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برچسب: Jennifer

  • Jennifer Frey: College Students Are Eager to Engage in the Liberal Arts

    Jennifer Frey: College Students Are Eager to Engage in the Liberal Arts


    Jennifer Frey served as Dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College. It required students to read deeply in classic tests and to converse vigorously with each other.

    More than a quarter of the student body signed up for this rigorous class.

    Yet two years after the Honor College opened, it was closed. Its leadrs said that students didn’t want this kind of education, the heavy focus on the liberal arts and the Great Cobversation about the meaning of truth goodness, and beauty. Dean Frey thinks the administrators were wrong.

    She wrote in The New York Times.

    University students, we’re told, are in crisis. Even at our most elite institutions, they have emaciated attention spans. They can’t — or just won’t — read books. They use artificial intelligence to write their essays. They lack resilience and are beset by mental healthcrises. They complain that they can’t speak their minds, hobbled by an oppressive ideological monoculture and censorship regimes. As a philosopher, I am most distressed by reports that students have no appetite to study the traditional liberal arts; they understand their coursework only as a step toward specific careers.

    Over the past two years as the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, focused on studying the classic texts of the Western tradition, I’ve seen little evidence of these trends. The curriculum I helped build and teach required students to read thousands of pages of difficult material every semester, decipher historical texts across disciplines and genres and debate ideas vigorously and civilly in small, Socratic seminars. It was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms. For the past two years, we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum.

    Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. It certainly captured the hearts and minds of our students.

    Sadly, this education has fared less well with my university’s new administration. After the former president and provost departed this year, the newly installed provost informed me that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” That meant eliminating the entire dean’s office and associated staff positions as well as many of our distinctive programs and — through increased class sizes — effectively ending our small seminars. (A representative of the university told The Times that while it had “restructured” the Honors College, the university believes that academics and student experiences will “remain the same.”)

    The stated reason for these cuts was to save money — the same reason the University of Tulsa gave in 2019 when it targeted many of the same traditional forms of liberal learning for elimination. Back then, the administration attempted to turn the university into a vocational school. Those efforts largely failed, in part because of lack of student support for the new model.

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    An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

    For those who do care to see liberal learning thrive on our campuses, the work my colleagues and I did at Tulsa should be a model. How did we do it? We created an intentional community where our students lived in the same dorm and studied the same texts. We shared wisdom, virtue and friendship as our goals. When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need.

    At Tulsa, we invited our students to enter “the great conversation” with some of the most influential thinkers of our inherited intellectual tradition. For their first two years they encountered a set curriculum of texts from Homer to Hannah Arendt. These texts were carefully chosen by an interdisciplinary faculty because they transcend their time and place in two senses: They influenced a broader tradition, and they had the potential to help our students reflect in a sustained way on what it means to be a good human being and citizen. Our seminars were led by faculty members who did not lecture or use secondary sources. Rather, the role of the faculty members was to foster and guide conversations among our students that allowed them to think through these questions for and among themselves.

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    That our students threw themselves into the task of reading and discussing the great works with one another should not shock. When we — students and teachers alike — share wisdom as a common goal, we will want to do the reading, to dispute one another, to exchange ideas and arguments, to propose amendments and to offer our personal insights. Liberal learning occurs in dialogue with those who object to us, who offer a different perspective or experience — who read the same book as we do in a completely different light.

    At the Honors College, we taught our students that wisdom is a distant goal, and that we need to work on ourselves as we try to approach it. We need to cultivate what our college called “the virtues of liberal learning.” For example, we need to cultivate the humility to recognize that we have much to learn from the past and from one another. We need to cultivate a love of truth for its own sake and the courage to speak our minds and to follow the truth wherever it may lead us — even when it leads us into difficult waters where our disagreements are deep and unsettling.

    When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.



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  • Jennifer Berkshire: How Democrats Miss the Boat on Education Issues

    Jennifer Berkshire: How Democrats Miss the Boat on Education Issues


    Jennifer Berkshire is a veteran education journalist who understands the importance of public schools. She has a podcast called “Have You Heard?” She is the co-author of two books with historian Jack Schneider:

    A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School. And: The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual.

    Berkshire wrote the following brilliant article about the failure of the Democratic Party to recognize that most people send their children to public schools and don’t want them to be privatized. Some prominent Democrats support charter schools, which the radical right has used as a stepping stone to vouchers.

