Public blunders, private mischief, and the great 2025 education squeeze

American education policy remains under the shadows of unserious officials and reformers alike

Honorary National Warlords of Education Donald Trump (President of the United States) and Dr. Maria Su (San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent).

Summer 2025 has kicked off by putting serious education reformers on a back foot. Though I touched on the chaos of the present moment in my introductory post, I wanted to describe a bit more why I think the current situation in education policy feels so disorienting. To put it shortly: too many of the biggest education policy players are no longer taking education policy seriously. Our collective attention regularly falls on new theories about the education system’s moral shortcomings, but little is said about what policies actually improve students’ math and reading abilities. The problem isn’t just one leaky pipe — the piping itself has frozen. And bad ideas and mismanaged policies are spewing everywhere, from everywhere.

Today we’re going to consider a few examples, and ask not only where they came from, but also whether there is anything the different players in this battle — the federal government and school officials, academics and consulting groups — might have in common. Because despite perennial commentary from the left and the right about America’s broken and unjust education system, they appear to agree on one thing: they’re willing to fight over it. And fight hard.

Public blunders…

Many of the biggest punches thrown this year have come from the Trump Administration and its Department of Education. Its approach to “fixing” education policy seems to be a hasty exercise in wildfire management: Our job is to burn, and we can count on what’s left to regrow. This was the approach that DOGE, initially led by Elon Musk, pledged to take to the entirety of the Federal Government.

The Department of Education was hit particularly hard, though, because more so than other fonts of federal policy, it tends to exhibit the kind of ideological leaning — progressivism — that makes up the other target of the DOGE team. And this double-mission has made the situation all the more chaotic and hard to parse for everyone, because getting rid of progressive-coded policies and making the government more efficient are actually two different goals. At least on the margins they will be.

But maybe that distinction, as roughly one half of the country thinks, really is a marginal one. Fair enough. Still, what specifically should be burned? On its face this is a question about particular policies, but how the Administration has answered reveals quite a bit about its values and, by extension, its seriousness about reforming education. Much has already been said about the approach the Trump Administration and its allies have taken to uprooting DEI and anything resembling it. Much less has been said, though, about decisions that are arguably much more revealing. Consider Jill Barshay’s excellent reporting on how the Education Department has bungled this year’s “Report on the Condition of Education.” The publication of this report goes back nearly 160 years, and since 2002 Congress has required Ed to publish it by June 1. But now, following a wave of DOGE-initiated grant and personnel cuts, apparently only three employees remain in the statistics wing of the Education Department left to grapple with the massive task of compiling a national report.

So it’s no wonder why they missed the deadline, nor why the report is now going to be published on a “rolling basis” instead of all at once: they got rid of almost everyone needed to do it! Whether what DOGE did in the Department of Education was legal or not — by violating statutory requirements, administrative law, or federal hiring and firing procedures — is now somewhat beside the point. There’s not a magic wand any single court, legislator, or activist can wave to undo a mass exodus of qualified researchers, officials, and appointees from a federal department. New employment opportunities have been taken and retirement offers accepted. Some might come back, but perhaps only after years or administrations go by. The right is waging a moral crusade over education, but not for it.

… And private mischief

In a different, more optimistic version of today’s story, an unserious education reform agenda adopted by the White House might have prompted opposition leadership — in deep-blue cities, for example — to distinguish themselves to voters who care about serious education policy. Unfortunately, the progressive policy agenda is arguably just as unserious, but also much subtler, as those policies often emerge from pipelines bearing traditional stamps of expertise and institutional legitimacy.

Consider some recent policy priorities taken up by education officials and policymakers in San Francisco. The most controversial among them by far is the “Grading for Equity” plan that was set to launch in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) this fall. Here is the basic description of the School Board’s plan, articulated in a presentation at a Board meeting:

That is quite the collection of big changes. Providing retakes, not penalizing for lateness, lack of effort or participation, and not factoring classwork or homework into a student’s grade — these are all changes that on their face reduce student accountability, strip away structure, and yes, introduce more bias into the task of grading. (Whether a paper was turned in on time is a straightforward question with an objective answer. The quality of a student’s writing? A bit less so!)

The important point is that these changes are all quite drastic and come with obvious downsides. Did San Francisco education officials or the consultants they hired take these issues seriously? Here is how they understood the risks and potential downsides that might come with “Grading for Equity”:

This tiny paragraph hardly mimics serious engagement with the actual policy being proposed. And I cannot tell if it’s more offensive or embarrassing for Superintendent Su and the Board to think that the policy’s biggest “Con” is just how hard it will be for its proponents to educate (read: re-educate) not only their own teachers, but “the whole system” into wanting to adopt it. It is also hard to imagine a circumstance where that gargantuan task should have to be the primary focus of a serious education reform agenda.

