Why Education Reformers Will Find A Home In The Trump Administration
02-15-2025 ~ Trump’s inclination to mix policymaking with business deals and profiteering is an ideal situation for education reformers like his nominee Penny Schwinn.
During Donald Trump’s first presidential term and the Joe Biden presidential administration, proponents of education reform declared their movement dead. Their well-funded campaign to blame teachers for low scores on standardized tests, threaten public schools with closures, and ramp up market competition from charter schools was “over” and had “died off,” reform proponents said, highlighting the “ending.”
Donald Trump’s rise in the Republican Party and his 2024 presidential win also posed challenges for education reform advocates.
As the 2024 presidential campaign raged, Axios found “public education reform missing from 2024 presidential platforms.” Prominent reform advocate Chester E. Finn Jr. lamented in the conservative education policy journal, Education Next, in 2023, “By omitting the longstanding ‘ed-reform agenda,’ the Trump team is not only departing from forty years of GOP education priorities, but also seems to not be making a play for suburban moms, independents, or Democrats, maybe not even for Republicans beyond his ‘base.’”
As Trump was about to take office in January 2025, Education Week reported that “[s]weeping education reforms is not a priority” for the incoming Trump administration.
“It’s hard to be optimistic about education reform in the wake of the [2024] election,” wrote Michael J. Petrilli, a longtime education reform advocate and president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
“Education reformers should respond to the election with some critical self-reflection,” wrote Mind Trust CEO Brandon Brown, a prominent charter school advocate, who accused his fellow education reformers of being “in a professional and cultural bubble… [that runs] the risk of not truly understanding the diverse communities we serve.”
However, the negative outlook of the reform crowd changed in January 2025 with the nomination of Penny Schwinn as the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education under Linda McMahon, Trump’s choice for secretary of education.
“Schwinn’s nomination offers hope that Uncle Sam could turn his attention back toward evidence and excellence,” wrote Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Dale Chu, noting “her belief in using state assessment data to drive decisions, ensuring that progress was both measurable and targeted.”
Another Fordham executive, Robert Pondiscio, opined, “Penny Schwinn’s nomination is an opportunity to refocus on what matters: ensuring that America’s schools fulfill their twin missions of cultural transmission and competence.”
Arne Duncan, the secretary of education under former Democratic President Barack Obama and an ardent reform acolyte, praised Schwinn as “a serious person” and “smart.”
But what makes Schwinn an especially good match for the Trump administration has nothing to do with education policy. Instead, Schwinn’s hire has everything to do with what some are calling, “Trump’s ‘golden age’ of corruption and cronyism.” Read more
How We Distribute Power Will Influence Our Future
Carole Crumley
02-14-2025 ~ As we head into a future shaped by climate change, we must find ways to stabilize societies and reduce conflict. Solutions may lie in the archaeological record.
Power in human societies is often viewed as hierarchical, meaning that it’s tiered and ranked. This view doesn’t fully capture the complexity of how power is managed in different cultures. Some societies are not strictly hierarchical but heterarchical, where power is distributed among various groups or individuals who work together without a clear ranking. There is ample evidence for the existence of heterarchy for a variety of forms of social and political power, including in the archaeological record.1
Historically, the idea that more complex societies are superior to simpler ones has justified racism, colonialism, and domination. However, research conducted since the end of the 20th century increasingly shows that all human societies are fluid and interconnected, with power often shared among different groups.
Understanding these power dynamics helps us see how societies change over time. For example, when an elite group loses control of trade, new power structures may emerge, such as guilds or associations. These changes affect the entire society and can lead to more distributed power and democratic institutions.
The combined study of heterarchy and hierarchy allows us to trace how societies adapt and respond to challenges. It shows that power can shift and evolve into new forms of social organizations that help societies survive and thrive, even if they may face new tensions or conflicts later. Read more
Foreign Companies Driving The Global Privatization Of Domestic Infrastructure
John P. Ruehl – Source: Independent Media Institute
02-14-2025 ~ Foreign entities have secured profitable positions in once-public domestic infrastructure. The pursuit of short-term cash has sacrificed long-term revenue streams to a variety of foreign investors.
