater-than-human ‘superintelligence’ rests on this same conception of ‘intelligence’ as a measurable quantity by which people (and machines) can be ranked.” (Page 36)

Billionaires—among them Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen—are setting the agenda for creating AGI and financially backing a modern-day eugenics. Musk repeats common eugenicist ideals claiming that there are not enough people and that humans (particularly the right humans) need to be having children at higher rates. Marc Andreessen echoed Musk’s thoughts when suggesting that elites from developed countries should be having more children. (Page 38)

Musk and Andreessen believe we are on the cusp of AGI development or are they just selling the con? Most people working on extruding machines are aiming to make a system that achieves what looks like human intelligence “to get ahead in what is already a crowded market.” (Page 39 and 40)

Today, there is no AGI; moreover it is unlikely that machines will ever develop “intelligence”.

Some Final Observations

“The AI Con” is packed with important information that could enable people to see through this billionaire-financed scam. Read it and convince your friends and family to study it as well.

Text and image extruding machines are not worth their costs to the environment and they have many hidden inefficiencies. It is wonderful that my smart-phone can assist me with texting, but I hate the AI driven enshitification of Google’s search engine.

Extruding machines are bad for education but people are out there hyping AI’s use in classrooms. The British Government has done serious harm to their health care system by mindlessly installing AI as a point of contact.

AI is not capable of doing science. A salient feature of extruding machines is they were designed to make stuff up.

Bender and Hana correctly note, “The AI project has always been more fantasy that reality.”

Tags: Aleksander Madry, Alex Hana, Elon Musk, Emily Bender, Jared Kaplan, Marc Andreessen

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Categories technology

Privatized Education Disaster in New Orleans

3 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/3/2025

August 29^th was the twentieth anniversary of hurricane Katrina wiping out New Orleans. On this occasion, the billionaire-funded baloney machine is outdoing itself. Ravi Gupta wrote a post for ‘The 74’ called, “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools.” The Washington Post assigned a guy from the United Kingdom, Ian Birrell, to write, “Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution.” I gave up my subscription to the Washington Post some time ago but my friend Gary Rubinstein wrote a post about Birrell’s article. He noted, “Supposedly based on recent research, it basically trotted out all the old bogus claims that I hadn’t heard anyone claim in at least ten years.”

The truth is that the all charter school district is a giant failure that even corruption rampant New Orleans is struggling to hide.

Before Katrina, Louisiana was passing laws aimed at taking over the New Orleans public school system and there was some merit to their endeavor. Six interim superintendents appeared between 1998 and 2005. An FBI investigation led to 11 indictments in 2004 and by end of the school year in May 2005 the district was effectively bankrupt. Unfortunately, the state created the Recovery School District (RSD) and turned to privatization to solve the problem.

By the end of the 2004-2005 school year, the state had taken over five New Orleans schools. RSD turned all five into charter schools operated by four groups: University of New Orleans; Middle School Advocates, Inc.; Knowledge Is Power Program; and Institute for Academic Excellence. All set to begin in the 2005-06 school year; however Katrina made landfall soon followed by “disaster capitalists” swooping like swarming buzzards.

Before Katrina, Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), which ran the public schools in New Orleans, operated 123 schools; in the spring following the storm, it was running just four. With OPSB out of the road and RSD in charge, “pheaulanthropists” like the Walton family, Bill Gates and Eli Broad were ready to help.

2005 Devastation by Hurricane Katrina

In 2009, Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) made it more difficult for schools to remain academically acceptable, effectively ending most of the remaining public schools in New Orleans. BESE raised the minimum school performance scores for academic unacceptability to 65 for the 2010-11 school year and 75 for the 2011-12 school year. By 2018, there were no public schools left.

Evaluating the Results

In her 2018 book, After the Education Wars, Andrea Gabor wrote, “To borrow another ancient military metaphor, the New Schools Venture Fund and its New Schools for New Orleans offshoot, is the Trojan horse that funnels outside money, expertise, and influence to New Orleans.” (Page 229) The majority of the school privatizing billionaires invested by funneling funds through New Schools Venture Fund and New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO). Most of the investing was in schools adhering to the KIPP no-excuses model.

