Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket CastsOn this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the strange and revealing controversy over Donald Trump’s rumored commemorative coin and what it says about the culture of flattery and self-abasement now defining MAGA politics.Then David is joined by former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for a candid look at the crisis in American education. Spellings, a key architect of No Child Left Behind and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, explains why U.S. test scores began to stagnate years before COVID and why the pandemic only deepened an accountability collapse already under way. They discuss the successes in states like Mississippi, the wasted billions in federal relief funds, and the political backlash against testing that, Spellings argues, has left millions of children behind.Finally, Frum turns to art and history with his discussion of The Judgment of Paris by Ross King, a story of how the impressionists overturned the art establishment of their time, and what it teaches us about how the future judges the present.The following is a transcript of the episode:David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest today will be Margaret Spellings, who served as U.S. secretary of education from 2005 to 2009. We’ll be discussing the ominous downward drift in U.S. student achievement, not just during COVID but even before. And we’ll talk about the importance of testing as the best and surest way to improve student achievement and reverse the decline that the United States has suffered in the achievement of its students in recent years.In the book segment at the end of the show—and I hope you’ll stay to hear or view it—I’ll be talking about a book called The Judgment of Paris by Ross King, a story of the origins of impressionist art in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s.Before I get to all of that, though, I want to open with some preliminary thoughts about a strange recent development in Donald Trump’s America.Now, some of you, if you are active on social media, may have seen that a right-wing commentator a few days ago released an image of a purported $1 coin, which featured a profile of Donald Trump on one side and then a full figure of Donald Trump clenching his fists in the aftermath of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, with the words Fight, fight, fight engraved on the other side of this purported $1 coin. And when you first saw it and you saw who was issuing this image—I mean, you saw, actually, the kind of cheesy, low-quality version of the image—you thought it had to be a kind of spoof way of trolling the libs, making people upset with some kind of stupid joke. But the image and the tweet were reproduced by Brandon [Beach], who’s the U.S. treasurer, the man in charge of the U.S. Mint and Bureau of Engraving, and he tweeted about this image: “No fake news here. These first drafts honoring America’s 250th Birthday and @POTUS are real. Looking forward to sharing more soon, once the obstructionist shutdown of the United States government is over.”So the man in charge of the Mint validated that at least the drawings are coming from the government or are in some way authentic, that there really is some kind of plan somewhere in the U.S. government to make a $1 coin for 2026, the 250th anniversary of 1776, with Donald Trump on one side in profile and Donald Trump in full figure on the other.Now, as I think everyone understands, this would all be completely illegal. There are laws prohibiting the use of any image of any living person on U.S. coinage—and not only any living person, but you have to have been dead for two years before you’re even allowed to use the image of a dead person. So it’s illegal. It’s also shocking and un-American. The idea of putting a ruler on the coinage? The American Revolutionary generation, the people whose revolution we commemorate the 250th anniversary of in 2026, were reacting against a system where King George III’s picture appeared on their money. There could be nothing less American than the image of a serving president—a still-living human being—on an American coin. So it’s illegal.Now, illegal things happen every day in Donald Trump’s America. It is illegal to detain and arrest people without a warrant; that happens. It’s illegal to blow up ships on the high sea without any kind of authorization by Congress; that happens. So mere illegality is not enough to stop it. But I think this case is—it’s so gross that I think I’m going to put this in the category of things I’m not worried that they’re actually going to happen, that there will actually be a Donald Trump coin issued next year. But what I’m interested in is the mentality that produced, even, this discussion. What led a right-wing influencer to propose such a thing? What led someone to make an image of the coin? And what, even more astonishingly, led the treasurer of the United States—I mean, it’s not such a grand office, but it does come with a big title and nominal authority over the U.S. Mint—what would lead such a person to issue a statement on Twitter suggesting there is some validity to the project of putting the image of a living president on a coin?I think there’s something in the MAGA movement that identifies sycophancy, cringing as real proofs of loyalty. The way you show you are a real Trump supporter is by abasing yourself as a human being and by finding new ways to grovel toward this figure, not as the leader of a party but as some kind of ruler or emperor above you.Now, again, a lot of this is kind of a spoof. They know that it upsets decent, patriotic Americans for people to behave in this way. And they enjoy upsetting decent, patriotic Americans, and that’s fun. There’s a lot of sociopathy in the Trump movement and especially in the Trump movement as it appears on social media, and so just making people upset is an important end in itself. But I think it also becomes a real test of in-group loyalty to see who can outcompete in slavishness the other members of the circle, who are also competing to be slavish. That’s why you get these strange [phenomena] like Donald Trump’s physicians claiming that he’s the most physically vigorous president ever.Now, even when Donald Trump was younger, he was a big man, but he was never a great athlete. And now, as he approaches his 80th birthday, he’s obviously not physically fit. As president, he’s not more physically vigorous than Barack Obama and certainly not than George W. Bush. These were people