Greg Wyman writes to celebrate traditional K-12 public education, and looks at some of the moments that have brought us to the present..
I recently came across this quote.
“That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children, including poor children, is a national disgrace. It is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination, that we do not see that meeting the most basic needs of so many of our children condemns them to lives and futures of frustration, chronic underachievement, poverty, crime and violence. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose, allied with one another in a common enterprise, tied to one another by a common bond.”
Many people reading those words might assume they were spoken in today’s political environment. They might wonder who said them and in response to what policy debate. In researching the quote, I learned it was spoken by Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, a lifelong advocate for traditional K–12 public education and a teacher for twenty years before entering the Senate. He delivered these remarks at Columbia University on March 31, 2000. Sadly, he died in a plane crash in October 2002, but his words remain just as relevant today.
The quote captures both the promise and the struggle of traditional K–12 public education. While Senator Wellstone’s speech focused largely on standardized testing, his broader message centered on the moral obligation of a democracy to educate all children. That moral obligation is especially urgent in the context of current federal policies. Whether it is the expansion of school choice, efforts to dismantle the United States Department of Education (USDOE), the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), or the SAVE Act, these policy directions ultimately harm children, particularly those who are already marginalized.
This week’s newsletter examines how these administrative priorities intersect with the students Senator Wellstone spoke of. It also explores how the cumulative effect of these policies contributes to widening wealth inequality and concentrating power, often at the expense of children and families who rely on public institutions. Traditional K–12 public education does not exist in isolation from these broader political ideologies and policies; but rather is impacted by their consequences every day in our classrooms, schools and communities.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson provides valuable context for understanding this political movement. She reminds us that:
In the 1980s, Republicans told Americans that the modern government that had regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected civil rights, and stabilized the international order since World War II was “socialism.” Undeserving Americans like President Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens,” who were coded to be Black Americans from inner cities, or talk radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazis”—women who demanded equal rights—were cheating the system to take tax money from hardworking white taxpayers. Cutting business regulations and taxes would usher in extraordinary economic growth that would boost the prosperity of hardworking Americans, they insisted, leaving behind those unwilling to work.
Yet, as Richardson explains, that promised prosperity did not materialize for most Americans. A February 2025 RAND report found that if the economic system in place before 1975 had remained intact, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have held nearly $80 trillion more in wealth by 2023. 2 She further notes that at least $50 trillion shifted upward from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2020. These are not minor adjustments; they represent a dramatic redistribution of opportunity and power.
Current administrative policies follow this same trajectory. School choice is built on deregulation and the privatization of public education funds. Although voucher programs are often marketed as vehicles of opportunity for low-income families, data from multiple states demonstrate that most universal voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families who were never enrolled in public schools to begin with. States such as Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio provide evidence of this trend.