Jason Riley’s June 17 Wall Street Journal column, “When Schools Try to Cover Up Their Failures,” deploys seven distinct techniques across its paragraphs to transform genuine pandemic-era data into an indictment of teachers’ unions, Democratic officials, and anyone who questions the standardized-testing apparatus. The piece reads as a neutral observer diagnosing a broken system. It is not. It is a product of the Manhattan Institute’s education-policy apparatus — an apparatus that advocates for the very defunding that produces the failures the piece documents — and the column systematically suppresses that institutional machinery while pretending to care about children. I should know. In the cable years, operators had a word for this. We called it the brochure: make the diagnosis look like concern so the prescription looks like medicine. This column is the brochure.
If you stare really hard—and maybe squint—at last week’s federal report on long-term K-12 education trends in the U.S., there is some good news. Math and reading scores among 9-year-olds have improved a little since 2022, and most of the gains were driven by struggling students. … The good news pretty much ends there. Among 13-year-olds in nearly every demographic group, test scores in math and reading were flat. And most youngsters continue to lack proficiency in both subjects. Standardized tests have no shortage of detractors, but these evaluations have become more important in an era of grade inflation and meaningless graduation rates.
— Paragraphs 1–2
The opener is a classic hold-over from the cable-years playbook: concede a sliver of good news to buy the appearance of balance, then pivot to the crisis you’re paid to manufacture. Frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ §A.1 — operates here through the pivot from documented data to the piece’s preferred frame. The NAEP data is real. The pandemic-era learning loss is real. Pandemic school closures caused the damage — not “the education establishment,” not teachers’ unions, not Democratic mayors. But within two paragraphs, the piece has moved from “pandemic school closures” to an unnamed institutional villain — “the education establishment is trying to hide its failures” — and calling graduation rates “meaningless” to position standardized tests as the only honest measure. The cause of the learning loss (a global pandemic that closed school buildings for months) vanishes from the frame entirely. The piece relabels a pandemic-era disruption as evidence of long-term institutional failure, and the relabeling does the work: once the cause is “the establishment” rather than the virus, the remedies can be anything the Manhattan Institute has been selling for twenty years. This is the brochure’s opening page. The good news is a head-fake: look at the recovery, now ignore it — the crisis we built is on. The data earns your trust. The pivot spends it. I’ve run this sequence a hundred times: begin with a concession, swing to the manufactured crisis. The teachers’ unions are already in the crosshairs.
Last week several readers pointed me to a recent investigative report in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the pressure on teachers to pass students regardless of classroom performance or even attendance. The paper said it was “an open secret that in many schools, it is nearly impossible to fail a student.” … But many teachers said that they were discouraged or forbidden by their principals from flunking students, or that they have given out failing grades that were overridden. Others said failing students was permitted if justified, but the administrative burden to rationalize failure, even for students who did not show up to school, is onerous or impossible.
— Paragraphs 2–3
A single investigative report becomes national systemic truth. A single anecdote, universalized, aimed straight at the union-protected workforce. The technique is hasty generalization — Bad-Faith Catalog ID: hasty_generalization — take one district’s dysfunction and scale it to indict the entire system. But the real operator’s move here is deeper: it’s the rigged metric. The graduation-rate pressure that Riley uses to condemn teachers originated with the very accountability-and-testing regime he champions: No Child Left Behind and its bipartisan successors made graduation numbers the metric of “success,” then punished schools that didn’t deliver. Teachers game the metric because the alternative is being branded a failure. The op-ed deploys a metric that guarantees the behavior it then attacks, and by hiding the circularity it makes teachers look uniquely corrupt. That’s the operation: build a trap, spring it, and blame the person inside for struggling.
And behind that operation is attribution of blame — Bandura mechanism; Bad-Faith Catalog ID: attribution_of_blame — the misidentification of the cause behind a documented symptom. The Inquirer investigation is real. The pressure to pass students is real. Administrators overriding failing grades is real. But the piece treats this as evidence of ideological capture — the establishment protecting itself — when the structural reality is institutional desperation. Principals in the poorest schools don’t forbid failure because they’ve been reading Paulo Freire. They forbid failure because the alternative is mass retention in schools that lack the resources, staff, or funding to serve retained students, in neighborhoods where the Manhattan Institute’s own policy agenda has been applied for decades: oppose tenure protections, oppose salary increases, block funding increases, champion charter-school expansion that drains enrollment and per-pupil dollars from the very buildings the Inquirer investigated. The Institute’s own published research — its voucher advocacy papers, its charter-performance briefs — uses standardized test-score data to argue for redirecting public funding away from district schools and toward choice mechanisms. That is not neutral scholarship. That is the policy apparatus that does the starving, and then the Institute commissions the column that blames the starving institutions for being hungry. The piece blames the institutions for a symptom while erasing the policy apparatus that produced the disease. The structural context — the testing mandates, the defunding of support staff, the endless “reforms” that treat teachers as interchangeable widgets — vanishes, and all that remains is an anecdote about lazy union members refusing to hold kids back. The accountability regime that created the problem gets a standing ovation from its own architect.