Around 2014, Neerav Kingsland was leading NSNO. He would go on to work for Reed Hastings and then become the leader of the Hastings and John Arnold created City Fund designed to promote privatization and end voter directed public schools.

In his article for ‘The 74’, Ravi Gupta claims, “There’s no one better at parsing the data than Doug Harris, who chairs Tulane’s economics department and directs the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans.” It is almost impossible to check Harris’s work because he has proprietary control of much of the education data from New Orleans. Furthermore, confidence in his work is undermined by his team sharing office space on the seventh floor of 1555 Poydras Street with NSNO.

In June, Harris released “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons”. It is organized around twelve conclusions. Of course conclusion-1 claims improved student outcomes in testing scores, graduation rates and college going. (Page 8) Improved graduation rates and increased college going is a national trend for which it is hard to credit the all charter school system. The claim of improved testing results cannot be shown. Since the entire system was shut down and then reconstituted as a significantly smaller privatized organization, there is nothing to compare to that was not changed.

Gary Rubenstein explained:

“Reformers needed a new experiment where the schools would keep the same students they already had, but the staff at those schools would be replaced with nonunion charter school educators, and charter chains or start-up charter boards would run the schools. Race to the Top provided Tennessee the funding and incentive to test the reformers’ hypotheses.” (Doomed page 19)

This experiment demonstrated that it was not the public schools causing poor performance and privatizing them provided no improvement.

There are a few items in Harris’s report that do not support the privatized system. One of those is Conclusion-5: where he shares, “Transportation costs doubled, and students are traveling farther to get to school.” (Page 20) From his map, it appears that more than 30% of the students are spending in excess of one-hour a day on busses which must be miserable and drives up costs.

In the report’s acknowledgement section, there is another reason to be skeptical of Doug Harris’s results. It says, “Second, we thank our funders, including Tulane and the Murphy Institute, but also the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Spencer Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, and Booth Bricker Foundation.”

Like almost all large foundations the Spencer Foundation (EIN: 36-6078558) with $667,415,167 in assets makes a few troubling grants but in general is supporting research and scholarship. The same could be said for the William T. Grant Foundation (EIN: 13-1624021) with $403,141,185 in assets.

However, The Booth-Bicker Fund (EIN: 72-0818077) with assets of $68,702,721 is spending heavily to promote privatized education and almost no organization in America has spent more to privatize public education than the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (EIN: 26-3241764) with its whopping $4,309,915,225 in assets. Of course, these large amounts of money are influencing Harris and his team.

What Do the Locals Say?

In April, at the NPE conference in Columbus, Ohio, Ashana Bigard and Antonio Travis presented on the all charter school system in New Orleans. Antonio’s description of being a student in New Orleans sounded like classic child abuse. Mrs. Bigard informed us that New Orleans schools are being sued regularly because of their practices with children. However, there is almost no reporting about the suits because the settlements always include a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). She told the story of asking a KIPP administrator how many NDA’s they had created. He said none but when she responded that she was in court just the week before and saw a KIPP NDA created, he backed off and promised to get back to her. She is not holding her breath.

Ashana Bigard is on the Right

Last year, when a charter school failed, the superintendent replaced it with the first New Orleans public school since 2017. The superintendent was fired, but that is what Mrs. Bigard said parents want. She said they desire that every time a charter school fails it is replaced by a more stable public school. Charter schools have become a revolving door with a couple schools going out of business every year.

In her 2018 book, “After the Education Wars,” Andrea Gabor reported that a third of New Orleans charter schools had been shuttered.

Senator Joseph Bouie Jr. equated the NOLA school system to the “Tuskegee syphilis experiment.” Professor Bouie, former administrator of Southern University at New Orleans, had good reason for this analogy. At Tuskegee University, black men with syphilis were given no treatment even after penicillin was shown to be effective. Dozens of men died and their wives, children and untold number of others were infected. NOLA black residents had their community schools taken away and replaced by privatized schools, often miles away. This “experiment” stole their rights and bestowed the public schools to private actors.

