The Death of Democracy Starts in the Classroom
25 Years of Mismanagement, Lies, Fraud, and Waste in
American Public Education
By Sean David Taylor, M.Ed. | Reading Sage
I am a dyslexic reading teacher. I spent six years in
special education programs that focused on "curing" my learning
disability with undertrained teachers while completely ignoring my creative
capabilities, my shame, and my raw hunger to learn. I eventually taught myself
to read using the same method as learning Chinese — whole-word recognition,
pattern, context, repetition. Sheer stubbornness. That experience did not just
shape how I teach. It shaped how I see every broken system that promises
children something it has no intention of delivering.
And right now, American public education is that broken
system.
Let me be plain with you: we are not in an education crisis.
We are in a democracy crisis, and the classroom is Ground Zero.
Arizona: The Laboratory Rat for Every Bad Idea in
Education
Arizona has always had a special, if dubious, distinction in
the history of American schooling. We were among the first states to embrace
charter schools, sold to parents as innovation and freedom. For some families —
particularly those in under-resourced communities — charters offered a genuine
lifeline. But the promise curdled quickly into a gold rush, and the prospectors
were not teachers or children. They were investors, politicians, and ideologues
who understood that public education represents roughly $800 billion annually
in the United States. That is not a system. That is a market. And markets, as
we have learned repeatedly, do not educate children. They monetize them.
Now Arizona has become the laboratory rat for the most
audacious privatization scheme yet: the universal Empowerment Scholarship
Account program, or ESA vouchers.
In 2022, then-Governor Doug Ducey signed the expansion of
ESAs to every Arizona family, regardless of income or need. The program now
serves over 100,000 students at a projected cost approaching $1 billion
out of the Arizona General Fund for the current school year. According to
reporting by 12News and data obtained from the Arizona Department of Education,
approximately 20% of ESA participants — at least 18,000 account holders
— used voucher funds on banned purchases. That is roughly $10.3 million in
taxpayer dollars spent on items including condoms, lingerie, diamond rings,
gaming laptops, big-screen televisions, and parents literally paying
themselves. One affluent Gilbert family attempted to use ESA funds for a $16,170
cello.
A RAND Corporation study found that the majority of students
using ESAs in 2025 came from affluent backgrounds and were already enrolled in
private school. The Grand Canyon Institute concluded that the program
"primarily ends up funding students who would not otherwise receive
general fund support." Meanwhile, the Amphitheater School District — my
district, in Tucson — voted to close four schools to save approximately $5
million, while more than $14 million in potential district funds were redirected
toward ESA vouchers within that same boundary. Tucson Unified lost $37 million
in potential funding in 2024 alone.
This is not school choice. This is the deliberate
dismantling of public education by people who never believed in it to begin
with.
Tom Horne and the Art of Explaining It Away
When investigators and journalists pressed Arizona Schools
Superintendent Tom Horne about the rampant misuse, his office's response was,
essentially: calm down. Horne has repeatedly insisted that fraud
accounts for less than 1% of total ESA spending, a figure the Arizona Attorney
General's Solicitor General's Office directly contested — noting that nearly 20%
of transactions in the program's Marketplace involved unallowable
purchases. His spokesman acknowledged the banned purchases but assured us the
department has a "collection and recovery process."
Translation: we'll try to get some of it back. Maybe.
But here is the deeper scandal. Horne's ideological
commitment to vouchers — and that of the Republican supermajority in the
Arizona Legislature, which has repeatedly killed every Democratic attempt at
oversight reform — means the accountability mechanisms are not just weak. They
are intentionally weak. As one Florida Republican school choice advocate
put it with refreshing candor: "Sometimes politics gets in the way.
There's a feeling among some Republicans that if we start to fix it, that's an
admission that there may be something wrong with it."
Admitting something is wrong with it? That billion dollars
is not an abstraction. It is music teachers and librarians and school
counselors. It is buses that run on time. It is a principal who knows your
child's name. We have traded all of that for someone's $16,000 cello.
The Real Crime: What We Did to Teachers
But let me tell you something that the ESA scandal, as
breathtaking as it is, does not fully capture. Because the fiscal looting is
only the visible wound. The deeper injury — the one that will take a generation
to heal — is what twenty-five years of the testing-and-accountability movement
has done to teachers.
Since the Nation at Risk report in 1983, and at full warp
speed after No Child Left Behind in 2001, American education has operated on a
single animating assumption: teachers cannot be trusted.
We responded by constructing an apparatus of surveillance
and compliance so elaborate it would make a Soviet commissar envious. We graded
and ranked schools. We tied teacher evaluations to test scores. We imposed
scripted curriculum and pacing guides so rigid that a gifted teacher who
detoured to follow a student's curiosity — the most powerful learning moment
that exists — was written up for "going off script." We introduced
new programs every two years, each one promising the moon, none of them
delivering, and nobody ever stopping to ask why we spent all that money for a
curriculum that doesn't work.
It doesn't work because we have never asked the right
question. We asked: How do we measure teachers? We should have asked: How
do we support them?
We stripped teacher autonomy. We stripped teacher trust. We
stripped teacher respect. And then we stood around bewildered, asking why
nobody wants to become a teacher anymore, why veteran educators are leaving the
profession in droves, why union membership has collapsed among people who once
would have marched under any banner that promised to fight for them.
I paid union dues for years. I watched the union mostly
protect the status quo, mostly avoid the hard confrontations, mostly issue
statements while the profession I loved was being systematically devalued. The
unions failed teachers by failing to name the real enemy clearly: not low test
scores, not lazy students, not underfunded schools — though all of those are
real — but the industrialization of childhood itself. The reduction of a human
being at her most formative and vulnerable moment into a data point. Into a
product. Into a profit center.