    She wrote on her Substack blog “The Education Wars”:

    And just like that, the Trump Administration has released the billions in funds for public schools it had suddenly, and illegally, frozen earlier this summer. The administration’s trademark combo of chaos and cruelty has been stemmed, at least temporarily. That Trump caved on this is notable in part because his hand was forced by his own party—the first time this has happened in the endless six months since his second term began. Make that the second time. Since I posted this piece, key senators from both parties decisively rejected the administration’s proposals to slash investments in K-12. Which raises an obvious question: of all of the unpopular policies being rolled out by the administration why would school funding be the one that forced a retreat?

    “Do they really care more about public schools than about…Medicaid?” is how historian Adam Laats posed the question. In a word, yes. That’s because Medicaid is a program utilized by poor people, a constituency that however vast enjoys neither a forceful lobby nor the patronage of a friendly billionaire. Public education, despite the increasingly aggressive efforts to dismantle it, remains one of our only remaining institutions that serves rich and poor alike. (For an excellent and highly readable history of how this came to be, check out Democracy’s Schools: the Rise of Public Education in America by historian Johann Neem.)

    This enduring cross-class alliance behind public schools, by the way, is a big part of why public education has been in the cross hairs of anti-tax zealots for so long. It’s also why school voucher programs keeps accidentally benefiting the most affluent families. Offering them a coupon for private school tuition is a nifty way to drive a stake through, not just this cross-class coalition that consistently supports things like more school funding and higher teacher pay, but the entire project of public education.

    A winning issue

    As David Pepper pointed out recently, the Trump Administration was forced to back down on school funding because of the bipartisan nature of support for public schools—part of what he calls a “clear and consistent pattern” that we’ve witnessed again and again in recent years.

    Whether we’re talking about the overwhelming votes against vouchers in red states in November or the bottom-of-the-barrell poll numbers for the Trump education agenda, public education defies the usual logic of these hyper-partisan times. Which makes it all remarkable that so few Democrats seem to understand the potency of the issue. Whither the Democrats is a question that Pepper, one of our most astute political commentators, has been asking too:

    I’m talking about an unflinching embrace of the value of public schools to kids, families and communities, and a blunt calling out of the damage being done to those schools by the reckless privatization schemes of recent years.

    It’s not coincidence, I’d argue, that rising stars in the Democratic Party including Kentucky governor Andy Beshear or Texas state representative James Talarico played key roles battling vouchers in their states. And before Tim Walz was muffled by the Harris campaign, we heard him start to articulate a sort of prairie populist case for public education, in which rural schools are the centers of their communities and today’s school privatizers are the equivalent of nineteenth-century robber barrons. The master class on how Democrats should talk about education, though, comes via Talarico’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

    Clocking in at two hours and 44 minutes, the conversation shows why Talarico is ascendant. But it was handling of the school voucher issue that truly demonstrated his chops. He deftly explained to Rogan that Texas has essentially been captured by conservative billionaires, and that despite their deep pockets and political sway, the anti-voucher coalition had nearly won anyway.

    Ultimately we didn’t win. [It] kind of came down to a photo finish, but it did to me provide a template for what happens if we actually loved our enemies, if we rebuilt these relationships. Like who could we take on if we did it together? Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and progressives. Like, I don’t know, sometimes I sound a little Pollyanna.

    Rogan’s response was just as instructive. “It’s not us versus them. It’s the top versus the bottom.”

    The dud brigade

    Having interviewed countless Republicans who oppose vouchers over the past year, I remain utterly convinced that there is no other issue that both resonates across party lines and exposes the influences of billionaires behind school privatization. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Democrats like Talarico and Beshear remain such a minority in the party. Especially at the national level, candidates and commentators largely view public education with disdain. Indeed, as the endless battles play out over the future of the Democratic Party, we can look forward to a full-court press pressuring blue state governors to opt in to the new federal voucher program. And while the school choice lobby will be leading the charge, influential voices from within the party—like this guy or this guy—will be making the case that vouchers = ‘kids-first policy’ and that Democrats need to get on board or be left behind.

    Part of what has been so refreshing about listening to Talarico, Beshear, Walz and other rising stars like Florida’s Maxwell Frost, is that they’re not just opposing school privatization but making a bold case for why we have public schools in the first place. They’re rising to the challenge that David Pepper throws down in which Democrats unflinchingly “embrace the value of public schools to kids, families and communities” and bluntly call out “the damage being done to those schools by the reckless privatization schemes of recent years.”

