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
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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.
