What to say when Know Nothings and villains start talking about "throwing money at schools."
Reposting until it stops!!!! schoolfinance101.com/2026/06/16/m...
— Bruce D. Baker (@schoolfinance101.bsky.social) June 17, 2026 at 9:51 AM
[image or embed]
For further analysis, see Bruce D. Baker's Education’s Merchant of Doubt: One man’s deceitful mission to undermine fair and adequate school funding, his schoolfinance101.com, and his Educational Inequality and School Finance.
I don't know where to start. I've written a lot about testing, and by testing I mean the Big Standardized tests (BS tests, h/t Peter Greene @palan57.bsky.social) that are required by school bosses local, state, and federal. I started teaching high school in 1994, and within the first few years I had gotten a master's degree and achieved National Board Certification.
Then, in 2001, the world began to change. No Child Left Behind, they called it, and in the beginning it involved simply making your standards and objectives concrete and observable by writing them on the board or posting them in the room, a practice that helped teachers, students, and administrators figure out what should be going on in the classroom.
If I remember, we started with about two or three BS tests a year: a high school exit exam and I guess the (P)SATs plus AP tests. In 1997 we started with the STAR tests in reading, writing, math, history, and science. That was a big step, but I think it took about a week and then we could get back to class. There was also something called a Stanford 9, but I don't remember why.
In 1999, test scores began to be used to calculate something called an "Academic Performance Index" used to rate and rank schools for "extra assistance" but mostly punishment. In other words, "ACCOUNTABILITY."
After that, it felt like testing, along with its evil offspring testing prep, testing PD, testing visits to the principal's office, seemed to explode like a fast-growing cancer, consuming all the healthy cells around it and squeezing every other purpose of schooling out of the school day. In my opinion, in my experience, it ruined school.
So, in other words, I hated testing, and I hated what testing did to students, to parents, to teachers, to administrators, to schools, and to schooling.
I've spent a lot of time hating testing, and for thirty years I have been itching to take all the Aspen Institutionalized, Foundationified, think-tankie, corporate shilling consultant-bots that ever walked in without a week's experience in the classroom, and I wanted to put them in a big bag and beat them with a baseball bat.
Which makes this next part hard. Here's a guy who claims to have seen the light. Writing in an opinion piece for the New York Fucking Times, a former? education reform evangelist named Ross Wiener claims to have come to the realization that testing may not only not be the answer, it may even be a little bit--gasp!--bad for kids. Not to mention everyone else.
Much like Never-Trumpers who ignored all the warnings from people who were right about the right all along (h/t Driftglass @driftglass.bsky.social), and now offer their critiques as if they are original analysis, Mr. Ross Wiener funnels the criticism, objections, and complaints from over twenty years of teachers trying to resist the testing madness into his very own road to Damascus moment.
Mr. Ross Wiener now understands, like all those classroom professionals have always always known, that he was wrong. However, the article quickly becomes more mea than culpa as he insists his heart was in the right place all along.
I say that's cold comfort to the thousands and thousands of kids denied a full, humane, robust, sometimes fun education because their educational captors were busy puking test score bullshit all over each other at the retreat. I'm bitter because my colleagues and I and teachers across the country were forced to implement a program WE KNEW WAS BAD FOR STUDENTS, and when we objected we were threatened and mocked and challenged over our commitment to our students. My friends still in the game are still facing that crap right now, today. And yeah, I'm still pissed.
But I search deep in my own heart and I find just a spark of forgiveness. Maybe we accept this reversal like it's a good faith repentance. Maybe we just take the win. BUT...
I would like to see some proof. I would like to see this former Aspen Institutionalized, Foundationified, think-tankie, corporate shilling consultant-bot do just one thing:
WORK AS HARD FOR AS MANY YEARS ON KILLING THE TESTING CANCER AS YOU WORKED ON SPREADING IT.
Then, maybe, redemption.
You can read it here for yourself. If it all sounds so familiar you want to beat somebody with a ball bat, I get it.
"It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers."
Yes. Yes it was. Mr. Wiener goes on:
But there was a question I couldn’t shake: Were the outcomes we were holding schools accountable for the ones that actually determined whether a young person flourished? I still remember when I first encountered research showing that high school G.P.A. predicted college graduation better than standardized test scores. I went to my boss’s office to discuss it, expecting her to help me push back, but she confirmed it was true, and always had been. If so, I recall thinking, why are we fighting so hard for test scores to be the arbiter of quality education?
