Statehouse Republicans Work With Democrats To Make Florida Purple Again

The establishment’s revival in Florida threatens Republican victories in the state long-term and Florida’s policy leadership across the country.

How California’s crisis could lead to a big political shift



California’s wide range of problems — including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market — shows the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there exists a will to change.

Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents — including about 1.1 million since 2021 — have been fleeing to other states.

California needs a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents, and, most critically, moderate Democrats.

Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.

In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s Republican National Committee member.

New awakenings

Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s second-largest political grouping), and, most critically, moderate Democrats.

Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents — billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers — have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.

Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the board of supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.

Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideology-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.

Critically, the liberal elites are not the only ones breaking ranks. Pressure for change is also coming from increasingly conservative Asian voters and Jews — who number more than 1 million in the state and largely are revolted by the anti-Semitism rife among some on the progressive left. Protecting property and economic growth is particularly critical to Latino and Asian immigrants — California is home to five of the 10 American counties with the most immigrants — who are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans.

These minority entrepreneurs and those working for them are unlikely to share the view of progressive intellectuals, who see crime as an expression of injustice and who often excused or even celebrated looting during the summer of 2020. After all, it was largely people from “communities of color” who have borne the brunt of violent crime in cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. Minorities also face special challenges doing business here due to regulations that are especially burdensome on smaller, less capitalized businesses. According to the Small Business Regulation Index, California has the worst business climate for small firms in the nation.

The shift among minority voters could prove a critical game-changer, both within the Democratic Party and the still-weak GOP. In Oakland, for example, many minorities backed the removal of Mayor Sheng Thao (D), a progressive committed to lenient policing in what is now California’s most troubled, if not failed, major city.

Latinos, already the state’s largest ethnic group, constituting about 37.7% of the workforce, with expectations of further growth by 2030, seem to be heading toward the right. In the last presidential election, Trump did well in the heavily Latino inland counties and won the “Inland Empire” — the metropolitan area bordering Los Angeles and Orange Counties – the first time a GOP presidential candidate has achieved this in two decades.

Back to basics

After a generation of relentless virtue-signaling, California’s government needs to focus on the basic needs of its citizens: education, energy, housing, water supply, and public safety. As a widely distributed editorial by a small business owner noted, Californians, especially after highly publicized fire response failures in Los Angeles earlier this year, are increasingly willing to demand competent “basic governance” backed by a “ruthless examination of results” to ensure that their government supports “modest aspirations” for a better life.

California once excelled in basic governance, especially in the 1950s and '60s under Democratic Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. The state managed to cultivate growth while meeting key environmental challenges, starting in the late 1960s, most notably chronic air pollution. In what is justifiably hailed as a “major success,” California helped pioneer clean air regulatory approaches that have vastly reduced most automotive tailpipe emissions as well as eliminated lead and dramatically cut sulfur levels.

All of this starkly contrasts with the poor planning, execution, and catastrophist science evoked to justify the state’s climate agenda. Even Pat Brown’s son, former Gov. Jerry Brown (D), recognized that California has little effect on climate. Given the global nature of the challenge, reducing one state’s emissions by cutting back on industrial activities accomplishes little if those activities move elsewhere, often to locations with fewer restrictions such as China and India.

Rather than focusing on “climate leadership,” Sacramento needs to tackle the immediate causes of record out-migration, including sluggish economic growth and the nation’s highest levels of poverty and homelessness. The great challenges are not combatting global temperature rises but the housing crisis and the need to diversify the economy and improve the failing education system. As these problems have often been worsened by climate policies, there seems little reason for other states and countries to adopt California’s approach as a model.

halbergman via iStock/Getty Images

Fixing housing

California now has the nation’s second-lowest home ownership rate at 55.9%, slightly above New York (55.4%). High interest rates that have helped push home sales to the lowest level in three decades across the country are particularly burdensome in coastal California metros, where prices have risen to nearly 400% above the national average. The government almost owned up to its role in creating the state’s housing crisis — especially through excessive housing regulations and lawfare on developers — earlier this year when Newsom moved to cut red tape so homes could be rebuilt after the Los Angeles fires.

Current state policy — embraced by Yes in My Backyard activists, the greens, and unions — focuses on dense urban development. Projects are held up, for example, for creating too many vehicle miles traveled, even though barely 3.1% of Californians in 2023 took public transit to work, according to the American Community Survey. As a result, much “affordable” development is being steered to densely built areas that have the highest land prices. This is made worse with mandates associated with new projects, such as green building codes and union labor, that raise the price per unit to $1 million or more.

A far more enlightened approach would allow new growth to take place primarily outside city centers in interior areas where land costs are lower and where lower-cost, moderate-density new developments could flourish. These include areas like Riverside/San Bernardino, Yolo County (adjacent to Sacramento), and Solano County, east of San Francisco Bay. This approach would align with the behavior of residents who are already flocking to these areas because they provide lower-income households, often younger black and Latino, with the most favorable home ownership opportunities in the state.Over 71% of all housing units in the Inland Empire are single-family homes, and the aggregate ownership rate is over 63%, far above the state’s dismal 45.8% level.

Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.

More than anything, California needs a housing policy that syncs with the needs and preferences of its people, particularly young families. Rather than being consigned to apartments, 70% of Californians prefer single-family residences. The vast majority oppose legislation written by Yes in My Backyard hero Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener banning single-family zoning in much of the state.