In 2021, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona visited the Orleans Public School District. He heard first-hand the growing disillusionment with the all charter system. Four of the six parents told him they wanted to go back to neighborhood schools. Parents complained about Teach for America placing unqualified teachers in schools and the One App process for not offering school choice where they lived.

Raynard Sanders who has over forty years of experience in teaching, education administration and community development, said the charter experiment has “been a total disaster in every area.” He asserted NOLA had “the worst test scores since 2006, the lowest ACT scores, and the lowest NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores.”

In a letter to the editor, former OPSD superintendent, Barbara Ferguson, stated:

“The state took over 107 of New Orleans’ 120 public schools and turned them into charter schools. Last year, 56 of New Orleans’ 68 public schools had scores below the state average. Thus, after nearly 20 years, over 80% of New Orleans schools remain below the state average. This charter school experiment has been a failure.”

Tags: Andrea Gabor, Ashana Bigard, Gary Rubenstein, Joseph Bouie Jr., Katrina, Miguel Cardona, Neerav Kingsland

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

Oakland Public Education Fund Questioned

23 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/23/2025

Recently the Oakland Public Education Fund (OPEF) posted, “OUSD Board of Education Renews Long-standing Partnership with The Ed Fund.” OUSD is the Oakland Unified School District and “The Ed Fund” is the latest of many names used to identify OPEF. A quick look at OPEF’s tax forms (TIN: 43-2014630) reveals that they have assets of about $25 million and a yearly income of more than $15 million. The question becomes who is this wealthy group and do their purposes include something more than just good education?

OPEF, formed in 2003 and was originally called “Oakland Autonomous Small Schools Foundation Inc.” EdWeek reported that in 2000 and 2003 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided two grants totaling more than $25 million some of which was designated for small school incubators. It seems likely some of this money was used as seed money to establish OPEF.

The founding executive director of OPEF was Jonathan Klein, a 1997 Yale graduate who became a Teach for America (TFA) fifth grade teacher in the Compton Unified School District. After coming to Oakland in addition to founding OPEF, he went on to become CEO of GO Public Schools, became Bay Area executive director of TFA and chief program officer at the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation. In 2013, he was named Change Agent of the year by New Schools Venture Fund. In other words, he is an education profiteer closely associated with enemies of public schools.

According to the OPEF web-page, the organization relaunched as the Oakland Schools Foundation in 2012 and then relaunched again in 2014 as the Oakland Public Education Fund. Today they refer to themselves as the “The Ed Fund.” In 2016, they put in motion a corporate partnership with Salesforce which provided $2.5 million for middle school computer science and math. This raises concerns that “The Ed Fund” is inappropriately employing wealth to drive public school curriculum using other than democratic means.

Billionaires Finance OPEF

A change in the way data was reported appeared in the OPEF tax forms for 2024. Previously, their reporting on the contributor’s page simply stated “RESTRICTED.” The new report still hides the contributor’s names but provides the amounts given by seven individuals.

In addition to the contributors not listed above, the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation have granted OPEF a total of $785,833 (IN: 65-1202020), the East Bay Community Foundation contributed $557,760 (IN: 94-6070996) and the Silicon Valley Community Fund provided a whopping $8,349,085 (IN: 20-5205488). The Silicon Valley Community Fund is a dark money site where extremely wealthy people can provide money without their name being attached. It is worth noting that the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation has granted the East Bay Community Foundation $6,165,000 since its founding in 2003.

Since 2014, OPEF has averaged giving more than $5 million a year to the Oakland Unified School District for a total of $51,885,477. However, their other spending undermines public education and promotes privatization. Educate78 has received significant support from both the Hastings Fund and the City Fund, known enemies of the public school system. GO Public Schools has been a consistent advocate for expanding the charter school movement. TFA has foisted unqualified teachers with 5 weeks of training on classrooms throughout America. The New Teachers Center is a Bill Gates developed center in Santa Cruz.

Anyone working in a public school knows that charter schools directly compete with and undermine public schools.

