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Hosted by a former teacher and current mom of three, this show covers what’s happening in education in the United States right now. We'll chat everything from federal policy and court cases to school boards, budgets, and all the in-between decisions shaping classrooms across the country.

Today, I am joined by Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton whose political career started with $35 worth of flyers and six hours standing outside a high school gym.

Before she was lieutenant governor, and before launching her campaign for U.S. Senate, Stratton was a Chicago Public Schools parent who ran for Local School Council at Kenwood Academy because she wanted families, educators, students, and community members to have a voice in their schools.

We talked about her public-school roots, growing up with a mother who was a Chicago public school teacher, raising four daughters, becoming a caregiver for her mother after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and the moment that pushed her from local school leadership into state politics.

We also talked about what education taught her about governing: “The wisdom is in the room.” If you want to solve problems in a community, the people who actually live, learn, work, and raise their families there need to be at the table.

And yes, we talked about what she wants to fight for in Washington! Everything from early childhood and K–12 education to higher education and career and technical education.

A very teacher’s-lounge conversation about public schools, representation, caregiving, democracy, and why local leadership matters.

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Teaching is political. Let's dive in!
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THE TEAM
Arielle Fodor, Mrs. Frazzled
Sarah Stickel, Assistant

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Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• KEEP IT UP, REPUBS!

• This pattern HAS to stop. When an institution says, “We serve vulnerable people,” and receives a public benefit because it serves vulnerable people, somebody needs to make that institution prove those people actually benefited.

• Hypocrites!

• A bounty on teachers????

• deeply dumb and unserious people… btw, students who are taught abstinence-only sex ed are no more likely to abstain from sex than students who did not. Doesn’t work. Which is why comprehensive sex education is important.

• This is CRAZY for the "pro life" crowd

• We HAVE to talk about this

• Now EMPATHY is indoctrination???

• I cannot BELIEVE this Senator said this!!!!

Civic Engagement Homework:

🚨 PUBLIC COMMENT OPEN NOW 🚨
Deadline: October 6, 2026
Go to: Regulations.gov
Search: ACF-2026-0595
Rule: Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs

💭 If you’re an early childhood teacher: explain what happens when ratios increase.
💭 If you’re a disability professional: explain what happens when a child with behavioral needs can be removed instead of supported.
💭 If you teach multilingual children: explain why home-language support is developmentally appropriate and what an English-only mandate actually looks like with a three-year-old.
💭 If you’re a Head Start parent: explain what the health, dental, disability or family services actually did for your child.

📝 An idea for a comment 📝
"I oppose the proposed Head Start rule, Docket No. ACF-2026-0595, because many of the provisions described as “reducing federal burden” would actually reduce protections and services for children.

I am a [WHO YOU ARE], and I am particularly concerned about [SPECIFIC PROVISION].

In my experience, [2–4 SENTENCES EXPLAINING WHAT THIS WOULD MEAN FOR REAL CHILDREN OR FAMILIES].

The Head Start Act requires comprehensive educational, health, nutritional, family, and social services and recognizes the needs of children who are learning English. It also directs HHS not to revise standards in ways that reduce the quality, scope, or types of core Head Start services.

Please keep strong national protections for children, including staffing standards, disability and behavioral supports, comprehensive health services, and linguistically appropriate education.

I urge HHS to withdraw or substantially revise these provisions."

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

: I had a conversation with Frazz recently, where she told me that when she was in the second grade, she was given an IQ test. Why? Because they wanted to put her in a gifted kid program.

“I remember taking an IQ test when I was in second grade to be put in the “gifted program,”” she told me, “and it basically ended up being the reason nobody realized I was neurodivergent lol.”

: ‘Tis true, dear readers. I squeaked right on by the threshold with a grand total of 131 IQ points. After that, any time I struggled, I mustn’t be trying hard enough. I was just lazy, you see.

Turns out I had a hell of a case of ADHD. But I was in GOAL, so they never went looking for anything wrong with my brain. (GOAL was the gifted program in my part of Pennsylvania. I cannot find what it stands for online, but you know what I’m talking about!)

They just said “Sit on your hands” and wondered why I cried about math class.

Back to you, .

There’s a good chance for Americans of a certain age that this is a fairly common story; when I was a kid, I also received an IQ test and was placed in GATE - the Gifted and Talented Education program in California, which was intended to provide support for “exceptional” students. And no, it’s likely not a secret CIA sleeper cell program for kids like Reddit would have you believe.

No matter what your memory is of gifted education, it’s a concept deeply woven into the experience of many parents navigating the best ways for their kids to succeed and it has been for over a century. A Gifted and Talented program in elementary school can set a child up, so the feeling goes, on the right path to honors classes, AP classes, a “very good college,” even. Of course, as Katie Arnold-Ratliff points out for New York Magazine, “in many parts of the U.S., G&T has a race problem. As of 2022, roughly 60 percent of American students enrolled in a gifted program are white, though recent data shows that white children are only around 40 percent of the total public-school population — a disparity that has been in place for as long as G&T has existed.

Now, why do you think that is? It’s probably because the concept of G&T, GATE, and any other related programs, at their core, rely on IQ testing as a sign of what constitutes “exceptional” students.

And “exceptional” is measured in a way heavily resembling the outdated and racist concept of eugenics.

EXCEPTIONAL?

What does “exceptional” even mean, though? Well… that was part of the problem.

If you look up GATE, or TAG, or even just “gifted education” as a concept, you’ll find wildly varying definitions of what “gifted, “talented,” or “exceptional” even means. For instance, in Pennsylvania, being “mentally gifted” can mean you are a year or higher above grade achievement level in one or more subjects, “as measured by nationally normed and validated achievement tests.” It can also mean that there is “documented, observed, validated or assessed evidence that intervening factors such as English as a second language, learning disability, physical impairment, emotional disability, gender or race bias, or socio/cultural deprivation are masking gifted abilities.”

But in California, a “gifted and talented pupil” is someone who “demonstrates the potential for high performance capability in…intellectual ability, specific academic achievement, creative ability, leadership ability, visual and performing arts talent,” and so on, with each district in the state providing its own identification procedures, such as cognitive and achievement tests like like the CogAT, MAP, or SBAC, or even simply teacher and parent nominations.

If you look at the info in that hyperlink I posted, though, you’ll see an interesting fact: “[In] 1961: California launched the Mentally Gifted Minor (MGM) Program, identifying students with IQs in the 98th percentile or above.” This raises two questions for me:

Number 1, what did they do before IQ tests?

Number 2, what’s the deal with IQ tests and eugenics?

Both questions can effectively be answered if you look at one person’s advancements in the world of intelligence testing by the name of Henry Herbert Goddard, a former football player at the University of Southern California who became a professor in Latin, history, and botany in addition to his coaching duties. After leaving USC, he went to Clark University where, in 1899, he earned a doctorate in psychology.

Eventually, he became a full time researcher and was invited to become the director of research at… *sigh* the New Jersey Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, in Vineland, N.J.. Now, despite the horribly aged name, Goddard had altruistic goals in mind: he wanted to figure out how children’s brains worked and wanted to be able to have education meet them at their level, rather than adopting a “one size fits all” approach to education - something we have seemingly always known doesn’t work.

But he had no idea what he was doing, so he went to Europe to see what other researchers were doing when working with people with disabilities. This is when he learned about French psychologist Alfred Binet, who alongside colleague Theodore Simon had developed the Binet-Simon Scale - a thirty question test focused on areas not explicitly taught in a classroom to measure a child’s aptitude. This included questions about attention, memory, and problem-solving skills, but also more philosophical questions about the difference between “boredom” and “weariness.”

The answers would lead to a definitive score, divided by the participant’s age, and multiplied by 100 to create… the intelligence quotient, or IQ. Binet & Simon really believed this test reflected “general intelligence” within a person. But, quick: define “general intelligence.” Much like “gifted kids” can’t be fully explained, “general intelligence” is something that simply does not exist - especially across the world. These concerns were raised early on with Binet & Simon, yet that didn’t stop the test from spreading globally…

…to people like Goddard, who took the test, translated it into English, and began testing it on his own students. Goddard was, if nothing else, a showman and a hustler - his rampant promotion of the method enabled it to spread quickly, and by 1911, it was used in public schools across the country. By 1913, it was used at Ellis Island for incoming immigrants.

EUGENICS?

Lewis Terman would later develop the “intelligence testing” we all know and “love” so well, but Goddard is the one who innovated the industry and made it popular as a result. But he was also the one who popularized feelings the world had about “feeble-minded people,” such as the idea that procreation with a “feeble-minded” person would genetically lead to “inferior descendants,” including criminals.

“Goddard argued that society should keep feebleminded people from having children, either through institutional isolation or sexual sterilization.,” Dr. Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. once wrote. “As a result of its seductive mix of science and ideology, Goddard’s book became a favorite among eugenicists. As such, Goddard’s views were part of a dark chapter in American history.”

And what “dark chapter” would that be? Why, eugenics of course! The belief that “desirable” and “undesirable” genetic traits could be controlled in humans via selective breeding.

As Dr. Stefan C. Dombrowski of Rider University explained in a TED Ed presentation, “What started as a way to identify those who needed academic help quickly became used to sort people in other ways, often in service of deeply flawed ideologies.” We quickly see the U.S. military used IQ tests for recruits during World War I, not taking into account that many recruits were recent immigrants with no formal education and a limited grasp on the English language.