Investment in the interior is critical for recreating the old California dream for millions of aspiring households, particularly among minorities who are being driven out of the home ownership market in the coastal metropolitan areas. The only California metropolitan area ranked by the National Association of Realtors as a top 10 pick for Millennials was not hip San Francisco or glamorous Los Angeles, but the more affordable historically “redneck” valley community of Bakersfield.

The numerous housing bills passed by Sacramento have not improved the situation. From 2010 to 2023, permits for single-family homes in California fell to a monthly average of 3,957 units from 8,529 during 1993-2006. California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9% between 2010 and 2023, lower than the national increase (10.3%) and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%), and Florida (16.2%).

A more successful model can be seen in Texas, which generally advances market-oriented policies that have generated prodigious growth in both single-family and multi-family housing. This has helped the Lone Star State meet the housing needs of its far faster-growing population. A building boom has slowed, and there’s been some healthy decrease in prices in hot markets like Austin. Opening up leased grazing land in state and federal parks — roughly half the state land is owned by governments — could also relieve pressure on land prices. Until California allows for housing that people prefer, high prices and out-migration will continue into the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, California has room to grow, despite the suggestions by some academics that the state is largely “built out.”In reality, California is not “land short,” either in its cities or across its vast interior. Urbanization covers only 5.3% of the state, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, while parks, agricultural land, deserts, and forests make up the bulk of the area.

Diversifying the economy

Even Jerry Brown has remarked that the “Johnny one note” tech economy the state’s tax base depends on could stumble. This would reduce the huge returns on capital gains from the top 1% of filers, who now account for roughly half of all state income tax revenues. This overreliance may be particularly troublesome in the era of artificial intelligence, where tech companies may continue to expand but have less need for people. Indeed, San Francisco County, which boasts many tech jobs, experienced the nation’s largest drop in average weekly wages, 22.6%, between 2021 and 2022.

To expand opportunity and, hence, its tax base, California has to make more of the state attractive to employers. The best prospects, again, will be in inland areas.Today, when firms want to build spaceships, a clear growth industry where California retains significant leadership, as well as battery plants and high-tech and food processing facilities, they often opt to go to Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, and Texas. Given lower land and housing costs, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, as well as spots on the Central Coast, should be ideally situated to compete for those jobs.

The current economic pattern creates a situation where AI developers, elite engineers, and venture capitalists may enjoy unprecedented profits, but relatively little trickles down to the mass of Californians. Not all Californians have wealthy parents to subsidize their lifestyle, and few are likely to thrive as AI engineers. To address the dilemmas facing the next generation of Californians, the state needs to focus not just on ephemera, software, and entertainment but on bringing back some of the basic industries that once forged the California dream. In this way, President Trump’s policies could actually help the state, particularly in fields like high-tech defense and space.

In the 1940s, California played a key role in the American “arsenal of democracy.” Today, it could do the same, not so much by producing planes and Liberty ships, but drones, rockets, and space-based defense systems. Indeed, there are now discussions of reviving the state’s once-vaunted shipbuilding industry that buoyed the economy of Solano County — something sure to inspire the ire of the Bay Area’s rich and powerful environmental lobby.

Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Improving education

Climate and environmentalism are not the only barriers to California’s revival. No problem is more pressing and consequential than the state’s failure to educate California’s 5.9 million public school children. In fiscal year 2023-2024, California will spend about $128 billion on K-12 public education — an amount exceeding the entire budget of every other state except New York. Despite this level of spending, about 75% of California students lack proficiency in core subject areas based on federal education standards.

Two out of three California students do not meet math standards, and more than half do not meet English standards on state assessments. Overall, less than half of California public school students performed at or above grade level for English language arts (reading, writing, etc.), while only 34.62% met or exceeded the math standard on the Smarter Balanced 2023 tests. The failures are particularly clear among minority students. According to the latest California testing results, only 36.08% of Latino students met or exceeded proficiency standards for English language arts. Only 22.69% met or exceeded proficiency standards in math. Latino students, for example, in Florida and Texas do somewhat better in both math and English, even though both states spend less per capita on education than California.

Not surprisingly, many parents object to a system where half of the state’s high school students barely read at grade level. One illustration of discontent has been the growth of the charter school movement. Today, one in nine California schoolchildren attend charter schools (including my younger daughter). The state’s largest school district, the heavily union-dominated Los Angeles Unified School District, has lost roughly 40% of its enrollment over two decades, while the number of students in charters grew from 140,000 in 2010 to 207,000 in 2022.

In addition to removing obstacles to charters, homeschoolers are part of the solution. California homeschool enrollment jumped by 78% in the five-year period before the pandemic and in the Los Angeles Unified School District by 89%. Equally important, some public districts and associated community colleges, as in Long Beach, have already shifted toward a more skills-based approach. Public officials understand that to keep a competitive edge, they need to supply industrial employers with skilled workers. This is all the more crucial as the aerospace workforce is aging — as much as 50% of Boeing’s workforce will be eligible for retirement in five years. In its quest for relevance, Long Beach’s educational partnership addresses the needs of the city’s industrial and trade sectors.

This approach contrasts with the state’s big push to make students take an ethnic studies course designed to promote a progressive and somewhat anti-capitalist, multicultural agenda. They will also be required to embrace the ideology of man-made climate change even if their grasp of basic science is minimal. A “woke” consciousness or deeper ethnic affiliations will not lead to student success later in life. What will count for the students and for California’s economy is gaining the skills that are in demand. You cannot run a high-tech lathe, manage logistics, or design programs for space vehicles with ideology.