All of this talk about the task of communicating and educating the public, teachers, and apparently everyone else that might be involved becomes even more baffling when we consider how Superintendent Su and most of the Board actually tried to implement it. To say that their actions evinced a lack of confidence in the plan would be an understatement, because as far as I can tell the attempt to implement it involved:

1. No communication with the public about the plan,

2. No earnest discussion with the public (or themselves) about the tradeoffs involved with such a radical change in grading policy,

3. Procedural hardball between Superintendent Su’s office and the San Francisco Board of Education when the plan first came to light, featuring an unconvincing argument from the former that the latter did not have the authority to accept or reject the plan, and

4. A relatively prompt backing-down after “Grading for Equity” was exposed to the public and received criticism from prominent local officials and national representatives.

To anyone unfamiliar with the progressive education policy pipeline, the San Francisco “Grading for Equity” fiasco must appear somewhat baffling. Despite local political will seeming to shift against anti-excellence in education, a radical anti-excellence policy almost found a way to avoid public scrutiny and sneak through the institutional cracks. Why do these ideas keep popping up, seemingly ex nihilo, in the progressive education policy pipeline?

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Fortunately, bad ideas cannot come from the aether, or out of nowhere, or from somewhere else impossible to hold to account. Instead, they can come from places like Crescendo Education Group, a team of education consultants organized around the Equitable Grading Project and its creator, Joe Feldman. The group has all the trappings of a cutting-edge team of education reformers, its founder a graduate of Harvard’s Ed School and a longtime educator and school administrator. Since its creation, Crescendo has apparently worked with over 200 schools, districts, and colleges, and major coverage of the changes it recommends usually only arrives after districts have implemented them.

What did Superintendent Su and the Board think Grading for Equity could do for the San Francisco Unified School District? Everything, apparently:

Equitable grading will be more accurate, fairer, and motivate students more than whatever the District was doing before. It will also address grade inflation, and a new phenomenon they call “grade depression” (which they helpfully explain). If only we would all buy in.

But I don’t. Fewer historically underserved students getting D’s and F’s will only help them if the newer, higher grades actually represent improved learning and aptitude. Of course Su and the Board and Crescendo claim they will, but so far the public doesn’t seem to be buying it. Superintendent Su thinks it’s partially because of all the “misinformation.”

At its core, Grading for Equity is a contentious moral agenda for reforming education masquerading as a serious system of educational and pedagogical principles. How the Superintendent and School Board of one of the most economically and culturally important districts in the United States could tout Grading for Equity’s tautological reduction of “D/F rates” as a reason to implement it, while at the same time admitting that “the whole system” doesn’t really understand or buy it, is quite frankly beyond me.

San Francisco students got lucky when the SFUSD equity grading “plan” leaked, and the public was able to mobilize against it. Students in other districts, like San Leandro, are not so lucky. For now, many are stuck being graded according to how their teacher interprets the theories in Feldman’s book, which one reviewer claims will “stop educators who want to improve their practices with underserved students right in their tracks.” In a sense I agree.

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Bad ideas from left-leaning education academics and consultants can get stuck in other parts of the policy pipeline, too. Teachers unions like the California Teachers Association and United Teachers Los Angeles have been consistent in their support for controversial new ethnic studies requirements and curricula. Moreover, these unions play a significant and… interesting role in the Democratic Party’s national ecosystem, with key union leadership until recently occupying some of the highest positions of power in the DNC. So the ideas and policies they endorse have a way of making their way to the desks of Democratic leaders, legislatures, and school boards, especially in deep-blue districts like San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Even the National Education Association (NEA), one of the two biggest teachers unions in the country (alongside the American Federation of Teachers), has for years now endorsed some of the most unserious and offensive ideas in the education/critical theory/advocacy space today. The “White Supremacy Culture Resources” that the NEA has featured on its website since the end of 2020 are admittedly quite aptly named, as they draw from the work of a white woman who claims requiring non-white people to think in a linear or logical fashion is racist.

