A lot below: Accountability debates in Virginia, dismantling the Department of Education, Ross Weiner’s op-ed, the national voucher tax credit, and child protective services. Plus – when Starlee Coleman attacks and Natalie Wexler on history standards.
ICYMI
I enjoyed talking AI with Alex Kotran, who is leading some really interesting work in the sector. You can tell this wasn’t filmed in July because I’m wearing a sweater, but it was just released. Watch here.
Coming Attractions
Today, I’ll be at AASA’s legislative conference with Lindsay Fryer and Roberto Rodriguez talking federal policy at a fireside chat moderated by Sasha Pudelski. No fire. Lingering heat wave. Lindsay usually brings fire.
I’ll be moderating a discussion about school choice at the NCSL meeting in Chicago on Wednesday the 29th. Come by to check out what promises to be a lively discussion on a fast-moving issue that is having its moment.
You can also find me in Aspen at Aspen Institute later this month. On my bike in Normandy training for the 2026 PMC, that’s the first weekend of August, (donations deeply appreciated, 100% to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to fight cancers).
Virginia Accountability
Lots of questions over the past few weeks that can be roughly aggregated and summarized as ‘WTF in Virginia?’
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… During the past few years Virginia’s Board of Education took steps to increase transparency and accuracy in school performance reporting and raise proficiency levels for students. Pre-pandemic scores had been trending the wrong way, the state board had lowered cut scores (the number of questions a student needs to answer correctly on a standardized test) in response, and in concert with efforts to raise standards in other states, Virginia ended up with the lowest levels in several grades and subjects according to NAEP benchmarking.
There was pressure on Governor Spanberger to reverse the recent changes because they happened on former governor Glenn Youngkin’s watch and because of the usual politics of education performance reporting. It’s telling that one of the biggest flashpoints in Virginia is not how much students are learning but rather the performance descriptors (labels) applied to schools. As you can see here it’s all about student learning:
When the non-partisan legislative analysts office (JLARC) in late 2025 advised against repeal and instead said that the new system should become the system going forward, it took the wind out of those sails. The legislature did task the state board with implementing some changes that JLARC had suggested.
Something JLARC did not suggest — lowering the cut scores again or not raising them as the board had committed to do. Flash forward a few months and in late June, out of left field, the Spanberger Administration put a proposal in front of the board to delay the phase-in of higher standards for two more years. This was sort of smuggled in under the guise of the JLARC recommendations.
This was obviously politically disastrous in terms of Spanberger’s avowed commitment to higher standards, including a day one executive order, and the moderate image she seeks to cultivate. It did nothing to help the Democratic brand.
It was also substantively lousy for two primary reasons. First, again, standards are already the lowest in the nation. Virginia should have higher aspirations for its students. Full stop. Second, though, the board had set up a staggered phase-in precisely to avoid a big jump in one year. In practice, creating a big step in two years instead of a phase-in now would mean in two years there would be calls to delay because of how disruptive such a big jump would be. In fact, the same people who previously called for a phase-in were now calling for the creation of this cliff as part of this delay strategy.
The phase-in will be a transition, it will be confusing, and it will require state leadership to help people understand what’s going on. But that’s all preferable to an enormous one year shift that shocks the system.
In any event, to its credit, the state board rejected the proposal 7-0. One member, an appointee of Governor Spanberger, who voted to reject the delay was nonetheless reappointed to a full term shortly after — you can take that as a signal if you like. But the main takeaway here is that pressure to keep standards low, and happy talk about how great the schools are, is high — and it’s not going to stop until a more performance-focused culture takes hold. Easier said than done because Virginia doesn’t have an organized parents or pro-kids advocacy group shaping that culture. No EAO in the commonwealth. That will continue unless philanthropy steps up and helps change the game around parent organizing so there is some effective counterweight to an establishment and political network committed to resisting higher standards and more honest reporting to families and the public.