On February 4, 2025, Chicago’s business community pushed back against Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal to raise real estate transfer taxes, adding to the city’s ongoing economic struggles.
Besides a struggling pension fund, high home prices, and other factors, a significant contributor to the city’s woes lies in the controversial privatization initiatives from the 2000s, known as the “Great Chicago Sell-Off.” Over the past two decades, these decisions have siphoned an estimated $3 to $4 billion from Chicago.
The privatization trend began under former Mayor Richard M. Daley, starting with the Chicago Skyway. In 2005, the 7.8-mile toll road was leased to a consortium led by Spain’s Ferrovial and Australia’s Macquarie Group for $1.83 billion. Tolls were raised immediately, and in 2016, the 99-year lease was sold to “a trio of Canadian pension funds” (the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS), the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP)) for $2.8 billion. Australia’s Atlas Arteria Ltd. then acquired a two-thirds stake for $2 billion in 2022, while OTTP retained the remainder.
In 2006, four downtown parking garages with more than 9,000 spaces were leased for 99 years to Morgan Stanley for $563 million. After Morgan Stanley defaulted on its debt tied to the lease agreement, control was transferred in 2014 to lenders, including France’s Societe Generale, the German government, and Italy’s UniCredit S.p.A. In 2016, Australia’s AMP Capital and Canada’s Northleaf Capital Partners acquired the garages.
Abu Dhabi came into the picture in 2008. In a $1.16 billion deal, 36,000 parking meters were sold to Chicago Parking Meters (CPM) LLC for 75 years, a consortium led by Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley’s Infrastructure group soon restructured CPM’s ownership, transferring major stakes to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Germany’s Allianz through complex investment vehicles. Over the next five years, parking fees more than doubled. By 2022, CPM recovered its entire $1.16 billion investment, while the city had spent $78.8 million buying back parking spots to cover the revenue it would have generated until 2084. As of 2024, the investment has returned $700 million, with 60 years left on the lease.
Daley’s goal was to balance the city’s budget without raising property taxes before leaving office. However, the one-time payments resulted in long-term consequences. In addition to financial losses, the privatization deals have hindered Chicago’s ability to modernize infrastructure by limiting efforts to build bike lanes and reduce car dependence downtown, and people even need to get permission or make payments to companies thousands of miles away for local street parades. Read more
The Central Role Of Collaboration And Trust In Human Societies
Carole Crumley – Photo: University of North Carolina
02-08-2025 ~ The concept of heterarchy has joined a developing paradigm shift in the social sciences.
How do we organize elements in a system? One way is through the lens of hierarchy, which presupposes levels, a top-down ranking of elements. Another is homoarchy, which permits one (and only one) ordering. Both terms, while useful to characterize a stable formation, do not accommodate the dynamics of complex systems. Heterarchy, by contrast, embraces the diversity of relationships among elements and encourages the study of systemic change over time.
The definition of heterarchy varies only slightly depending on the scientific discipline and application. For mathematician and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter,1 it is a system in which there is no “highest level.” For sociologist David Stark,2 it’s “an emergent organizational form with distinctive network properties… and multiple organizing principles.” Social theorist Kyriakos Kontopoulos 3 defines it as “a partially ordered level structure implicating a rampant interactional complexity.” In anthropology and archaeology, a general-purpose definition suits a variety of contexts: the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked, or when they possess the potential for being ranked in different ways, depending on systemic requirements.4 These definitions offer an arena for examining diversity and change in systems, organizations, and structures.