More to come

Conventional wisdom on the right considers California to be on the road to inexorable decline. Progressives, not surprisingly, embrace the Golden State as a model while ignoring the regressive, ineffective policies that have driven the state toward a feudal future.

Yet both sides are wrong. California’s current progressive policies have failed, but if the state were governed correctly, it could resurge in ways that would astound the rest of the country and the world. Change is not impossible. As recent elections showed, Californians do not reflexively vote for progressives if they feel their safety or economic interests are on the line.

If change is to come in California, it may not be primarily driven by libertarian or conservative ideologies but by stark realities. Over two-thirds of California cities do not have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other expenses. Twelve of the state’s 15 large cities are in the red, and for many, it is only getting worse. The state overall suffers $1 trillion in pension debt, notes former Democratic state Rep. Joe Nation. U.S. News and World Report places California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states. This pension shortfall makes paying for infrastructure, or even teacher salaries, extraordinarily difficult at the state and local levels.

Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable, even if a handful of people get very rich and the older homeowners, public employees, and high-end professionals thrive. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.

This can only happen if the state unleashes the animal spirits that long drove its ascendancy. The other alternative may be a more racial, class-based radicalism promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America and their allies. They have their own “cure” for California’s ills. We see this in debates over rebuilding Los Angeles, with progressives pushing for heavily subsidized housing, as with the case of the redevelopment of the Jordan Downs public housing complex, while seeking to densify and expand subsidized housing to once solidly affluent areas like the Palisades.

California has survived past crises — earthquakes and the defense and dot-com busts — and always has managed to reinvent itself. The key elements for success — its astounding physical environment, mild climate, and a tradition for relentless innovation — remain in place, ready to be released once the political constraints are loosened.

Fifty years ago, in her song “California,” Canada-reared Joni Mitchell captured the universal appeal of our remarkable state, not just its sunshine, mountains, and beaches, but also how it gave its residents an unprecedented chance to meet their fondest aspirations. Contrasting her adopted home with the sheer grayness of life elsewhere, she wrote, “My heart cried out for you, California / Oh California, I’m coming home.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

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Trump’s swift actions drag America back from the brink



During Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a lip reader focused on an off-camera exchange between Barack Obama and George W. Bush. According to the lip reader, Obama, a staunch socialist, leaned toward Bush, an established RINO, and asked how they might “stop what’s happening.” Thankfully, the immediate answer is nothing at all. Trump’s inauguration represents a significant shift, pulling the nation back from the brink of the November 5 election, which many feared could lead to a tyrannical socialist regime.

For over a century, the Democratic Party and complicit Republicans have gradually imposed socialist policies in America. Since Obama’s rise to power in 2008, these policies have increasingly targeted American conservatives. Executive agencies, such as the IRS, harassed the Tea Party movement, the Department of Health and Human Services targeted the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the FBI investigated reporters who dared to challenge the Democratic Party line.

In America, the illness is the Democrats, and we all need a cure.

Since Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy in 2015, these agencies, along with RINO Republicans, directed their efforts against him, his family, his businesses, his associates, and other conservatives. Americans should recognize how close the nation came to losing its freedoms and express profound gratitude to Trump for his decisive actions in just the first four days of his second administration.

Trump’s new administration withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, restoring sovereignty over the nation’s economy and health care system to the American people.

At home, Trump has nominated John Ratcliffe as his new CIA director, Pam Bondi as his attorney general, and Kash Patel as his man to reform the FBI. Under this new leadership, conservatives will no longer face investigations or persecution for expressing their love of country and freedom. These appointments aim to ensure full investigations into the past 16 years of agency misconduct, uncovering the truth about recent history.

Trump is securing the border while empowering law enforcement to operate in Democrat-controlled sanctuary cities. This marks the end of years where Democrat-led city and state administrations shielded criminal gangs involved in systematic drug and sex trafficking. In just a few days, hundreds of murderers, rapists, and drug dealers have been arrested, making the nation safer. This also signals the end of the Democrat Party’s alleged practice of importing illegal immigrants to replace American voters or form socialist militias to plunder inner cities.

Trump has declared the Green New Deal dead and frozen further funding for the Inflation Reduction Act. Both initiatives were designed to enable a massive economic takeover of the energy sector and redistribute wealth to Democrat-controlled states and constituencies at the expense of businesses and taxpayers nationwide. This move could spell the end of environmental, social, and governance policies, which aimed to control the nation’s investment capital and direct it to Democratic Party-aligned enterprises. Let’s hope it also ends the practice of financial institutions “debanking” citizens and businesses for holding unfashionable conservative views.

Trump is dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across all government agencies and the military. These DEI initiatives, engineered to divide the country, infiltrated public institutions and businesses through executive boards and human resources departments to indoctrinate American adults.

He is also putting an end to critical race theory in education. This socialist-driven framework re-educated America’s youth to despise their country and themselves. What’s more, the president is halting transgenderism in education and medicine — another socialist initiative that exploited prepubescent children by pushing psychotropic drugs and promoting irreversible physical changes. These policies, which included surgeries and treatments that targeted children’s minds and bodies, were part and parcel of the Democratic Party’s agenda.

From restoring national sovereignty and reforming intelligence and justice agencies to securing the border, enforcing law and order, and shutting down redistributionist programs, Trump is steering the nation away from the precipice engineered by over a century of the Democrats’ socialist policies. His actions are bringing the country back to free enterprise and a focus on education reform.

