Michael Vadon (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Florida Governor Jeb Bush at an education summit in New Hampshire, August 2015.
After Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20, his administration will begin enacting an agenda that could radically change the United States’s approach to education.
Trump campaigned on a promise to shut down the Department of Education, and his pick for Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, is a billionaire who ran World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). While the right has attacked public education for decades, it is now more important than ever to keep a close watch on specific advocacy groups that seek to reshape public education. One of those groups is ExcelinEd.
ExcelinEd is the rebranding of the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), which was started by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in 2008 to influence education policy by “drafting legislation and paying travel expenses for state officials, lobbying lawmakers, and connecting public officials with industry executives seeking government contracts,” according to The Washington Post. In districts across the nation, ExcelinEd’s influence has put profits and corporations above the good of public school students.
As The Washington Post reported in 2013, FEE was at the nexus of rightwing political influence in K-12 education and corporate interests seeking to profit from the nation’s schools. Rather than sharing “what works” to improve schools and education opportunities for students, FEE provided a crossroad where corporate executives from education companies like Pearson and Amplify could mix it up with operatives from conservative think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is connected to Charles Koch, the “extreme libertarian” who has been working since 1980 to privatize public schools.
In 2015, Bush and FEE created a spin-off advocacy group made up of education leaders called Chiefs for Change. The group has been a stalwart advocate for charter schools, as well as other conservative education agenda items such as Common Core State Standards and evaluating teachers and schools based on student performance.
This policy agenda has proven to have multiple negative consequences—such as narrowing curriculum, harming teacher morale, and stigmatizing schools that educate high-poverty students—and many states that adopted these policies have since rolled them back.
Chiefs for Change had an especially damaging impact on public schools in Oklahoma, where FEE officials were involved in the development of Department of Education regulations. Under the rule of former Superintendent and Chiefs for Change acolyte Deborah Gist, Tulsa schools saw a significant increase in teacher turnover and a top-down approach to micromanaging teachers that led to the 2018 teacher walkout.
Another Oklahoma education policy leader anointed by Chiefs for Change, former State Superintendent Janet Barresi, pushed for the use of unreliable algorithms using test scores to evaluate teachers based on test scores.
Five years after Tulsa launched its Teacher and Learning Effectiveness Evaluation (TLE) that used standardized test data to measure student academic growth and evaluate teachers, research from Stanford University showed that Tulsa had the seventh lowest rate of growth in student learning in the nation.
In 2013, Tulsa World reported that public records requests by privatization watchdog In the Public Interest showed that FEE was writing education legislation in six states—an arrangement the group called “essentially a ‘pay-to-play’ scheme in which corporations can influence policy and then reap the profits.”
At the 2024 Oklahoma conference, ExcelinEd used misleading and misconstrued data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a periodic nationwide assessment of academic achievement, to conflate NAEP “proficiency” with “grade level.”
Since the Reagan Administration, the term “proficiency” has been misrepresented in order to denigrate public education. As Jan Resseger explains, the nation’s NAEP proficiency grade “represents A-level work, at worst an A minus.” She then asks, “Would you be upset to learn that ‘only’ 40 percent of eighth graders are at an A-level in math and ‘only’ one-third scored an A in reading?”
This mischaracterization of NAEP scores and other talking points ExcelinEd has used have contributed much to what has become a test-and-punish culture in education.
In the wake of the presidential election, ExcelinEd is bound to double-down on high-stakes testing, a culture of competition, and privatization, even though their claims have been refuted by social scientists and educators. Shortly after the results, Jeb Bush issued a statement on the ExcelinEd website proclaiming, inexplicably, that the results were a confirmation of voters’ demand for “choice,” even though, in a number of states, pro-public school candidates won victories and school choice referendums were handily defeated.
Now is the time to reread the work of education supporters like Jeff Bryant who, in 2013, described “irrefutable evidence that leaders driving the reform agenda are influencing public officials to write education laws in a way that benefits corporate interests rather than the interests of students, parents, and schools.”
Since I retired from teaching, when visiting schools, I would see plenty of young teachers who would love to teach in a holistic manner (like many of us were free to do before the enactment of No Child Left Behind.) But it’s hard to do something that many have never seen in their schools. Perhaps we can start to repair our schools by increasing the fact-checking of advocacy groups like ExcelinEd.