This “created an erroneous intelligence hierarchy of ethnic groups,” he said. “The intersection of eugenics and IQ testing influenced not only science, but policy as well. In 1924, the state of Virginia created policy allowing for the forced sterilization of people with low IQ scores— a decision the United States Supreme Court upheld. In Nazi Germany, the government authorized the murder of children based on low IQ.”

The IQ test was, of course, improved over the years, but an intelligence quotient isn’t meant to be a “one-size-fits-all” answer to whether somebody is intelligent or not. Ironically, it wasn’t even designed to be as such! And yet almost immediately after Goddard, and later Terman, popularized the IQ test in the U.S., it began being used as a means to identify “gifted” students who scored highly on the tests. By 1922, educator Leta Hollingworth began creating curricula and specialized classes for high-IQ children in New York City. Fun fact, this was the era of Social Darwinism, so her classes initially focused on the ideas that men could operate on levels ranging from “genius” to “stupidity,” and women were… merely average. Why you gotta do us like that, Leta?

_{(In her defense, Leta immediately pivoted to trying to dispel not only this notion, but also the idea that “”bright children take care of themselves,” and especially sought to emphasize the importance of early identification of intelligence, daily contact, and grouping gifted children with other gifted children with similar abilities.)}

But that’s the thing about all of this: you may have noticed that IQ tests didn’t improve drastically before they attached themselves to gifted education, and they didn’t become improved in any meaningful way over the following century, either. That’s the focus of a study by Michael S Matthews and Jennifer L Jolly that bluntly asks, “Why Hasn’t the Gifted Label Caught up with Science?”

“Eugenic societies thrived during the first several decades of the 20th century as they pursued the goal of bettering human society through the control of reproduction, largely among those from non-White racial backgrounds, the physically or mentally ill, and those considered feebleminded, criminal, or socially deviant,” the pair write. “For example, low IQ scores were used to identify individuals for forced sterilization campaigns carried out throughout the United States and continuing until as recently as the 1970s. This misguided and reprehensible use of IQ test results likely has fueled the ongoing narrative among some writers that claims IQ tests are intentionally designed to be racially biased (rather than the more reasoned view that their differential results reveal a lengthy history of systemic discrimination and related societal inequities). In gifted education these intertwined ideas likely have impeded a greater acceptance of recent research related to IQ and intelligence and thereby also have limited the field’s ability to consider labels that could have greater utility than the term gifted.”

The 1970s!!! Think about that for a second. The IQ test was created in an archaic form at the turn of the 20th century, and multiple generations later, it existed in tandem with the problematic worldviews it upheld. We simply should not be tying a test linked so closely with eugenics to the idea that some children are “gifted” because they are “generally” more intelligent. It seems absurd that nearly a century and a quarter-century later, programs like these still rely on this test.

Even worse, though, is the labeling itself:

The label issue for gifted education still fails to reflect what we have learned over a hundred years of scientific study. Over time our understanding of learning, teaching, personality, and the influence of non-cognitive factors on educational attainment has grown dramatically, but the identification practices and terminology of gifted education have fallen drastically behind the progress made on these same issues in the related field of special education.

In the best of cases, a label indicates needed services without conveying prejudice or other ancillary meanings. Labels used in special education have become more nuanced and prescriptive over time, whereas in gifted education there are fewer branches—a cactus rather than a tree—meaning that the general gifted label is far less useful for purposes of service delivery than a special education label (e.g., dyslexia or a specific learning disability in numerical processing). This is true even when the gifted label is further divided into identification categories based on academic achievement vs. intellectual potential, or even into reading or English language arts vs. mathematics. In other words, the utility of the gifted label remains on par with the utility of early special education terms like ‘moron’—which is to say, it still has little relevance to service delivery.

…

[W]e urge those who wish to support the needs of students currently or potentially labeled as gifted learners to continue thinking about how to improve the label in a manner that would make more evident these learners’ specific individual and collective differences and needs from typical learners, while also being more palatable to policy makers and the public at large than the term gifted currently is.

This is the problem with the illusion that there is even such a thing as “gifted education.” If anything, it’s gatekeeping that relies on outdated mindsets to keep “certain” children paywalled away from success. If 60% of “gifted” students are white when only 40% of all public school students are white, there’s a barrier that is clearly unable to be breached through a test created in the early 1900s.

But on the flip side, being “gifted” and told that maintaining the trajectory this program sets for you determines your adulthood can lead to an explosion of high expectations drowning a child, which could lead to the very real phenomenon of “Gifted Kid Burnout,” defined by Monika Roots, MD, a child psychiatrist, as “when a gifted kid experiences exhaustion, frustration, and diminished motivation due to persistent pressure to excel and meet high expectations.”

“This can sometimes manifest in a decline in performance and motivation, but more often presents as increased irritability, social withdrawal, or a mental health issue such as OCD, anxiety, or an eating disorder,” Rachel Goldberg, founder of Rachel Goldberg Therapy in Los Angeles, CA, says.

And what does Roots say further down in that article?

“Although not every gifted child may be diagnosed with a type of neurodiversity, giftedness is often associated with neurodiversity, including autism spectrum disorders. Children with neurodivergent brains “often experience burnout more intensely than other kids,” Dr. Roots says. “They often have more of a cognitive response and exhibit brain fog, detachment, and sometimes difficulties completing basic tasks and self-care.””

Full circle.

It is incredibly likely that we are poorly serving all students with an outdated look into what constitutes being “gifted,” and maybe we should allow the term to catch up with the science or even, like we did with eugenics, leave it in the past where it belongs.

Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• The fact they’ve kept the red scare going is honestly wild!

• Fox News has been bashing college more than usual while they try to make education a labor pipeline...

• This is simply crazy

• CLEAR THE WISHLIST! Send me yours!!!

• Has your school broken the law???

• @honesty4ohioed Shout out! #couragenow

• Yeehaw

• I mean this is just ONE way but…lil parenting hack

• !!! #couragenow

Civic Engagement Homework:

Back to school season means teachers are already dipping into their own paychecks for supplies their classrooms should have been given in the first place. Pencils, tissues, books, basic stuff. It adds up to hundreds of dollars (or more) a year, every year, and it’s one of those quiet costs of underfunded public education that never makes it into a headline.

This week, let’s do something small that actually helps immediately.

Clear a wishlist.

Here’s how:

• You can start with one of these two lists!

• Don’t know a teacher personally? Search Amazon or DonorsChoose for teachers in your own zip code or district. There are always more requests than there are people funding them.

• Grab one item, five items, or the whole list. Every bit lands directly in a classroom.

• Share the link in your group chat or on social. Wishlists move fast when more people see them.

You don’t need to fix the whole funding system, but you can make sure one classroom has what it needs this week.

Go clear a list. 🛒

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

It got me thinking about a couple of things…

1: No.

2: If you didn’t want me to talk about what a weirdo you are, you shouldn’t have been a weirdo.

and 3: Student teaching is one of the strangest financial arrangements we treat as normal.

Basically, the system is built around the assumption that somebody else is keeping student teachers alive.

In my accelerated California credential program, I student taught all day and attended classes at night (sometimes until ten o’clock!) There was no time left for another job. But rent, food, gas, and every other condition necessary for remaining alive continued to cost money. Imagine that.

On top of this, we have to pay tuition, examination fees, application fees, fingerprinting fees, and more. Then you report to a school, set up a classroom with no money, and work full time without pay…because your first paycheck doesn’t come until after you work a month.

This was not an alternative-certification shortcut or an unusual path I had chose!

(The unusual path I chose was staying with a loser and believing he would not continue to be a loser. More on that in a moment…)

Everyone says they want more teachers, but the entrance into the profession is a mess that is easiest to survive if you’re rich or have savings (somehow) or another person to financially support you.

I was in my final few weeks of a tedious student teaching assignment in first grade. The end of the program was so close! I had almost done it!

At one o’clock in the afternoon on Friday the 13th, my boyfriend called me.

We had already spoken during my lunch break just an hour ago, so when he called again so soon and I knew he had gotten in the car, I worried there had been an emergency.

I told my mentor teacher I was going to quickly answer, and she took over circulating and helping the first graders with their math workbooks.

He started breaking up with me.

“I’m teaching,” I told him. “I’m at school.”

“Oh.”

“Could you not have waited until you got back to our apartment?”

He continued his break up speech.

What followed was the most financially precarious, formative, and (in retrospect) completely absurd period of my life.

I remember sobbing and saying I just wanted someone to tell me it would be alright. The moral of the story is: it all turns out better than alright. But damn, we really need to pay student teachers.

I have no interest in getting another email from my ex or his wife scolding me for sharing my story, so the deranged details are locked down…

Read more

Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• They aren't even good

• Loser energy

• Lying as usual

• Incredible minds at work

• It’s all a lie

• Argue with the wall

• IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN!!! We are CLEARING TEACHER WISHLISTS!

• No one is talking about this

• Why is no one freaking out

• Cops shouldn’t manage schools

• “Don’t let your kids be weird”

• New far-right pipeline just dropped 🫩

• Are the college educated “the” problem? Really?

• Republican college grads complain about college after sending their kids to college

• “Don’t let your kids be weird” is a thing they say because that is THEIR biggest fear

Civic Engagement Homework:

Push Your District to Keep Tracking Discipline Data

Last week, the Department of Education quietly killed one of the only tools that made schools prove their discipline policies weren’t targeting kids of color or kids with disabilities. Now OCR only cares about proving intent, and nobody writes “we meant to do this” in a school board memo.

