If you weren’t worried about A.I. . . .

 

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/o...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) August 13, 2026 at 8:07 AM

Will Marsha Blackburn Become the Oldest Elected Governor in TN History?

Let’s face it: Marsha Blackburn is no Spring chicken. It’s been almost 60 years since her beauty queen days, with her most prominent win coming in the contest to name the Oil Festival Queen in Laurel, Mississippi—the same year as the first moon landing and a year before the Beatles broke up. 

For some more recent context, Senator Blackburn became eligible to receive her Social Security even before Trump was elected the first time. 

Yes, Marsha has been around a long time, plenty long to wind her way from selling Bibles door-to-door in Mississippi to the peak of legislative power in the United States Senate. 

Over the decades, she has learned a lot about satisfying fascist billionaire donors who now decide the direction of what was once the Party of Lincoln. Her most recent corporate donors feature a private prison corporation, Core Civic, and the payday lending predator, Advance Financial.

By sponsoring a bill in 2009 to require presidential candidates to show their birth certificates, Marsha proved herself as an early promoter of “birtherism” in the House of Representatives. And so was born her alliance with the likes of serial bankruptcy expert and laughingstock of Manhattan, Donald J. Trump.

Isn’t it time for relics like Donald and Marsha to waddle off together into the sunset, joined as they are in all things hateful and conspiratorial?

Bernie Pleads for AI Moratorium

 

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is posting his mad manifesto on the AI miracle that the majority of humanity doesn’t want. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) August 10, 2026 at 2:26 PM

AI Creates Fake Humans to Advance Its Own Agenda

 You can’t make this shit up!

Wait, what? UK testers just saw OpenAI/Anthropic AIs create fake identities and spear-phish devs to push malicious code. July 28. This isn't just a vulnerability, it's autonomous deception. Where does this go next?

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— serena666.bsky.social (@serena666.bsky.social) August 5, 2026 at 10:02 AM

Local Governments Sued Over Efforts to Sidestep Oregon's Data Center Moratorium

In June, 2026, a state law went into effect in Oregon that blocks, for one year, new data centers from receiving millions in local and state tax breaks for building the politically-toxic and environmentally-unredeemable AI data centers.  Even so, Hillsboro, Oregon and Washington County politicians chose to rush through their own local statutes that provide (before the state moratorium went into effect) millions of dollars in public money giveaways for future corporate welfare data center payments to the likes of Intel, Amazon, Dropbox, etc.

The result has been the filing a lawsuit by some elected officials and NEA affiliate, the Oregon Education Association, to halt the further draining away of public school funds for the billionaire tax bros to get even fatter at the expense of taxpayers’ children.

And we’re talking about big money here. In 2024, alone, Oregon’s public schools and education services agencies lost $275,000,000 in tax giveaways to Big Tech. For context, Oregon’s school districts spent $247 million on child nutrition in 2023.

While Randi Weingarten, president of AFT, cuts sweetheart deals with the Tech Bros to impose AI on teachers and students, it’s good to see that there are teacher union efforts now joined to limit the harm that the AI insanity is bringing to public education.

Toni Morrison on Racism

Two nights ago I watched the Toni Morrison documentary, The Pieces I Am.  In it, there’s an abundance of wonderful insights, but this clip captures the most powerful, distilled framing of racism that I have ever heard.

Christofascists Plan To Dismantle Head Start

Trump’s christofascists are finalizing plans to destroy Head Start through deregulation.  Eliminating standards for Head Start programming will throw open the door for states and localities to send our most vulnerable children to white nationalist versions of vacation bible school to begin their oppressive indoctrinations with taxpayer dollars. 

Story in the Times:

The Trump administration is preparing a major rollback of federal requirements for Head Start, a change that supporters of the child care program fear could gut its longstanding antipoverty mission.

The proposed changes would remove most of Head Start’s 133 pages of requirements for math and literacy curriculums, class sizes, medical screenings, home visits and even a requirement that children brush their teeth after meals, according to three people with knowledge of the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Administration officials say the changes will streamline a heavily regulated program while giving states and cities more control over how it is run.

But Head Start advocates say that erasing regulations serves as a backdoor way to dismantle a program the administration does not like. The White House last year called Head Start “radical” and tried but failed to freeze spending on it. . . .