Many of the foundations that OPEF is supporting are supporters of school privatization or they just make us ask why. For example, why has OPEF sent The San Francisco Foundation over $2.5 million? Why are they sending money to obviously anti-public schools groups like the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation or the David and Lucille Packard Foundation?

What is the true purpose of the Oakland Public Education Fund? Do the billionaires who are financing it want to control OUSD and promote privatization or is this true philanthropy. It is hard to know but rich people giving away money based on the goodness of the hearts seems like a rare event.

The T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation

T. (Thomas) Gary Rogers was the first non-family member to become chairman of the board at Levi Strauss. Before Levi Strauss, he and business partner Rich Cronk purchased Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream. T. Gary was the CEO while he and Cronk were the principal shareholder for almost 30 years. They sold to Nestlé in 2002. T. Gary became chairman of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and was once Chairman of Safeway Inc. This boy from Stockton became a highly regarded and respected businessman.

T. Gary and his wife founded the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation in 2003. Looking through their tax filings, it seems there are two distinct periods. Period one is from the foundations start to the death of T. Gary Rogers on May 2, 2017.

In 2003, the Rogers family put $35 million in to start the foundation and the next year they put in another $13.25 million which put the total assets at $52 million. That included some return on investment.

The only giving cited, which started in 2006, was to an organization that became the East Bay Community Foundation. In 2010, they made their first two education related grants to Lighthouse Charter Schools for a total of $840,000. In 2011, in addition to giving to Lighthouse they started granting $50,000 a year to the Oakland Schools Foundation which was later renamed OPEF. By 2017, the Rogers Family Foundation had grown to $78 million in assets.

Period two began after T. Gary died.

From the start, T. Gary’s son Brian has been significantly involved in leading the Foundation. In 2019, he dramatically increased the number of grants given and the money spent. He upped spending to support pro-science of reading organizations and individual charter organizations. He put money into organizations working to privatized public education and advance the charter industry.

The foundations 2022 Tax Form showed the total assets dropping to $55,367,184. However, this seems to be part of a plan. In 2020, Brian posted to the foundations web page:

“It is therefore with bittersweet emotions that we share with our grantees, partners, and fellow community organizations our planned spend down of the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Family Foundation. Within the next five years, we anticipate sunsetting our Oakland education grantmaking and operations.”

That $55 million left in 2022 still has the potential to reek a lot of havoc.

Conclusion

OPEF is a billionaire funded-organization that is exerting undo control on Oakland public schools. Some of their spending is laudable like their generous giving to OUSD. However, so much money in the control of a few not well-known individuals undermines the democratic process. I cannot help wondering if some of the odd decisions previous superintendent, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, made were coerced by the money this organization wielded.

Tags: Brian Rogers, education, Jonathan Klein, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, T. Gary Rogers

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

Behaviorism as Cognitive Science

10 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/10/2025

Greg Toppo writes for ‘The 74’ which suggests he is a professional propagandist working for billionaires. In his July 24^th article, “‘Cognitive Science,’ All the Rage in British Schools, Fails to Register in U.S”, he did not even attempt to be objective as he lionized a form of ‘Cognitive Science’ that is a euphemism for behaviorism. It is a corrupt approach that philosophically undermines a field of research exploring undeniably important ideas.

There are many definitions of cognitive science; this one is from Yale University:

“Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field devoted to exploring the nature of cognitive processes such as perception, reasoning, memory, attention, language, imagery, motor control, and problem-solving. The goal of cognitive science is to understand (1) the representations and processes in our minds that underwrite these capacities, (2) how they are acquired, and how they develop, and (3) how they are implemented in underlying hardware (biological or otherwise). Stated more simply, the goal of cognitive science is to understand how the mind works!”

A cognitive science subset, Cognitive load theory, was developed in mid-1980s by Australian education psychologist John Sweller. His theory pays attention to human cognitive architecture: characteristics and relations between long-term memory and short term memory, and how load on memory affects learning.