who worked out every day, lifted weights, mountain-biked. Obama played basketball very skillfully, could sink a shot from a great distance; you saw that—there’s video of him doing it. Why would you feel the need to say—you could believe in Donald Trump in all kinds of ways and believe that he was a great dealmaker, you could believe that he’s rich and powerful, but that 70-plus-year-old Donald Trump is the healthiest physical specimen ever to be president of the United States? Why do you feel the need to say that?Well, it’s precisely because it’s not true. It’s because it shows—any observant person can say that a fit president is fit, but to say that an older and overweight president who does no exercise, that he’s physically fit, that’s a real sign that you’re committed to the cause. The fact is, you’re not just willing to tell a lie, but tell a lie that abases you, that makes you look foolish, that makes you look like you don’t care about yourself at all, that you only defer to the leader. That’s the real sign of loyalty. It’s flattery that is not meant to be believed but functions as a kind of system of in-group recognition.And the surest way of proving your loyalty is to let Donald Trump steal from you. That’s, again, one of the signs of loyalty in this cult, is that they take part in the purchase of meme coins and other things that are not going to—that obviously take money out of their pockets and put it into the president’s pocket in exchange for nothing whatsoever. Or why Republican officials all over the country are so delighted to make sure that everyone knows that they do their events in Donald Trump’s spaces and pay money to him. Yes, partly, it’s a way of buying the president’s favor, for sure. But it’s also partly a way of saying, I am a person absolutely without self-respect, and that’s why you can trust me.This is a very strange thing in American life. That the stereotype of an American, the idea of what an American means, is a person who, whatever their political views, carries themselves with a certain independence, a certain disrespect for authority, a certain You can’t tell me what to do. I’m a freeborn citizen. I have my rights—where is that mentality? It’s gone. That they seem to take [it] as a test of group loyalty, and that’s what this coin tells me: kind of cringing, wheedling, hunched-over, abject, Kick me; I’m a dog attitude toward the people who they regard not just as the people they employ to run the government for them but as their actual leaders and betters. I think I can understand it a little on the level of abnormal psychology. I can’t understand it as a behavior of Americans who claim the name of Americans. And I certainly can’t respect it.One of the things that we are often urged to do is to find ways to cross the divide. I think, in general, that’s probably a good idea. We should be sympathetic, empathetic to people who think differently from us. We should find ways to connect and to discuss across lines. We’ll be talking about that with Margaret Spellings: How can people of different political views work together to raise test scores and make sure the next generation of Americans is more educated? So there’s something to be said for that kind of cross-the-aisle cooperation. But how do you cross the divide with people who think the test, the proof of their group loyalty, is their lack of self-respect? Because if you don’t respect yourself, how am I supposed to respect you?And now my dialogue with Margaret Spellings.[Music]Frum: Margaret Spellings began her career as an education advocate in Texas. She served under two Texas governors: Bill Clements and George W. Bush. Upon Bush’s election to the presidency, Spellings came to Washington. As a White House education adviser, she was the driving force behind the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. From 2005 to 2009, she served as U.S. secretary of education. She has also served as president of the University of North Carolina system and is now president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center.I’ll add a personal note to this introduction. I first got to know Margaret Spellings as a set of initials on White House speeches about education policy.Margaret Spellings: (Laughs.)Frum: Mercifully, I didn’t write very many of those speeches; I wrote about other things. But I would see the initials, and they struck awe in the hearts of all who saw them. And she continues to strike awe, and I’m very happy to welcome her to the David Frum program today—Spellings: Please, David, settle down, ugh. (Laughs.)Frum: (Laughs.) I want to talk to you about school testing. So let me start with a general outline that I think most people will be aware of, but if—you’ll want to amplify this. We saw from the early 2000s until about a decade ago strong, consistent improvements in the performance of U.S. K–12 students in both math and reading.Spellings: Especially math. Especially math.Frum: Since about 2012, ’14, we saw stagnation and, more recently, decline. And many people blame the decline on the COVID pandemic—which, of course, made things a lot worse—but the decline begins before the pandemic. So tell us: What is going on with American children? What happened in the 2010s to stop the progress of the decade before that?Spellings: Man, you did your homework; that is exactly right. And you don’t have to take your word for it or my word for it. You can take a look at the national education report card, and it shows without question that, when we were paying attention to the achievement gaps, when we were measuring what we said were our priorities—reading and math, every grade, etc.; grades 3–8—we were getting results, and then we took our foot off the gas. And what does that mean? And you’re absolutely right, it happened—those declines started well before COVID.And when I say “take your foot off the gas,” what I mean is we stopped paying attention to what I call the fine print of school accountability. We were in the early days of what I call the era of local control—and I’m big for local control—but we allowed states to really walk back on the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment, the transparency, and the consequences for failure. And we started to see the effects of that: drifting and flattening and then declining student achievement.Frum: How much emphasis do you put on the change of the federal law that occurred in 2015? So No Child Left Behind is there for a decade and a half, from 2001 to 2015. There is discontent with it from some local school districts, and in 