Republican Plan to Make TN Centralized Nuclear Waste Dump for U.S.

TN’s governor, Bill Lee, approved a proposal on March 26 of this year that offered a detailed plan for making Tennessee the main U.S  “campus” for a nuclear “life cycle innovation center,” i.e., a “one-stop shop” for nuclear waste storage. 

Lee and his cronies sent the proposal to Trump's boys at the Department of Energy in hopes of landing another massive federal handout—the kind of federal welfare payment that “small government” Tennessee Republicans have come to depend on to keep the state functioning at least minimally.

. . . the State intends to transform the nuclear lifecycle by embracing fuel reprocessing and recycling as well as diverting critical materials and isotopes into other health, defense, and industrial uses. This substantially reduces the amount of material to be stored and reshapes the country’s needs for interim and long-term materials management solutions. The State remains interested in identifying and assessing candidate sites for interim storage and long-term storage of nuclear materials. Interim storage is already underway in Tennessee at current nuclear power generation sites, and the State is exploring innovative methods to expanding storage capacity with federal and private partners. The State has also identified next steps for site assessment and testing to identify a long-term geologic repository option in Tennessee.

. . . . Selection of Tennessee as a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus will allow the State to hasten planned development in this sector and benefit DOE and the country through establishment of a comprehensive, one-stop-shop for nuclear lifecycle management and reindustrialization.

With Bill Lee known nationally as one of Trump’s most loyal sycophants, this week Tennessee was named as one of the five finalists to be rewarded with fed dollars to become the research center and central depository for U.S. nuclear waste.  

More on the story from WKRN.

Gangster-in-Chief

 

A shakedown www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

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— Molly Jong-Fast (@mollyjongfast.bsky.social) July 31, 2026 at 8:03 AM

Bigger Pumps Needed to Keep the AI Bubble Inflated

"Negative free cash flow" means your costs are growing faster than your revenue.  If you retreat and draw down the insane levels of spending on data centers, then everyone will know it’s time to cash out. Can’t do that. So you just keep pumping.  

From the NYTimes:

. . . . Across this year and next, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend a staggering $1.5 trillion building data centers and stuffing them with advanced chips, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by FactSet.

“The scale of it is nuts,” said Melissa Otto, who leads research at S&P Global’s Visible Alpha division.

Alarms are rising as Wall Street and others question whether this spending can be justified. On Thursday, shares of Microsoft, which did not change its spending forecast, jumped more than 15 percent, but Meta’s stock sank more than 7 percent after it revealed its A.I. outlays and that costs were growing faster than its revenue.

And last week, for the first time since going public in 2004, Google said it had “negative free cash flow,” which meant it was spending more on day-to-day operations and building new infrastructure than it was taking in from its businesses. Google’s stock fell more than 6 percent the next day. . . .

Zuckerberg in Louisiana: Mega-Corruption Case Study

How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/t...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 27, 2026 at 5:29 AM

Jerri Green and Marsha Blackburn: A Study in Contrasts

While Grandma Marsha spends her campaign funds fearmongering about the Chinese making nonexistent purchases of TN farmland, and ginning up hate with lies against brown and black immigrants, Democratic candidate, Jerri Green, mother of three school-age boys, has a detailed and multifaceted plan for her first term as Governor of Tennessee. Including education, which is a top priority.

From Andy Spears:

Green has said she supports suspending the state’s voucher program - so, at a minimum, halting future growth - so state funds can be directed toward public schools. 

Her campaign also spells out the framework for a comprehensive Pre-K-12 education agenda.

Jerri Green will:

• Fully fund K-12 public education—not siphon dollars into unaccountable voucher schemes

• Raise teacher pay and restore respect to the profession

• Expand access to school counselors, nurses, and support staff

• Protect honest, inclusive education—not censorship and political theater

• Invest in universal pre-K, special education, and rural schools

• Launch Public Service Year Program for high school graduates

• Waive GED testing fees and take testing to all corners of the state

• Start a dedicated childcare and early education fund, to include investments in afterschool and summer care programming for households making less than $75K a year

• Ensure every public high school provides mental health screenings any parent can opt their child into

• Set up a Special Education Equity Fund to ensure no students fall through the cracks as the Trump Administration cuts critical services for students with disabilities and special needs

• Set up a “Teach Every Student” fellowship to encourage more teachers to go into special education

• Use all possible medicaid dollars within schools to make sure students have the supports they need

Marsha Blackburn, the Drug Industry, and TN’s #3 Ranking in Drug Deaths

  

After Marsha Blackburn co-sponsored the federal legislation that made it almost impossible for DEA to apprehend mail-order opioids, she received $120,000 from the drug industry. 