Your district doesn’t have to drop this just because the Department of Education did. This week, email your school board or bring it up at the next meeting. Ask:

• Are we still tracking discipline data by race and disability status?
  If patterns show up, what’s our plan to address them?

• Cc the superintendent and keep the reply. Silence is an answer too.

Want to fight it at a bigger level? Groups like the Education Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund are already gearing up in court and could use your support.

They rolled this back quietly on a Thursday, hoping nobody would notice.

Be the paper trail they were hoping you’d never keep.

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

On April 23, 1951, a 16 year old Black girl by the name of Barbara Rose Johns decided she had enough with the conditions of her high school.

She was a student at R.R. Moton High School, an all-Black high school in Farmville, Virginia, that was set up to fail right from the jump. This was a school built to hold 180 students, but within one year of opening it was home to over 450 students. No gym. No cafeteria. No desks. No blackboards. All books and equipment were hand-me-downs from a nearby white school.

The county did their best to make this right, though. And by ‘did their best,’ I mean they did practically nothing at all: they built temporary facades for classrooms for extra students that were heated by potbelly stoves and ramshackily built to the point that roofs leaked during rainy seasons. The students, if you could believe it, had to use umbrellas in class.

Reverend Francis Griffin, both the President of the local NAACP and the Chair of the school’s PTA, told the school board something had to give, and new facilities were needed.

He was denied.

On that day in April in 1951, School principal M. Boyd Jones received a call about “racial problems” at the bus station in downtown Farmville, and when he left, all teachers received notes to bring their students to the ramshackle auditorium. And as the teachers arrived, they were surrounded by a group of students led by none other than Barbara to leave.

You see, friends, Barbara had faked the call to the principal. Barbara wrote the notes. And Barbara, on that day, took the stage and gave an impassioned plea to students and faculty… to go on strike to protest the poor conditions of the school.

Over 450 people walked out and marched to the homes of members of the school board, who would not leave their homes. In fact, the students were told if they didn’t return, they would be expelled.

The students did not budge. In fact, this strike lasted two whole weeks.

Barbara, who again is only 16 years old at this time, reached out to the NAACP’s Special Counsel for the Southeastern Region of the United States asking for representation. The NAACP agreed… if the students would agree to seek an end to school segregation once and for all.

If this story in any way sounds familiar to you, that’s because it’s the foundation for what would eventually become known as Davis v. School County Board, one of the precursors to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, both of which were cases heard before the Supreme Court who decided, once and for all, that segregation in public education was unconstitutional and illegal.

You know that saying, “History is written by the victors”? It’s a bit of a misleading statement considering the gatekeeping that used to (and still does) exist within academia, but when it comes to the story of Barbara Johns, it is something that is considered rather unambiguously to be a case of victor-written history. And yet the story didn’t stop at the Supreme Court victory, even if it’s easier to summarize it as such.

Because what you might not be surprised to find out is that the decision was almost IMMEDIATELY denounced by white Virginians. It’s described as a “campaign of massive resistance,” where The Board of Supervisors for Prince Edward County refused to appropriate funds for the school district from 1959 to 1964. This ensured that Prince Edward County schools remained closed for five years, which led to (in an example of history mirroring itself) vouchers for private schools known as “segregation academies” being handed out to white students.

Segregation academies as a concept, and Black students all but being blocked out of education within the county, persisted until the Griffin v. Prince Edward County case, a separate case heard by the Supreme Court that found the closures to be violations of the 14th Amendment.

The story of Prince Edward County is one of the most patriotic stories I, as an American, can think of. An entire ethnicity was barred from proper and safe education, which is an internationally recognized human right as recognized by the United Nations. In response, a small but dedicated group of students fought for their HUMAN RIGHTS - and won. In response, they were called every slur in the book. They were called traitors. And most of all, they were called “un-American.”

That’s the thing, though. Dissent is not the opposite of patriotism. Dissent is often VERY patriotic, and the only reason the country ever gets better. And the fact that Americans seem to think otherwise - that it’s often best to not “rock the boat” - means that American exceptionalism has failed us as a country.

Over the years, the label “un-American” has been used against labor organizers, civil rights activists, anti-war students, immigrants, LGBTQ people, socialists, teachers, and anyone who says the country is failing its own stated ideals. You can see this recently with Republican nominee for New York State Comptroller Joseph Hernandez (as well as many Republicans) calling Zohran Mamdani “un-American.” You can see this with the way Republicans speak about Barack Obama to this day: there’s a whole book alleging he’s the “un-American president!” President Trump called trans people “un-American.” And the idea that teachers are “un-American” is a remnant of the Red Scare!

A lot of this rhetoric is acceptable, though, due to the uniquely American idea that there is a “right” way to be an American, and a “wrong” way to be one. We are taught that the U.S. is uniquely free, uniquely democratic, uniquely good. All families need a husband, a wife, two children, and a white picket fence. America, so the vibe goes, can do no wrong.

This is tragically a failing of the U.S. education system, which by the day is being systemically gutted by Donald Trump and the “leaders” at the slowly-dwindling Department of Education. A better education system would teach that the U.S. has democratic promises, violent contradictions, global power, and most importantly that it was social movements that forced the country to expand rights. America isn’t perfect. America has never been perfect.

But you know what America has been? A nation of fighters. We’re a nation founded on dissent and “good trouble” leading to great accomplishments. Look at the long hard road to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA) that fought against President Roosevelt’s 1935 declaration that people with disabilities were “unemployables.” Nearly 55 years of protests followed that eventually culminated in the legendary Capitol Crawl, where 60 activists with disabilities climbed out of their wheelchairs and up the 83 steps of the Capitol to protest their rights not being protected.

Or we can look at one of the most interesting yet underdiscussed education-related protests in American history: the 1970 Minneapolis Teachers’ Strike. In the late 60s, Minneapolis public school teachers saw huge class growth, and not nearly enough school supplies to match each student. In a sadly relatable turn of events, nearly every teacher relied on purchasing their own supplies or begging families for help.

The teachers unions and district administration negotiated the issues to no avail, and so after nearly a year of paused negotiations, the teachers’ bargaining units were preparing to take further action. These teachers were split up among two separate unions: the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and the Minneapolis Education Association. The federation voted to go on strike, but the association did not.

And on the morning of April 9, 1970, 2,200 Minneapolis teachers picketed in front of district schools, which was actually illegal in Minnesota at the time. This put teachers at risk of losing their jobs, benefits, and pensions, and yet they persisted for twenty whole days. This resulted in the Minneapolis School District closing all schools on April 13, since more than half of the teachers were on strike. A compromise was reached on April 29, when MPS leadership gave the teachers increased wages and a new no-reprisal clause which made it so the school board couldn’t penalize any striking teachers.

This created a sort of Butterfly Effect moment: one year later, the Minnesota legislature passed the Public Employee Labor Relations Act (PELRA), which allows for public employees to strike legally if negotiations are deadlocked as long as certain requirements are met. Soon after, the Minnesota legislature passed new tax laws that completely overhauled the state’s public school systems: local property taxes funded schools and forced schools to balance their budgets.

But most importantly, the laws increased funding for public schools and fixed funding discrepancies between high-income and low-income schools. These laws are known as the “Minnesota Miracle,” and they would not have been possible without a little bit of dissent. If patriotism means commitment to the public good, then public schools are patriotic infrastructure - and it took a good bit of fight to make this patriotic miracle happen.

In response to Barbara Rose Johns’ part in the Davis protests, she was harassed for years, which included the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in her front yard. At her parents’ insistence, she was sent to Montgomery, Alabama, to live with her uncle… civil rights pioneer Vernon Johns (contrary to popular belief he had nothing to do with Barbara’s own strike). But as her biography states, life was relatively peaceful for her after this: she received a degree in library science from Drexel University, got married, raised five kids, and lived in Philadelphia… where she became a librarian for the Philadelphia school system until her death from bone cancer in 1991.

Barbara Rose Johns is an unsung patriot who objectively made the world a better place, and used her own accomplishments to give back to her community.

And I cannot think of anything more American than fighting for what’s right and then giving what you learned back to the youth who may one day fight their own good fight.

Read more

Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• I constantly think about J6 when I am in here I think something is wrong with my brain.

• Food is part of the system that makes learning possible.

• The members are the union and they are SCARED of y’all.

Civic Engagement Homework:

Your public-education homework this week:

Senator Cassidy promised a July vote to block the transfer of federal special-education programs to HHS. The committee is meeting Wednesday, July 22, but that measure is not currently listed on the agenda.

If you are represented by Republican HELP Committee members (Louisiana, Kentucky, Maine, Alaska, Kansas, South Carolina, Missouri, Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, Florida and Oklahoma): Call your senator! Tell them to get it on the agenda and ask them to vote to keep special education away from RFK Jr.

Everybody: look up what your own school board is doing while everyone is on summer break.

Search four terms: budget, staffing, special education and contracts. Then choose one item and attend, submit written comment or email the board!

Notable Education News:

• Ten days after the administration moved education civil-rights enforcement into the DOJ, The White House released a 224-page Christian nationalist blueprint from hell. The “religious liberty” draft includes forced outing of trans kids, DOJ hotlines, using the DOJ defend Ten Commandments posters on walls...Separation of church and state is nowhere to be seen

• Listen... these bills are not going to pass. So I’m not going to cover them.

