An Education Expert
By Max Eden
Four days after the shooting, an article in the Washington Post exonerated the Broward school district: “Instead of slipping through the cracks, it appears Nikolas Cruz was the target of aggressive work to help put him on the right track.”1 The Post noted that Broward was “a leader in the national move toward a different kind of discipline—one that would not just punish students, but also would help them address the root causes of their misbehavior.” The Post reporters wrote that the school district “might have hit the limit of what could be done” to help 18–1958.
However, when Alexander Russo, an education journalist for Kappan magazine, read the Post article, he drew a fundamentally different conclusion. He tweeted, “This piece makes Max Eden’s argument.”
As a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, I had regrettably determined that, in education, the truth is often the opposite of what gets reported. Shortly before the shooting, I had written a series of articles about the disastrous effects of “education reform” in Washington, D.C. schools. What I saw unfold there had convinced me that the leaders of a movement that purported to “put students first” were far more concerned about their reputations within an elite bubble than about what actually happens to students in schools.
Education’s Social Justice Industrial Complex
In 2016, the Washington Post Editorial Board described the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) as the “fastest improving urban school district in the country.”2 Philanthropic foundations had invested heavily in the district and deemed it the flagship of the education reform movement, which insisted that schools should be run more like businesses. The idea was that, if school administrators were given expertly designed management systems that stressed improving “bottom line” student outcomes such as test scores, suspensions, and graduation rates, struggling schools would see transformational improvement.3
This idea gained substantial bipartisan support but was derided by some progressive critics as the “corporate reform agenda.”4 These critics lamented that billionaires were propping up advocacy organizations to push an agenda that undercut teachers and sacrificed substantive education in favor of artificially inflated or deflated metrics. But according to the Post Editorial Board (and the activist groups), the numbers at DCPS were “unassailable.”5 Test scores had increased, suspensions had plummeted, and graduation rates had soared.
There was only one problem: the numbers were not real.
In 2017, I discovered that the test score gains were essentially a product of gentrification.6 A local NPR reporter found that the graduation rate increase at one school was entirely attributable to fraud.7 Following her explosive reporting, a third-party review concluded that principals across the district had dropped standards so low that students no longer needed to attend school in order to graduate. Two-thirds of DCPS students who missed more than half of their senior year graduated anyway.8 One researcher calculated that if DCPS had followed its official policies, “last year’s record 73 percent graduation rate would have been closer to 48 percent.”9
And, as the Post eventually uncovered, the decrease in suspensions was also entirely fraudulent.10 Principals had simply stopped reporting suspensions to the district office. Rather than following the formal process, they sent around e-mails to teachers telling them to not allow certain students into the building. The pressure to improve statistical “outcomes” did lead to better numbers, but at a tremendous cost to students. A survey of DCPS teachers found that principals used the district’s nationally famous, “data-driven” evaluation system to coerce teachers to ignore bad behavior and pass students no matter what.11 It was a systematic con job from the top down.
The most amazing thing was that, when these misdeeds came to light, no one who had promoted these policies seemed to care. After the news broke that DCPS’s graduation rate increase was entirely fraudulent, the CEO of Teach Plus continued to laud the district’s graduation rate as proof of the success of the movement. Months after it came out that DCPS had lowered suspensions by refusing to record them, the Center for American Progress invited DCPS’s chief of equity to an event to highlight the district’s success in lowering suspensions.12
Watching the flagship of the education reform movement sink, and no one seeming to care, made a profound impression on me. I realized that in this new era of “corporate” education policy, the only stakeholders who mattered were the outside activist groups. There were two ways to make a reputation within this billionaire-funded, progressive bubble: fake the numbers or compete for the status of most “woke” at education reform conferences.