The basic premise of cognitive load theory is that short term memory or working memory is limited and can be overloaded. Therefore, Sweller postulates that explicit instruction is superior to discovery approaches for teaching new content and skills. He claims that to think critically we need to know a lot of stuff; therefore critical thinking can only be actualized through copious amounts of content knowledge. He and colleagues say it is not possible to teach critical thinking because it is not a transferable skill.

Selling Cognitive Load Theory

Toppo began his article by introducing his readers to Zack Groshell, a former Seattle-area fourth-grade teacher. His 2024 book, Just Tell Them, is a guide for delivering explicit instruction and adhering to the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) premise of learning. Dewey, Vygotsky and Piaget would surely be saddened by this 21^st century misunderstanding of student development.

The article also introduces Benjamin Riley, founder of Deans for Impact, a Texas-based group that has pushed to make cognitive science more central to U.S. teacher training programs. I find it instructive that his organization is financially supported by Besos, Gates, Dell, Schusterman, Zuckerberg and other billionaires.

Toppo cites the influence of E. D. Hirsch who wrote in his book, The Schools We Need, “Higher-level skills critically depend upon the automatic mastery of repeated lower-level activities.” He further called for tougher standards which prompted education writer, Alfie Kohn to note that Hirsch’s approach “reflects a particular model of learning—behaviorism.”

As Kohn stated, in the debate between behaviorism and “constuctivism”, Hirch comes down squarely on the side of behaviorism. Kohn went on to observe that, “E. D. Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, might be called the ‘bunch o’ facts’ approach to education.” (Page 11)

Like other behaviorists, E. D. Hirsch is calling for education material to be atomized and drilled.

Most of Toppo’s article is concentrated on education in the United Kingdom which might explain why he brought up the very unpopular education leader under former Prime Minister David Cameron, Michael Gove. Gove attempted to reform English education through privatization and testing. Gove’s associate Nick Gibbs said he first encountered Hirsch’s book in 2006 and that it formed the basis for all of their education reforms.

In 2013, more than 150 leading educator wrote and signed a piece for the Times of London calling Gove’s reforms dangerous. They stated in part:

“Sir, We, the undersigned academics and children’s authors, are gravely concerned at the impact that current developments in state education in England are likely to have on our children and their futures.”

“These damaging developments must stop. If they go ahead there will be devastating consequences for children’s mental health, for future opportunities and, most importantly, for the quality of childhood itself.”

At about the same time, England’s national teachers union held a unanimous vote of no confidence in Gove. General Secretary of the teachers union, Christine Blower, said teachers were not the “enemies of promise” that Gove said they were. “We just have the temerity to assert that the secretary of state is wrong.”

Meaningless Data Quoted

Besides citing people like Gove and Hirsch to sell this new behaviorist approach to education, Toppo writes, “From 2011 to 2021, English students’ average scores in the PIRLS International Benchmarks of Reading Achievement, a key global comparison, rose six points, placing them fourth worldwide, while U.S. students’ dropped eight points, ranking the U.S. just below England.”

This was weak sauce.

Top 8 scoring Nations in the 2021 PIRLS

For several years, education in England has been trying to get rid of the Gove stench, and they appear to be on track. The six point gain in a decade on a more than 500 point scale is not much to brag about. In 2011, the US score was 556 England’s was 552 in 2021 the US score was 548 England’s was 556. Even if I believed in standardized testing, which I don’t, I still do not see any real difference. Remember, we were just starting to come out of the COVID nightmare in 2021.

In 2022, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), did its every three year assessment of 15 year olds one year late because of COVID. Of the 80 countries compared, the USA’s reading score of 504 was number 9 and the UK’s score of 494 was number 13. There is not a lot to brag about here either.

The testing data Toppo cites does not prove or even suggest that this new behaviorism is any kind of silver bullet.

Researchers and Educators Have Concerns

The lead sentence in the latest issue of UK’s Schools Week states, “Teachers need to be sceptical about applying popular but “untested” cognitive science theories to education, a panel of experts has warned.”

Noam Chomsky is the scientist-philosopher who more than any other contributor seriously undermined B.F. Skinner’s theories of behaviorism. A 2006 interview with Chomsky states, “Chomsky’s (1959) review of Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957) has been hailed as the most influential document in the history of psychology.”

