MAGA Moms Sic AI On School Districts

In the midst of their current summit (cleverly scheduled for the end of Banned Books Week), Moms for Liberty unveiled a new AI tool. M4L AWARE (a name that looks much like MAL-AWARE which is a little on the nose) will flag "DEI contracts, gender policies and curriculum changes every 12 hours to mobilize parents," says Fox News, which was the first outlet to share the scoop.

AWARE is supposed to stand for Agenda Watch, Alert, Response, and Engage. Sure. M4L itself announced "school boards put on notice," as if school boards do not already operate under laws that require transparency, including things like publishing the agendas of future meetings. 

Co-founder and CEO Tina Descovich handled the rollout herself. Co-founder Tiffany Justice recently finished her brief fling with the Heritage Foundation; her linkedin now says she's self-employed as a "conservative activist, strategist, and donor advisor," so I guess the "ordinary mom at the kitchen table selling t-shirts" mask is fully off now.  Meanwhile, co-founder Bridget Ziegler hasn't been very busy since her own bi-sex scandal (other than suing the city) and chose not to run for re-election to the Sarasota School Board this year (her husband was booted from his party chairmanship gig).   

There was a time when, if you squinted hard, M4L looked like a conservative parental activism group. These days they're just an unabashed estrogen wing of MAGA. So of course Descovich, when rolling out the new surveillance AI, invoked Joe Biden. "The Biden admin targeted our parents for showing up to school board meetings," Descovich claimed, echoing a new report from Trump's Weaponization Working Group, part of Dear Leaders use of the Department of Justice to target and push back on anyone who was ever mean to him or his allies. Back in 2022, when M4L and other MAGAs were aggressively attacking school boards, the National School Board Association asked law enforcement at every level for some help for its members and used the phrase "equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism" in their letter, which has been a PR gift to the MAGA crowd ever since.     

M4L's AI agent will, apparently, scan school board agendas looking for any particular words or phrases that indicate Naughty Policies "buried deep within school board agendas." Because "it's incredibly time-consuming to sift through thousands of pages in agendas each week," says Descovich, "and school districts count on that." Because school boards are the enemy. Do any school boards have thousand-page agendas? Or is it the main M4L office that's scanning them, in which case, can't local M4L chapters scan local agendas? Is this initiative lazy, or is it trying to weaponize roving bands of MAGA moms to be deployed to whatever district the AI says needs spanking?

Using AI to track down objectionable DEI stuff (plus anything else these snowflakes think might harm them) has certainly been tried before. ChatGPT has become a popular tool for generating book banning lists, even as it puts books on the list that make no sense (The Life of Fredrick Dounglass? Les Miserables?)  And DOGE famously tried this on a large scale to find spending cuts, like cutting HVAC replacement as DEI and just generally doing such a bad job that the courts reprimanded them. In Texas, university professors must now submit course content for AI scanning. 

So MALAWARE promises at least some instances of a bunch of angry MAGAs showing up to protest a high school auto shop unit on transmissions because ChatGPT reported a lesson on trans stuff, which would be entertaining if anyone in MAGA world was capable of saying, "Ooops, we made a mistake" and not "Let's just keep repeating our original story even though it has no more evidence than the stories about litter boxes in schools." 

Maybe the main idea here is to use technology to make up for M4L's flagging membership in some areas. 

At any rate, one more way for MAGA moms to agitate the base while facilitating the harassment of school boards across the country, whose members are elected from their own communities and, in most cases, paid little or nothing for their trouble. Look, I'm all for local taxpayers speaking up about the actions of their school boards, but there is something lazy about this approach, which does not encourage people to pay attention to what their school board is doing all the time, but to wake up and squawk only when the AI tells them something is happening they might not like, with no context or background provided. MALAWARE is not here to facilitate involvement-- just attacks. Not involvement or engagement— just intimidation and undermining.

ICYMI: Banned Edition (10/11)

I have deliberately waited until after Banned Books Week this year to talk about banned books because it's a topic I hate to see relegated to just one week where we all wring our hands with concern and then, come Sunday, sigh "Well, now that's over with" and move on. But the attempts to curtail reading of certain Naughty Texts is a 52 week project for those who are determined to try to keep certain ideas away from human brains, so let's stay alert all the time.