  Basically, the House Republicans know Linda and Trump can’t keep moving things out of the Department of Education and into random agencies without Congress...so they proposed 10 bills to “officially” make it happen. They got out of committee, but haven’t been scheduled for a vote. Even if they pass the House, they don’t have the votes to pass the Senate. I don’t wanna work y’all up into a tizzy for nothing. xoxo

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

Read more

Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• Florida be normal challenge!!!!!!!!!

• Money money money!

• This is being IGNORED

• I can't wrap my mind around it

• Thank you to the librarians...

• Platner needs to file that paperwork so the people of Maine can choose their nominee

• We need to talk.

Civic Engagement Homework:

The Department of Education has proposed rescinding the regulations for the Equity Assistance Center Program.
These centers are tied to Title IV of the Civil Rights Act and provide technical assistance connected to desegregation and equal access in public schools.

Equity assistance center script: “I oppose this rule because it could make it harder for public schools to get clear, local civil-rights support around desegregation, discrimination, language access, disability access, gender equity, immigrant students, LGBTQIA+ students, and equal educational opportunity.”

If you are a parent, educator, student, school board member, civil-rights advocate, or anyone whose community has relied on help around discrimination or equal access in schools, say that too!

Deadline: July 27, 2026

Notable Education News:

• The National Education Association (NEA) has a new leadership team! Princess Moss for president, Noel Candelaria for vice president, and Robert Rodriguez for secretary-treasurer. We will miss Becky Pringle dearly. (Thank you for all you’ve done!) Now…it’s time to keep working

Good News in Education:

• The journey of Bobbie Simpson: Transgender woman making strides on school board in deep red Shasta County.

• Weighted Funding Formula, Phonics Push Loaded Into School Bus

• Revived lawsuit claims Florida underfunded FAMU by nearly $2 billion

• Central Texas College receives a $250,000 grant to help parenting students

• Educators launch ‘I Love WV Public Schools’ campaign while more school closures loom

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

On May 26, the U.S. Department of Education, in association with the Labor Department, officially announced a new partnership to promote “patriotic education.” It was something we’ve known was coming since January 29 of last year when President Trump announced he was going to “end radical indoctrination in public schools,” but what wasn’t clear was when this was going to happen.

And it turns out the exact time to do this was as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary. According to Jack Roberts at Campus Reform, ten grants will be awarded, totaling around $20 million, to nonprofits, private businesses, and public institutions. The awards are meant to be for recipients that “demonstrate the ability to “improve the quality of American history, civics and government.””

But what, according to the Trump administration, does that mean? It could mean the “History Rocks” program of religious civics curriculum for kids, which McMahon has been traveling the country to promote that is associated with the America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA, and Hillsdale College. It could also be the America 250 Initiative, a “coalition” that partakes in “nationwide programs including state tours, lectures, student competitions, and teacher summits [to] celebrate our nation’s rich history, inspire citizens of all ages to reflect on America’s story, deepen understanding of civic responsibility, and reinforce the shared values that unite us as one nation.”

That organization, by the way, is associated with Moms for Liberty.

But the truth is: patriotic education is whatever McMahon and Trump want it to mean.

”Under the previous  Administration, schools were encouraged to prioritize anti-American, race- and gender-based ideologies in the classroom, rather than to equip students with a comprehensive and honest understanding of American history and founding principles,” the statement from the Education Department says.

You might remember a little thing called Project 2025, a 900-page federal policy blueprint created by the “fine” folks at The Heritage Foundation, which sought to reshape the government into a much more conservative image, all while expanding the power of the presidency and turning back the clocks on any progress made in the United States in the last 100 years or so. This is bar for bar a part of that plan, and you don’t even need to dive deep to find the first reference to this on page 8 of the text:

“Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”

What does this mean to Linda McMahon, the Trump Administration, and the Heritage Foundation? McMahon herself told Fox News that, “…too many schools have moved away from teaching the basics of what it means to be an American. From understanding the Constitution to showing respect for the nation’s symbols… we don’t teach love of country. We don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance. We are not creating that same sense of patriotism.”

The Pledge of Allegiance is something we treat like a timeless school tradition, as if it was there at the start of America, it’s here in present day America, and it will be there long after we’re dead and gone at the end of America. Yet the Pledge was only recited publicly for the first time publicly on October 21, 1892:

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands—one nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.”

Was the Pledge of Allegiance also a push from a “Patriotic Education” initiative? Did the 1890s equivalent of Linda McMahon (which I guess would be - I don’t know - Nancy Fish, the second wife of P.T. Barnum???) decide that we needed to be more patriotic as industrialization expanded and Ellis Island opened to immigrants for the first time? The answer to all of those things…

Is no.

Depending on who you ask, The Pledge of Allegiance was either written by Captain George Thatcher Balch, a Union army officer in the Civil War who later wrote a book on how to teach patriotism to children in public schools, or former Baptist preacher Francis Bellamy, who reportedly revised Balch’s quote into the Pledge in two hours for the magazine the Youth’s Companion as an oath. Why? Because it was a marketing gimmick.

As Amy Crawford at Smithsonian Magazine summarized it, “the Companion offered U.S. flags to readers who sold subscriptions, and now, with the looming 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World, the magazine planned to raise the Stars and Stripes “over every Public School from the Atlantic to the Pacific” and salute it with an oath.”

_{(by the way, I think we’re better off crediting Bellamy than Balch, since Balch’s was simply “We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag!” Not quite as catchy.)}

The Pledge, as created by Bellamy, likely would have stayed a curio in a magazine if it weren’t for the timing of its release; as Boston Review points out, native-born Americans were VERY anxious with the arrival of immigrants, as “more than 2.7 million immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1870s, followed by over 5.2 million in the 1880s and another 14.5 million between 1900 and 1919. Bellamy channeled the alarm many felt when he told the NEA in 1892 that “Americanism brings a duty . . . it must be made a force strong enough to touch the immigrant population which is pouring over our country.” Naturally the use of his pledge in public schools was a key component, he contended, for the inculcation of loyalty to the United States.”

One thing would lead to another - the New York Manual of Patriotism would include the Pledge of Allegiance as a potential flag salute for students, the National Americanism Commission believed we needed a single standard flag code, which led to the shift in the pledge saying “the flag of the United States of America” rather than just “my flag” - but it wasn’t until 1942 when Congress passed the U.S. Flag Code, adopting Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance as an official pledge for students, and it wasn’t until 1954 that the decision to add “under God” to the pledge.

Quite a sixty year journey this marketing gimmick has gone on. We went from a quick rewrite of a veteran’s pledge for a flag contest to a “strongly requested” pledge of patriotism, with an added dose of religious nationalism for good measure! But there was one important step I skipped over: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, which was ruled on June 14, 1943.

This landmark case is actually why students are not REQUIRED to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school, despite the West Virginia State Board of Education making saluting the flag mandatory for all students and teachers in any school supported by public funds a year prior. But as Jane Metters LaBarbara for West Virginia University Libraries recounts, a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses (the Barnett family - the Supreme Court screwed their name up. Really.) felt that reciting the pledge went against their own beliefs. Father Walter told his daughters to “stand respectfully but to not participate in the salute or the pledge.”

This resulted in the girls being expelled.

“The Barnett family filed suit in the United States District Court for themselves and other Jehovah’s Witnesses in the area,” LaBarbara writes. “They won the case. In the two years since the Gobitis judgement [ed. note: a 1940 ruling that deemed the pledge and flag salute “secular practices], three justices who had supported the majority opinion had made it known they no longer agreed with their decision. Because of this, the District Court felt they did not have to accept the decision “as binding authority.” The State Board of Education then appealed. The appeal went to the Supreme Court. Justice Harlan Stone had been the lone dissenter in the Gobitis case. He was now the Chief Justice. The SCOTUS ruled 6 to 3 to overturn the decision.”

You might be asking right now: what does all of this have to do with Linda McMahon’s push for patriotic education?

Put simply: the implementation of the Pledge of Allegiance and the implementation of patriotic education within the United States are both based off of jingoistic fearmongering that strike into fears that Americans have about the “other.” In 1892, it was Italians, Hungarians, Russians, and Poles. In 2026, it’s Black history. Trans history. Gay and lesbian history. World history. And even the darker aspects of American history.

McMahon’s initiatives are America-focused, but the scale of what she’s whitewashing isn’t fully known yet. So we can look at other aspects of history that the Trump administration has worked tirelessly to remove from national parks sites. Earlier this month, lower courts granted the Trump administration permission to keep removing signs and exhibits about slavery and climate change across the country. Right when he took office in January 2025, LGBTQ and HIV resources were removed from the White House and other government websites. And one month after that, references to trans people were removed from the Stonewall Monument website - as well as the “T” in “LGBTQ.”

Access to education, a complete education, is a cornerstone of our democracy. Knowledge is enlightenment, and information is currency. The Pledge of Allegiance, for any value it may have in regards to helping Americans develop a love of country, is just a marketing gimmick that evolved into something bigger. Yet to people like Linda McMahon, the symbolism matters more than the truth behind its history.

“It was about belonging, responsibility, and an oath to America,” she tweeted.

And maybe it is. But if children are not granted access to a freedom of information, there is no belonging in an irresponsible nation we are effectively forced into reciting an oath to. The only way to “end radical indoctrination in public schools,” in fact, is to end Linda McMahon’s stewardship at the head of the Department of Education.

Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• This is AWFUL

• We can’t have ANYTHING

• Make it make sense????