Importantly, behaviorism undermines the important works of William James and John Dewey. Chomsky’s 1959 review of Skinner’s book went a long way toward reviving Dewey’s theories and shutting down behaviorist ideology.

In 2022, Australian researcher Peter Ellerton published, “On critical thinking and content knowledge: a critique of the assumptions of cognitive load theory [CLT].” After presenting evidence from several papers, Ellerton asserts:

“The absolute claim of CLT that “critical thinking is unteachable” is clearly refuted by these studies. As is the claim that it is not transferable. The softer claim that it is best done through a context of engagement with deep content knowledge is also challenged by these findings. Claiming critical thinking is not directly susceptible to pedagogical influence beyond content development stands in contrast to a significant body of research and pedagogical practice that does not seem to be engaged with or addressed by CLT.“

Why is CLT Promoted?

The application of CLT makes teaching children at digital screens more doable. Delivering on-line education is much easier if it is broken down into small chunks so the learner can work through menus of skills and assessments. It is bad education but the billionaires promoting it care more about profits than America. Besides, their children will attend pricey private schools that don’t employ behaviorism.

Tags: Alfie Kohn, Benjamin Riley, E.D. Hirsch Jr., Greg Toppo, Jean Piaget, John Dewey, John Sweller, Lev Vygotsky, Michael Gove, Zack Groshell

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

Christian Nationalism and Education

28 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/28/2025

Since 2024, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas have passed laws requiring ten commandment posters in all classrooms. These kinds of laws come to us courtesy of a single Christian “bill mill,” Project Blitz. Dozens of other state bills in fidelity with Project Blitz’s proposed legislation were also passed. In 2021, they distributed 74 pieces of model legislation of which 14 passed into law including “Parental Review and Consent for Sex Education” and “Religious Freedom Day” promoting “a historical version of ‘religious freedom’ rooted in Christian nationalism.” Mark Keierleber, reporting for The 74, wrote, “Among the architects of Project Blitz is the Barton-founded influence machine, WallBuilders.”

The WallBuilders home page claims to be, “Helping Americans Remember and Preserve the True History of Our Great Nation …” Unfortunately; it is in reality a propaganda site posting lies about American history in order to advance a Christian Nationalist agenda. Texas preacher and amateur historian, David Barton, founded WallBuilders and has become the most quoted man in the realm of Christian Nationalism. The organization’s name is an Old Testament reference to rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.

The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, told an audience at the ProFamily Legislators Conference, which was being hosted by WallBuilders, Barton’s teachings have had “a profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do.” It is widely held that the Speaker is a Christian Nationalist. President Trump has cultivated their support. In March, he hosted David Barton in the oval office.

David Barton and Trump in the Oval Office this March

David Barton

Barton was born in Fort Worth, Texas. When he completed junior high, his family moved to the small Texas town of Aledo about 40 miles west of Fort Worth. After graduating third in his high school class, he attended Oral Roberts University, the evangelical Christian college in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Barton came to Oral Roberts on a math and science scholarship but ended up with a degree in religious education.

His parents started a Bible study group in Aledo which became a fundamentalist church and a K-12 school. David taught math and science, coached basketball, and became the school’s principal.

Barton became an amateur historian. In her first book, The Good News Club, Katherine Stewart claimed, “Pseudo-historian David Barton—a Texas-based darling of the Religious Right and founder of the Christian Nationalist organizations WallBuilders and the Black Robe Regiment—seems to have no problem fictionalizing the history.” (Page 67)

Nate Blakeslee in an article for the Texas Monthly observed:

“In a broader sense, Barton’s work is reminiscent of nineteenth-century historians like Charles Coffin and Parson Weems, scholars who wrote from an unabashedly Christian perspective at a time when there was no culture of objectivity among historians. Weems was best known for his biography of George Washington, in which he did his best to claim Washington for the Christians, despite his well-known reputation as a Deist. In a brief, credulous treatise called The Bulletproof George Washington, Barton resurrected an old Weems-era tale about the supposed divine protection of Washington during the French and Indian War.”