At one such conference, held by the Standards Institute in 2018, the CEO of UnboundEd received applause for telling the audience, “If you are under the impression that there are good white people and bad white people, you’re wrong.” The speaker exhorted the audience to recognize that they were “part of a systematically racist system of education” and that the mission of education reform was to disrupt “patterns of implicit bias, privilege, and racism in ourselves and in the education field.”13
A decade earlier, education reformers had viewed the racial achievement gap as evidence of serious societal problems that their policy ideas could ameliorate. But as their prescriptions failed, their diagnosis shifted: all racial gaps were now evidence of “institutional racism” in schools and “implicit bias” from teachers.
The education reform movement’s new goal was to fix the problem of “biased” teachers. This was a fraught mission for education reformers, who believed that they were, according to a much-lauded internal review of the movement conducted by Promise54, tainted by a “white dominant culture” and its “systems, structures, stories, rituals, and behaviors.”14
Yet somehow, they convinced themselves—and more importantly, their funders—that with they could fix the problem of racially biased teachers once and for all. And, naturally, anyone who questioned them or their policies must—whether that person realized it or not—be motivated by racial bias.
The term “corporate reformers” no longer seemed adequate to describe what this movement had become. A “social justice industrial complex” had taken hold of American education. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, impressed by DCPS’s apparent gains, used money from the 2009 stimulus bill to incentivize (some might say bribe) states to follow DCPS’s policy lead on test-based teacher evaluations and the new (and much-hated) Common Core academic standards.15 With those policy levers and incentives in place, and with ever more money flowing to “woke” conferences and training programs, school district leaders across the country have learned that the fastest path to career advancement is to fake statistical progress for minority students while passionately decrying privilege and institutional racism.
What Role Did Policy Play?
If Washington, D.C. was the flagship of the education reform movement writ large, Broward County was the standard-bearer for the new approach to school discipline: an aggressive push for leniency on the grounds that racially biased teachers were unfairly punishing minority students. This issue was personal for me because of my mom’s experience at an inner-city school in Cleveland, Ohio.
My mom’s first dozen years as a middle school teacher were great. Her students loved her, and the principal always had her back when one of them misbehaved. But in 2014, a new principal was hired as the school district was in the midst of a major shift in its approach to school discipline. Principals increasingly felt pressured to reduce not only the number of suspensions but also the number of times students were sent to the office. My mom’s new principal told teachers that she didn’t want students sent to her office unless they’d been violent.
The kids quickly realized that the rules had changed, that they could get away with almost anything, and that there was nothing Mrs. Eden could do about it. My mom lost control of her classroom, and she eventually decided to leave the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and become a substitute teacher in the suburbs. Today, she’s doing just fine and enjoying her work. In the end, it was my mom’s students who were hurt. They learned that they could be disrespectful and disruptive without consequence, and they were ultimately deprived of my mom and other great teachers who left for the same reason.
The more I researched, the more I found that my mom’s story was far from unique. Shortly after Runcie launched the PROMISE program, Duncan issued a federal “Dear Colleague Letter” to pressure school districts to follow Runcie’s lead. (More about that in chapter 9.) School administrators across the country were pressured to reduce their discipline numbers and generally reacted in one of two ways: by not enforcing the rules or not recording it when they did. After reading the Post article, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this dynamic had played a role in the shooting. If the shooter had committed the crimes his classmates alleged, did school administrators forfeit opportunities to have him arrested, which could have prevented him from legally buying a gun?
I was not the first person to pose this question. CNN’s Jake Tapper asked it almost two weeks after the shooting in a hard-hitting interview with Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel.16 Days after the shooting, Israel declared that his officers had done incredible work and then pointed a finger at the National Rifle Association at a February 22 CNN “town hall.” But three days later, after news broke that Broward deputy Scot Peterson had hidden outside the school during the shooting, Tapper invited Israel back on CNN for a scathing, one-on-one interview. Tapper listed all the red flags that Israel’s department had missed, including the number of times the police were called to 18–1958’s home. At that time, the official number from Israel’s office was twenty-three; the press later determined that the true number was forty-five.17
Tapper asked Israel if he would, like any good leader, take responsibility for the failures of his organization. Israel responded, “I can only take responsibility for what I knew about. I exercised my due diligence. I have given amazing leadership to this agency.”