2015, the law is rewritten. Is that an important event in the stagnation?Spellings: It is an important event, and really, the implementation of that law is what set us on the wrong direction. So when I said, Pay attention to the fine print, we saw schools loosening what was required. We had schools defining academic years in ways that would allow migrant children, for example, not to be included as part of the accountability system. Schools and states started manipulating their cut scores, the passing grade that a student had to muster to be over the line, and we allowed those standards to be lowered. Curriculum standards, potentially, were lowered. So all the various pieces and parts of an accountability system started to get walked back from, and then a net effect of that was declining student achievement.Frum: Now, people who don’t want to talk about assessment and achievement focus a lot of our attention on COVID, and that surely was a transformative event, and we haven’t recovered from that. Describe a little bit how COVID made things worse, but then I want you to double back to the years before COVID.Let’s start with how COVID has changed American education. What happened to American kids during the COVID epidemic?Spellings: Well, for starters, we had an immediate, gigantic experiment in online learning that educators and school systems were not quite ready for. And so, obviously, parents ended up being on the front end of managing student learning. Kids largely—and certainly more so in some parts of our country—did not show up in schools for a very long time. And all of that is part of the stew, but that was happening concurrent with this reduced accountability, reduced muscle, reduced focus, and those things together—there will never be a researcher that can prove cause and effect, but it was a series of things that happened that [was a] cause for declines. But the fact that we sort of didn’t care as much in the accountability system, and coupled with COVID and all the various conditions I’ve just described, really made for a very significant downward trajectory that we had not yet recovered from.Frum: And recovery, as you say, recovery from COVID doesn’t seem to have begun. It’s now, I guess, three years since almost all students were back in school almost all the time, or at least they were obliged to be back in school almost all the time—there are attendance issues. But we don’t see even the beginnings of recovery yet.Spellings: Well, there are some places that have some glimmers of hope; that’s not universally true. But the other thing that was happening then and I really despair about—especially as, we will get into this, this ramped-up era of local control—now we had just a massive influx of federal resources during those days so that states could really reinvigorate tutoring programs, summer school, technology, teacher development; it was basically free money, bags and bags of free money. And the net effect of that is bupkes—virtually no return on those dollars. So reduced accountability; bad inputs, if you will—kids not in school, educators not maximizing technology, disengagement, mental health, all of that stew—and lots of money that was wasted.Frum: Now, you mentioned some exceptions, and one of the places that has got the spotlight is the state of Mississippi.Spellings: Absolutely.Frum: Do you agree that that’s a success story, and how do you explain it?Spellings: Absolutely, I do agree. Well, for starters, they used—and, golly, I just really can’t decide if it makes me mad or makes me cry—but you’ll recall from the early days of the Bush administration, we were all about reading: Reading First. And [first lady] Laura Bush embraced this. It was a big part of the law. We tripled the federal investment in reading, and the National Institutes of Health had just led the way to how little children’s brains worked and how they can learn to read, and so we started down that path. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Sold a Story podcast; it’s well worth the listen.Frum: No.Spellings: It’s well worth the listen. But basically, it became politicized as “George Bush’s reading program,” and it’s now in fashion again; that’s the good news. Research-based reading instruction that shows us the way: It’s phonics. It’s phonemic awareness. It’s practice. It’s decoding skills. Those are the things that Mississippi and others—Alabama, Louisiana—have put into place and done so using those research-based approaches.But not only that, because more than 30 states have passed laws that insist on those things now, what they did—and it’s the hardest work in education—is implementation with real fidelity. So they had leadership; they had a woman who was the reading czarina, who literally just dogged curriculum directors, school superintendents, traveled the state—she was like a rodeo circuit rider—making sure that people truly implemented, with fidelity, these research-based approaches. And the results speak for themselves.Frum: You mentioned—is Alabama doing similar things?Spellings: Alabama and Louisiana. It’s interesting, and you read about this a lot, that some of the red states have been more eager and more able to implement some of these things more quickly, often because they don’t have the vigorous union influence that makes reforms like that slower and potentially more difficult.Frum: A story that people who want to question testing tell is they say: What happened in 2012, it’s not about the changes in the law in 2015. It’s not about the relaxation of the testing requirement. It’s part of the largest story of society. You go through this tough recession in 2008, 2009, the recovery is slow, and we have economic disruption in the larger society, and that’s the culprit, not the changes in education policy. How do you answer that?Spellings: Well, my friend [former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education] Joel Klein has the perfect response to this, and that is we often think that education—I mean, that poverty is the thing that’s holding us back; well, education is the thing that catapults us further. And so we need to really double down on education when those things are true, because it’s really the only way out of the wilderness, out of the despair of economic troubles. And so: education, education. And if we’re waiting for poverty to be resolved before we attend to education, that won’t happen.Frum: Well, it’s not so much exactly poverty, but what happened in the Great [Recession] was disruption. People moved houses more. If you lose your house, maybe