In her second book, The Power Worshippers, Stewart noted:

“The historical errors and obfuscations tumbled out of Barton’s works fast and furious. Intent on demonstrating that the American republic was founded on ‘Judeo-Christian principles,’ Barton reproduced and alleged quote from James Madison to the effect that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of American civilization. Chuck Norris, Rush Limbaugh, Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, and countless other luminaries of the right recycled the quote in so many iterations that it has become a fixture of Christian nationalist ideology. Yet there is no evidence that Madison ever said such a thing.” (Page 133)

An NPR article from 2012 provides a good example of what Blakeslee and Stewart are writing about. While most of us learned that the Constitution was a secular document, Barton disagrees and says it is laced with biblical quotations:

‘“You look at Article 3, Section 1, the treason clause,’ he told James Robison on Trinity Broadcast Network. ‘Direct quote out of the Bible. You look at Article 2, the quote on the president has to be a native born? That is Deuteronomy 17:15, verbatim. I mean, it drives the secularists nuts because the Bible’s all over it! Now we as Christians don’t tend to recognize that. We think it’s a secular document; we’ve bought into their lies. It’s not.”

“We looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible, but not one of them checked out. Moreover, the Constitution as written in 1787 has no mention of God or religion except to prohibit a religious test for office.”

In 2012, Barton’s bestselling book “The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson” was pulled by its Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, because they “lost confidence” in the book. Senior Vice President Brian Hampton noted, “There were historical details — matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all.”

The 1792 Aitken Bible was the first Bible ever printed in the USA. Barton claims it was published and paid for by congress. This was another one of his proofs that the United States was founded on Christian principles. The bible was not published by congress; it was published and paid for by printer Robert Aitken. At the time, there was an embargo on bibles from England. Responding to Aitken’s request, Congress agreed to have its chaplains check the Bible for accuracy.

From 1997 to 2006, Barton was vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party.

In 2015, David Barton took leadership of Ted Cruz’s Keep the Promise Pack. The $38 million super PAC which put Cruz legitimately into the presidential contest was financed mostly by four people: New York hedge fund guy Robert Mercer ($11 million), Houston investor Toby Neugebauer ($10 million) and ($15 million) from Dan and Farris Wilks, billionaire brothers from West Texas. This was the Christian Nationalist ticket for 2016.

Barton Speaking at a 2016 Cruz Rally in Henderson, Nevada

The Henderson rally was hosted by Keep the Promise PAC which Barton was running. Besides Cruz, he was also joined on stage by Christian Nationalist pundit Glenn Beck. Barton maintains a relative low profile but his influence is massive.

Wrapping Up

Most people have never heard of David Barton but his sway with politicians like Speaker Mike Johnson, born again evangelical pastors and Christian Nationalist billionaires is pervasive. Several political organizations have started tracking his activities. The following were extracted from a lengthy article on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s web page:

“In 2012, readers of the History News Network voted Barton’s new book the “least credible history book in print.”

“Without religion, and specifically without Christianity, as Barton narrowly understands it, the Constitution will die.”

“…, Barton is better seen as a Republican political operative, as researcher Frederick Clarkson has described him, and as a culture warrior, who is deeply committed to right-wing theology, and seems focused not on accurate historical writing but instead on rewriting the norms of government and culture in a decidedly Christian supremacist direction.”

“He has advised Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Sam Brownback, and Michael Huckabee.”

“This includes bills to ban abortion and prevent gay marriage, support religious expression in public schools and public life, and resist gun control.”

“And it allows him to argue that anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and actions are constitutionally, as well as religiously, imperative.”

“In 2010, the Texas Board of Education voted to rewrite the history textbooks to make them more conservative and Christian-friendly. Barton was appointed as an expert advisor. This caused controversy as Barton supported efforts to excise Martin Luther King Jr. and 1960s farm worker activist Cesar Chavez from textbooks.”

The ideology is so backward that only lies and billionaire dollars sustain it.

Tags: Dan Wilks, David Barton, Donald Trump, Farris Wilks, Glenn Beck, Katherine Stewart, Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, Toby Neugebauer

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