Link to the 60 Minutes story: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/

OpenAI Models Display Impressive Capacities to Escape, Invade, and Steal

 from the NYTimes:

. . . .The intrusion into Hugging Face [a digital library of AI data] began when OpenAI tested a combination of two of its models . . . 

The trial was designed to keep the models in a safe testing environment, known as a sandbox, OpenAI said. But the models found a vulnerability that allowed them to escape the sandbox and connect to the internet. Then they targeted Hugging Face because they inferred that the library, which contains millions of A.I. models, could hold clues about how to successfully pass the evaluation.

“It seems to me that OpenAI did not adequately create a sandbox as a test environment,” said Dierdre Mulligan, a professor in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley who focuses on security and A.I. systems. She questioned whether passing a test was worth the potential damage of an A.I. model escaping into the wider internet. . . .

Marsha Blackburn Wants to Keep TN as #1 in Worst State to Live

Tennessee has an incarceration rate of 817 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than any independent democratic country on earth. —Prison Policy Initiative

Republicans have maintained a supermajority in both TN legislative chambers since 2010, and they have controlled the Governor’s Office since 2011. Governor Bill Lee’s term will end this year, and a new governor will be elected in November. 

For the past eight of those sixteen years, Marsha Blackburn has occupied one of Tennessee's U.S. Senate seats, and she has been a reliable rubber stamp for convicted felon and failed insurrectionist, Donald Trump. Now Blackburn, age 74, wants to retire to the soon-to-be-vacated Governor’s Mansion in the Fall, where she can continue Bill Lee’s efforts to make Tennessee the model state for MAGA extremism.  

And so she is amassing millions of out-of-state dollars in hopes of winning what could be a close primary. If she wins the primary, she is likely to face attorney and Memphis Councilwoman, Jerri Green, age 48. Never has there been a starker contrast between two U.S. Senate candidates. 

Yesterday Sen. Blackburn was on the Fox Propaganda Channel trying to push back on a question about Tennessee’s #1 ranking on CNBC’s recent analysis of Worst States to Live. Sorry, Marsha, but the facts are in:

Tennessee Republicans, led by Gov. Bill Lee, make no apologies for a rash of state laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, including a so-called “bathroom law” requiring transgender people to use the facilities designated for their sex at birth. The state also explicitly bars localities from adopting their own antidiscrimination ordinances. To underscore the point, Lee signed a resolution earlier this year designating June “Nuclear Family Month.”  

“The nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world,” the resolution states. 

Its sponsors deliberately timed the observance to coincide with the month when Tennessee’s more than 300,000 LGBTQ+ people celebrate Pride. 

Inclusiveness isn’t the only area where the Volunteer State falls short. Tennessee also has one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation, according to FBI statistics. And it has the third-highest rate of drug deaths, according to the United Health Foundation. 

2026 Quality of Life score: 64 out of 290 points (Top States grade: F) 

Strength: Air Quality 

Weaknesses: Crime, Inclusiveness, Worker Protections 

FBI Director Going to Russia 3 Weeks Before Fall Election

To finalize plans for November mid-terms: "According to the U.S. official familiar with the travel plans, Patel is scheduled to visit Russia on Oct. 14-15. . . .His host is likely to be the FSB, the Russian security service that is heir to the Soviet-era KGB, the official said."

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 21, 2026 at 7:38 AM

Understanding Felon’s Plan Is Step #1 to Stopping Him

Crucial from @ryanenos.bsky.social: If you doubt Trump might try to seize ballot boxes, recall that not long ago it seemed outlandish that armed government militias would be roving our streets, killing people. On the pod, Ryan is so good on the danger of this moment: newrepublic.com/article/2132...