Our nation has been saved.

One of Trump’s best nominations so far might be Linda McMahon as secretary of education. Her appointment should serve as a model for this generation and the next. Trump assigned McMahon with returning control over education to states, local communities, and citizens, with the goal of putting herself out of a job.

Socialism, like all tyrannies throughout history, thrives on concentrated power. To reverse the tide of tyranny in America, we must decentralize power for a generation or more — shifting authority out of Washington, D.C., and returning it to the states and the people.

History offers a cautionary tale. When Ronald Reagan took office promising a conservative revolution, then-House Democratic Leader Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) publicly declared, “I can read the Congress; they go with the will of the people, and the will of the people is to go along with the president.” Privately, however, he assured fellow Democrats, “Time cures all ills.”

In America, the illness is the Democrats, and we all need a cure. Thank you, Dr. Trump.

Vivek Ramaswamy exposes ‘right fragility’ with culture truth bomb



If Vivek Ramaswamy continues discussing immigration on X, some of his former supporters might urge the incoming Trump administration to assign him to manage the White House 7-Eleven, a scenario humorously predicted by the Babylon Bee earlier this year.

The biotech entrepreneur sparked a firestorm with a lengthy post about immigration and the economy. In his opening paragraph, he wrote:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over "native" Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy and wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture.

The former GOP presidential candidate and Trump surrogate argued that American culture has emphasized mediocrity over excellence long before young people reach college. His comments drew sharp criticism from conservatives who support stricter limits on both illegal and legal immigration. Critics argued that institutions should prioritize American workers, address skills gaps, and avoid outsourcing high-paying jobs to other countries.

I believe every country’s policies should prioritize its citizens over foreign nationals. I understand the frustration felt by STEM graduates who struggle to find jobs in their fields, especially when they see companies hiring workers from India, China, and other parts of Asia. But strong leaders must prioritize hard truths over convenient lies.

Unfortunately, too many conservatives default to 'right fragility' whenever the culture police come knocking.

Anyone who has criticized participation trophy culture in youth sports, grade inflation in high schools, or emotionally fragile college students knows there is some truth in Ramaswamy’s argument. His point about how social norms influence social outcomes deserves discussion, not dismissal.

Unfortunately, many conservatives reacted emotionally, interpreting his comments as a claim that Asians — specifically Indians — are superior to Americans — specifically white people. This simple observation about cultural norms inadvertently exposed the “right fragility” increasingly evident among conservative social commentators.

I found the reactions to Vivek’s comments fascinating because white conservatives often invoke “culture” to explain why black Americans struggle to gain admission to elite universities or remain underrepresented in the tech industry. They cite factors such as family structure, study habits, media consumption, values, priorities, drive, and grit as alternatives to the progressive explanation of systemic racism. Some so-called racial realists take it further, claiming that low IQs account for the educational and economic disparities between black and white Americans.

Vivek’s remarks, however, revealed a closely guarded political secret: The socioeconomic gaps between Asians and whites are as significant as those between whites and blacks. For instance, the difference in SAT math scores between Asian students (626) and white students (532) exceeds the gap between white and black students (441). Similar disparities exist in the average number of hours high school students spend on homework and the percentage who complete it five or more days a week.

Even smaller achievement gaps can significantly affect outcomes. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 64% of Asian eighth-grade students are proficient in math, compared to 44% of white students. A similar disparity exists in reading proficiency. Conservatives often cite family stability as a factor contributing to the “achievement gap” between black and white students. While Ramaswamy didn’t address these factors in his cultural analysis, he easily could have. Asian-Americans have higher marriage rates and lower divorce rates, and they are far less likely to have children out of wedlock.

Discussing culture, rather than genetics, is valuable because a society’s norms, values, and priorities can change over time. No country or ethnic group has a monopoly on hard work, determination, or innovation. The dominance of students of Indian descent in the Scripps National Spelling Bee has little to do with the H-1B visa program. In many cases, these children likely speak English as a second — or even third — language at home.

Excelling in math and science at the highest levels requires tremendous discipline and dedication, much like the commitment needed to become an elite athlete. The makeup of the robotics club and basketball team at the University of North Carolina reflects the students who are willing to put in the hard work necessary to compete at the highest levels in their respective fields. Complaints about discrimination will not change that reality.

Educator Jawanza Kunjufu once appealed to young black men by saying, “That that you do most will be that that you do best.” His call to foster a culture of excellence in the classroom should resonate with conservatives who acknowledge the challenges in the K-12 education system and seek to improve economic opportunities for American citizens. Unfortunately, too many conservatives default to “right fragility” whenever the culture police come knocking.

Abolishing the Department of Education is not the answer



In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory, many education reformers are saying that now is the time to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the presumptive leaders of the new Department of Government Efficiency, have been strongly hinting that eradicating the DOE outright is a real possibility.

That’s an attractive goal — the DOE wastes a great deal of money and does a great deal of damage to American students. But eliminating it outright will be difficult. Education reformers need 60 votes in the Senate to abolish the Department of Education. Using budget reconciliation might allow that requirement to be sidestepped, but it’s doubtful that Congress will go along with that tactic. Additionally, the Trump voting coalition isn’t just made up of small-government conservatives — it includes voters who don’t mind big government so long as it isn’t woke.

The way to achieve swift and substantial education reform is thoughtful, detailed work to simplify and reduce the Education Department.