The downstream damage of promoting students to the next grade based on their age rather than their mastery of the material might be incalculable, and it raises frightening questions about what our workforce will look like in the decades to come. The literacy and numeracy skills of Americans have declined in recent years. An Education Department study in 2024 found that 1 in 4 young adults are functionally illiterate, even though more than half received high-school diplomas.
— Paragraph 5
Threat inflation, pure and simple. The functional-illiteracy statistic is a genuine crisis, but Riley pins it entirely on social promotion, casually erasing the deeper drivers — concentrated poverty, underfunded schools, the legacy of redlining, and the fact that the same accountability-and-standards movement he defends has produced decades of teaching to the test, not to deep comprehension. The suppressed variable is the social context the op-ed’s funders explicitly dislike discussing: that poverty, not teacher laziness, is the strongest predictor of literacy outcomes. Scary-number deployment — pick a stat, isolate it from its cause, and attach it to the villain you want to slay. Works wonders with a segment producer, and it works in print when the reader isn’t shown the denominator. Take a real problem, detach it from its cause, and attach it to the villain you’ve been paid to destroy.
Job prospects and earnings for people who lack rudimentary language and math skills can be severely limited. … Eliminating standardized tests wouldn’t change that reality, and it would help policymakers and the education establishment avoid accountability.
— Paragraph 6
Here the strawman — Bad-Faith Catalog ID: strawman; WSJ §A.6 — is laid bare. The only alternative Riley acknowledges is “eliminate tests,” as if critics of high-stakes standardized testing are calling for no assessment whatsoever. The actual reform position — multiple measures, portfolio assessments, developed-by-teachers performance tasks — is erased. The technique is the “our tests or chaos” false dichotomy; anyone who questions the validity of a narrow, multiple-choice-driven, high-stakes exam is cast as part of the “education establishment” that wants to hide failure. The operator’s eye sees it immediately: this is a permission structure for the testing industry. Pearson, ETS, and the rest of the testing-industrial complex benefit from the narrative that only their high-stakes exams can measure learning. And the Manhattan Institute’s own donors — the DeVos, Walton, and Koch networks, whose publicly documented grants to school-choice and charter-promotion operations run well into the hundreds of millions — stand to gain directly when public schools are labeled “failing” and their replacement by private operators is sold as reform. The false choice is the con: “our tests or chaos.” The testing lobby thanks you.
Political leaders insist on the need for more education spending, but it isn’t expensive to teach children reading and arithmetic, something that was done competently for many decades on budgets much smaller than what educators have at their disposal today.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proposed smaller class sizes to address the learning gap. This is a hobbyhorse of the teachers unions that control public education (and the mayor) because it requires employing more dues-paying instructors and school staff. Nevertheless, empirical studies have shown that smaller class sizes have minimal effect on student learning.
— Paragraphs 7–8
This is the austerity-thrift move with a nostalgia-glaze. Riley recasts the era of all-white school boards, de jure segregation, and a student body that excluded children with disabilities as the golden age of cheap, effective education — omitting that special education mandates, English-learner supports, and the basic requirement to educate every child have all increased the real cost of schooling. He pits “more spending” against “competence,” as if the two are opposites. The operator’s-eye-view: we called this “the budget myth” — pretend the problem is wasteful spending, never mention that per-pupil funding in the low-income districts most in crisis is often lower than in wealthy suburbs, because property-tax-driven funding formulas are the true driver of inequity. The donor class behind this op-ed fights every effort to equalize school funding. The budget myth: the con that money doesn’t matter, while the donor class ensures it never reaches the classrooms that need it.