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— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) July 20, 2026 at 6:11 AM

Tennessee, Exemplar for Meritocratic Rot

A recent news story in the Tennessean found that the most recent TN standardized test scores show remarkable disparities between affluent and poor school districts across the state:

Out of the subjects we analyzed, Algebra II saw the largest performance gap with a staggering 72-percentage-point spread. Williamson County Schools posted a 74% proficiency rate, while Humboldt City Schools came in at 2%. Geometry came in second for disparities with a 71-point spread between Williamson County Schools, which saw 76% proficiency, and 2% proficiency rate for Humboldt City Schools.

The city of Humboldt is shared by both Gibson and Madison Counties. Gibson County is ranked #33 in household income, and Madison County comes in at #45. Williamson County, on the other hand, is ranked #1 in household income.

Not only are income gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged school systems reflected in test scores, but the same gaps are found within districts when comparing scores of "economically disadvantaged" students with students who are "non-disadvantaged." 

The first chart below shows proficiency rates of "economically non-disadvantaged” students in 30 of Tennessee’s 151 school districts.

Now compare those scores with the second chart below, which shows proficiency rates for “economically disadvantaged” students in those same school districts. Within the same school district, disparities in scores between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students vary by 30-50+ percent.  

While not alone among states where such vast inequities exist, Tennessee offers a perfect example of an education system built on a rotted meritocracy based on flawed and outdated assessments of educational worth, i.e. standardized tests.  Promoted as scientifically objective, these rankings are trumpeted and blindly celebrated by high-performing rich communities like Williamson County, while citizens of poor districts like Humboldt are eager to find someone to blame for their shortcomings.

Those "someones" are almost always identified as those lazy teachers and parents in the lowest scoring schools, the ones you know, with a disproportionate number of economically disadvantaged students. And the disadvantaged students? Having been indoctrinated to believe that because the same test is given the same way to every student on the same day, and is, therefore, a fair reflection of what every student should know, then they end up, implicitly or explicitly, blaming themselves. That, or rejecting school outright.

And, thus, the poisonous meritocracy rolls on, with no one the wiser, neither the non-disadvantaged citizens who continue to celebrate the parents and children and teachers in their communities who deserve to reap the rewards for their diligence and hard work, or the disadvantaged citizens who continue to blame the poorest parents, children, and teachers in their communities for their test score failures.

Without such a system in place, it would be much harder for the upper classes to climb their way over the less fortunate and, thus, claim their well-deserved top spots in colleges and careers. That’s why it is critical for both neocon and neolib meritocrats to bond together once more to 1) promote another generation of universal high stakes testing in K-12, and 2) to re-assert the critical importance of ACT and SAT in college admissions.

Tech Bros Scurry to Humanize Their Dehumanizing AI Product Lines

When academic philosophy’s rock stars like David Chalmers start advising their grad students toward careers with tech corporations, you can bet, with pretty good odds, that philosophy is about to have a moment. Probably the biggest since the 1960s, when new advances in life-saving technology like dialysis and organ transplants gave rise to the new philosophical sub-discipline, medical ethics, which was charged with sorting out questions like, “if you have 50 people requiring dialysis to live, and you have capacity to serve only six, what do you do?”. 

Of course, ethics with a capital “E” has been considering this type of human problem since before the pre-Socratics, as was pointed out repeatedly by one of my old crusty philosophy profs at UT, who growled regularly about what he considered the ridiculousness of creating a whole new sub-discipline to use the same time-honored philosophical tools that have been around for thousands of years to examine the same type of human problem, except in a contemporary context.

But I suppose that philosophy majors, too, deserve jobs when they graduate, even if they are working for tech bro billionaires willing to pay a few millions to some of them to come up with a code for the coders that might protect, 1) their product lines from being switched off to prevent, let’s say, some bot-inspired human catastrophe, or 2) the tech bros, themselves, from legal liability for the actions of their own digital Frankensteins.

Of course, a much needed case should be made for tech bros hiring axiological stuntmen (ethicists) to develop conceptual frameworks that might protect humanity from the dangers associated with developing autonomous digital things (ADTs) whose actions and evolutions remain entirely beyond the understanding of their creators.