Plenty of reading from the week. Remember to share the pieces that speak to you.

Banned Books Week: The Florida Law That Opened the Floodgates

It is, of course, the Free State of Florida that leads the nation in book banning. Sue Kingery Woltanski recaps the tale of how it got that way. 

A ‘Gold Rush Moment’ for Private Education

The federal voucher program is ripe for profiteering and discrimination, but some states are signing on anyway. Jacob Goodwin explains the issues at The Progressive. 

Trump’s School Choice Program Could Push Public Schools to Charge New Fees

Mark Liebrman at EdWeek tries to sort out what federal vouchers will mean for public school finance. 

What We Mean When We Say “Good School” (pt. 3)

Jose Luis Vilson continues his series examining what expect from good public schools (and who we expect them to welcome).

Billionaires Love This School Policy. Many Regular Parents Hate It.

Jessica Grose at the New York Times starts to catch up to Jennifer Berkshire, noting that the Texas GOP is having trouble because they sold out public schools. (Should be a gift link)

Merging school districts was supposed to save taxpayers money. It didn’t, a 20-year study in Arkansas found

Jill Barshay at Hechinger with a counter-intuitive study from Arkansas about how combining tiny school districts might not actually save any money.

How Texas Helped a Private School Chain’s AI Tool Get Into Public School Classrooms

The folks behind Alpha School have been very generous with political donations in Texas, and it seems to be paying off with some sweet side contracts.

Efficiently Mediocre: Why Measuring School Efficiency Requires Measuring Cost

I really appreciate Bruce Baker's ability to render school finance comprehensible, and I recommend his blog. Here's a quick tutorial in how to chart "efficiency" in non-garbage ways (as well as a debunking some garbage charting).

Is AI Being Oversold in Schools? A Quick Look Back to the 1990s and 2000s Would Say Yes Because Teachers Are AI-ed To

John Robinson reminds us that the ed technobaloney of earlier decades is still baloney.

Information vs. Knowledge vs. Application

Nancy Flanagan picks up some ideas from one of my posts and runs with them. I do like it when posts become a conversation.

Department of Education denies Freedom of Information Act request for school voucher data

Steve Nuzum is trying to get information out of the South Carolina Department of Education regarding the state's voucher program. It's not going great.

Fascism Warning Play “The Wave” Silenced at Ocean County Vocational in New Jersey

The Downstage Center blog has been tracking the censorship of high school theater productions. In New Jersey, administration has axed a production of The Wave, a play about that famous classroom experiment about the rise of fascism.

What Happens At TFA 35 In Vegas …

Gary Rubinstein went to Teach for America's 35th birthday party and brought us all an account of the events. Things I learned include that TFA is still tight with reformsters, that they can command quite the roster of entertainers, and that Michelle Rhee is still full of it.  Fascinating read.

Reclaiming a Vision of Humane Schooling

Ben Riley hosts a column by Alicia Stoller arguing for actual human values in schooling.

MAGA fraud hunting account targets money going to Ohio Islamic charter school

Ohio, like many other choice states, gives taxpayer money to some Islamic schools, and yet MAGA voices insist that such a thing is Very Bad and money should only go to religions they personally agree with. Stephen Dyer reports.

At the Bucks County Beacon, I make one more plea to Josh Shapiro to reject the federal school vouchers. 

Having Students Follow An Idea

Saurabh Anand published a piece at JSTOR last month that has been an open tab on my desktop ever since, even as I have added it to my file of Things I Would Totally Steal If I Were Still Teaching.

The piece is "Teaching Students to Follow an Idea," and Anand is talking about an assignment that he uses with first-year academic writing students at the University of Georgia. 

I developed this activity because students often perceive research writing as a series of requirements: finding scholarly sources, writing an annotated bibliography, citing sources, and producing a literature review. These requirements are useful, but they can also make scholarship seem like a collection of finished objects. Articles appear in databases, then students download them, extract information, and cite them. I wanted students to see something different: scholarship as a conversation that changes over time.

Yes! The "collection of finished objects" really strikes a chord with me, and the rationale parallels my thinking when I designed an assignment around having students research local history mostly from primary sources. 

But Anand lands in a different place, and it is also cool. He asks students to take a scholarly article, pick an idea from it, and trace that idea's history. Where did it come from? What were the responses to it? Who built on it? Who disagreed with it? 