you’re not in desperate poverty, but you’re certainly in a new school district, very possibly.Spellings: Right, right.Frum: If one of the parents is in long-term unemployment, the mood in the house, the patience, the calm, where homework can be done without a parent snapping pencils all the time. (Laughs.)Spellings: Yeah, and I get all that. And that’s why the fine print of accountability matters. Is that a kid who moves? Are they counted as part of the accountability system? Do they matter to the educators who are accountable for that performance? Are they captured as part of that remit of the school district? And when the answer is no, then who cares?Frum: Why do so many professional educators dislike testing so much?Spellings: Well, because it leads to accountability for grown-ups, and none of us like that particularly, I guess; it’s just a reality of being an adult and being responsible. And to your point, there are a lot of other factors at play. But we can’t use that as an excuse to shirk from the work. We just have to stay laser-focused on, especially, these basic skills of reading and math.Where I thought you were going a second ago, David, was it’s narrowed the curriculum, that all we care about is reading and math. And my response to that is it’s hard to learn science or social studies or history or anything else if you can’t read.Frum: Yeah. Well, there’s a suggestion that the reading and math emphasis is coming at the expense of art and music. But art and music are victims of other factors. You can do reading and math and still have time for art and music if a state wants to.Spellings: Absolutely. It’s not against the law to improve student achievement or to include extracurricular activities in your curriculum.Frum: Yeah. You could even maybe reduce football.Spellings: Some have suggested that.Frum: (Laughs.)Spellings: But I’m a Texan. I’m not sure I’d go that far. (Laughs.)Frum: Right. But it is interesting that you can reduce phys ed for most people, and there’s quiet; you’d reduce football for a few, and there’s revolution.Spellings: Yeah. Amen, sister. (Laughs.)Frum: (Laughs.) So let’s look at—the chart suggests that the period 2012 to 2015 is the decision moment for the stagnation and then decline of American education. So that’s actually after the worst of the Great Recession; by 2014, we’ve recovered to 2000 levels of output. And so it’s not 2009, 2010 that the damage happens—Spellings: And we were still going up in those days; we really were.Frum: Yeah. Do you think there’s an interplay with migration patterns? That you have a lot of outflow of migration in 2009, 2010 and then a new kind of illegal immigration that takes place after 2014. Basically, the profile of the illegal immigrant of the 1990s is a single young man trying to evade law enforcement and go directly to a workplace. By 2015, it’s families or children or very young people under 18 coming, and they’re often looking for contact with the authorities to make an asylum claim. Is that intersecting with the changes in performance at all?Spellings: I mean, it’s possible. I guess if I were getting a Ph.D. in this stuff, I might want to look at particular states and how they calibrated the fine print of the accountability plan against that. I used the example of defining the academic year to make sure that the migrant students were not included as part of that. So whether it’s they’re coming back to the South in the winter or they’re in parts of the Northeast in the early part of the fall, those are the sorts of things you’d wanna take a look at. “How did the migrant students show up as part of the accountability system?” is a question I’d want the answer to.Sure, I mean, there’s so many different factors and why we go round and round about these debates, about whether unions are responsible or the curriculum or the narrowing or the cut score or the—but, frankly, what really is happened and what I’m in despair about is that we’ve lowered our expectations for every kid. No Child Left Behind—those words say it simply—was essentially an expectation that virtually every kid ought to have an expectation that they can get what they need in our public schools. And I’m not sure that people believe that anymore. And then our strategy now is: Get a voucher. Get the hell out. See about yourself. And this idea that it’s in our national interest for an institution called American public education to attempt to do something no other country does is important.Frum: Well, you mentioned vouchers. One of the flash points, especially in some of the red states, is whether the vouchers come with any achievement conditions attached to it. And you’ve always been an advocate for this, which is, maybe your state wants to try it, but the voucher kids don’t get to opt out of the test.Spellings: Exactly. And when I look at a state like Indiana, who has been at the school-choice game for a long time, including accountability—very Republican state—but they get that. They understand that taxpayer dollars, wherever they are deployed in service to education, we ought to know if we’re getting something for it. And that’s certainly been true of the charter-school movement. Charter schools are public schools, and they, of course, have been subject to school-accountability provisions, and it seems to me that ought to be true in public funding wherever it might be found.Frum: Well, it’s striking that the hostility to testing is not just about kids. There’s now a big movement in many medical schools to get away with the MCAT test. There’s chafing against the LSAT and the bar exam in the law schools. And we’re not talking about 9-year-olds who maybe you don’t want to judge the whole course of their life on one day; we’re talking about people in their middle 20s seeking access to the most demanding, and in the case of medicine, life critical of the professions, and people are saying, Well, it’s just too tough a thing to test them, either.Spellings: Well, and, of course, we’ve seen—and this certainly happened in the COVID era—a walking away from standardized assessment in admissions criteria and, frankly, one of the things that I liked as part of the Trump compact for the 10 universities that were to get sort of favored-nation status on federal funding was this use of standardized tests. And it’s more in fashion now. Many of the people that got rid of those assessments are now putting them back in place because, while they’re not perfect, they’re a heck of a lot more reliable and a heck a lot more valid then this other range of portfolios and things that