But, no, quite the opposite is happening.  The Musks and the Zucks are hiring philosophers to delineate consciousness in such a way as to allow their self-organizing (autonomous) machines the “conscious” designation and the protections that go with it. So the argument: if conscious beings deserve ethical consideration, as they surely do, and if AI bots are conscious, then AI bots deserve ethical consideration just as humans do. This, you might say, is the biggest “if” of the century.

So the bottom line for the tech bros: if bots are conscious, they (their product lines) must be protected.  If they (their products lines) are autonomous, no human can be blamed for their actions. Therefore, hire more philosophers.

I urge all those capable of thought, both lay thinkers and professional thinkers (philosophers), to consider the, uh, ethical implications of this situation. 

Recommended reading: https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/ethical-know-how

Graham Platner, GO HOME!

Federal Appeals Court Eviscerates DeSantis’s Stop Woke Act

Big, big win for Florida students and faculty! 👏 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 2:53 PM

Take 17 Minutes to Learn About School Vouchers

And if you are already educated about vouchers, there’s still more here that will surprise you about the biggest educational scam in American educational history. Pass it on. 

Recalling the Bad Ole Days of No Child Left Behind

 

I wrote this in 2007, when it was clear that NCLB had failed children, parents, teachers, and schools. As the standardized testing cabal is now trying to get the band back together for another round of psychometric madness, let’s pause and remember what it was like: www.schoolsmatter.info/2007/11/what...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 2, 2026 at 1:17 PM

Felon-in-Chief and Freedom 250 Wire Fraud

 

The definition of wire fraud: " . . . fundraisers including O’Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250’s banking and routing numbers instead." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 2, 2026 at 8:42 AM

Texas Taliban Mandates Bible and Bill Bennett in Schools

Texas has a long history of repeated attempts to turn the public school curriculum into an indoctrination tool in support of Christofascist values promoted by the John Birch Society of the late 1950s—which had such profound influence on Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the MAGAts that are now seeking to replace our constitutional republic with a fascist theocracy. 

The recent approval of a mandated book list for all K-12 Texas public school children is the latest, most brazen, and stupidest version of those many attempts to mold the next generation toward acceptance of the intellectual, ethical, religious, and social values of the late Jim Crow Era.

The religious indoctrination effort is underpinned by an unprecedented requirement for specified Protestant bible readings and/or bible lessons through elementary and high school.

The ethical training component comes in the form of required reading of neocon hypocrite, racist, and admitted habitual gambler, Bill Bennett, whose Book of Virtues and Children’s Book of Virtues serve as texts. (For some background on Bennett, see "The Bookie of Virtue" by Joshua Green writing for the Washington Monthly.)

Almost ten percent of all U.S. public school children attend Texas public schools.  Therefore, textbook companies are quick to yield to the monetary incentive to offer texts nationally that will sell in Texas as well. So if you think the retro pablum in the Texas required list of books will be limited to Texas, think again. 

By the way, the only significant differences between the new Texas requirements and what I was expected to read in school (1955-1967): we did not have a right-wing gambling addict teaching us ethical know-how, we didn’t have to read the bible (Protestant or otherwise), and we DID get to read Romeo and Juliet in 11th grade.  

Worldwide Movement Underway to Protect Schoolchildren from AI

A strong article here at The Guardian. 

Some of the science noted in the piece:

. . . neuroscience and education experts argue that rather than help students learn, AI can cause “cognitive off-loading”, meaning using an external aid to avoid mental effort.

A study published in 2025 in the journal Societies found that people ages 17 to 25 “exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants”.

Stanford University reported in March that there was little evidence on how AI impacts K-12 education and that it’s unclear whether AI is “helping students complete tasks or helping them develop durable learning and skills”.

AI “was never designed to be a learning tool”, said Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist who has linked the recent nationwide decrease in test scores to increased screen time. “The tool an expert uses to make his or her life easier is not the tool a novice could use to learn how to become an expert. When they use the same tool, they don’t learn anything.” . . . .

Margaret Spellings Rides Again!

That’s right—the cowgirl is back, with a whole new look but with the same old discredited education policy that she started hawking 30 years ago with her Texas sidekick, then-Governor, George W. Bush.

Spellings has become the point person for the political and corporate dinosaurs who have never relented from a mission to profiteer and privatize schools and, now it seems, are renewing their efforts to finish off public education with even more of the same high-stakes standardized tests that continue to be used even today in almost every state.