• Have you heard of book deserts?

• We could do THIS instead!!

• Kindergarten teacher teaches SCOTUS a lesson after they rule against ONE CHILD

• They tried!!!!!

• Open books, open doors!

• Idk about all this!

• Not every family can do this!

• UH OH, America!

Civic Engagement Homework:

The Trump administration has proposed a rule that would ban federal funds from being used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or even facilitate” anything it decides counts as DEI. That vague language is the whole point. It’s a net wide enough to catch after-school and tutoring programs, food pantries, community health nonprofits, legal aid clinics, family support centers, programs that recruit and train educators, programs serving immigrant families, LGBTQIA+ people, or disabled folks. In other words: the programs that fill the gaps when government systems fail.

To make matters worse, in this rule, political appointees, not elected officials or experts, could get a bigger say in which organizations get federal funding. So instead of grants being awarded based on need, community impact, or whether a program actually works, the filter becomes “does this organization align with the president’s priorities?” So efficient. So much “eliminating of bureaucracy”.

The good news: this rule is not finalized yet, and public comment is open. 

• Go to NEA.org/writeOMB and submit a public comment. It does not have to be fancy.

• If you work for, volunteer with, or rely on a federally funded program, say that. Comments from people with direct experience carry weight. “I run an after-school program that serves 60 kids” hits different.

• No cussing. I know. I KNOW. But they can throw out your comment for it, so keep it PG and make it count.

• Extra credit: send this to one person who works in a nonprofit, a clinic, a tutoring program, anyone whose work could get caught in this net. Most of them have no idea this is coming.

Public comments create a record. They slow things down. They make it harder for people in power to pretend nobody objected. This is one of those rare moments where the system is legally required to listen, so let’s be loud while the mic is on.

Notable Education News:

• As soon as 2028, college students can lose the ability to borrow federal student loans if the alumni of their programs don’t earn “enough” early in their careers. This will hit teachers, childcare workers, social workers, artists, journalists, and other systematically underpaid professions.

  My thought: If a teacher-prep program’s alumni don’t earn enough, is that because the program is “LoW vAlUe”? Or is it because America underpays teachers?!?! For undergraduate programs, alumni have to earn more than workers with only a high school diploma. For graduate programs, alumni have to earn more than workers with only a bachelor’s degree. And if too much of a school’s federal aid is tied to these so-called “low earning” programs, the school itself can face consequences, including losing access to Pell Grants. This 💩 is crazy.

• The Education Department tried to dictate which degrees are considered “professional” in their student loan borrowing caps. A court hit pause on part of that, so now we have an “UPDATED” temporary list of which careers will be allowed to borrow $50,000/year. (Seen here) If a program isn’t listed, students can only borrow $20,500/year.

  Missing: library science, school counseling, social work, public health programs like MPH/DrPH, education, and more.

• Trump’s attempt to turn Public Service Loan Forgiveness into an political loyalty test was struck down in court! The rule would have cut people off from PSLF if their employer did something the administration declared “illegal.” (Particularly vulnerable were nonprofits, school districts, and hospitals who touch immigration, LGBTQIA+ rights, or anti-discrimination law). The Department of Education *may* appeal, so keeping an eye on this...

• Yeah yeehaw, California’s budget is “balanced.” But to do it, they cut a school library program that gives students access to vetted research tools and primary documents in the middle of an AI slop/misinformation/literacy crisis. It could cost hundreds of millions of dollars for districts to replace the program themselves, while the state saved $5.5 million by taking it away... $3.9B school funding is also being withheld (basically until they see how the rest of the budget stuff shakes out) 🫩

Good News In Education:

• Memphis schools takeover blocked by federal court for now

  A federal judge temporarily blocked the Memphis schools takeover after officials argued it could delay important decisions on purchases like HVAC repairs.

• A judge blocks Trump’s plan to limit a major student-loan forgiveness program for public servants

  A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s plan to narrow eligibility for a major student-loan forgiveness program, ruling that the Education Department could not use the program to impose political preferences that Congress never wrote into law.

• Federal Judge Blocks DOJ From Getting Its Hands on Trans Children’s Private Medical Records

  The order protects Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford patients whose records the Trump administration sought through criminal grand jury.

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

This post is in partnership with AFSCME.

A federal budget does not live in a press release or in the C-SPAN footage of grown men cheering as they pass a bill most of them did not read.

It lives in a school cafeteria at 11:45 in the morning, when a seven-year-old gets to the front of the line and finds out they are no longer on the “free lunch” list. It lives in the ER where a child is having an asthma attack because their preventative inhaler got too expensive. It lives in the IEP meeting where a parent is told the same speech therapy their kid has had for three years is “being reviewed.”

A year ago, the people who passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” told us it was a “once-in-a-generation chance.” On that one point, I will give them full credit. Because it was. It was a “once-in-a-generation chance” to take money out of food, health care, and public schools and hand it to people who already own multiple homes and a rocket.

They just left out the part where the generation paying for it is the one currently sitting in third grade classrooms.

Horrifyingly, most of this bill’s damage hasn’t happened yet because the biggest cuts are scheduled, deliberately, for after midterm elections. Naturally, the people who wrote it understand the optics of branding a terrible law as “Beautiful” for an entire year. I know this because they switched the name to “the Working Families Tax Cut” as people started to catch on.

But even with the worst still on the way, let’s look at what one year has already done:

- More than 3.5 million people have lost food support.
- 1 million fewer people are enrolled in health care through the Affordable Care Act because they can’t afford the premiums anymore.
- 446 hospitals are at heightened risk of closing.
- For the first time since Gallup started tracking it, its data shows more workers say they are struggling than thriving.

The tax cuts were so large that, even after gutting public services, the bill is projected to add over $4 trillion to the federal debt and they want us to pay for it by cutting food and healthcare. And the people who passed this are going to ask us to vote for them in the midterms!

Mind you, the billionaires the bill was actually written for are doing great.

Their collective fortune has grown by 30% since the 2024 election, and we now have the world’s first trillionaire!

Within just seven months, more than 3.5 million people lost food assistance. In Arizona, about half of SNAP beneficiaries got pushed out - including 180,000 children. A child’s hunger is a precondition for everything else we ask them to do in schools.

It enrages me to no end to hear, “Oh they just expanded SNAP’s work requirements!” The implication there is that there’s a vast population of people sitting at home refusing to work.

That population does not exist.

Most SNAP recipients who can work already do! What these anti-worker extremist politicians have created is a paperwork gauntlet where you have to document monthly hours, file forms, and people fall off because it’s all too easy to miss a deadline in a maze like that.

The part most coverage skips is this: A child’s eligibility for free and reduced-price school meals is often tied directly to their family’s SNAP enrollment.

Kids on SNAP get “directly certified” for free meals - no separate application required. And whole schools in lower-income neighborhoods often qualify for universal free meals based on how many of their students are directly certified through programs like SNAP.

So if you knock millions of families off, you are cutting the number of kids who automatically qualify for school meals, and that could mean an entire school can no longer offer free breakfast and lunch to everyone.

The other issue is that schools bill Medicaid to help cover services for eligible students. Things like school nurses, speech and occupational therapy, counseling, etc. A meaningful share of the support that makes special education function runs partly on Medicaid dollars!

I needn’t remind you that special education is already underfunded.

So when this bill makes the largest Medicaid cuts in the program’s history, districts may get hit, too, and either have to take on the cost despite their already-strained budgets or cut services.

Speaking of strained budgets, the bill is also shifting more SNAP and Medicaid costs onto the states, and state budgets are already cracking under the weight! At least six states, including Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Oregon, have warned of likely shortfalls. Colorado is projecting a $1 billion gap.

When States’ costs rise, it forces them to cut money somewhere else to make up the difference. And that “somewhere else” is very often schools.

They are cutting health care and food access to help pay for a tax cut for the richest people who have ever lived. And the law that made it so was called both “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and “The Working Families Tax Cut.”

The bill also let the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium subsidies expire on December 31. Those subsidies were helping more than 90 percent of ACA enrollees afford their insurance. With them gone, the premiums individuals pay have more than doubled on average. About 1 in 10 people who had ACA coverage last year have dropped it entirely, and another 17 percent are at risk of doing the same.

Of the families who managed to hang on, more than half said that they’re now cutting back on food or basic household items just to pay the higher premiums.

And it gets worse for everyone, including anyone with regular insurance! When people drop or lose health coverage, they often skip care until they end up in the emergency room with something that should have been caught early. In Indiana, ER visits surged 17% in a single year as more residents went uninsured.

Those uninsured people cannot pay, but they still must be taken care of. That creates a cost that hospitals cannot bill an insurance company for. To cover the unpaid bills, hospitals raise their rates, which raises costs for all of us, and the ERs get more crowded and slower for everybody.

There is no version of this where only “other people” pay.

But this all brings me to who actually delivers all of these services.

When you add a mountain of new paperwork to SNAP and Medicaid, somebody has to process that paperwork. That somebody is a public service worker, frequently underpaid and already stretched thin, who now spends more of the day on red tape, and less of it actually helping people.

Eligibility caseworkers…social workers... And inside schools, the staff, school employees, counselors, library workers. Public workers being asked to deliver the same quality of service while the pile of work in front of them grows and their funding shrinks.

We have watched this playbook run before! Starve the thing, watch it fail, then announce that the private sector could do it better.

Again - the worst of this bill is yet to come.

The largest Medicaid cuts are timed to hit after the midterms.