Riley then attaches the class-size proposal to the unions by label (“hobbyhorse”) before engaging the evidence — making the demand seem self-serving and therefore dismissible without a serious look at the research. The technique is ad hominem by association: the policy is stained because the unions want it. The operator’s name for this: the union hit. Hang the policy around the union’s neck, and the donor class never has to argue why smaller classes wouldn’t help the kids who need them most. Every time you say “hobbyhorse” instead of “policy,” you spare the donor class the need to debunk it honestly.
What follows is dressed up as a research-based rebuttal, but it’s actually evidence cherry-picking. The Tennessee STAR study, the Wisconsin SAGE study, and California’s Class Size Reduction program all found meaningful gains for disadvantaged students in smaller classes. Skeptics note that later re-analyses of STAR trimmed the effect size; the point remains that the best-designed experiments show gains for the very children in under-resourced schools, and no study shows harm. The piece does not name a single study, nor does it engage the evidence. It relabels the research as union propaganda and moves on. The move is what operators call “loading the dock”: name the opponent (unions), name the motive (dues), name the remedy (smaller classes), and let the audience conclude the remedy is corrupt without ever engaging whether it works. It works. The piece just does not want you to know that.
Countries that consistently outperform the U.S. on international tests, including Japan and South Korea, have larger classes on average. So do many high-performing charter schools. The data show that a good teacher is far more important than a smaller class, yet our public school system values seniority over competence.
— Paragraph 8 (continued)
Hasty generalization — Bad-Faith Catalog ID: hasty_generalization — operates here through the selective extraction of a single variable (class size) from systems that are structurally incomparable. The Japan-and-Korea comparison is a category error, treating ethnically homogeneous societies with universal healthcare, universal or near-universal pre-K, heavily subsidized teacher training, enormous outside-school tutoring infrastructures, and social safety nets that insulate children from the poverty effects that dominate American educational outcome data — as though they refute American class-size research simply because class sizes happen to be larger. The piece extracts one variable from a system where dozens of variables differ, and presents the extracted variable as dispositive. The suppressed variable: the factors that actually explain Japan and South Korea’s performance — universal social infrastructure, generous teacher compensation, cultural investment in education as a public good — are factors the Manhattan Institute has systematically opposed in the American context. The piece uses international data to argue against the very policies that make the international examples work. And the charter-school example ignores selection bias: charters serve families who have already opted in and can shed disruptive students. The whole sequence exists to delegitimize any union demand without ever grappling with it on the evidence.
The piece never asks: if class size doesn’t matter, why do the best private schools in Manhattan — where Riley’s readers’ children attend — maintain class sizes of twelve?
Liberals are likewise focused on classroom diversity and on hiring teachers who share the racial or ethnic background of minority students. But you will be hard-pressed to find much racial diversity in the classrooms of Tokyo and Seoul, and the best-performing students in the U.S. tend to be of South Asian and East Asian heritage. They are among the groups least likely to be taught by someone who looks like them.
— Paragraph 9
This is the model-minority wedge, and it works by giving the reader permission to dismiss the entire argument for structural equity without ever addressing the actual barriers Black, Latino, and Indigenous students face. By pointing to the success of South and East Asian students and noting that those students rarely have race-matched teachers, Riley implies that systemic racism is not a meaningful obstacle and that diversity initiatives are a liberal indulgence rather than a response to real disparities. The underlying operation fractures the potential coalition between minority groups: if Asian kids can succeed under the same system, the logic goes, then the problem must be something other than racism — which is exactly the conclusion the Manhattan Institute’s donor class wants the audience to reach, because it insulates them from demands to desegregate housing, equalize school funding, or dismantle the property-tax-based system that produces the very disparities Riley uses the wedge to erase.
The comparison to Tokyo and Seoul repeats the category error: ethnic homogeneity in a nationalist education system is treated as equivalent to the racial politics of the United States. Advantageous comparison — Bandura mechanism — operates here through a category error dressed as an observation. American diversity advocacy addresses a specific American condition: segregated schools, an overwhelmingly white teaching force, documented outcome gaps along racial lines, and a history in which Black students were systematically excluded from the institutions that trained teachers. The piece equivocates on the word “diversity” — using it as though it means the same thing in Seoul as it does in Detroit, as though the American conversation about teacher representation is interchangeable with a conversation about Japanese demographics. The piece then uses Asian American academic performance to dismiss the relevance of representation, ignoring that Asian American achievement is shaped by immigration selectivity, family resources, and concentration in well-resourced school districts — the very factors the piece has spent paragraphs arguing do not matter. The suppressed variable: the documented benefits of same-race teacher effects for Black and Latino students in under-resourced schools — the schools the piece has been calling failures. Divide the coalition, and you never have to admit that racism, not teacher demographics, is why Black kids get underfunded schools.
