Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing

The David Frum Show

The Atlantic

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ ? minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On 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 underway. 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 about how the future judges the present. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by Eleven Labs, the company behind AI voices that don't sound like AI voices, like this one.
0:09.3	Learn more at visit11labs.io slash Atlantic to get started for free.
0:14.9	Music Hello, and welcome back to the David Frum show.
0:29.0	I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic.
0:31.8	My guest today will be Margaret Spellings, who served as U.S. Secretary of Education from 2005
0:36.4	to 2009. We'll be discussing the ominous downward drift in U.S. Secretary of Education from 2005 to 2009. We'll be discussing the ominous
0:40.2	downward drift in U.S. student achievement, not just during COVID, but even before. And we'll talk
0:45.1	about the importance of testing as the best and sure as way to improve student achievement
0:49.8	and reverse the decline that the United States has suffered in the achievement of its students
0:53.5	in recent years. In the book segment at the end of the show, and I hope you will stay to hear
0:58.7	or view it, I'll be talking about a book called The Judgment of Paris by Ross King, a story of the
1:03.8	origins of Impressionist Art in Paris in the 1860s and that 1870s. Before I get to all of that,
1:09.6	though, I want to open with some preliminary
1:11.6	thoughts about a strange recent development in Donald Trump's America. Now, some of you,
1:17.7	if you are active on social media, may have seen that a right-wing commentator a few days
1:22.2	ago released an image of a purported $1 coin, which featured a profile of Donald Trump on one side,
1:29.6	and then a full figure of Donald Trump clenched his fist in the aftermath of the assassination
1:33.8	attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, with words fight, fight, fight, graved on the other side of this
1:39.3	purported one dollar coin. And when you first saw it, and you saw who was issuing this image, and you saw actually the
1:45.7	kind of cheesy, low quality version of the image, you thought it had to be a kind of spoof,
1:50.5	a way of trolling the libs, making people upset with some kind of stupid joke. But the image and the
1:58.5	tweet were reproduced by Brandon Breach, who's the U.S. treasurer, the man in
	...

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