Finland Did Not Reform. Finland Restored.
I want to tell you about Finland. Not as a fairy tale, not
as a fantasy, but as a decision. A decision a society made about what it
values.
In the 1970s, Finland's education system was unremarkable by
international standards. Then, over the following decades, they made a series
of deliberate choices. They did not call it reform. They called it restoration
— a return to the fundamental truth that teaching is a learned art practiced by
trusted professionals, not a compliance exercise performed by monitored
employees.
Finnish teachers are required to hold master's degrees — but
not masters in educational administration or policy. Masters in solving
problems. Their preparation is rigorous, selective, and deeply respected.
Only about one in ten applicants is admitted to teacher education programs. The
profession attracts the best young minds in the country, not because it pays
the most, but because it is honored.
There are no national standardized tests for students in
basic education in Finland. None. Teachers assess their own students, using
their professional judgment, within a broad national framework that trusts them
to understand their classrooms better than any distant bureaucrat. There are no
school inspectors threatening to shutter buildings. There is no
test-and-punish. As education scholar Pasi Sahlberg documented, Finland runs on
"trust-based responsibility" rather than "test-based accountability."
When I traveled to Sweden in 1998 to begin a master's
program in multicultural education at the University of Uppsala, I was studying
a related and urgent problem: how Sweden could best acculturate immigrants from
sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East into Swedish society. The question was
not merely educational. It was societal — workforce integration, community belonging,
cultural dignity, religious accommodation. It required a whole-systems
approach. I never finished that degree. Twenty-seven years later, Sweden is
paying a catastrophic price for not finishing that work. The failure to
acculturate, to build genuine belonging and civic identity, has produced a
fracturing society where parts of the immigrant community have become
economically and socially isolated — and some have become a criminal element.
Sweden is struggling now with the consequences of what was left undone.
Education is not just a school problem. It is a society
problem. And if we treat it only as a product problem — something to be
packaged, sold, ranked, graded, and defunded — we will reap what we have sown.
The Micro-School Mirage
I understand why parents are fleeing. I do. When a school is
a test-prep factory. When a child who learns differently is told, implicitly or
explicitly, that there is no room for her here. When the one teacher who lit a
fire in your son gets burned out by year four and leaves. I understand the
desperation.
But here is what the ESA escape hatch does not tell you:
most parents are not trained educators. They are not curriculum designers. They
are not literacy specialists. Some families — the ones who do their homework,
who build intentional learning environments, who treat it with the seriousness
it deserves — will thrive. Their children will be exceptional.
Most will not.
Most families, facing the daily demands of work and life,
without pedagogical training, without diagnostic tools to identify learning
differences, without the structured community that school provides — will
slowly lose ground. Some children will fall behind in reading. Some will never
learn to write with precision. Some will grow up unable to critically analyze a
claim, evaluate evidence, or solve a problem they have not seen before.
And that — that slow, quiet, invisible catastrophe — is how
a democracy dies. Not with a bang. With a generation that cannot read a ballot
measure, cannot parse a political argument, cannot tell a fact from a
fabrication.
What We Have To Do
The problem is not too complex to solve. We keep saying it
is. We keep pointing fingers at poverty, at parents, at phones, at anything
that lets us off the hook. The problem is solvable. Finland solved it. It
requires only that we do the things we already know work and stop doing the
things we know do not.
We need to decide, as a society, that teachers are
professionals. That means competitive compensation. That means master's-level
preparation focused on research and problem-solving in real classrooms. That
means genuine autonomy — the freedom to follow a student's curiosity off the
pacing guide and down the path that leads to real learning. That means
evaluation systems that support teachers, not terrify them.
We need to stop grading and ranking schools as though they
are consumer products. We need to stop the two-year curriculum churn, the
endless new programs that promise transformation and deliver nothing but new
consultant contracts. We need to apply real design thinking — the kind that
starts with who are the people in this room and what do they actually need
— rather than the kind that starts with how do we hit this quarterly metric.
We need accountability in the ESA program that is not a
punchline. A billion dollars of public money, with no income caps, no
standardized testing requirements for recipients, no independent accreditation
for private schools accepting those funds, and automatic approval for any
purchase under $2,000 — that is not a school choice program. That is a cash
machine pointed at the public treasury.
And we need to tell the truth about what the last
twenty-five years have produced: a teaching profession hollowed out by
distrust, a public school system starved of resources while absorbing every
social failure we refuse to address elsewhere, and a generation of children
taught, above all else, how to fill in bubbles on a form.
A Final Word
I am a dyslexic reading teacher. I was told by more than one
professional that I would never read or write. The written word was, as I have
said before, a collection of cuneiform squiggles swimming on a page.
I learned anyway. Not because a system trusted me — it did
not — but because somewhere along the way a teacher looked at me as though I
was worth the trouble. As though what was locked inside me mattered more than
what the test said I could not do.
Every child deserves that teacher. Every teacher deserves
the conditions to be that person.
We are not building those conditions. We are burning them
down, then selling tickets to watch the fire and calling it freedom.
We need to do better. Our democracy — what remains of it —
is counting on us.
Sean David Taylor, M.Ed., is a veteran retired classroom
teacher from the Amphitheater Public Schools district in Tucson, Arizona, the
creator of Reading Boot Camp, and the author of the Reading Sage blog. He has
taught in international settings including Sweden and has spent over two
decades developing literacy interventions for struggling and Title I readers.
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