“Amazing leadership?” Tapper was incredulous. “Maybe you [should] measure somebody’s leadership by whether or not they protect the community.… I don’t understand how you can sit there and claim amazing leadership.”
Unfazed, Israel insisted, “In the five years I have been sheriff, we have taken the Broward Sheriff’s Office to a new level.”
That part of the interview went viral, but it was the next part that caught my attention.
TAPPER: But let me ask you something else. A lot of people in the community have noted that the Broward County School Board entered into an agreement when you were sheriff in 2013 to pursue the “least punitive means of discipline” against students. This new policy encouraged warnings, consultations with parents and programs on conflict resolution instead of arresting students for crimes. Were there not incidents committed by the shooter as a student, had this new policy not been in place, that otherwise he would have been arrested for and not able to legally buy a gun?
ISRAEL: What you’re referring to is the PROMISE program. And it’s giving the school—the school has the ability under certain circumstances not to call the police, not to get the police involved on misdemeanor offenses and take care of it within the school. It’s an excellent program. It’s helping many, many people. What this program does is not put a person at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old into the criminal justice system.
TAPPER: What if he should be in the criminal justice system? What if he does something violent to a student? What if he takes bullets to school? What if he takes knives to schools? What if he threatens the lives of fellow students?
ISRAEL: Then he goes to jail. That’s not applicable in the PROMISE program.
TAPPER: That’s not what happened. But that’s not what happened with the shooter.… I know that the agreement that you entered into with the school allowed the school to give this kid excuse after excuse after excuse, while, obviously—
ISRAEL: Not for bullets, not for guns, not for knives, not for felonies, not for anything like that. These are infractions within the school, small amounts of marijuana, some misdemeanors.
TAPPER: There are teachers at the school [who] had been told [by school administrators], “If you see Cruz come on campus with a backpack, let me know.” Does that not indicate that there is something seriously awry with the PROMISE program if these teachers are being told, “Watch out for this kid,” and you don’t know about it?
ISRAEL: We don’t know that that has anything to do with the PROMISE program. I didn’t hear about this until after the fact. I [heard] this information about a week ago. I don’t know about it. I don’t know who the teacher was. It hasn’t been corroborated, but that has nothing to do with the PROMISE program. I can’t, nor can any other Broward sheriff’s deputy, handle anything or act upon something if I don’t know about it.
Israel deflected blame by saying the shooter’s crimes were never brought to the attention of police. But not referring criminal behavior to police was the whole point of the PROMISE program. Israel’s defense that PROMISE only dealt with misdemeanors was technically true but practically dubious: If school leaders are pressured to lower arrests, they’re likely to err on the side of leniency without consulting the fine print every time. Had the school willfully neglected opportunities to arrest 18–1958 for felonies that could have prevented him from buying a firearm? Or that could have made the FBI more likely to act on tips that he was planning to shoot up a school?
“The School-to-Mass-Murder Pipeline”
Besides Jake Tapper and me, everyone else was focused exclusively on gun control in the first two weeks after the shooting, and the debate was becoming (predictably) bitter and vitriolic. I wrote an op-ed for City Journal headlined, “How Did the Parkland Shooter Slip Through the Cracks?”18 After raising the question of whether the school district’s initiative to not arrest students played a role in 18–1958 avoiding arrest, I concluded:
Reporters should dig deeper into the implementation of a policy that prevented school officials from contacting the police, even when common sense would call for it, as it surely did in Cruz’s case. There remain more questions than answers at this point, but we owe the families of Cruz’s 17 victims better than another scripted culture war, with each side voicing the usual talking points.