When the politicians who voted for this bill galivant around this fall and talk about how much they love teachers and kids and “fiscal common sense,” I want everyone to remember that they front-loaded the tax cuts for the rich and back-loaded the pain for their constituents, specificallyso the bulk of the damage would arrive after they’d already gotten your vote.

Midterm elections are the entire reason the cuts were scheduled the way they were.

However, I refuse to end on a note of despair. Mr. Rogers says to look for the helpers, and the people who provide these services to the country are not politicians. They have been fighting back, and they have been winning.

AFSCME is the union for public service workers and its members are organizing in the places where these cuts land.

In Dracut, Massachusetts, school custodians stopped a plan to privatize their jobs.

At Illinois State University, workers ended a four-week strike with a new contract that lets them actually provide for their families!

In Cleveland, primary care providers are forming a union. (I love a union.)

In court, workers have fought and won to protect funding for libraries, museums, and child care.

All of those things happened because people organized and refused to unquestioningly accept what anti-worker politicians were handing down.

My suggestion is: arm yourself with knowledge. AFSCME has a clear, sourced breakdown of how the Big Beautiful Bill is hitting working families and the public services we depend on, and you should read it so you can explain it to the people in your life who haven’t connected these dots yet.

And also, remember the timeline. The people who voted to raise your costs so billionaires could get a tax break are counting on you to forget by November so they can get you to vote for them. The single most powerful thing you can do is make sure you don’t, and make sure everyone you know doesn’t either.

They scheduled the pain for after the election.

We get to schedule the consequences.

Until next time,
Frazz

Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• Will Linda McMahon be IMPEACHED? (Or not?)

• Trump or FBI???

• WILL THEY IMPEACH LINDA???

• Have you heard this??!?!

• Have they lost their minds?!

• The Texas State Board of Education has voted to make Bible passages required reading in K-12 public schools. This is a change to their statewide reading list. This change is expected to begin rolling out in 2030. I broke it down (before it passed) back in April.

• INCLUSION WIN

• A slap in the face to Californian voters

• THIS IS CONFUSING

• Bible in Texas schools… even more.

• Who is a professional vs. "graduate student"?!?!

• New LAUSD Superintendent!

Civic Engagement Homework:

Articles of impeachment against Linda McMahon:

Three articles of impeachment have been filed against Education Secretary Linda McMahon by Rep Suzanne Bonamici.

McMahon is the first U.S. education secretary to be the target of impeachment proceedings.

If it gets a vote, McMahon could be impeached if more than half of the House votes “yes.” (2/3 of the Senate would have to vote “yes” for her to be removed, though.) We are still waiting to see what Republicans do in the House.

CALL YOUR REPS, TELL THEM TO CO-SPONSOR!

Script you can use when calling your House representative:
Hi, my name is [NAME], and I live in [CITY/ZIP].
I’m calling to ask Representative [NAME] to support the articles of impeachment filed against Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
Students, families, and teachers need a functioning Department of Education. The Secretary should not be allowed to dismantle the department or ignore the laws Congress passed.
Please ask [Representative _____] to support this impeachment effort.
Thank you.

Representatives you can say THANK YOU to because they are ALREADY co-sponsoring Rep. Bonamici’s (D-OR) effort to impeachment Linda McMahon:
Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA)
Maxine Dexter (D-OR)
Veronica Escobar (D-TX)
John Garamendi (D-CA)
Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ)
Jahana Hayes (D-CT)
Jared Huffman (D-CA)
Mike Quigley (D-IL)
Doris Matsui (D-CA)
Andrea Salinas (D-OR)
Lateefah Simon (D-CA)
Mark Takano (D-CA)
Shri Thanedar (D-MI)
Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
Nikema Williams (D-GA)

Public Comment Period:

Attacks on Federal Grants

• A proposed rule would revise federal financial-assistance rules, including rules about when grants can be suspended or terminated.

  
  It also names DEI/DEIA policies and practices that the administration says violate federal anti-discrimination laws.

  
  You can say: “I oppose this rule because it could threaten after-school programs, tutoring, food assistance, mental health support, disability access, immigrant family services, LGBTQ support, legal aid, housing help, and community programs that people rely on.”

  
  If you work for, volunteer with, or rely on a federally funded program, say that too!

Equity Assistance

• The Department of Education has proposed rescinding the regulations for the Equity Assistance Center Program.

  
  These centers are tied to Title IV of the Civil Rights Act and provide technical assistance connected to desegregation and equal access in public schools.

  
  Equity assistance center script: “I oppose this rule because it could make it harder for public schools to get clear, local civil-rights support around desegregation, discrimination, language access, disability access, gender equity, immigrant students, LGBTQIA+ students, and equal educational opportunity.”

  
  If you are a parent, educator, student, school board member, civil-rights advocate, or anyone whose community has relied on help around discrimination or equal access in schools, say that too!

Notable Education News:

• LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has resigned. I don’t know if it was due to pressure from the Trump administration or because of the federal investigation he is under (reportedly connected to school contracts with the failed “AllHere” AI chatbot) He has not been charged with a crime. LAUSD and Trump have been in conflict with over immigration and students’ rights...I don’t know. I’m just here to tell you that the superintendent of the nation’s second-largest school district just resigned!

• LAUSD has a new superintendent after Alberto Carvalho resigned.

  The Los Angeles school board appointed Andrés Chait, who had been serving as acting superintendent. LAUSD is dealing with a lot right now: political pressure out the wazoo, ICE, declining enrollment, projected budget deficits, more than 1,000 layoffs… The reaction has been mixed, of course. But now we’ll see what shakes out.

• The Texas State Board of Education has voted to make Bible passages required reading in K-12 public schools. This is a change to their statewide reading list. This change is expected to begin rolling out in 2030.

• California voters just voted for State Superintendent. BUT lawmakers are about to weaken that office by taking away its day-to-day control over the CA Dept. of Education. That power will be handed to a new governor-appointed education director and the already-governor-appointed State Board of Education. And before any of the State Board members hop in my DMs again: I do understand the “fragmented governance” argument. I just don’t believe that clearer authority has to = consolidated authority.

• Remember the whole “professional degree” list that didn’t include nurses/teachers/etc? WELL, a judge blocked that weird little list.

  But the loan caps are still happening. We just don’t know which students are stuck in the lower “graduate program” borrowing bucket or higher “professional program” borrowing bucket. We might know more next week. I suggest dissociating until then.

• The lawsuit does NOT mean SAVE is saved. These headlines are SO CONFUSING. Borrowers are arguing that the Dept. of Ed. can’t kick them off SAVE/REPAYE and take away forgiveness benefits they were already earning. But, SAVE borrowers: still be ready to pick a new plan! The earliest you will have to switch is 9/29, but PLEASEEEE call your servicer about your specific situation. I know they’re annoying, but you gotta call and ask.

• Texas approved a major K-8 social studies rewrite. The official elementary standards embed the Bible and shift the curriculum toward a more Christian, Western/Eurocentric version of history. But I need a second to go through what was a draft vs. what passed... The biggest high school rewrites to U.S. history, world history, geography, and government were delayed for another vote. Please hold!

Good News In Education

• Every California school site is required to have at least one all-gender restroom available for students by July 1!

• Judge Blocks Trump Administration Attempt to Seize Private Medical Records of Trans Youth From New York Hospitals.

• Supreme Court turns away another parental notification case

• Republican behind nation’s first ban on Pride flags in schools loses primary

• Knox County Schools takes “Roots” off banned book list, restores to libraries

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

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McMahon is now the first U.S. education secretary to be the target of impeachment proceedings.

If it gets a vote, McMahon could be impeached if more than half of the House votes “yes.” (2/3 of the Senate would have to vote “yes” for her to be removed, though.)

Right now, we are waiting to see if Republican House leadership sends it to committee, buries it, or lets it move forward.

CALL YOUR REPS & TELL THEM TO CO-SPONSOR THIS!!!

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Representatives you can say THANK YOU to because they are ALREADY co-sponsoring Rep. Bonamici's (D-OR) effort to impeachment Linda McMahon:
Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA)
Maxine Dexter (D-OR)
Veronica Escobar (D-TX)
John Garamendi (D-CA)
Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ)
Jahana Hayes (D-CT)
Jared Huffman (D-CA)
Mike Quigley (D-IL)
Doris Matsui (D-CA)
Andrea Salinas (D-OR)
Lateefah Simon (D-CA)
Mark Takano (D-CA)
Shri Thanedar (D-MI)
Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
Nikema Williams (D-GA)

Script you can use when calling your House representative:

Hi, my name is [NAME], and I live in [CITY/ZIP].
I’m calling to ask Representative [NAME] to support the articles of impeachment filed against Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Students, families, and teachers need a functioning Department of Education. The Secretary should not be allowed to dismantle the department or ignore the laws Congress passed.

Please ask [Representative _____] to support this impeachment effort.
Thank you.

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Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• WHERE are the Democrats? (Yes - I’m asking about the political party)

• Treating homophobic/transphobic parents like the babies they are!

• Arizona's ESA is a VOUCHER SCAM

• Gina Hinojosa has big plans for Texas.

• CTA opposes billionaire tax in favor of long-term fix

• They WANT you confused.

• BREAKING EDUCATION NEWS: Special Education, Civil Rights Enforcement MOVED

• DOJ now has a hand in schools

• Montessori is ANTIFA

• Gentle parenting your homophobic aunt!