really do not allow you to have a fair and transparent system. And that’s true, of course, in our professional schools as well.Frum: Yeah, well, there’s always a racial element here, a suggestion that the tests are disadvantageous to people who come from groups that have suffered oppression in the past. And I think a point that you have made—I’ve seen you make this in other contexts—is the alternative to testing is not randomness; the alternative to testing is word of mouth.Spellings: Right, exactly.Frum: And word of mouth really encodes prejudices.Spellings: Amen.Frum: If you think standardized testing does, wait ’til you hear how people say, Well, you can just tell he’s a good doctor. Just look at him—he looks like a doctor.Spellings: Absolutely, absolutely.Frum: And maybe the good doctor doesn’t look like—what was the name of that Australian actor of the 1960s who was such a heartthrob? I’m going to forget now. But maybe Richard Chamber—was it Richard Chamberlain?Spellings: Yeah, Richard Chamberlain, yeah.Frum: Maybe Richard Chamberlain, the actor, would not be a good doctor, right? (Laughs.)Spellings: Right, yeah. I doubt it. Yeah, exactly. And so are they perfect? No, but they are the best instruments we have, and I know that the—you know, these are nonprofit organizations for the most part: the SAT College Board, etc. They’ve worked hard on bias in those assessments, and they’re a heck of a lot more valid than somebody’s opinion.Frum: Yeah. What do you think about exams on—one of the things that makes things like MCAT different is these are exams, also, on the way out.Spellings: Mm-hmm, right. They’re gating mechanisms, and that’s true of licensure exams in virtually every profession. And it allows us, as consumers, to have some kind of confidence that some threshold, some floor has been met in terms of knowledge. It still doesn’t make you the great doctor, but it tells you you know something.Frum: As you look back on No Child Left Behind, it contained both incentives and disincentives for doing well on these tests. And the schools that met the requirements, they got access to resources; there were consequences for school systems that didn’t. But I wonder, if you look back on it with your kind of more Machiavellian hat, did those incentives and disincentives apply to all the power actors? Like, teachers unions have been a consistent opponent of testing. Unions often exist to protect their least-capable members, and was there some way that, in a more cunning way, the unions could have been brought more into the tent? Or was that just—were they just doomed, because their mission is to protect their least-capable members, to be in opposition no matter what?Spellings: And I think, okay, so here we have the benefit of being able to look back at that, and as I’m saying now, and we’re seeing it in real time, when there’s no problem—that is to say, when the tests don’t reveal failure—we don’t need resources. And if we don’t have a problem, then we don’t need resources, then who gives a heck darn? We have no federal role, no civil-rights imperative around achievement as a national matter. And so those who’ve railed against testing, I think, are being hoisted on their own petard because here we are about a lot of rhetoric around eliminating the Department of Education, dramatically reducing federal resources, sending it back to the states with virtually no accountability, no responsibility, and kind of a Let them eat cake attitude. Why? Because there’s a march towards eliminating the things that diagnose a problem that people fully know and understand we have.Frum: What does the Department of Education do, the federal Department of Education?Spellings: Well, for starters, it’s a big bank. In higher education, obviously, it deploys Pell Grants and many types of advantageous loans to students so that they can pursue post-secondary education in affordable ways. It’s also a leader around this national imperative, and we’ve had, for many decades, a bipartisan thesis that it is a national imperative for people to have opportunity, irrespective of where they live, and that the federal government has some role—a minor role, a leadership role, an accountability role, a gap-closing role—in attending to that, while 90 cents on the dollar in K–12 comes from state governments.Look, if I had a nickel for every school superintendent or chief state school officer who said to me, Thank God for No Child Left Behind. We never would’ve been able to pass that here in fill-in-the-blank, often union, state. And it has kept us honest. And when we walk away from that, the results will, as they have, decline. I believe it, as sure as I’m sitting here.Frum: I was reading a website of one of the major anti-testing groups, and they went through a series of the objections to testing and, as you said, narrowing the curriculum was one; unfairness was [another], racial gap. But one of the things, the last one they came to—and one of the things you notice as a writer is the thing that someone leaves for last is usually the thing they care about the most—is they said that testing made teaching less fun for teachers. And I was struck by—is that true? Is it less fun? I mean, don’t you, as a teacher, want to know what’s going on in your class? All these smiling faces or blank faces, don’t you want to know what’s inside those faces?Spellings: That might be true, and here’s why: There is a way—the word regiment comes to mind—but direct instruction prescribed in a sequential, serious way, where there’s fidelity of implementation and hewing to the research, is the path to success. Now, we have gotten into this idea that every teacher should go into their own classroom and create and invent and student-led and all of this kind of stuff, and it sounds like a blast, but does it work? And the answer has largely been no. So it’s just like, we wouldn’t want your physician making up the protocols for cancer treatment; neither should our teachers make up stuff and hope that it works, just the spray-and-pray method of teaching. And so, yeah, might that be less fun? Yeah, maybe. And I think one of the things I’m encouraged about is: What can technology do and media do and tools that are available through technology to make teaching more fun, to better engage students? But to get results, sometimes you gotta eat your broccoli.Frum: Yeah. Well, in some of your statements, you’ve expressed, in a general way, optimism about the impact of technology on education. But right now, you’re hearing a lot of concerns about the impact of phones. And at the