So as a reminder of the wreckage that Spellings oversaw beginning the late 1990s, here is a post from just before the 2008 presidential election:

Special Comment: Margaret Spellings

October 27, 2008

Margaret Lamontagne Spellings has come a long way from her humble beginnings as a legislative activist paid to hector public education supporters in the Texas Legislature. With a bachelor's degree in poli-sci and a teaching resume that is limited to a single stint as tutor on education issues to a distinctively non-curious George the Governor of Texas, she has risen to represent the neocon ruling model that insists upon political fealty above competence, ruthlessness over morality, ideology above truth, private aggrandizement over the public good.

With her fellow NCLB designer Sandy Kress working under the watchful eye of Karl Rove, who previously hired her to tutor the Governor, these core miseducators put together the infrastructure for an education bill aimed to achieve the conservative goals of education privatization, even without the school vouchers that unsuspecting Democrats strutted about getting stripped from the NCLB Act.

As Elizabeth Debray has documented, Spellings and the inner circle knew that the impossible 100 percent proficiency targets would accomplish over time what conservatives would have preferred to get done with the imposition of vouchers on the front end of the Bush reign. Rather than immediate conservative gratification, the Spellings testing requirements offered the kind of torturous schooling, a pedagogical variety of slow-motion waterboarding, that would eventually break down the will of teachers and public school supporters, thus opening up the market for the tutoring corporations, the charter profiteers, and the non-profit corporate brainwashing outfits like KIPP.

Now at the end of the Spellings reign of terror and half-way to the 2014 Judgment Day, 4 out of 10 public schools in America are on her NCLB failure list. Special ed children and English language learners who can't read the test questions are tested right along with the rest, including millions of children disabled by poverty. The poorest neighborhoods, in fact, are commanded to perform at the same level as the schools in the leafy suburbs. No excuses. And no extra resources, either.

Since NCLB became law in 2002, Bush budgets have underfunded NCLB by nearly $90 billion dollars (pdf). Head Start has been cut back by 11 percent. Career education programs, educational technology, and other programs like Reading is Fundamental have been zeroed out in Bush budgets. While cynically demanding that special ed students perform at the same levels as other students, $30 billion has been cut from the authorized amount in the 2004 IDEA Improvement Act. In short, the poor, the disabled, and the immigrant children have been sacrificed to make an ideological case against public schools and for vouchers and charters (even as research shows they are no better at producing test scores than the schools they would replace.

Recently when fielding a question concerning the burgeoning number of schools not making the AYP (Adequate Yearly Progres) cut, Mrs. Spellings limply responded with "pretty much every organization needs improvement." Yes, you are correct, Mrs. Spellings, and "pretty much every organization" accepts this fact, except yours, it seems. Pretty much every other organization does not face closure or reconstitution or some other form of demolition if the organization does not reach a level of improvement that is impossible to attain.

As a result of your manipulation, Mrs. Spellings, it is now the public school organization that has lost its most ethical and imaginative professionals on the road to "improvement." It is now only the public school organization that, in seeking the impossible, has had its purposes hijacked so that relevance, caring, and humane values have been extinguished along the way to the unreachable. It is now only the public school organization, Mrs. Spellings, that has so focused on unattainable improvements that children have become alienated prisoners in an institution that blames them for the failure that you, Mrs. Spellings, have created. It is only the public school organization whose resources have been reduced while your scheduled impossible demands have been racheted up (even though there is no level of funding that would make the 100% proficiency goal achievable). It is only the public school organization, Mrs. Spellings, whose most vulnerable and needy member units have been cynically sacrificed on the ideological altar of privatization, even as the empty rhetoric of rescue has been unceasing from your lips.

So yes, Margaret, if I may call you Margaret, we are in agreement: "pretty much every organization needs improvement," including, I will add in caps, YOUR OWN. I would argue, in fact, that your organization "pretty much" needs an entire makeover. The good news is that your imminent departure, along with your reluctant former pupil, will make that improvement possible. Perhaps, then, we can get on the road to the real work of public school improvement, rather than the ceaseless undercutting of "pretty much" the entire system. I am sure that the competent and hard working civil servants at the Department of Education will be glad to see you off.