• We need to FLIP OUT about this

• They HAVE to stop doing this

• It's time for ACTION

• They just DON’T care

• They WANT to be victimized…they aren’t

• Hot take: Some people don’t deserve to know about their kids

• Corruption in Georgia?

Civic Engagement Homework:

Last Tuesday, the Trump administration announced it’s moving the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) to the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice.

OSERS makes sure states are actually following IDEA and oversees billions in grants. The OCR is what families turn to when their kid is being discriminated against at school (and Trump has been sabotaging it hardcore). And now both of those things are being handed off to agencies with zero infrastructure for this work and their own pile of crises to manage.

Congress still has to formally close the Department of Education, but if the courts or SOMEBODY doesn’t stop this latest move, there will barely be a department left to close.

Your homework: Call your senators and your House rep this week and tell them you oppose dismantling the Department of Education and these transfers of OSERS and OCR.

Keep it to the point: who you are, what’s at stake for your community, and what you want them to do about it. Use 5calls.org if you need a script and a quick connection to your reps.

They moved fast and quietly on this one. Let’s make some noise.

Notable Education News:

• BREAKING EDUCATION NEWS: Rep. Bonamici has announced she will introduce a resolution to impeach Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. This comes after McMahon made false/misleading statements to Congress & broke federal law by transferring the operations of more than 100 programs out of the Department of Education to other federal agencies without Congress’ permission.

• The Trump admin spent months messing up the Department of Education’s Offices of Civil Rights (putting staff on leave to the tune of $1M a week, closing offices, waging culture war fights & ignoring real issues, etc.) Now they’re pointing to issues they made worse as a reason to move education civil rights enforcement out of the Department of Education and into DOJ.

• One of the ORIGINAL REASONS for creating the Department of Ed. was: education programs were inefficiently scattered everywhere! Trump's administration is just recreating all of those issues! UGHHHH

• BREAKING: The Trump admin has announced it is moving special education oversight from the Dept. of Education to HHS, and education civil rights enforcement from to DOJ.

  ***This does not repeal IDEA, Title IX, or Section 504.***

  We do not yet know the basic mechanics (if someone will sue, whether complaints filed today still go through OCR, whether existing OCR cases transfer, whether families get routed to DOJ, or whether DOJ creates a separate process entirely, etc.)

• BREAKING: The Trump admin says it’s moving “student privacy work” out of the Department of Education into the Department of Justice.

  I am very concerned. FERPA is a student privacy law that Trump’s Education Department and the far-right have been bringing up and citing in anti-trans attacks. And the DOJ is already being used aggressively against trans rights...This whole thing feels like an alarming escalation that isn’t being brought up...

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

I went to a very large political and advocacy creator conference recently, and it was absolutely pivotal. It clarified so much for me.

Aaaaand haters gonna hate, but we are paywalling my emotions again.

Read more

Let’s get into this week’s posts, homework, and news!

This week’s blog post:

ICYMI:

• This can NOT happen! Targeting vulnerable students does not strengthen schools, improve education, or help kids succeed. And it certainly does not push our country forward. Please make a plan to bring this up with your community and every education official you can get the ear of! #NILCPartner @NationalImmigrationLawCenter ​

• Tell them to stand for something!!!! These people are terrified of our coordinated annoyance, so obviously we are going to be as annoying as humanly possible. Comment CEO to join me in emailing dozens of CEOs who once had a backbone to help them find it again. The link takes like a minute and it's so fun.

• Checking in from trending up!

Civic Engagement Homework:

Happy Pride! 🌈

This month’s homework: Find one banned or challenged book with LGBTQIA+ themes and buy it, borrow it, or recommend it to someone.

Bonus: Consider making a public comment at your next library or school board meeting in support of inclusive books, librarians, and diverse collections.

You can also check out what’s been challenged or removed in your district, leave a review on sites like Goodreads for a banned book, or donate a challenged title to your local library!

GOOD News in Education:

• Math teacher makes a beeline to rescue thousands of bees at Sturgeon Bay school

• Mayor Mamdani and NYC Public Schools Announce Continued Investment in Birth-to-2 Programming Through 2026–27 School Year

• SUN Bucks going out for Summer 2026; majority of eligible children receive benefits automatically

• Large School Districts Expand Access to Healthy School Meals Despite Ongoing Challenges

• Summer meal programs fill gap as families face rising food insecurity as school ends

• Nearly Two-Thirds of Governors Prioritize Child Care and Early Learning in Their 2026 State of the State Addresses

• Teachers Union Urges Schools to Curb AI Chatbots, Screen Time

That’s all for this week!

Mwah,
- Frazz

While it’s easy to accuse the administration of incompetence or disorganization, no one can say their plan is incoherent. In fact, it’s very connected and cohesive…and it is working. But before we dive into that, spoiler alert: organizations like Education Law Center (ELC), which this Substack is in partnership with, are fighting back. Support them! Follow ELC on their social media platforms (@edlawcenter), join the ELC mailing list, and sign up for news alerts from their Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS) campaign to stay in the loop on education policy updates that matter.

What is happening to public education right now is the result of a very long effort that goes back to the creation of the modern U.S. Department of Education. The civil rights enforcement collapse, the gutting of the Department of Education, and the federal voucher program disguised as a tax policy and hidden in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” are all connected moves to weaken the rules, hollow out the agency that enforces them, and redirect the money to a private system that never had to follow any rules in the first place.

Once you see it, every individual headline starts to make sense.

Public education in this country is held together by three things: A set of laws, including education policy laws that provide funding and support for disadvantaged students and hold schools accountable for improving student achievement, and civil rights laws that say schools getting federal money cannot discriminate based on race, national origin, sex, disability, or age. An agency with the staff, regional offices, and legal authority to enforce said laws and to make sure federal education dollars reach the kids they are supposed to. And third, the widely-held belief that public dollars belong in public schools which are accountable to elected school boards, open to every child, and obligated by law to serve each of them.

The Trump administration is going after all three at once. And the goal is to fundamentally change what “public education” means in the United States.

The Office for Civil Rights is not a household name, but you have benefited from it whether you realize it or not! OCR enforces Title VI (protects against discrimination based on race, color, national origin), Title IX (protects against sex-based discrimination), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (protects disabled folks), and the Age Discrimination Act.

The law says you can file a complaint with OCR for discrimination in schools. For example, if a kid with autism is denied their services, a Black student is disciplined three times as often as their white classmates for the same behavior, or a girl is pushed out of a STEM program, a transgender student is barred from a bathroom, or an English learner is put in a classroom with no language support… OCR is supposed to investigate these sorts of things and more.

That office is now ground zero for a planned demolition.

In March 2025, the administration shuttered seven of OCR’s twelve regional offices and put more than half of its employees on administrative leave. The courts blocked the reduction-in-force, but the department told its OCR attorneys not to do any work. They made them sit at home for months, fully paid, while complaints piled up. The Government Accountability Office estimated that taxpayers spent up to $38 million paying OCR staff not to work between March and December of 2025. The attorneys were finally recalled in December, but the damage had been done.

One internal source said the pending backlog of complaints was roughly 25,000, including about 7,000 open investigations. Between March and September of 2025, as the attorneys were forced to stay home, OCR received more than 9,000 discrimination complaints. But about 90 percent of the unresolved cases were dismissed because the administration has narrowed what OCR will actually enforce. At this point, civil rights enforcement has basically been reduced to challenging policies that protect transgender kids.

In April of this year, the agency went so far as to take back Title IX agreements with five school districts and a California community college because those agreements had been negotiated to protect LGBTQIA+ students.

In the May 14 hearing, Linda McMahon was pressed on why Trump’s proposed budget slashes the Office for Civil Rights by 35 percent. And in the same breath that she defended the cuts, she also insisted the office remains critically important.

The game plan seems to be:
1. Say you support civil rights.
2. Defund the office that enforces them.
3. Trust that no one is paying close enough attention to notice.

In practice, that means families are still able to file a complaint if their student is discriminated against. They just can’t expect anyone to read it.

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Most people don’t have a strong opinion about the Department of Education because most people don’t know what it actually does and there is a lot of misinformation pushed to make sure it’s as confusing as possible.

First, what it does not do: It does not run schools. It does not write curriculum. It does not decide whether your district teaches phonics or whole language. Those are state and local decisions and always have been!

The Department of Education was created to send money where it needs to be sent, enforce civil rights laws, collect data, manage the federal student loan portfolio, administer Title I funding for high-poverty schools, Title III funding for English learners, administer IDEA funding for students with disabilities, and oversee research.

These are not glamorous functions. In fact, I like to compare these nitty gritty functions to plumbing. When you rip out plumbing or break the pipes, the building doesn’t fall down. It just slowly starts to smell and rot.

In this case, the plumbing they’re destroying is intended specifically for public education.

Nine days into his second term in January of 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14191, “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families,” which directed every agency possible to find ways to take existing federal money intended for public schools and child care and reroute it toward private schools, homeschooling, and charters. In March, a second executive order told McMahon to begin shutting down “non-essential” functions of the department itself (which they were already doing).

Since then, the administration has signed at least six interagency agreements moving programs to Labor, Interior, State, and HHS. Mind you, these departments have no history of running any of the Department of Education’s programs and already have plenty of other work to do.

The administration has signaled that IDEA itself, the federal law that has guaranteed a free appropriate public education to children with disabilities for fifty years, may follow…if they can figure out how to do it without Congressional approval.