What is the biography of that idea?

Anand is working in scholarly materials, but the possibilities here-- especially when applied to chunks of history--are considerable.

It also reminds me of teaching high school juniors about the various intellectual and social waves in US history. Because-- and some folks seem to have lost track of this-- we can talk about ideas in a classroom without actually "indoctrinating" anyone. Every year I had to talk about American attitudes, throughout history, about race and gender and religion and society itself. And I opened each new wave with a version of this speech:

I am not asking you to decide that these folks were right or that they were wrong. I am not here to convince you to agree with them, but I am going to present, as clearly as I can, how they viewed the world and the human beings in it. You can agree or disagree-- that's entirely your decision-- but I want you to understand where they were coming from.

Implicit in that approach was holding the ideas themselves at arm's length, studying them as things in themselves. The idea was to look at how they grew and spread and how the affected the people who embraced them, not to try to decide whether or not they were True. In doing so, my hope was that students would learn to recognize pieces of those ideas still floating around in our cultural soup today. (Also, if I'm honest, to help students develop the habits of mind that made it possible to examine their own beliefs and scan them for integrated consistency). 

So I can see a version of Anand's assignment working on a large scale (Where did the critical realists start? What were they reacting to? How did different writers try to articulate or dramatize their ideas, and which pieces of the ideas did particular authors favor? Did they fall from favor, and if so, why? What ideas pushed them aside? Damn, but I am just itching to go back in time and use some of this approach.). The assignment can also work on smaller scale (Where did the story about litter boxes in schools start? How did it spread? Who helped spread it? Has it peaked yet?)

Ideas and beliefs have their own lives, growing, changing, both responding to and shaping the world around them. They are not set in concrete, unchanged and unaltered by time, and they can be studied by questions so much more interesting and useful than, "Is this correct?" This, for me, is one of the fundamental problems of the those who are fighting "culture wars"-- their insistence that for most questions, there is one True Answer and it has never changed and will never change-- which is itself an idea that has shifted and ebbed and flowed and changed over the centuries. 

Humans and human society shift and change and rise and fall and regularly re-assess the world around them and their place in it. That process, that life of ideas, is fascinating and useful. I am glad that subtext was part of my teaching, but right now I would love a little bit of a do-over.

The End of Disparate Impact Language

The Trump administration has been crossing out rules about "disparate impact" all across federal agencies. The language was axed in the Department of Education back in July, and while the change was covered in some media and greeted with appropriate complaints from a host of civil rights groups, lots of folks sort of napped through the whole business, even as the DOJ threw out fifty desegregation cases involving schools.

So let's take a second to talk about disparate impact and why anyone should care that the feds no longer pay any attention to it.

The principle of disparate impact starts with the understanding that 1) not all discrimination is intentional and 2) not all intentional discrimination is announced as such.

Disparate impact allows us to bypass an argument about whether or not someone in charge had prejudice in his heart which he deliberately enacted through policy. 

For the last several decades, everyone has understood that you cannot write down in official policy, "We will not hire Black people." But if you have hired 100 people in the last six months and 50% of the applicants were women and 0% of the actual hires were women, there is reason to suspect that perhaps your organization has a civil rights problem.

In education, a common disparate impact argument has centered on discipline, the argument being that if Black students composed 20% of your student body and 90% of your discipline referrals, maybe something is going on. 

The effect of the principle of disparate impact is that many employers and schools have been super-careful because they're afraid they might be doing a racism without even trying. The principle of disparate impact has launched thousands of implicit bias PD sessions and made folks examine more carefully how they might be discriminating without even meaning to. 

But that same effect makes reactionary snowflakes sad. You can't just let every discriminatory thought fall out of your mouth without someone making a fuss! Even Supreme Court Justices aren't immune; “You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Sam Alito said at a Federalist Society event in 2020. “Until recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now, it’s considered bigotry.”

So for MAGA, already accepting the premise that white men are the most oppressed and downtrodden group in the country, disparate impact is one more way that they are held down. 

Ther is no doubt that parsing out disparate impact is an inexact art, and there is absolutely no doubt that public schools do not suffer from a shortage of people looking over their shoulder, waiting to catch them doing Something Wrong.