Also, “abolishing the Education Department” can mean less than meets the eye. Every single office and program can be transferred over to the Department of Health and Human Services — uncut, unreformed, and unchanged. Putative reformers could declare a hollow victory while supporters of the radical education establishment would then happily perform their outrage dance, secure in the knowledge that nothing really has changed.

To get real reform, we reformers should instead perform radical surgery on the DOE. We should eliminate spending on dozens of useless or counterproductive small programs — and preserve in as simple a form as possible the big-ticket items that command massive popular support, including within the Trump coalition. We also should chop the Office for Civil Rights down to size so it can’t use “Dear Colleague letters” and case resolutions to play the enforcing thugs for America’s radical race and sex fanatics. When we’ve done this, we can establish real accountability over the Department of Education’s core functions and then determine whether further reform is necessary.

The DOE mostly spends its money on Title I funds for disadvantaged K-12 students ($18 billion a year); special education funds for physically and mentally handicapped students ($14 billion a year); Pell Grants for disadvantaged postsecondary students ($29 billion a year); and direct student loans to postsecondary students ($106 billion a year). The Department of Education should say explicitly that it will preserve these four core functions — although with a gimlet eye toward eliminating waste, fraud, bureaucratic bloat, and grifters who cry poverty or handicap to grab a slice of federal money.

These four core functions also should be radically simplified.

  • The four formula grants for Title I funds should be amalgamated into one formula grant, as close as possible in form either to a no-strings block grant to the states or portable aid given to individual families.
  • The Rehabilitation Services Administration ($4.4 billion a year, which is nearly a third of the special education budget) should be moved to HHS. Congress should revise the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act so it doesn’t impose on states or school districts unfunded, undefined mandates for special education spending.
  • Every remaining college grant program should be amalgamated into Pell Grants; special programs such as college aid for veterans should be relocated to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
  • All college loan programs should be merged into the Federal Direct Student Loan Program. Ironclad congressional statutes should be passed to make it impossible for a future administration to repeat the Biden administration’s illegal “loan forgiveness.”

In addition, the OCR should be reduced from 633 employees to no more than 175, so that their ratio to the population they serve is at most in proportion to that of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The OCR then should be incorporated into Justice and its enforcement powers constrained to litigation, with no ability to issue “Dear Colleague letters” or conduct case resolutions.

For now, the Department of Education should keep a few programs, such as those that support charter schools, gifted education, English language acquisition, historically black colleges and universities (for which the U.S. has historical commitments that can be honored by institutional support without resorting to discrimination among citizens), and state assessments. These are good goals, and though these aren’t core functions, the DOE could be reformed to support them properly.

Everything else should go at once — the discretionary grant programs, the race discrimination programs that seek “equity,” the miniature welfare states disguised as education programs, the political propaganda camouflaged as “social and emotional learning” and “mental health.” Some of these programs should be relocated to better homes, such as the State Department (international education; money for Pacific Island nations); the Interior Department (Indian education); the Defense Department (foreign language programs); the Justice Department (prison education); the Labor Department (vocational education); or the National Endowment for the Arts (arts education). Every office or program that discriminates among American citizens, such as the Hispanic-Serving Institutions Division, should be eliminated immediately.

The OCR also should formally rescind every legal reinterpretation that:

  • justifies quotas;
  • uses disparate impact theory;
  • redefines sex to include gender, gender identity, or gender expression;
  • redefines sex discrimination to include sexual harassment and sexual violence;
  • and abridges due process and First Amendment rights within educational institutions.

The OCR also should rescind every policy, requirement, document, case resolution, and investigation that draws upon these legal reinterpretations and state as an explicit principle that the Department of Education requires every educational institution that receives federal money to champion due process and the First Amendment — period. Oh, and any education institution that tolerates or facilitates Jew-hating intimidation by campus mobs will get its money cut off at once.

When the Department of Education has been reduced to four key functions and is largely shorn of all discretionary grant programs, policymakers and the public can then begin to demand true accountability regarding its remaining functions. They can achieve that by:

  • creating efficiency measures in every office, which gage how well the ED’s own bureaucrats perform;
  • creating return-on-investment measures for every DOE program, which estimate how much educational improvement the taxpayer gets;
  • and eliminating fake accountability measures such as: 1) money disbursed without measuring whether it was worthwhile; 2) student achievement scores without investigating their connection to federal dollars spent; 3) numbers of teachers trained without any sense of whether it helps student achievement; or 4) “qualitative” measures of success that are just an academic way of saying, “My gut tells me this was a pretty good way to spend your money.”

If all these reforms are carried out, education reformers will be in a better position to make a simple and clear case to the public that the remaining core functions of the Department of Education should be relocated, reformed, or ended. Or they may decide that a slimmed-down DOE does, in fact, serve the public good. In either case, the practicable way to achieve swift and substantial education reform is thoughtful, detailed work to simplify and reduce the DOE. Do that first, and then consider whether it should be eliminated.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

How to make American education great again



Imagine these words as the first speech delivered by Donald Trump’s incoming secretary of education.

Today, I am here to deliver bitter medicine: American education has failed. Teachers and parents, administrators and government — and even students — all bear some responsibility.

Just as Sputnik spurred the urgency that sent Americans to the moon, we need a bold initiative to revolutionize education.

The most common explanations for our educational crisis are inadequate funding, overuse of standardized testing, and systemic prejudice. They are false.

Our schools do not lack funding. No country spends more on public education.

The poor results of standardized tests indicate our failures; they are not the cause.