    Now contrast that with the way that so many influential Democrats talk about education—the bloodless rhetoric of ‘achievement,’ ‘data,’ and ‘workforce preparation’ that resonates with almost no one these days. Here’s Colorado governor Jared Polis, for example, rolling out the National Governor’s Association’s Let’s Get Ready Initiative, an impossibly dreary vision of K-12 education that hinges on a “cradle-to-career coordination system that tracks how kids are doing, longitudinally, from pre-K through high school into higher education and the workforce.” If you want a bold case for why we have public schools, you won’t find it here. Deftly combining right-wing talking points (the kids are socialists!) with the same corporate pablum that centrist Democrats have been peddling for years (the skills gap!), this is a vision that is a profound mismatch for our times. I read a sentence like this one—“Competition between schools, districts and states will lead to more students being ready for whatever the future might hold”—and I die a little inside.

    Back in 2023, Jacobin magazine and the Center for Working-Class Politics released a study called “Trump’s Kryptonite” about how progressives can win back the working class. Among its many interesting findings was this: the candidate best equipped to appeal to working class voters with a populist message was a middle school teacher. I’ve referenced this study endlessly in my writing and opinonating but it wasn’t until I listened to the Rogan episode with James Talarico that I really reflected on why a middle school teacher might make such an effective candidate. The exchange consists largely of Rogan peppering Talarico with the sorts of endlessly curious queries that a bright seventh grader might fire off. To which Talarico, an actual former middle school teacher, responds patiently and without condescension, largely steering clear of the sorts of policy weeds that are incomprensible to regular people.

    In the coming months, we’ll be told endlessly that the future of the Democratic Party belongs to Rahm Emanuel, Cory Booker, Gina Raimondo or Jared Polis—all of whom represent the identical brand of ‘straight talk’ about the nation’s schools that Democrats have been trying—and failing—to sell to voters for decades. That same Jacobin study, by the way, found that the very worst candidates that Democrats can run are corporate executives and lawyers. I’d add one more category to this list: corporate education reformer.



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  • Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Next for Vouchers: Champagne or Storm Clouds?

    Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Next for Vouchers: Champagne or Storm Clouds?


    Jennifer Berkshire has both good news and bad news about vouchers. The idea of public funding for religious and private schools had some big wins this year, especially in Texas. But most vouchers are subsidizing kids who never attended public schools; that’s a feature, not a bug as it creates strong support for the giveaway among the highest-income people. But, lo! The real cost of have the state pay for everyone’s tuition is beginning to get the attention of taxpayers. And that could cause a backlash against welfare for the wealthy. Florida is already paying $4 billion a year for vouchers. Will taxpayers object?

    She writes:

    Champagne corks, storm clouds—I’m mixing my metaphors here. But as we survey the steaming wreckage of the 2025 state legislative sessions, both are present in spades. Let’s start with the popping corks: the school voucher movement really did notch some big wins this year, adding Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho and the biggest prize of all, Texas, to the list of states with “education freedom.” Now add in the sneaky move to slip a voucher program that is really a tax shelter for the wealthy into the tax code and it’s easy to feel despondent, and not just about the future of public education. 

    Listen in on the debates that played out in these states, though, and you’ll come away with a very different view. As the economy sours and the tide of red ink rises, alarm bells are sounding and a backlash is brewing.

    Let’s start with a quick trip to my neighboring state, New Hampshire, where a familiar series of events has transpired. Now, in the Granite State, vouchers are known as Education Freedom Accounts, and they were sold to notoriously thrifty Yankees as a way to save money as students abandoned “government schools” for less expensive private religious schools, home schools, microschools. But nothing of the sort happened, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for thousands of students who’d never attended public schools. Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s revenue situation has been deteriorating rapidly thanks to yet another round of slashing taxes on businesses. 

    All of which adds up to some pretty bleak math as the state must now figure out how to pay for an expensive—and expanding—school voucher program even as New Hampshire’s budget pie keeps shrinking. Which is how GOP lawmakers seem to have landed on the worst of both worlds: an austerity budget that slashes funding for the state’s public higher education budget in order to pay for the cost of further undermining the state’s public education system. (If you’re wondering why this recipe sounds familiar, you’re thinking of Indiana, star of a recent episode of Have You Heard, and a cautionary tale about what happens when a state expands school choice while simultaneously cutting school funding and divesting from public higher education.)

    Different state, same story

    While the libertarian paradise known as New Hampshire may be unique, the dynamic playing out here is the same as in virtually every state that has now adopted school vouchers. 1) Ever-shifting goal posts regarding the purpose of these programs? Check. 2) Ballooning voucher costs as states now pick up the tab for students already attending private schools? Check. 3) Deep tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, meaning less revenue to spend on public education and other social programs? Check. 

    Consider Louisiana, which last year enacted the so-called LA GATOR program—short for Giving All True Opportunity to Rise. Now if you know anything about the recent history of school vouchers in Lousiana (spoiler: not good!), this is the time for a chuckle of the bitterest variety. What IS rising rapidly is the program’s cost—nearly $100 million in its second year, estimated to reach as much as $520 million as the program scales up. But when Governor Jeff Landry tried to collect the cash from lawmakers, something interesting happened. They said no, or at least, not so much. 