Years later, research from the University of Chicago Consortium would show that schools’ effect on students’ social well-being and work habits predicted academic gains about as well as test performance did, and was more predictive than test scores for students’ graduating from high school, enrolling in college, and staying out of the criminal justice system.
Accountability policy gave unprecedented authority to the idea that standardized test performance is the most important outcome schools produce and made it the organizing principle of American schooling. What could be easily tested gained importance. What could not — the practical, civic, relational and developmental — was pushed to the margins.
Above I said I'd written a lot about testing. Here's some of it:
In "The War On Teachers Part Two: Working Conditions - Testing. Obviously" about the effects of testing on working conditions and the teacher shortage.
In Data is bullshit. Part One I wrote about how the tests do not generate "data," they generate test scores from assessments given over several days under different conditions. Schools generate tons of data; test scores are among the least valuable.
In "Data is bullshit. Part Two: What's the plan? Testing is easy; fixing things is hard," I wrote:
If there’s no schoolwide plan to address issues revealed in the data and no time carved out to analyze the data and formulate a set of strategies (maybe during one of the thousand “not this again” PDs), then the school is profoundly unserious about data and is not advancing the interests of students but simply using the testing for some other purpose."
In "Data (scores from state-sponsored standardized tests) is bullshit. Part Three, part one" I wrote about how the tests don't measure what they say they measure.
In "Data (scores from state-sponsored standardized tests) is bullshit. Part Three, part two" I wrote about the testing PDs and how destructive they are.
And finally, and absolutely worst of all, I wrote about the pernicious and abusive practice of collecting data on our students through all these testing and testing preparation programs in "Test Scores are bullshit. Secret data is evil bullshit."
Whether thrilling to the awesomeness of large numbers, or tsk-tsking their way through a "How did this happen?" segment, talkers talking about Elon Musk and his Glorious Trillion predictably invited other people to talk along with them. Many of the invitees have been at least ambivalent about individual humans owning their own countries (haven't we already done this?), and many are adamant that no, individual humans should not, in fact, have the money (or fiction of money) to control the fates of tens and hundreds of millions of folks.
But whatever the particular bent of the particular talker, one question that gets asked as if it's a moment of holy reflection is: "Is it wrong for someone to have a trillion dollars?" (Used to be a billion. Good old days.)
It's a trick question, of course, straight from the bot-scripted newsy show handbook. If the well-meaning guest says "No, but..." the questioner is all "Then what's the problem?" implicitly endorsing the widespread delusion that owning billions and billions of dollars proves you are god.
If, however, the guest comes up with, "Yes, of course it is wrong," then they are bombarded with two dozen versions of "Why?" and ten "stifle innovation" hypotheticals dipped in contempt and fired directly into the "communist!" guest's face until they retreat, harrumphing their way to commercial.
But it doesn't have to be that way. There is an easy, elegant, best of all straightforward answer to the question, whether one is a cheerleader for the wealth class or thinks obscene amounts of dollars is wrong or immoral or bad or destructive to democracy (which it certainly is).
Nope, don't need none of that. The simple answer is: "No, billionaires, even trillionaires are not inherently evil or immoral. The problem is the system that creates them. This system, a system that creates billionaires and created Trillionaire #1, is not fair.
Taxes are not fair (see carried interest, unrealized capital gains leveraged for loans (buy, borrow, die), even the preferential rates on capital gains). Special V.I.P. access to information and investments is not fair. Inheriting all the money and pretending you earned it--not fair.
Individual billionaires--and even Trillionaire #1, 2, 3 etc.--may or may not be evil, may or may not be immoral, but the system that created them and which they strive every day to recast to their advantage, that system is rigged against everyone else. It's corrupt, and it's unjust, and the wealthy strive every day to further corrupt it and make it even more unjust. The system is evil and immoral.
The wealthy work tirelessly to reshape the system to their advantage by buying more and more influence. It is wrong, but it is not eternal. Where it is legal, laws can be changed. Where it's illegal, criminals can be prosecuted. This brand of capitalism, with its front-of-the-line treatment for chosen insiders and slamming doors for the rest of us, is not an immutable law of nature. It was designed and developed by human beings, some more powerful than others, to serve the interests of the most powerful. It doesn't have to be this way.