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Rosstrums
Ross Weiner set off another round of NCLB history debate with an op-ed in The Times that at one level makes perfect sense and at another does not and is ahistorical. The perfect sense part is that, of course, schools are about more than math and reading scores and there has to be room for that in policy. The incoherent part was the, ok, so what? Because the op-ed seemed to give cover to those who want to minimize measurement and accountability — at the very time we ought to probably be doing more of it, while recognizing, to be clear, it’s not the totality of what schools do. I think the problem is less a debate of accountability hawks versus anti-accountability types than people thrashing around in that messy middle.
(One reason some degree of school choice makes a lot of sense is precisely because of all the things that matter to parents but you can’t neatly measure. These include themes and areas of emphasis, pedagogy, size and offerings, and so forth. But the lack of basic information for parents seems at odds with what we know about markets — they need information, too.)
After a flurry of pushback (I’d recommend Chad Aldeman and Charlie Barone) Ross took to LinkedIn to revise and extend his remarks, as they say around D.C. This part I think is mistaken,
A generation of technocratic, top-down reform strategies alienated parents and the broader public, who wanted more focus on practical skills, critical thinking, and character development, but were told the focus needed to stay on test scores. Meanwhile, young people are chronically absent, disengaged from school, and deeply distrustful of institutions as they navigate AI, affective polarization, financial anxiety, and extreme wealth inequality.
OK, first, find the American generation, in the post-war period, that didn’t complain that the ones behind it were disengaged. Second, the test scores don’t tell you everything, it doesn’t follow from that they don’t tell you anything. The signals are important.
Finally, while arguing about testing and accountability in terms of optimal policy seems important — there is not a lot of evidence that this is what broke trust in schools or alienated everyone. Here’s Gallup:
You might be able to make some argument for political priming here, but it’s hard to argue a focus on testing and accountability did this. And the pandemic was rocket fuel for absenteeism.
What clearly did drive dissatisfaction was the pandemic response — or lack thereof — and what the pandemic revealed about education. We closed schools but kept bars open. We sent workers back but kept kids home. All of this long after the initial confusion and chaos of Covid had given way to some clarity. David Zweig does a good job walking through this in his book An Abundance of Caution. At the same time parents got a firsthand look at the kind of work kids were doing and in many cases didn’t like it.
Whatever you think about assessment, we’re not going to restore trust until we come to terms with pandemic’s impact. It’s why several Dems running in 2028 are openly saying it was a mistake — they are trying to get in front of it. So much of what we’re talking about now is an echo of 2020-2021.
The other thing Ross says on LinkedIn that I think is off is,
There aren’t many healthy places for nuance in education policy discourse. You’re either a test-based accountability hawk or you are anti-accountability, but that binary doesn’t represent most of the people I talk with. In private conversations, people comfortably say that our policy agenda is outdated and our measures of success are anemic — and then don’t say that out loud for fear of alienating allies or giving ammunition to people they otherwise disagree with. So we stay stuck in polarized debates that don’t move us forward. I wrote the piece partly to say what a lot of people are thinking and not saying.
He’s right about nuance, and to some extent about the policy debate being shopworn, but I think wrong about the directionality here. In my experience, the opposite is true. I have an email box full of what read like notes from hostages. People wanting it known they’re really reformers even if their day job prevents that. And D.C. is full of people who see a political appointment in their future and consequently endeavor not to say or do things to put that in jeopardy.
People disagree, sure, but if we truly had a Festivus for education I don’t think it would all go anti-reform the way some seem to think.
Federal Education Tax Credit
You might have seen the thinly veiled political threat from the teachers’ unions to Democratic governors about opting their states into the new education tax credit. The threat gets the headlines, but it’s par for the course, not what’s interesting.
What’s interesting is the split that is emerging among Dems on the question of how much of this money can be directed toward public schools. You’re seeing new scholarship-granting organizations spin up with this in mind. And Democratic governors opting in think some of this money will benefit public schools. (Here’s Sara Mead on possible early ed angles.) Some conservatives agree. Here’s Daniel Buck fretting it might just become another public school slush fund.