But the loss of the principle of disparate impact means that discrimination can only be called out when some school administrator or staff member is stupid enough to announce, "I am taking this action in order to discriminate against this group of people, a group that I personally hate." It may take a while for some districts or states to feel free enough to start doing terrible things, but they've got at least two years to get comfortable with the idea. In the meantime, families of female or minority or LGBTQ students will have to start looking for another means to protect themselves. 

What's Wrong With Educational Research (Part 23,881)

Noah Smith is an "econ blogger" who mostly does econ stuff, but a week ago he decided to take a swipe at education. Yes, it's always super-awesome when economists try to talk about education, but this particular post caught my attention because Smith would like to explain why smaller classes are a snare and a delusion, and his argument highlights one of the major problems with education research over the past several decades.

Smith starts out commenting on the Nikole Hannah-Jones piece (I believe at this point there are three grown adults on the planet who have not expressed an opinion about the piece, and two of them are stuck under rocks) and then wades into a round of "do schools need more money" as a way of introducing his gripe, which is that when schools get more money, they spend it on teachers to try to reduce class size.

"I’ve been hearing all my life that smaller classes will improve the quality of education," he opines, then goes on to cite some contemporary praise for smaller class size. He cites a 2014 study and a 2013 program in Tennessee (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio or STAR) and digs into a study of the entire country of Israel, where due to a rabbinical rule, class sizes were capped at 40 (like 40 students somehow qualifies as a small class in any year since about 1957).

The initial study showed "gains" but then a follow-up study showed no class size effect. Then he pulls up a couple of meta-analyses (a study of studies, for those of you who skipped this day in college). He quotes a study from Filges et. al.:

Overall, the evidence suggests at best a small effect on reading achievement. There is a negative, but statistically insignificant, effect on mathematics. For the non-STAR studies the primary study effect sizes for reading were close to zero but the weighted average was positive and statistically significant. 

And more of the same, all looking at the effects of smaller class size on "student achievement." 

Student achievement.

Here we go again. Hundreds of studies that accept Big Standardized Test scores as accurate, reliable, and valid proxies for the desired outcome of an education. 

Do researchers use the proxy because they truly believe BS Tests are a valid proxy, because BS Tests are the easiest thing to find that comes in nice numbers, or because they know on some level that publishing a study that examines the effects of X on the scores from a single multiple-choice reading and math test given once a year would cause too many people to respond, "Well, who cares?" Or are they simply implicitly arguing that BS Test scores are, in fact, the whole point and object of education and nothing else matters?

Look, measuring education and student achievement and growth is really hard, because what we want for our children includes a whole lot of hard-to-measure stuff, not to mention things that don't really kick in or pay off until years later. Plus all the things that require a slow approach; can you measure how well a student can read and reflect and dive into a full novel by giving them a series of multiple choice questions about a 500-word excerpt? No, you cannot. But somehow many folks have come to accept that a tiny, not-very-valid measure of a tiny sliver of a tiny part of a whole human's education can be treated as a proxy for the whole big picture. And that leads to all sorts of bad conclusions.

This particular instance stands out because I don't think there's a single human being who remembers being in a K-12 classroom who does not understand that smaller class size is a plus. It guarantees students more attention, makes the teacher's job easier (both in teaching and management), and provides the student with a more human experience. There isn't a parent on the planet who, given the choice, would say "Don't put my child in the class with fifteen students-- I want her in the class with 45." There isn't a teacher on the planet who would say, "Yeah, could you just jam ten more students into each of my classes, because that will make my job easier." Need more? There's a whole organization (Class Size Matters) that can provide more. 

You can line up studies that "prove" that class size doesn't matter from here to the moon and the eyerolls and muttered comments of "bullshit" will far outnumber the responses of, "Oh, well, I see. I guess I don't care how big the class is after all." Because no sensible human being would believe that class size doesn't matter. And when research is based on bad and incomplete data that causes it to arrive at literally unbelievable conclusions, it does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Smith goes on to make some valid points. Like good teachers are better than bad teachers, and there is not an infinite supply of good teachers. So if we hire a bunch more teachers in order to reduce class size, we will end up hiring less-than-great teachers. Fair enough. Though I will point out that putting a mediocre teacher in front of a small class gives you a better chance of success than putting them in front of a large class. 