college level, you hear, even in fairly elite institutions, professors saying that young people, because of either technology or because of artificial intelligence or what have you, are arriving completely unable to read anything that’s more than a couple of pages long, and they no longer assign full books; they no longer assign novels—that students just can’t cope with them, even at very distinguished institutions.Spellings: Yeah, no, I largely agree with the people who are concerned about the use. But I do think it also can be a tool, but it ought to be part of what is prescribed, if you will, by the people who are accountable for the results. But I’m a big fan of no phones in schools. And here’s a big part of the problem, and it relates to your question about professional licensure exams too: Kids can’t read well enough. Why is that? We took our foot off the gas, and we’re paying the price for 10 years ago. Those kids who are in colleges now were underserved during COVID, don’t have the necessary practice in reading skills and math skills that they should have to do work at that level.Frum: Your point about the lag is so powerful because I think one of the things that we didn’t appreciate during COVID is the decisions you make in any year about education ramify for almost a century.Spellings: Amen.Frum: I kept thinking all during COVID, when—and I generally was supportive of stern public-health measures, especially the vaccination part, that you should have to—now, I got in a lot of heat for this. But, yeah, you wanna send your kids to a school, they should be vaccinated, for sure, because it’s not just about your kid; it’s about everyone else’s kid. The other people are not volunteering to be exposed to your virus, which doesn’t stay your virus. But when we closed the schools and kept them closed into that second year, it just kept hitting me: 50, 60, 70, 80 years from now, there were going to be Americans whose lives were wrecked because they were on the cusp of the decision: I’m having trouble; should I finish high school, or should I leave in grade 10? And there are a lot of people who made the decision in 2020, I guess I’ll leave in grade 10, and they’re gonna be with us for a long time, we hope, but that consequence is gonna be with us for a long time.Spellings: Absolutely. My friend Mike Morath, who’s the chief state school officer in Texas and a darn good one, talks about in Argentina, back during the strife down there, they had a period where the schools were closed for years. And they’ve done all kinds of analysis around it, and it has been a major part of the economic decline of Argentina.Frum: Is there any hope for the kind of remediation of the COVID generation? Or are they just gone?Spellings: Sure, of course, there’s hope, but we have to make up our mind that it’s a priority, and we’re going to do what it takes to cure the problem. And because we’ve waited so long, it’s going to be more expensive and potentially more intensive. But, David, my former boss used to say—and he was, famously, the only Republican who did not call for the abolishment of the Department of Education—when he said that, he said people heard, Abolish education. And now we’re in this kind of Abolish education. Do we really care whether those kids are educated or not? Or do they just wash through the system, and in a competitive environment, those people are at the starting line, and my kid’s across the finish line? And it’s just gotten to be at a very corrosive place for our country.Frum: Well, in last week’s show, I had a dialogue with Sam Harris about the mental attitudes of leaders of Silicon Valley and how, with this infatuation with artificial intelligence and transhumanism that has gripped some of the leaders in that community, there does seem to be, in some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in America, not just a willingness but actually kind of zeal to write off vast stretches of the American population—maybe even a majority of America, maybe even a large majority—say, Who needs them? That it’ll be an elite view, surveying a civilization in which machines do not only the work but the thinking. And most people are just surplus to any requirement that the elite view will have, and maybe pay them a universal basic income, maybe hope they don’t reproduce, but what happens to them is of no concern to the people at the top. And this is, I don’t wanna say a widespread view, but the people who have this view are important, and they have a lot of influence in the current administration.Spellings: I couldn’t disagree with any of that, you know, when President Trump, a few months ago, said, All the schools need to do is teach English.Frum: Yeah.Spellings: So was that a throwaway line, or does he actually believe that? Who knows. But I do think it’s—there’s some element about that.Frum: Teaching—you mean, like, grammar? You know what, the president could use a few lessons—Spellings: Well, no, no, no. I mean, yeah, no—Frum: (Laughs.)Spellings: —I believe that too, but no, that the only thing—that, in other words, that native speakers should speak English, that that was the prime imperative.Frum: Oh, I see. You mean no foreign languages?Spellings: Right.Frum: Yeah. Well, why don’t American schools teach foreign languages?Spellings: Well, I used to be on the kick where every student should be able to be bilingual. If you’re a Spanish speaker, you need to be an English speaker, and vice versa, or whatever—Chinese and the dozens and dozens of languages that are taught in our schools. But, yeah, look, we’ve got to start with reading and math, and then we can get into other things—and should.Frum: All right, so let’s, as we round to the end of the conversation, let’s look at the signs of hope. You see them in Mississippi. You see them a little bit in Alabama. Aside from those two states, are there other tendencies or trends anywhere at the center of the education system that give you reason for feeling confidence about the future?Spellings: Well, I think there’s energy around reading. Thirty-plus states—California has finally gotten on board with these research-based reading practices and has recently passed a law about that, and we’ll see about their fidelity of implementation. I think people are taking—and, frankly, it’s a regret I have that we’ve paid too little attention to teacher preparation: Who’s in our classrooms? How well are they prepared to deal with the kind of challenges we’ve been talking about for the last half hour or so? Do they know the research? Do they understand what it is