If California leaders and education officials imagined “pioneering” a truly transformative, historically sound, and academically robust ethnic studies requirement, then they still have a long way to go. Paint-by-numbers academic theories spuriously equating capitalism with racism have no place in a serious K-12 education, and classroom activities requiring students to “rank” races or gender identities read like a decade-old parody of progressive education priorities. Coincidentally, it was a decade ago that the California State Legislature first mandated the creation of a model ethnic studies curriculum. And much like those who pushed the Grading for Equity plan in San Francisco, the proponents of the new ethnic studies curriculum in California are not exactly doing their part to instill confidence in the rigor of its material or how it will be instructed.

Any rigorous new curriculum, for example, should probably be able to be publicly defended on the merits, at the very least by its own authors. But in their February 2021 letter to California’s State Board of Education and Ed Department, the authors of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (“ESMC”) demanded their names be removed from the “Curriculum Acknowledgements,” declaring that its “guiding principles, knowledge, frameworks, pedagogies, and community histories have been compromised due to political and media pressure.” To be clear, comment-and-review processes like this — necessarily open to the public and its diversity of opinions — are basic features of contemporary democratic governance and policy making. The authors of the letter just did not like how the public, the California Department of Education, and the State Board of Education reacted to its proposed model curriculum.

On the whole the letter isn’t a very serious document; it’s only one page long, and it does not bother to cite anything, even when it references “many studies” that support the authors’ claims. It complains about the final comment summary from California’s Ed Department not mentioning positive comments on earlier versions of the model curriculum, without realizing — or admitting — that those earlier versions were publicly rejected in spite of those positive comments. I don’t think the drafters of the ESMC had to worry — as they did in the final paragraph of their letter — that anyone else was claiming the kind of “Ethnic Studies expertise” that they purport to intellectually monopolize. Once serious public scrutiny found the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, however, its authors quickly sought to distance themselves from it, while at the same time managing to avoid actually calling for the ESMC itself to be retracted, and calling for the Board to hire numerous full-time ethnic studies experts to support teachers.

If California districts follow through on their own versions of this new curriculum — which some seem to be — then the already-strained pipeline of available educators is about to undergo an even greater squeeze this fall and beyond. And for what? Not to improve California students’ troubling math and reading scores, but instead to introduce a novel, dubiously-valuable additional curriculum requirement for students across California. I just hope the students worrying about fitting all their classes into their new schedules will be able to do so.

The great education squeeze

It’s no wonder why education policy now feels so disorienting. Too many on both the right and the left are engaged in a winner-take-all, fever-pitched battle, yet neither seems to be really in it for the sake of education. I’m not sure what else can explain cancelling such an important national education data report, or strangling student performance and the pipeline of state teachers with controversial, novel, and questionably-useful grading practices and curricula.

One takeaway should be that both the left and the right need to get a bit more serious about gatekeeping the people and ideas they either tacitly embrace or explicitly endorse in the education policy arena. Put another way, America needs to get better at distinguishing between the moral seriousness and the technical or pedagogical seriousness of any education reform agenda. The crisis of American education policy begins and ends according to our ability to do just that. When we lose sight of what education policy should be all about, anyone with an agenda can smash or sneak their way in, and the results will often appear dim or wicked to the unconvinced and the unbelieving.

Instead, let’s get back to the basics: we know a lot about what works when it comes to educating kids. Academic talent is a trait as widely distributed as any other, and meeting them where they are — instead of where we want them all to be, in an undifferentiated mass — is the right place to start. Some schools are already starting to experiment in this direction, with incredibly promising results. Hopefully the experiments with ability-based grouping in Rockford, Illinois elementary schools start inspiring similar models across the country.

The problem is that moral seriousness really can feel a lot like technical expertise. It’s why fixing education just looks like a moral-institutional anti-DEI blitz to some, while to others it involves furtively degrading academic standards and promulgating odd and alienating social narratives. The costs of wielding these criticisms are often greatly outweighed by the benefits its public supporters bestow on those carrying their preferred moral banner, and this is a primary cause of the “policy reform arbitrage” we see across the education world today. And when the pendulum swings, the losers can always slightly modulate their moral grievances to be ready to pounce when their replacement’s own misguided project fails. So on and on it goes.

Calling out unserious education policies for a country as large and politically divided as ours is a challenge unto itself: “national education policy” is actually incredibly local and decentralized. But education policy and its makers are a cultural milieu like any other, susceptible to political motivations, ideological fads, and everything else that affects every one of us. And with over 13,000 school districts in the country, at least a few bad curricula and grading reforms are bound to slip through the cracks. Developing a common vocabulary for these sorts of misguided reforms beyond “DEI” and “MAGA” is probably going to be necessary, so stay tuned: we’ve just started.

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