Maybe we could use the money to raise salaries and attract more good teachers rather than reduce class sizes, Smith suggests, and boy have we been here before. In 2015, Marguerite Roza and the Georgetown Edunomics Lab were trying to make a case for the Super Sardinemaster-- one great teacher in front of a couple hundred students. Way back in 2010, Bill Gates (who, I will remind you, has never been right about education) thought it sounded like a great idea. Reformsters like the idea because it's cheap. For a while, the Super Sardinemaster was imagined as a great teacher working over the internet with many students, but we ran a large scale experiment about that kind of teaching back in 2020, and mostly everyone hated it.

What many economists understand about education could be spread out on the head of a pin and still leave room for a flock of angels to hold a good-sized square dance. But they ought to understand that using bad data leads to bad results, and this is a particularly dramatic demonstration of that principle. Too much education research rests on a foundation of junk, no more reliably stable than a pile of sardines

ICYMI: New Adventure Edition (10/4)

This is the weekend of Applefest in Franklin, an annual festival hung on the thin hook of Johnny Appleseed's residence in the are for fifteen minutes a couple hundred years ago. John Chapman is a fascinating story, and so is the story of how he became a story, and I recommend Johnny Appleseed: The Man, The Myth, The American Story by Howard Means for reading about all that. As for Applefest, we have a few hundred booths, a car show, a lot of food, a show at the theater (this year-- Mean Girls), and a race from one end of town to the other; the board of directors and the CMO will be running again this year.

But the most exciting thing this week was that the board of directors had their first instrumental music lessons. One board member is pursuing percussion, and the other aspires to trumpeting. They have their instruments, their method books, and the privilege of attending a school with a full time music teacher who will see them once a week as we begin this adventure. Tooting and bonking abound at the institute, loaded with potential and promise. We shall see.

In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.

A warning to blue-state governors from the Florida voucher wreckage

Democratic legislator Carlos Guillermo Smith lays out the many damages done to education by Florida's voucher program.

What Impact Will Trump’s Federal School Voucher Scheme Have on States?

Andy Spears gets a quick quote from Jeremy Mohler of In The Public Interest. Short answer: impact will be negative.

Statement of Jessica Levin, Esq., Director of Public Funds Public Schools, on Treasury Department’s Proposed Regulations for the Federal Voucher Scheme

There are a plethora of statements out there now that the rules are out, but Jessica Levin is a smart lawyer and I find her comments particularly valuable, because much of what's being said just isn't accurate.

All Our Kids Will Go To Alpha School

Many folks have thoughts about Ben Riley's reporting about Alpha School, but this piece by Matt Seybold is one of the better ones for capturing the wider implications of this upscale snake oil emporium.

Public Schools Can Help Save Us From AI and Alpha Schools!

Nancy Bailey looks at the Alpha baloney and AI and what public schools could do about them.

Seventeen Years of Roza-Tinted Glasses

Bruce Baker, the noted education funding expert, has made a long-time habit of cleaning up after Marguerite Roza (whose name you may not work but whose economic apologetics for reformsters you have almost certainly encountered). Here's an overview of her greatest hits (and why they're baloney).

My Different 12 Low Cost Suggestions

Larry Ferlazzo offers a reaction to the NYT piece that asked thirty education "experts" how to improve schools-- but he gets beyond the eyerolls hat most of us offered to get to some more practical matters.

We’re Reporters, Not Teachers.We Were Able to Start Private Schools Anyway.

ProPublica reporters demonstrated that in some states, any dope can start a private school. This is a pretty astonishing piece.

What’s Left for Public Education?

Jennifer Berkshire continues to ponder why Democrats cannot get an act together when it comes to public education. No, not even those Democrats.

Why Am I Going To The TFA 35th Anniversary Alumni Summit?

Gary Rubinstein recalls his long, complicated, and important history with Teach for America.

I Told You So: Five Predictions for the New Federal Voucher Program

Sue Kingery Woltanski has made many correct calls about vouchers in Florida. Now she has some predictions for the federal voucher program. They all look correct to me.

Ohio Charter School graduates spend far longer in poverty than Public School graduates

Stephen Dyer continues to puncture the old myth that charter schools in Ohio will help lift students out of poverty.

Fired for not moving LGBTQ books, a former Tennessee librarian sues

Yet another battle in the ongoing fight against censorship.