    “I was not remotely expecting that,” [Senate President Cameron] Henry said about Landry seeking an extra $50 million for the program. “Somehow there was a misunderstanding, which we will rectify.” Despite Landry’s request, Henry said he will hold firm to spending roughly the same amount as vouchers cost this school year: $43.5 million “It will be no more” than that, he said, “because that was the original agreement.”

    And it wasn’t just Louisiana. Over in Missouri, lawmakers axed their governor’s request for $50 million to scale up the voucher program known as MoScholars. The GOP senator behind the move offered a simple explanation. “I want to make sure that we’re fully funding our obligation to public schools before we start spending 10s of millions of general revenue dollars on private schools.”

    If you’re wondering what’s going on, the answer is fairly simple. As voucher programs have ballooned in size and cost, they’ve become a bigger target, especially in states where they’re now hoovering up state funding at the expense of the public schools—which are still attended by most children in every state. And years of tax slashing in these same states is exacerbating what we might call the ‘pie’ problem. Factor in the worsening national economic forecast and things look even more dire. Texas, which is now on the hook for $1 billion a year to pay for vouchers, plummeting oil prices due to Trump’s tariffs is likely to lead to a recession as soon as this summer. 

    Theory of change

    As regular readers of this newsletter know, I’m an avid reader of conservative treatises. As I type, I’m surrounded by anti-public-education screeds by Pete Hegseth, Kevin Roberts, Betsy DeVos, and Corey DeAngelis. It’s the last one, Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, that has proven to be a particularly useful guide to our times. How, for example, did school choice for the very wealthy become the civil rights cause of our times? Dr. DeAngelis explains:

    “Allowing politically advantaged groups to benefit from the program is also a smart way to keep the policy protected for years to come.”

    You see, there’s a theory here: that as monies grow scarce and one state after another devolves into a pitched battle over what’s left, the richest and most connected will fight the hardest to keep what’s theirs. For a preview of what this looks like, I recommend a pitstop in West Virginia, where lawmakers just wrapped up another session by shoveling money at tax cuts for the wealthy and school vouchers, while cutting programs that help people get clean water, find work after struggling with addiction and get child care. Oh well…

    But for the theory of change to work, people have to want to live in a West Virginia-like reality, and I’m not at all convinced that that’s the case. Don’t believe me? Let’s head to Florida, which school choice proponents like to point to as a model for the rest of our states, and which now spends $4 billion a year on vouchers. Since the state made the program available to even the wealthiest Floridians, surprise, surprise, they’ve leaped at the opportunity to have tax payers pay their children’s private school tuition:

    More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions.

    But Florida is also an example of the bad math, and shoddy assumptions, that drive the push for school privatization. As public education advocate and blogger extraordinaire Sue Woltanski has been tirelessly documenting, vouchers are indeed succeeding in defunding Florida’s public schools:

    This isn’t because the money follows public school students fleeing to private options, but because, when families, whose children are ALREADY in private schools, are offered a tax-funded discount for their private school tuition, they flock to apply, and private schools encourage it.

    As Sue keeps pointing out, the big flaw in the school choice lobby’s theory is that Florida’s public schools aren’t going away. A state that used to brag about how little it spent on its students is now funding two parallel education systems: “one for the nearly 3 million students still enrolled in public schools, and another for the hundreds of thousands already in private or home education, all out of the same funding formula.”

    So what gives? The GOP’s solution is to slash funding for popular programs in public schools: AP, IB, CTE. When I asked a reader in Florida what he thought was motivating the lawmakers, he saw a longer-term conspiracy at work. Get rid of programs that parents care about and eventually they’ll abandon their local public schools. But that assumes that these parents are powerless and that lawmakers can eviscerate programs and institutions that matter to them without paying a price. I’m not so sure. 

    A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Sarasota to speak to a group called Support Our Schools. SOS is a phenomenal advocacy group, and in partnership with a youth-led group that’s “organizing school boards to fight fascism, protect democracy, and build power from the ground up,” they’re having a real impact in a community that’s been ground zero for the right-wing takeover of public education. I headed south anticipating that my hosts would be despondent over the state of Florida and the nation, but what I found was the opposite. These local activists were energized, convinced that their cause—defending and strengthening public education—is finally breaking through. In their words, the situation for Florida public schools is now so dire that it’s impossible to ignore. 

    Throughout my visit, one theme echoed repeatedly. A backlash is coming. It can’t come soon enough.



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