One of the appealing qualities of heterarchy is its flexibility, which is why it has become popular in biological, physical, and social sciences.5 There is now clear evidence that economic, political, and social power take many governmental forms that are never entirely hierarchical, even in autocratic states. As shown in Historical Ecologies, Heterarchies, and Transtemporal Landscapes,6 stable collaborative governance has a long history, both hierarchical and heterarchical relations are complex, and together they enable the analysis of shifting forms of power over time. Read more
Who Will Manage Global IP Protections?
John P. Ruehl – Source: Independent Media Institute
06-02-2025 ~ The growth of new technologies and geopolitical rivalries has complicated international IP protection. WIPO’s flexible, mediating approach may succeed where more rigid regulatory frameworks have struggled, but hurdles remain.
Amid the military posturing, economic sanctions, and political power struggles shaping the U.S.-China rivalry, intellectual property (IP) disputes remain a major battleground. In January 2025, Chinese company DeepSeek’s latest AI model helped wipe $1 trillion off the U.S. stock market by demonstrating how open-sourced collaboration—refining publicly available AI technology—can rival proprietary models without massive investment.
Major U.S. AI company OpenAI, however, quickly accused DeepSeek of infringing on its work, joining the chorus of U.S. officials and companies that have long accused China of IP theft across various industries. Yet OpenAI itself has been accused of using other copyrighted material without permission to build its generative AI model, even though it maintains that it is protected under the fair use doctrine.
The internet and newer technologies like AI and 3D printing allow creators to produce, distribute, and monetize their work without traditional gatekeepers. Yet, these same tools expose these works to rampant infringement and diminished control. Globalization has further complicated IP protection, with fragmented enforcement and tensions over protecting innovation and public access.
Globalization and IP Protections
While IP has weathered past technological disruptions, today’s rapid innovation in a globalized context is dismantling old protections faster than policymakers can adapt. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has positioned itself as the key mediator to address 21st-century IP disputes involving countries, corporations, and individuals, but faces growing obstacles in keeping pace with the fast-moving changes.
Advocates argue that strong IP laws drive innovation by protecting creators, encouraging collaboration in a fair system, and enabling others to build on existing work. Critics counter that these laws often favor large corporations and shareholders over consumers and developing countries, hinder collaboration, create monopolies, and restrict access to essential goods.
Global IP protections are nonetheless a relatively recent concept. They trace back to Ancient Greek recipe safeguards, but gained momentum in the last few centuries. The printing press revolutionized content distribution in the 15th century, and the industrial revolution later fueled invention, mass production, and transportation advances—alongside rampant IP theft. Post-independence, U.S. entities frequently copied British industrial designs, accelerating industrial growth. Read more
Rethinking Rank And Privilege In Human Societies
Carole Crumley – Photo: University of North Carolina
02-05-2025 ~ By applying a concept widely used in mathematics and computer science, Carole Crumley has radically changed the way anthropologists see and study societies.
For two centuries, archaeologists, historians, and social scientists studied human societies in search of the origins of hierarchy—a layered structure where power and privilege are concentrated in the top layer. Realizing that this model failed to account for the real-life complexity of human relationships and communities, I proposed a term that would reflect the diversity and complexity of the human social organization: heterarchy, a concept that had already proved pertinent in mathematical, computational, and biophysical contexts. (I wrote the entry for “Heterarchy” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.1) Heterarchy is now regularly applied to the study of human societies and in many other contexts.
What Is Heterarchy?
Heterarchy addresses the diversity of relationships among elements in a system and offers a way to think about change in spatial, temporal, and cognitive dimensions. A general-purpose definition that suits a variety of contexts is the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked, or when they possess the potential for being ranked in many ways, depending on systemic requirements.
The concept of heterarchy offers an arena for examining change in a system, organization, or structure.
Heterarchy and Complex Systems Science
Complex systems science is the study of dynamic nonlinear systems that are not in equilibrium and do not act in a predictable manner. A complex system is difficult to model because of the changing relations and dynamics among its elements. Some examples of complex systems include the human brain, global weather, and cities. Key features in complex biophysical systems correspond surprisingly well with key features of social systems. Read more