The teachers unions, on the other hand, seem to think that they and their allies can’t capture enough of this money to make it worth the political trade-off. Given how the program seems likely to be structured, and their ability to influence donations (payroll deduction) and state-level policy activity, this is revealing. I don’t buy the high-end estimates on the cost of donor acquisition. Even accounting for the novel nature of the program, people will be able to do this for less.
Someone is making a bad bet here — we’ll know who soon enough. Along with AI, this might be the most unpredictable thing happening to the sector right now.
Shawshank Education
By statute, the Trump Administration can’t abolish the Department of Education, but they can smuggle it out piece by piece. Here’s a good Rick Hess-Lindsay Fryer discussion on what the newest interagency agreements, about special education and civil rights, mean, short term and longer term (though in this case longer term probably means until Democrats win the White House).
In my view, the special education move to HHS doesn’t make much sense and points up the fundamental problem and illogic of this whole gambit. We are in need of some government restructuring, but it should be done with effectiveness in mind, not just how to close an agency for ideological reasons and where to park things. Education programs, for instance Head Start, should be moved to the Department of Education, not from it. And there is a case for moving some things out (loans, training and some postsecondary, for instance). This should all be done via statute, though, not on the fly to align with a talking points.
In theory, there is a stronger argument for moving OCR and civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice. In practice, the Trump Administration has kneecapped Justice, so it’s a legitimate question what capacity will be there to handle the workload, which includes frivolous and nuisance claims but also a lot of legitimate and important cases from parents. There are also real question about special education enforcement versus other civil rights enforcement living at Justice. Worth noting, too, that ED OCR was not hitting it out of the park and had become highly politicized, in different ways, under Republican and Democratic administrations.
That tweet is true, and also I think people are underweighting how challenging it is going to be. Under the surface, the administration is embedding funding, data, and other processes in such a way that moving some of this stuff back will not be a simple day-one executive order and GSA moving a few offices.
Along with the forthcoming OMB rule, government functions are being remade in more than the transitory and chaotic way of Trump’s first term. That is consequential.
Buttigieg and CPS
As you probably heard, we discovered a new fresh hell in our politics recently. As if swatting was not bad and dangerous enough, someone decided to up the ante and call child protective services on former Transportation Secretary and likely Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, apparently without evidence or cause.
To say this is vile doesn’t even touch it. Leave aside the abuse of government process — involving someone’s kids like this, forcing even a short-term separation of kids and parents, it’s grim. In this particular case it also fuels one of the most revolting, and data-disproven, misconceptions about gay people and child abuse — we talked about that a few years ago.
As with past escalations and acts of violence against public officials and public figures, there is no “but” here following any denunciation. It’s simply unacceptable and without any justification, no matter how much you may disagree with someone’s politics.
While we’re here, though, it’s also worth mentioning that unsubstantiated reporting — not politically motivated like the Buttigieg episode but just mistaken — is a problem here in education. Teachers actually have the highest error rate among mandatory reporters, even accounting for the fact that they are in contact with a lot more kids. Thankfully the weaponization we saw in the Buttigieg context is still rare. But accidental error is not, and it also causes a lot of distress and disruption. It’s a place we should try to do better, because false reporting of any kind undermines an important government function just as not reporting puts kids at risk.
That’s why this is something schools should train on more. It’s often a throwaway moment in pre-service training and it should be more of a focus.
What They’re Saying:
Natalie Wexler on the new Texas history standards:
If other state officials are looking to beef up their social studies standards, as I hope many are, I would suggest they look to Virginia rather than Texas. A few years ago, that state’s board of education unanimously adopted a set of social studies standards that, while somewhat controversial, managed to avoid charges of Christian nationalism and America- or Virginia-first-ism. The board was specific about content to be covered in an even-handed way, noting as one of the standards’ foundational principles that “American is both exceptional and imperfect.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Virginia board was evenly split between Republican and Democratic appointees, and each side recognized the need to make compromises. The Texas board has a Republican majority, and votes on both the social studies standards and the reading list were essentially along party lines.
NACPS CEO Starlee Coleman to RI Governor and former charter school champion Dan McKee, who is locked in a tough reelection campaign:
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