It was an earnest sentiment, but also a naïve one. The piece sparked a brush fire in conservative media. Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News’s Laura Ingraham all took up the argument, and two days after my piece was published, Ann Coulter penned a column headlined, “The School to Mass Murder Pipeline.”19 Coulter wrote:
Nikolas Cruz’s psychosis ended in a bloody massacre not only because of the stunning incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. It was also the result of liberal insanity working exactly as it was intended to. School and law enforcement officials knew Cruz was a ticking time bomb. They did nothing because of a deliberate, willful, bragged-about policy to end the “school-to-prison pipeline.” This is the feature part of the story, not the bug part.
So much for moving beyond the culture war. As the issue I raised became a conservative counterargument to gun control, Superintendent Runcie held a press conference and declared, “[The shooter] was never a participant in the PROMISE program. He wasn’t eligible for it. There’s no connection between Cruz and the district’s PROMISE program.”20
If that were true, the situation seemed even worse. If the shooter committed felonies and wasn’t even referred to the PROMISE program, then administrators must have been all the more negligent. But then Runcie’s statement changed.
In late March, he penned an op-ed in the Sun Sentinel headlined, “Focusing on Safety and Security, and Toppling ‘Fake News.’” He wrote:
As we focus on these issues and meeting the needs of our students and families during this difficult time, the rise in “fake news” related to this tragedy is reprehensible. To be clear...contrary to media reports, the district has no record of Nikolas Cruz committing a PROMISE eligible infraction or being assigned to PROMISE while in high school.21 (Emphasis added.)
Why, I wondered, would Runcie include those last few words unless 18–1958 had been assigned to PROMISE in middle school?
What’s more, the district claimed that PROMISE was for “13 non-violent misdemeanors” (emphasis in original).22 That was a plain lie. Students could be sent to PROMISE for fighting, and footage had emerged of the shooter in a big fight at school a week before his eighteenth birthday. I figured that with all the media coverage, someone would eventually note these inconsistencies and dig deeper.
I was wrong. Asking about what went wrong at MSD became a “conservative” question. Mainstream reporters treated questions about the district’s discipline policies as matters to be debunked rather than investigated. Politico reported that there was “no evidence” that the district’s approach to discipline played any role in the shooting.23 According to the New York Times, the question was a racially tinged red herring that Republicans were exploiting to distract from gun control:
After a gunman marauded through Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month, conservative commentators—looking for a culprit—seized on an unlikely target: an Obama-era guidance document that sought to rein in the suspensions and expulsions of minority students. Black students have never been the perpetrators of the mass shootings that have shocked the nation’s conscience nor have minority schools been the targets. But the argument went that any relaxation of disciplinary efforts could let a killer slip through the cracks.24
It is true that the shooter was not black. He was, however, diagnosed with a disability. And the policies pioneered by Runcie, and spread across America by Arne Duncan, sought to reduce discipline for students with disabilities as well. When you hear that students with disabilities are “disproportionately” disciplined, it might conjure an image of students with physical impairments or learning disorders getting punished more frequently than their peers. But that doesn’t happen.25 Rather, students who habitually behave badly are often diagnosed with having an “Emotional and Behavioral Disability.” And those badly behaved students are disciplined more frequently. This unremarkable fact is, however, bemoaned by education reformers as evidence of “ableist” discrimination.
Schools are pressured to discipline students who behave badly at the same rate as students who behave well, which creates predictably perverse incentives and consequences. Sometimes schools refuse to diagnose students in order to retain the flexibility to discipline them. Other times, schools decline to document misbehavior and troubled students get passed from one teacher to another with no paperwork trail to say, “This student needs help!”
What’s more, federal and state policies pressure schools to push students with disabilities into the “least restrictive environment” possible. This pressure makes it harder for school districts to put students like 18–1958 into specialized schools that cater to their needs and encourages school administrators to keep troubled students in normal classrooms for the sake of “inclusion.” The pressure to document fewer disciplinary incidents, especially for students with disabilities, makes administrators less willing to record behavioral problems, allowing issues to fester and leaving everyone worse off. Did these pressures, I wondered, contribute to the massacre?
