A clarification regarding my comments regarding schools

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I am on occasion accused of being an apologist for schools, someone willing to criticize policy, policy makers, and critics of the public education system, as if somehow their criticisms are entirely unwarranted. Those accusations mostly just mean that they ran across one thing I wrote or said and took it out of context. 

The objective reality is that our public school system in 2026 is a good ways from what it needs to be. I know of no educator who thinks otherwise. But at its core it is a system designed to educate young people for a world that hasn't existed for decades. Any attempt to fight that system is met by the forces of gravity pulling towards an undesirable state.

And not every school is a good school, just as not every hospital, police department, or public institution can be said to always be performing as it should. Understanding and accepting that is how we get better.

What I criticize are those with the power to make things better.

  • You cannot underfund an institution for decades and then wonder why it isn't what you want it to be.
  • You cannot reduce the value offered by an institution to a research metric as if that can define the quality of a school (when it was never designed for that purpose) and expect the institution to thrive.
  • You cannot put an accountability system in place with in which the negative judgments are largely be assigned by zip code and expect the system to improve.
  • You cannot think your accountability judgments are valid when most of the positive ratings judgments go to schools in neighborhoods filled with students who would likely succeed regardless of the school.
  • You cannot throw your hands in the air when your bad policies don't work and think the solution is to fund a parallel system freed from those bad policies.
  • You cannot build systems that revere one ideology at the expense of all others and think somehow you've created an environment conducive to learning.
  • You cannot make the system better by giving a handful of students the opportunity to leave it.
  • You cannot spend massive amount of legislative capital trying to figure out how to hold school's feet to the fire and also determine how to make them all as excellent as possible.
  • You should not — and yet this is commonplace — create terrible policies designed to undermine public schooling and then complain when those places have the intended effect, and then use that as justification for more bad policies.
  • You cannot, decade after decade, keep doubling down on the same policy framework that has never produced the effect you claimed to have wanted and seriously think, maybe this time it will work. 

Those are things I criticize, and they are deeply deserving of everything I have ever said against them and more.


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