to be effective in the classroom with the kind of kid you’re gonna encounter? All of that. And so we’re starting to see more energy around those issues. And how can technology help support what we know we need in a dramatically changing teacher corps and teacher workforce? I think some of the things that we’re seeing—choice is happening. How might we use that tool to maximum effect? We’re learning a lot about that. So people are still at it. But I do think leadership around what it is we’re trying to do—do we, as a nation, care about opportunity for everybody—we’ve got to reinstill and reinstate that principle.Frum: Well, when I was citing this conversation with Sam Harris about the disdainful attitude of business elites—through American history, the democratic idea and the public-education idea have been beyond symbiotic; they’re the same idea. And if you don’t educate, you don’t have citizens, and a society that is disvaluing citizenship is a society that’s disvaluing education. In fact, disvaluing education’s a sign that you’re disvaluing citizenship. And maybe there’s something fitting that, at a period when our democratic institutions seem to be in so much crisis, that the educational institutions that are indispensable to and supportive of those democratic institutions are also facing so many questions.Spellings: Yeah. And you know who can fix that? Us. And so we have to, as we head into midterms, ask the people that are offering themselves up for service: “How do they feel about that? Are they willing to work across the aisle? Do they understand that major piece of our country’s founding and success?” And so we need to have answers to that.Frum: Let me finish by asking you to offer a little bit of news you can use. Some of the people, I’m sure, who are watching this are parents or people entrusted with the care of a child. What’s the checklist that they should have in their head when they vote not only for president and senator but school board? What are the things you wanna hear from people with authority?Spellings: Yeah, we’ve been talking a lot about education, so I’ll start there. We still have pretty significantly rich data about the quality of your schools. Go familiarize yourself with your district and your campus, not only your kid in the subgroup that your child is part of but really understand what’s going on in your school district: Are the best teachers in the most challenging places? Just get smart about what you are being offered up as a consumer, number one. And number two, I think—obviously, I wouldn’t be leading the Bipartisan Policy Center if I didn’t believe this—but hold your elected officials at whatever level to account for their ability to work together, to solve problems, and to keep the main thing the main thing. And I think we are feeding the beast of electing folks who want to reinforce what we and only we want to hear, as opposed to playing the long game. And we’re going to get the best government that we deserve, so it’s on us.Frum: Well, a lot of people running for local races, including school boards, press certain hot-button issues that we all have opinions about and get us all very excited. But what’s the question—if you are a parent voting in a school-board election, what’s the most important, as opposed to the most exciting, question that you should be asking yourself and asking those who seek your vote?Spellings: Well, you should ask: “How is your kid doing and how is your community doing against these metrics that are reportable today? How many kids can read and do math? What’s the graduation rate, and what is it for everybody? And what’s the trajectory over time? Did your school district dip down during COVID, and how much recovery was there? How many federal dollars did your school district receive, and what did they do with them?” I mean, these are not really very complicated questions to get answers to, and they’re, actually, they’re pretty straightforward, and they ought to be able to answer them to your satisfaction.Frum: Well, one of the things I think about a lot, and I think about this in the debate—this incredibly bizarre and destructive debate we’re having about vaccination, is there is an important place in our economic life for individualism, but in our health-care life and our education life, individualism can be overtaxed. Your virus is my virus. Your bacteria is my bacteria. And your underperforming child who is falling short of his or her potential is also my problem. And anybody can have a special-needs child—absolutely anybody.Spellings: Yeah, and to the point of generations that are going to get written off, they’re going to stress our social safety net; they’re going to be aggrieved and frustrated and motivated to not-nice behaviors, potentially, and left behind. And that’s a terrible place for our country, who we still, I think, fancy ourselves as the land of opportunity.Frum: Margaret Spellings, thank you for joining me today. Thank you for fighting this fight. Thank you for believing in the possibilities.Spellings: Thank you, David.Frum: Bye-bye.Spellings: Bye.[Music]Frum: Thank you to Margaret Spellings for joining me on The David Frum Show today.The word impressionism entered everyday speech after an art exhibition in 1874 in the city of Paris, where a collection of paintings by painters who would become world famous, including one by Claude Monet that gave the movement its name, were displayed to the French public. The 150th anniversary of that 1874 exhibition was in the year 2024, and to honor the event, the National Gallery in Washington and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris organized a joint exhibition where they gathered together almost all, maybe even nearly all, of the paintings that were shown in 1874 in the show that gave impressionism its name, and I had the opportunity to visit both of those shows and found them deeply moving. Afterward, an artist friend of mine gave me a book, and that is the subject of my discussion today, about the origins of the impressionist movement, a book called The Judgment of Paris, written by Ross King and published in the year 2006.Now, The Judgment of Paris is a complicated book with many subplots. I want to focus today on just one part of the story. One of the central characters in The Judgment of Paris is a painter named Ernest Meissonier. And in the period from 1840 to about 1870, Meissonier was the most-famous and best-paid painter in France and, therefore, in the world. And when I say best paid, this man lived in a giant château and had kept teams of