Our schools are not prejudiced. The most aggressive education reforms since 1955 directly aimed to eliminate systemic discrimination.

The diagnosis

For decades, we ignored signs of trouble, but the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the depth of our challenges. The problems are so pervasive and complex that there is no quick fix. We cannot merely repair; we must rebuild.

Since 2020, American families have struggled mightily. The declining quality of education prompted affluent families to opt out of public schools, leaving middle- and working-class families with diminished resources and influence to push for reform. States' refusal to enact school choice reforms widened the wealth gap and limited generational mobility.

But lower- and middle-class families bear some responsibility, too. The rise of single-parent households, less common among affluent families, has been catastrophic. When the only adult in the home works up to 60 hours a week to make ends meet, there is little time for homework help, PTA meetings, or engaging with school officials. Even in households with two working parents, time and energy are often in short supply.

Teachers, for their part, have good reason to despair. Despite the monumental importance of their work, many are underpaid. They face administrators who value standardized test scores above all else.

Meanwhile, declining standards for decorum and discipline, often justified in the name of “social justice,” have made schools unsafe for both teachers and students.

Violence and insubordination create an environment unfit for serious learning. Some parents treat schools as day-care centers or demand good grades for minimal effort. Worse, parents of disruptive students often refuse to ensure that their children do not rob others of the opportunity to learn.

Yet teachers, too, have failed. They inflate grades to keep their jobs but do no favors for students unprepared for future challenges. This, in turn, lowers the quality of education for students ready for more advanced work, driving gifted students out of public schools.

Another harsh truth is that many teachers are unprepared for the job. The education system has failed for so long that many teachers have never mastered the material they are supposed to teach. Colleges steer future educators toward education majors, where coursework focuses more on leftist “social justice” ideology than on subject mastery. Some graduates believe their mission is to “dismantle” an “unjust” society by creating anti-American activists.

When these activist teachers enter classrooms, they often abandon their duty to transmit America’s culture, knowledge, and values. Instead, they teach students to disdain their nation, its people, its past, and its way of life. This undermines social cohesion and deprives disadvantaged students of the tools they need to succeed.

Outdated curricula exacerbate these issues. Most schools still use models from the late 20th century, failing to address how computing, the internet, and artificial intelligence have transformed how we read, write, and learn. Even in innovative schools, teachers often struggle to balance the needs of non-native, non-English speakers with those of native English speakers, diluting the educational experience for the latter.

Our colleges and universities are also broken. Admitting underprepared students has lowered academic standards nationwide. General education curricula often assume a need for remediation, leaving motivated students without the challenge or preparation they deserve.

Government-run financial aid has inflated tuition costs while diminishing the value of college degrees. Proposals to cancel student debt signal to universities that they can continue raising prices without consequence, encouraging predatory admission policies that saddle students with unmanageable debt.

The prescription

How do we revitalize American education? Nothing short of an academic Sputnik will suffice. Just as Sputnik spurred the urgency that sent Americans to the moon, we need a bold initiative to revolutionize education.

  • We will create K-12 curricula prioritizing history, civics, and an understanding of our government.
  • We will eliminate curricula that divide Americans by race, class, religion, sex, or sexual identity.
  • We will implement school choice nationwide.
  • We will end federal student loan programs, allowing private lenders to evaluate borrowers' ability to repay. Conditional lending will force colleges to lower tuition and revise admissions and program offerings.
  • We will expand vocational training and enhance opportunities for gifted students.
  • We will raise teacher credentialing standards to ensure advanced subject knowledge.
  • We will enforce decorum and discipline in schools. Uniforms will unify student bodies, and measures like suspension and expulsion will ensure that classrooms are conducive to learning.
  • We will revise college accreditation standards to reflect post-graduation success and employment metrics.
  • We will penalize public colleges and universities that engage in discriminatory admissions practices.

And that is just the beginning.

The destiny of our nation depends on education. The effort to revitalize our schools must be as bold as our aspirations. Together, we will bring American education into the 21st century. Together, we will make American education great again.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearEducation and made available via RealClearWire.

Schoolhouse limbo: How low will educators go to ‘better’ grades?



Maryland’s new education chief, Carey Wright, an old-school champion of rigorous standards, is pushing back against efforts in other states to boost test scores by essentially lowering their expectations of students.

States, including Oklahoma and Wisconsin, are making it easier for students to demonstrate on annual assessments that they are proficient in math and English after a decade of declining test scores nationwide. By redesigning the assessments and lowering the so-called “cut scores” that separate achievement levels such as basic, proficient, and advanced, several states have recently posted dramatic increases in proficiency, a key indicator of school quality.

'If you don’t set high expectations, you’re never going to achieve the kinds of goals that you want to achieve. And in our business, it’s called student learning.'

Wright warns that lowering the bar on proficiency can create the public impression that schools are improving and students are learning more when, in fact, that’s not the case.

“You can make yourself look better to the public by lowering your cut scores,” Wright, the Maryland state superintendent of schools, told RealClearInvestigations in an interview. “But then you are not really measuring proficiency. My position is no, no, no. Parents and teachers need to know if their children are proficient or not.”

As most public schools continue to deal with the related crises of learning loss and chronic absenteeism years after COVID-19, Wright says now is the worst time to lower expectations of students, which can stifle the impetus to improve. In other moves to accommodate struggling students, districts and states have reduced graduation requirements and inflated grades with policies that ban failing marks. The best evidence comes from studies in Washington and North Carolina showing that grades have held steady at their pre-pandemic levels even though students are learning much less.