The legal problem they’re running into is that you cannot abolish a federal agency by executive order. Congress created the Department of Education and only Congress can dissolve it. So the administration is ripping its insides out and then telling the public that the agency was always too big and clearly nobody is using it anyway.

The thing that kills me is that they are just moving functions to other departments, not getting rid of the actual functions themselves. By moving functions and staff out of their specialized department and putting them in unspecialized agencies, they are creating the very kind of bureaucratic nightmare they always say the Department of Education is.

A coalition of states, school districts, unions, and disability rights organizations is suing in Somerville v. Trump and New York v. McMahon, arguing that these interagency transfers are unlawful and that they are causing harm to children. In addition, a coalition including the NAACP and public school parents, represented by Education Law Center and co-counsel, filed a lawsuit to prevent the Trump administration from terminating federal grants and shuttering regional OCR offices. Recently, a Maryland court denied a motion to dismiss this case.

I mean, one thing they are kicking around is putting the oversight of IDEA under HHS. IDEA is not a medical program. It’s a Civil Rights law. A child with dyslexia does not need a doctor. A child with autism in a fifth-grade classroom does not need a hospital. They need a teacher, trained school staff, and a school legally required to provide everything they need to be successful.

Even Republican senators have flinched at this part. But it is clear what the administration wants to do.

On July 4, 2025, the president signed Public Law 119-21 (which I refuse to call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” without putting it in quotes, because that name is ridiculous). Inside the OBBBA is the country’s first federal private school voucher program, and it will take billions of dollars that are meant to fund public services and convert them into private school tuition.

The new Education Freedom Tax Credit, which Education Law Center’s Public Funds Public Schools campaign has been tracking from the start, allows individual donors to give up to $1,700 to a “scholarship granting organization,” or SGO, and receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit in return. Not a deduction. A credit. That means you take money you would have paid in federal income tax, send it to an SGO, and the SGO uses that to write scholarships for private school tuition. This tricky maneuvering means the federal government is the donor, but the SGO is a laundering mechanism of sorts.

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Senate Democrats introduced a bill in April to repeal the credit which kicks in for the 2026 tax year, which means donors can claim it on the returns they file in early 2027.

States have to opt in, but at the time of publication, almost 30 states have indicated that they plan to do so. If you want to get the lowdown about this voucher scheme and have the right ammunition to convince your governor to opt out, check out this PFPS webinar scheduled for June 4.

The administration is very motivated to get states to opt in because the federal voucher program is designed to grow. It creates a permanent pipeline of federal money into private education with no antidiscrimination requirements attached to the SGOs or the schools they fund. (The anti-DEI push running parallel to all of this doesn’t help, either.)

Private schools that take voucher money can still refuse to admit students with disabilities. They can still expel a student for being gay. They can still decline to provide special education services or English learner support. They have to follow none of the laws that public schools follow, and they’re going to get federal money anyway.

If you remember - the Department of Education is supposed to make sure that public schools actually serve all students because public schools receive federal funds.

This voucher program is busting on the scene in a country that is already going voucher-crazy at the state level. Two-thirds of states now run private school voucher programs. Eighteen of those programs are universal or near-universal, meaning they give public money to families regardless of income, and crucially, regardless of whether the kids were ever in public school in the first place.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 2 last year creating a universal ESA program that promises up to $10,000 per family. Tennessee has expanded its program. Florida’s universal voucher already cost taxpayers nearly $4 billion in 2024-25, triggered a state budget crisis, and set off school closures and mass layoffs in public districts across the state.

This is what the data has been telling us for years. Arizona’s voucher program blew a massive, nearly $1 billion hole in the state budget. A recent audit of one of Florida’s ESA programs could not account for over $270 million in spending. Arizona ESA dollars have been spent on jewelry, lingerie, luxury travel, and wedding gifts. In Louisiana, voucher students saw their academic achievement drop in math, reading, and other subjects, on a scale researcher Joshua Cowen has compared to pandemic-level learning loss. Across study after study, vouchers don’t improve outcomes for the kids who use them, harm public schools, and mostly act as a tuition discount for families with kids already enrolled in private school.

If your honest goal were to improve education for kids, this is not the policy you would pick.

So let’s look at the big picture… When this goes live in 2027, billions of public dollars will start flowing out of the public system. Those dollars will land at private schools that are not required to follow Title VI, Title IX, IDEA, Section 504, or the ADA. (Even if those schools were required to follow those civil rights laws, the office historically responsible for enforcing them has been wrecked.) But even if OCR still had teeth, the Department of Education that houses it is being broken into pieces and scattered across other federal agencies which have never run an education program and don’t really have the bandwidth to do so.

Each move makes their next one easier.

This pattern is very familiar to anyone who has watched what privatization does in other sectors. They call the public option broken while starving it and breaking it more. Then, they say “Oh my gosh, that public option is so bad! Look how bad it is!” and their data acts as evidence that the private option was necessary all along.

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When you look at it like that, it’s no wonder Trump wanted someone with a business background to be the Secretary of Education. The difference here is that education isn’t a business. It’s infrastructure which serves roughly 50 million children.

The framing is “freedom” and “parental choice,” but that is easily debunked if you look at how the Department of Education has been engaging with Democratic-led states. The only people with “choice” are those who are bought-in on this administration’s goals for education.

That being said, I think there are a lot of things we can do here.

It may not seem like it, but a huge amount of what the administration is attempting is being contested legally. In fact, the judicial branch is one of the last meaningful checks and balances we have. Federal courts have already blocked parts of the Department’s anti-DEI enforcement campaign. Coalitions of states, school districts, unions, disability rights groups, and civil rights organizations are suing over the attempted dismantling of the Department of Education, the collapse of OCR, and the administration’s abuse of executive power and attempts to undo programs Congress created.

Organizations like Education Law Center are not just publishing reports and explainers (although those are helpful!) They are actively helping lead legal and advocacy fights around school funding equity, disability rights, civil rights protections, and the privatization of public education itself.

ELC’s Public Funds Public Schools campaign, which created many of the voucher resources cited throughout this piece, exists specifically because voucher expansion has become a coordinated national strategy.

However, courts cannot save public education by themselves. We have a role to play and there are a lot of options because fights are happening simultaneously in state legislatures, governors’ offices, school boards, and federal agencies all at once!

Here’s the game plan:

What to tell your governor: First, you need to know if your governor intends to opt in, out, or if they are on the fence regarding the Education Freedom Tax Credit. (If they have not commented, they are deciding right now.) The opt-in decision is theirs to make unless your state designates someone else.

“No” is an option! Don’t let them tell you it isn’t!

Public Funds Public Schools has published a resource called Debunking the Trump Administration’s Claims about the Federal Voucher Program that exists specifically for the political conversation governors are having right now.

What to tell your state legislators: First of all, dear reader, you need to watch your own legislature like a hawk. The PFPS Voucher Bill Tracker monitors voucher legislation in all 50 states and updates weekly. California’s most recent voucher proposals, SB 64 and AB 19, both failed in committee in the 2025-26 session but they will be back. (They always come back in one form or another.) The Educational Freedom Act, the Children’s Educational Opportunity Act, the School Choice Flex Account Act…these are all the same idea repackaged by the same well-funded groups.

The PFPS Universal Voucher Price Tag Tool at pfps.org/universal-voucher-tool lets you estimate what a voucher program would cost your state. Whenever you call your state legislators, bring those numbers to them. Money talks, even if your state loves vouchers.

What to tell lawmakers at the federal level: Call your senators and your representative and tell them you support the Senate Democrats’ bill to repeal the federal tax credit scholarship. Tell them you do not want the Department of Education dismantled, you do not want IDEA moved to HHS, and you do not want OCR’s budget cut by 35 percent.

And locally… Get to your school board! Watch your local school board and vote in your school board elections! The federal pressure is real, but most of what happens in schools is still decided down the street.

The PFPS Federal Voucher Program webpage, the campaign’s FAQ, and its Explainer are the cleanest and simplest breakdowns available. Read them and send them to people who think this is a fight about “school choice!”

If they are going to flood the zone with disinformation and chaos, we have to work triply as hard to combat it.

Public education in this country was built by people who knew that a country with a functioning democracy needs a system that educates every child. And it has taken many fights to make sure that “every child” really means every child.

What is happening now is an attempt to dismantle yet another cornerstone of our democracy. They can’t do it all at once, because that would be politically impossible, but rather in pieces small enough that most people will not notice until it’s too late.

Have you ever seen an optical illusion where everyone sees different images at first? But once you see both versions, you can’t go back to just seeing one?

That is kind of what the administration is afraid of. They know that once enough people see their attacks for what they are, they won’t be able to continue dismantling public education. That’s why they rely so heavily on confusion, exhaustion, and fragmentation…and that’s why they are so afraid of the courts.

Public opposition would look very different if everyone saw the culture war distractions for what they are and knew that every fight for democracy is connected.

I’m so grateful that courts are slowing pieces of this down and I’m so glad that you, reader, are here in this fight with me so none of this happens in the dark.

Public education has survived previous attempts to segregate it, privatize it, defund it, and politicize it. I know that if we stick together, it will survive again.

Till next time,
Frazz

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P.S. If this piece fired you up, let’s help Education Law Center continue their valuable work by donating. (Or if you’d like to show your support for public education all over town, the ELC merch store is here: bonfire.com/store/education-law-center.)

They are in the courts, boots on the ground, hands in the policy fights we talk about all the time. Every dollar helps them keep going.