Historically, educational attainment has been an effective way of addressing social inequality, and standardized testing is one of the few ways to measure which policies are working and which ones aren’t. The educators and policy wonks who want to do away with these assessments aren’t looking out for children. They are looking out for themselves.
— Paragraphs 10–11
The closer is the moral inversion — the same move we deployed to end cable segments. Take the people who spend their working lives in under-resourced classrooms, and recast them as the self-interested villains, while the person writing the piece is paid by a think tank funded by the very donors dismantling public education. The technique is attribution of blame layered with a dollop of threat inflation. It is the key to the whole operation: substitute the union-protected teacher for the hedge-fund manager or the charter-network CEO, and the audience claps while the donor class picks their pockets. “They’re looking out for themselves” is the moral inversion that lets the audience feel righteous while their schools are sold off.
And the suppressed variable behind the closing: the standardized-testing apparatus is the Manhattan Institute’s institutional lifeblood. The think tank’s own published research uses test-score data to argue for charter expansion, voucher programs, and the defunding of traditional public schools — its papers on vouchers and school choice explicitly frame standardized testing as the accountability backbone of the choice agenda. The testing regime Riley defends is not neutral infrastructure — it is the machinery that powers the defund-document-blame cycle the piece has been executing across its full length. The piece defends standardized testing as accountability. It is accountability for the institutions the Manhattan Institute wants to destabilize. It is never accountability for the charter schools or private voucher recipients the institute champions. When Riley writes that test critics are “looking out for themselves,” he is describing the Manhattan Institute’s relationship with the testing apparatus. The piece just does not want you to see it.
So here is what the whole thing actually does, taken together.
I’ve seen the same sequence in a dozen cable-year strategy decks: open with real data to earn the audience’s trust, pivot to institutional scapegoating before anyone can ask who actually starved the schools, then lock the frame with international misdirection, a respectable-sounding diversity debate, and a model-minority wedge so the testing apparatus — the machine that justifies the whole operation — looks like the last honest thing standing.
The diagnosis is real — schools in poor neighborhoods are failing children, and administrators are covering it up. The prescription is the con: defund those schools further, oppose tenure for the teachers who stay, expand charters that draw away the students and dollars, and use standardized test scores as the justification for every move. Riley’s own institution — the Manhattan Institute — is the apparatus that does the defunding, opposes the tenure, champions the charters, and publishes the research that justifies the test-and-punish regime. The piece does not name the apparatus. The piece uses the apparatus.
The children are real. The concern is not. The concern is a delivery mechanism for a policy agenda that has been destabilizing the institutions those children attend for two decades. The children’s failure is the Manhattan Institute’s product. Every charter that opens on a drained-district budget is a Manhattan Institute success story, and the children left in under-resourced classrooms pay the price. The column is the marketing. Jason Riley and the Manhattan Institute have published a propaganda operation — a donor-class manifesto masquerading as a sincere op-ed about school standards — and they’ve placed it in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, the same space that for decades has laundered the anti-union, pro-privatization agenda of its advertiser and owner class. The piece selects a few test scores and a Philadelphia anecdote, wraps them in the rhetoric of accountability, and aims them squarely at the teachers unions and public schools that stand in the way of the privatization project its funders have pursued for forty years. The op-ed is not a diagnosis; it is a weapon. And the reader who shares it as “common sense” has been handed a propaganda pamphlet and told it was journalism.
The appropriate question is the one the piece is engineered to prevent you from asking: if the schools are broken, who broke them? Not the unions — they did not close the buildings during a pandemic. Not the diversity advocates — they did not defund the schools that serve the poorest children. The Manhattan Institute spent decades advocating for the policy apparatus that starved public schools of resources, opposed teacher protections, and championed the standardized-testing regime that Riley now calls the last line of accountability. The piece blames the institutions for the outcomes of policies the Manhattan Institute built. That is not journalism. That is the con.
Welcome to the operation. I used to help build them. And the Philadelphia teacher who was forbidden to fail a kid who never showed up? She’s the operation’s ground-level casualty — her story got repackaged as a statistic in a donor brief. The people who wrote this one know exactly what they did.
— Phukher Tarlson