“With grades and assessments, the education system seems to be sleepwalking into a policy of ratcheting expectations down to better reflect what today’s students can do, rather than doubling efforts to help get students to where they need to be,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which argues for high academic standards.

Wright, who took over Maryland schools this summer, is refusing to backpedal on standards in a state that plunged from the top to the bottom in U.S. performance over the last decade. The superintendent says she aims to improve Maryland’s declining proficiency rates the hard way by making academic standards more rigorous in all content areas. As students learn more in class, the theory goes, they should become more proficient on state tests.

But a strategy that asks more of teachers and students is never an easy lift in districts that often resist top-down calls for change. Without direct control over school districts run by local boards, state superintendents like Wright must depend on the ability to inspire principals and teachers to follow their lead and meet inconvenient truths head-on.

Wright has done it before. As the state superintendent in Mississippi a decade ago, she collaborated closely with districts in lifting content standards and provided support to completely revamp literacy instruction in what was the worst-performing state in the union. Student proficiency soared without lowering cut scores. Educators called it the “Mississippi Miracle.”

“If you set the bar low, that’s all you are going to get,” Wright said. “But if you set the bar high for students, and support teachers and leaders, it’s doable.”

Lowering cut scores, boosting proficiency

Each state controls its own definition of proficiency and how students can achieve the all-important marker of academic success. The state sets its own content standards that detail what students need to know in each grade, writes its own tests to determine if they are proficient, and devises its own cut scores.

The undertaking is more art than science. There is no accepted single definition of what makes a student proficient. States mostly aim for grade-level proficiency, or what the average student can do, based on their own content standards. A handful of states shoot higher, approaching a more rigorous definition of proficiency spelled out by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card.

By moving the bar on tests and cut scores, education officials have instantly raised or lowered proficiency rates. Over the years, some states have added enough rigor to allow only a third of students to show proficiency while others have reduced it to ensure that the vast majority perform well, Marianne Perie, who has helped more than a dozen states develop assessment methods, told the New York Board of Regents last year.

Today, states are lowering the bar and lifting proficiency rates. “Oklahoma just lowered their cut scores and Wisconsin is another one that ended up with less rigorous cut scores,” Perie told RCI. “If more kids are proficient this year compared with the previous years, it indicates that cut scores are less rigorous or that kids learned a lot more over the last year.”

High standards fall in Wisconsin

Wisconsin, like most states, has experienced a big drop in proficiency. In 2017, 44% of public school students were deemed proficient in English. That percentage fell in 2018 and 2019 and then plunged in the early years of the pandemic before recovering a bit to 39% in 2023.

This year, Wisconsin rolled out its new test and cut scores. State Superintendent Jill Underly was transparent about the changes, explaining in October that the redesign was meant to fix a problem created a decade ago when Wisconsin and other states aligned their cut scores to an “extremely high” level used by NAEP, reducing Wisconsin’s proficiency rate in the years that followed. Underly wrote that Wisconsin’s new grade-level cut scores better reflect the actual proficiency of students, making results easier for families to understand.

What families saw was a dramatic boost in English proficiency to 48% this year — a nine percentage-point gain over 2023 — due to assessment changes that had nothing to do with classroom learning.

To be sure, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction didn’t tout the 2024 results. It announced that they shouldn’t be compared to prior years since testing methods changed. Still, families who don’t follow the fine print of assessments may be left with the impression that Wisconsin schools are performing much better this year.

Paul Peterson, a prominent Harvard professor of education policy who has tracked changes to state proficiency levels, says politics seems to be a driver in the lowering of testing rigor.

“Student performance is falling so I would imagine the pressure on states to rethink standards must be considerable,” Peterson said. “Officials want to show that they are spending the public's dollar well, and that students are learning.”

No notice in Oklahoma

In Oklahoma, a similar assessment revamp unfolded this summer but with a controversial twist: State leaders in Oklahoma didn’t inform school districts or families that they had lowered the bar before releasing the test results in August, according to reports in the local media.

When school districts saw the results, principals and teachers were in disbelief over the huge increase in performance. In fourth grade English, for instance, 47% of students reached proficiency — an extraordinary 23% jump compared to 2023.

Later in August, State Superintendent Ryan Walters, a conservative who has been under fire for insisting that public schools teach the Bible, admitted that the state changed its assessment regime without publicly announcing it. Republican state lawmakers issued a statement criticizing Walters for “putting a false narrative out there” about a jump in test scores. Oklahoma’s Department of Education didn’t respond to a request from RCI for comment.

“I believe in transparency and communication,” said Perie, the testing expert. “Oklahoma was the only state where it seemed like they were hiding the changes.”

New York denies lower standards

As in Wisconsin and Oklahoma, New York’s retooled content standards, assessments, and scoring also produced higher proficiency rates.

A New York education official told RCI that the goal was to determine what should be expected of today’s students and how to evaluate their proficiency in various subjects using the new content standards. New York saw a dramatic 13% increase in math proficiency and a small boost in English in 2023, the year the changes were implemented.

Officials in New York and Wisconsin are adamant that the updated assessments don’t amount to a lowering of academic standards even though proficiency rates jumped. The New York official added that while several factors impact student achievement from year to year, instruction is one of the most highly related attributes.

“It is incorrect and irresponsible to derive from this that the standards have been lowered,” the official said in an email.