horses. He was a wealthy, wealthy man—all of it achieved by his artistry, which, when you look at it, is indeed amazing.Meissonier was a painter of incredible verisimilitude, who was especially, astoundingly excellent at capturing the movement of horses. Now, this may sound like not such an achievement, but actually, until the invention of the motion-picture camera, which allowed you to take a consistent image of a horse in movement and then break it down into frames, no one in the world exactly knew how a horse ran, because the feet moved almost too fast for the eye. Meissonier built a kind of racing track at his estate where he would have a kind of cart that would allow him to keep more pace with the horses so he could take sketches and observe exactly how their knees and legs moved in order to, in the battle scenes of his great patriotic paintings, capture horses in action.Meissonier made most of his living by painting scenes of still life in costumes of the 17th and 18th century. But the thing that made him a famous celebrity were his great patriotic paintings of the two Napoleons: Napoleon the First, Emperor of France in the early 1800s; and then Napoleon the Third, who was the ruler of France during Meissonier’s lifetime. And he painted them at moments of triumph, at moments of grim defeat but resolute defeat—very patriotic paintings honoring the Bonaparte dynasty.Meissonier lived until the year 1891, long enough to see his own work, once so acclaimed, once so valuable, go out of style. His most famous pictures are now in the Metropolitan Museum, but if you go to see them, you won’t, because they’re in the basement. (Laughs.) And when they are on display, they’re beside an elevator. No one thinks all that highly of Meissonier anymore, this artist who, in his day, dominated the profession in a way that names that we think of as more famous could only begin to envy.Another of the characters in The Judgment of Paris is a painter called Édouard Manet. You’ve certainly heard of him if you haven’t heard of Meissonier. Now, Manet—not to be confused with Claude Monet, although in their own lifetime, people often did mix them up, so if you do confuse them, you’re entitled—but Manet, who was a generation older or a half generation older than Claude Monet, Manet was not a great draftsman. He wasn’t even interested in the problem of drafting. Manet was of an age where he grew up when the camera was obviously going to be and the development of photography was obviously going to become important to the history of art. Important how? Maybe you couldn’t quite say. But the whole project of capturing exactly the way a horse ran, that was obviously something that machines were going to take away from people in time to come.So Manet lost interest in questions of drafting, and he became interested in the question of “What is painting for, now that photography exists? How do you use existing art to teach the eye to see in new ways?” Now, Manet was not a revolutionary at all. In fact, he was deeply immersed in the art of the past, and many of his paintings are actually references to the art of the past. And he would take scenes from mythology, scenes from works by Titian, and then regroup them into exactly similar postures in the costume of present-day Paris. And he painted nudes, but he painted nudes of women who were present-day women. He would take a pose of the goddess Athena and make her into a present-day courtesan in Paris. But he got his inspiration from the past, but he was training his audience to see for the future.Now, why do I tell you this story now? For what it’s worth, I pay a lot of attention to contemporary art, and I notice that, in our day, as well as in the past, a lot of people become very rich and famous, and some of them are people who I don’t think should be so rich and famous. And there is a kind of rough justice in the story of Ernest Meissonier—who’s, by the way, a much more accomplished and impressive person than many of the people who are rich and famous today—but how the judgment of the present is not the last word, that there is a future, because the future will be interested in different subjects than the past. And the study of the history of art teaches us something, which is not just to appreciate the beauty of the things that human artistry can affect, but also to understand something about how we belong to a larger human story and how different generations of us grapple with similar and different questions over time. And the questions do sometimes change. Questions sometimes remain eternal, but other questions do change in ways that are interesting and that should humble us about our certainty, about our place in the scheme of things.I don’t know, maybe when you see people making big paintings that look like subway graffiti, maybe there’s somebody doing something on TikTok right now that is actually the art that the future will care about in a way that the future ended up caring about Mr. Manet, with his often crude draftsmanship, and not Mr. Meissonier, the great painter of the flashing horse. To be able to lift ourselves out of our present time, with all its limitations, is, I think, a worthy activity and a way that can sometimes bring us some fear for the future but some consolation about the difficulties of the present. People have outlived terrible things in the past. Generations that were pessimistic about the future have been proven wrong by the amazing cultural achievements of future generations. In 1874, who knew that the exhibition of show, which was displayed in a photographer studio far away from the Grand Salon in the center of Paris, that that was the future and that all the pictures that filled the big-show places—thousands and thousands of them that attracted the attention of the world—that they would be consigned to attics and basements?Thank you so much for watching and listening to The David Frum Show today. I hope you’ll join us again next week for more of The David Frum Show. Remember the importance of liking and subscribing: If you enjoy the content we’re providing here, it really helps to bring the message to new people. And always, if you want to give support to the work of this podcast and of The Atlantic, the best way to do that for myself and all my colleagues at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll please consider doing that.Thank you so much for watching and viewing and listening and downloading. I hope to see you next week back here on The David Frum Show. Thank you.[Music]Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.