To Superintendent Runcie, the only education policy problem was guns. He told the Sun Sentinel, “The biggest problem is, we could provide services perfectly, [but] if the individual is still able to go out and buy a semi-automatic weapon, that becomes a major hole in anything that we could possibly do.”26
It seemed to me that if a school provides even adequate services, students don’t become mass murderers.
Why I Traveled to Parkland
Many education journalists showed little interest in digging into what happened in the Broward County school district. Their attitude, like Runcie’s, seemed to be that anything other than guns was a distraction.
By late May, after the revelation about the shooter’s involvement in PROMISE, Alexander Russo included the coverage of Parkland on his list of the worst educational journalism of the 2017–2018 school year, noting:
Three months after the tragedy in Florida, initial national and local coverage of the Parkland school shooting...is proving to have been enormously sloppy and in ways misleading.... School systems and administrators shouldn’t be treated with kid gloves in the aftermath of a shooting incident, as was the case for much too long here. As this case shows, they warrant as much scrutiny as anyone else.27
I never expected to do anything beyond writing that one op-ed in February posing a question. But in late April, I found myself in Andy Pollack’s living room. A local student journalist, Kenny Preston, had read my City Journal column and contacted me on Facebook asking for help with a report he was writing on the school district’s failures. I almost never accept Facebook friend requests from people I don’t know, but for whatever reason, I accepted his. When I read his report, I was glad that I had. As I advised him, I became much more invested in trying to answer the question I had originally raised: how did the Parkland shooter slip through the cracks? And after I saw Runcie apparently orchestrate a smear campaign to discredit Kenny, I decided to go to Parkland myself to investigate further. I asked Kenny whether he could introduce me to any MSD teachers. He told me that I should meet Kim Krawczyk.
Separately, my new friend Nicole Landers encouraged Alex Arreaza to contact me. I decided I would meet with him while I was in Parkland. I had no plans to meet with Andy Pollack. But Alex told him that a guy from D.C. was digging for details about the school district, and Andy called me and asked me to come to his house.
At the time, Andy was a member of the state Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission investigating the causes of the tragedy and asked me if I had any questions he should bring up at its next meeting. I mentioned the lingering questions around the shooter’s disciplinary history, and at the next meeting he asked about it.
Or rather, he tried to.
It had been nearly two months since the Florida Legislature provided the Commission with full authority to review all documents from all entities, from the school district, to the county’s mental health provider, to the police. Andy asked the commission’s lead investigator whether he had received all of the shooter’s disciplinary records. The investigator replied that he wasn’t sure whether the school district had handed everything over.
Andy asked, “Is that normal, two months after an investigation, not to have all his disciplinary records?”
The investigator replied, “I don’t know if anything about this is normal.”
Andy asked him whether the Broward school district was cooperating.
The investigator replied, “Some [entities] are probably being more cooperative than others.”28
After that meeting, Andy texted me, “Max, thank you so much for helping. You will be such an asset in helping me find justice for my daughter’s murder.”
That’s when it got real.
I couldn’t find enough details in my first trip to write an article, and I had no plans to return. But after I got Andy’s text, I felt I had no choice. I asked if he could spread the word that I was looking for answers about what happened at MSD.
Andy generated about a dozen leads for my second trip. By the end of that trip, I could hardly believe what we’d discovered. Discipline policy was only one part of a total system failure that was bigger than I could have imagined. As I pieced together the shooter’s journey through the Broward County school district, it struck me that it was as though all the things that were going wrong in American public education had joined forces to let him slip through every crack.
I told Andy that it would take a book to expose it all and explain its full significance, and Andy said we should do it together. I felt a duty to do everything in my power to help Andy find justice for Meadow and help draft a book that did justice to his story. But this book would never have been written without Kenny Preston, the student journalist whose story we will tell next.