Petrilli of the Fordham Institute calls such explanations from state officials doublespeak. “By definition these states are lowering standards for proficiency because it’s easier for students to meet the standard than it was before,” he said.

Wright’s ‘Mississippi Miracle’

Education experts say Wright’s tenure as the state superintendent in Mississippi offers a lesson to states struggling with low proficiency rates today: Even in the worst of times, Wright showed, states can raise their expectations of students and get results.

When Wright took over Mississippi schools in 2013, they were at the very bottom in performance nationally. A mere 21% of fourth graders were proficient in reading, according to NAEP. Educators in the South would say, “At least we are not as bad as Mississippi.”

The decade before the pandemic was a time of rising expectations in public education. With Wright in charge, Mississippi joined half of the states in raising the bar for fourth grade reading proficiency between 2013 and 2019.

The lifting of expectations was relatively easy. It’s policymaking. The tough part for state superintendents was implementing changes in schools to reach those higher goals. For the most part, the higher bars didn’t translate into higher levels of proficiency by 2017, according to research by Daniel Hamlin at the University of Oklahoma and Harvard’s Peterson.

There are only theories as to why: After the Great Recession of 2009, school funding declined. The Obama administration relaxed federal accountability measures put in place by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind reform of 2002. The advent of smartphones became a major distraction for students.

Mississippi was a notable exception. Its fourth grade reading proficiency jumped by 11 percentage points from 2013 to 2019, rising to a top-20 performer in the United States, according to NAEP. In math, the increase was equally impressive.

Wright got results the old-fashioned way, with a tenacious focus on improving proficiency for all students, including those living in poverty, says Washington Cole, then her chief of staff and now a district superintendent in Mississippi. To get there, Wright rolled out a literacy program that was backed by decades of research and, crucially, provided teachers and administrators with extensive training in the model and sent coaches into the lowest-performing schools. “The professional development was a huge part of it,” Wright said.

Wright also toughened the district grading system that provided public accountability. When districts earned an “A” for performance, they were publicly celebrated by community members and lawmakers, adding to the incentives for other districts to improve. Over a decade, Wright’s team transformed Mississippi into an unlikely national K-12 success story.

“Dr. Wright set high expectations and her hard work and determination were very infectious with everyone. She was amazing,” Cole said. “I have no doubt that she will do the same thing in Maryland.”

Maryland tries a turnaround

Wright has her work cut out for her. After a decade of decline in Maryland, 48% of students are proficient in English and 24% in math.

In Baltimore, where almost all students are black or Latino, the numbers are tragically low. Only 6% of middle and high schoolers are proficient in math. More than 40% of Baltimore students were chronically absent last year, according to a district estimate, well above the national average. Students can’t learn if they don’t show up.

None of this seems to faze Wright, who assumed permanent leadership of Maryland’s schools in July. In returning to her native state, where she earned her doctorate in education and began her career as a teacher and administrator, Wright has wasted no time in setting a very ambitious goal.

“In the next three years we are expecting a five-percentage point increase in proficiency each year in English and math,” she said.

To achieve that goal, Wright appointed a task force of teachers, leaders, experts, and parents to quickly recommend changes to the state’s accountability system, which she discovered painted a very rosy picture for the public. It was giving high marks to three-quarters of all schools despite their low proficiency scores. Wright wants the new system to provide school leaders with clearer measurements on a range of topics, such as the pace of student growth and graduation rates, so they can target their weak areas for improvement.

“Superintendents take a lot of pride in their ratings,” Wright said. “They want to be that district that gets recognized.”

Major changes are also coming to classrooms. Wright’s new early literacy policy, which won state board approval in October, details expectations for instruction based on the science of reading and teacher training in an attempt to lift test scores that have fallen to 41st in the country.

The biggest change in policy puts an end to social promotion. Districts with parental consent will be able to hold back third graders who don’t meet literacy standards rather than promote them to fourth grade, where they will continue to struggle to read, hampering their future performance. It’s the kind of bold change that Wright wasn’t hesitant to push despite opposition from some board members and families concerned about the impact on disadvantaged students.

It worked for Wright in Mississippi, producing a very large increase in reading performance by sixth grade, according to researchers.

“Putting a stake in the ground and saying we are not just going to move kids along if they haven’t learned to read by grade 3 is very powerful and much needed for our education system,” said Joan Dabrowski, the chief academic officer of Baltimore City Public Schools. “Dr. Wright is very clearly telling the districts they need to prioritize this policy and the state will be monitoring districts so there is a lot of accountability.”

Will the policy work? Dabrowski says it depends on the support teachers and principals receive from Wright to make the difficult changes over several years. “I like everything in the policy, but there are lots of points where implementation could go well or not go well,” she said.

Illinois next to lower cut scores

In June, Illinois made clear that it plans to boost proficiency, too, by following the approach of Wisconsin. Illinois Superintendent Tony Sanders said in a report that his state has one of the toughest definitions of proficiency in the nation. He said students who are on track for college could be mislabeled as not proficient, sending a wrong message to their families.

To fix this, Illinois is planning to adjust its assessment methods by 2025, which will likely boost the state’s proficiency rates.

If Wright fails in Maryland, would she consider following Illinois and other states in easing the rigor of assessments?

She scoffed at the idea.

“When you look over the last decade of dropping test scores, now is not the time to be lowering the bar,” she said. “If you don't set high expectations, you're never going to achieve the kinds of goals that you want to achieve. And in our business, it's called student learning.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.