BIG EDUCATION HAS BEEN DOING SO, FOR YEARS, WITHOUT ELON MUSK'S HELP.

A Los Angeles special education teacher seeks to rile up the Common Dreams base.  "I Didn't Become a Teacher to Watch Public Education Be Sold for Scrap."  The main point of her lament is

This administration’s end game relies on a population that is uneducated and disempowered. One where our children don’t know our histories or learn from them. Instead of nurturing young people who question the world around them, they want to produce workers that can be underpaid, mistreated, and controlled. This is about power, not policy.

As if that hasn't been the purpose of the common schools from the beginning.  That compulsory education in Massachusetts?  The descendants of the Puritans imposing a curriculum to tamp down papist notions circulating among the newly-arriving Irish.  Manipulating young minds, with a docile work force the outcome?  None dare call it schooling in capitalist America.

It does no good to have "appropriate modifications " that leave the audience unprepared for success in the United States. Yes, at one time, the common schools used tracking and ability grouping to deprive some people of a shot at living up to their potential (please, let us not hear any talk of "maximizing" potential; think of your gym teacher asking you to do as many chin-ups as you could plus one.) At the same time, those schools, with dress and discipline codes and coat-and-tie teachers, attempted to socialize the young into the middle class.

And yes, I am aware of the book by that title: the content is not the leftist rant the title and institutional affiliations of the authors suggests.

More to the point, perhaps the reason Our President is on board with abolishing the department of education and removing the federal strings is that that department and those strings have not produced an efflorescence of youthful intellect.  "You can't have bourgeois prosperity or bourgeois civilization without the right life management skills."  Ten years ago, we were calling attention.

Some of that is the implosion of the blue social model in Michigan. Some of that may be a hold-over of the days of the Old Industrial State, in which all the Michigan public schools had to do was produce a reasonably sober work force for the car companies.  We're either in neglect of the implications of tax incidence territory, or in the world of the state as fiction by which each lives at the expense of everyone else.

Moreover, it might be that the government schools have become residually attended by the spawn of the poor because years of Noble Intentions from Washington have created common schools that anyone with any hopes for his kids wants to stay away from.

The people who object to excessive testing and Common Core and the rest of the deaducational fads are almost surely correct.  But there's more damage being done to young people in rough neighborhoods by well-meaning, self-despising multiculturalists who let the bad habits slide under some lunatic notion of authenticity.

Here's Joanne Jacobs.  Disorder hurts low-income strivers.  Current Enlightened Policy seeks to achieve "suspension equity" (or something similarly silly) and that makes it more difficult for the youngsters who would like to, oh, learn something, achieve their goals.  Current Enlightened Policy is wrong.

But teachers of the Marcela Chagoya stripe see nothing wrong with continuing business as usual.

The forces behind Project 2025 are pushing plans to shut down entire federal departments and destabilize the programs our communities rely on. They’re calling for the elimination of Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, Social Security, and more. These cuts would devastate poor and working-class Americans, veterans, the elderly, and most of all, our students and their families. They want our kids hungry, our elders unsupported, and our communities too desperate to fight back while they steal and profit off our labor.

Although the threats to dismantle the DoE, as well as the ICE raids against our immigrant students, have made this personal, we educators are always on the frontlines of democracy. We work with students of all abilities, from all racial and economic backgrounds. We see inequity firsthand. We are workers ourselves and we know what it means to be overworked and underpaid. When we organize, we’re not just fighting for a contract. We’re fighting for a country where a child’s zip code doesn’t decide their worth.

Unfortunately, when the people who shape Expert Opinion and Influence Education Policy let the bad habits you find in the poverty-pocket zip codes slide, you end up undermining whatever ambitions the children living there might have.