The system is the problem and it needs to be changed. It was made by human beings and it can be destroyed and remade by human beings. The sooner the better.
Then we won't have to worry so much about the rich.
All I remember seeing is rockets crashing and exploding, but whatever.
My point is that this is immoral and poisonous, and it ought to be against the law.
In other words: Why is everything so fucked up? Too many goddamn billionaires.
And now there's fucking trillionaires.
Evil Jeff Bezos is in the news planning to do some more evil shit so I thought I'd republish this from late last year. Like many of us, I'm just yelling the same things over and over because they are always true and it always makes me furious.
Once again, the answer to all our questions is: Money (and once again, h/t Tony Kornheiser)
Just a quick word about Elon Musk and the tussle over whether to pay him a trillion dollars as Tesla's CEO. In the November 6 issue, the New York Times asks the important question: "Would Elon Musk Work Harder for $1 Trillion Than $1 Billion?" (no link, because fuck the New York Times) I didn't read it because I don't give a shit what their answer is because, again, fuck the New York Times.
The question reminded me of something I've thought about for ever. Why do we think that billionaires making less money makes billionaires want less money? Do we do that with poor people? Working people? Do we believe that paying people less per hour makes them want and need more hours or fewer hours? Do we believe that taxing the money above a billion makes billionaires quit at a billion? Or go find a different job?
I'm convinced that the biggest lie in capitalism--among thousands--is that if Big Brain Masters of the Universe don't get their money (including their tax breaks and their public investments and etc.), they'll close up shop and tell everyone else to suck it.
I think that's extortion, and I don't think it's true.
When it comes to how we think about money, I think there are two kinds of people. One kind of person thinks about the life they want to have and thinks of money as the way to get that kind of life.
The other kind of person thinks of money as a way to keep score in the big game of World's Greatest Human (aka Biggest Asshole).
For the first kind of person, money as a means to a material end might mean feeding your family, a decent car, a home of your own. For lots of people it's being able to pay your medical bills. Send your kids to college. Travel once in a while. You know, normal shit. For this kind of person, if you have enough money you can get the life of your dreams, so you work and save to have that life.
For the other kind of person, there's no such thing as enough money. It's not a means to an end, it's a competition. That means if you make a million and someone else makes two, you're losing. If you make a billion or ten, that doesn't put you ahead in the race against eight billion other people; it puts you behind a couple thousand other assholes.
In other words, this kind of person can never get enough money because somebody's always got more or they're trying to get more. They're not working for enough; They're working for more, more than anybody else.
Which is why, if Elon Musk lost 459 of the 460 billion dollars he now owns, he would never ever not in one billion years stop trying to make that 459 billion dollars back again -- and then a trillion more. That goes for the rest of the goddamn billionaires, too.
In the 1980s, people said, "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." That was greedy and selfish, but at least it was tangible. Toys could be played with. Today's billionaires have an empty hole right through the middle of them, and they can never earn enough or steal enough or inherit enough to ever fill it. (h/t Kevin Jarre,
Tombstone)
We have too many goddamn billionaires, and billionaires ought to be illegal.
It's hilarious to hear a bunch of middle-aged, middle class folks cry for the billionaires and vote to protect them from the communist socialist leftist antifas.
I imagine it's especially hilarious to billionaires who shout "look over there!" as they scoop all the money into numbered bank accounts or crypto accounts or whatever else I wouldn't know about because I'm not a goddamn billionaire.
I don't know a single billionaire, nor do 99.99% of the people screaming to keep our commie hands off the money owned by billionaires. "Be nice! Don't make them mad! They'll quit and take all the jobs with them! They'll stop making new iPhones and bad newspapers and weird trucks and delivering our toothpaste in three hours!"
What is it we're really afraid of? What would we lose if we lost all the billionaires?
What would we lose if one morning they all became just millionaires?
It's stupid that the rest of us do all that screaming for them.
Now there's goddamn trillionaires.
If you want to know why things have gotten so fucked up, follow the money.
Further reading: Why is everything so fucked up?