I was really busy at Forbes.com this week. There you will find stories about:

* The Oklahoma decision furthering the cause of religious charter schools

* A report on where special student needs are growing

* Natashe Singer's book about tech giants commandeering classrooms

* Federal voucher rules and how they show no chance for flexibility for states

I love good cross-genre cover. It can open up a song in ways you just never thought of. Here's Lake Street Drive doing a completely other cover of "I Want You Back"

Teachers Should Know Stuff

Carl Hendrix is on Elon's cyber-sewer this week arguing that teachers who were trained over the last fifty years have been taught that "knowing stuff is the least important part of thinking," offering a diagram of Bloom's Taxonomy as evidence. 

I'm not going to get into an argument about the taxonomy's virtues or lack thereof, and in the thread, Hendrix acknowledges the idea of knowledge at the bottom of the taxonomy because it's foundational, not least important.

But I will agree that the tide has run away from Knowing Stuff in education. for which we can blame a confluence of ideas. 

One is the foolish "we don't need know stuff cuz we has google" argument, which was always without foundation. It's hard to look things up when you don't know enough to ask questions. And storing information outside your brain just means that it's not available to power your thinking or insights. The ugly cousin of this argument is that AI can just know stuff for us, which is even worse because AI cannot be trusted to get things right, and if you know nothing yourself, you cannot judge when AI is feeding you baloney. The cherry on top is that AI and enshittification have worsened Google and the internet so badly that it is even less useful as a repository of knowledge than it used to be. It is not a safe or accurate place for outsourcing your responsibility to know stuff.

The other is the modern reform movement, especially Common Core. The emphasis has been skills, skills, skills. Never mind knowing what Hemmingway had to say in The Sun Also Rises-- it's time to work on using context clues and inferences. This has always been a crock-- you cannot practice skills like critical thinking without some content to think about. It's not useful to practice chewing with your mouth empty. You can't generate waves without some medium through which the waves move. Knowing Stuff has to come before "skills."

Twenty-some years of teacher training has indeed shifted practicum to the idea of teaching to the standards and developing skills in order to do well on the Big Standardized Test. Most of the student teachers I hosted in my classroom were working from content knowledge they'd acquired in high school. It is, in fact, the teacher training mirror of the problem-- teacher prep in way too many cases focuses on the skills and techniques of teaching while ignoring the actual content knowledge that the teacher is supposed to be teaching.

This is fixable. I know, because my own teacher training fixed it, and could be a model for other teacher programs.

My undergraduate degree was not in education, but in English, because my college (Allegheny College in Meadville PA) used to run a program based on the idea that the teacher should be a content area expert. That came first. I took 1.5 education courses before I student taught (plus one English course designed specifically for teachers). That's the first part.

The second part was exceptional support during student teaching. My supervisor watched me in the classroom usually once a week, often for more than an hour. During student teaching, I took more methods courses. The college had a field office for all of us--and there were only 9--in the downtown Cleveland hotel where we all lived, and we took courses there a couple nights a week. Methods courses taught by working teachers, not college professors. One was a methods course taught by the same person who observed our teaching, so the methods course could include practical discussions of something that happened two days ago in our actual class. 

The third part was an extension of that support into our first year of teaching. To the district, we were first year teachers; to the college we were interns. During that year, more classes at the field office, and more, less frequent, observations by the same person who saw us in student teaching. And then an assortment of Masters-level education courses in summers back at the college, leading to a Masters in Education. 

It was a low-volume, high-cost program, so of course the college eventually killed it. But the model is still a good one. Create content-area experts-- people who Know Stuff-- and then support the heck out of them as they sharpen their teaching edge on the hard stone of actual classrooms. 

Teachers should Know Stuff and be trained in the What of teaching and not just the How. Because all the technique in the world will not help you if you don't know what the hell you're talking about. And yes-- knowledgeable competence is one piece of the classroom management puzzle. Yes, a teacher needs to know some of the How as well-- lots of Hows, really. But so often the How is driven and shaped by the What; I worked with more than a few student teachers who couldn't figure out how to teach a lesson because they literally could not figure out what exactly they were trying to teach (pro tip: downloading some worksheets from an online teacher site, or having ChatGPT whip one up, will not help you solve any of these problems).

Teachers should Know Stuff so that they can Teach Stuff. Everything comes after that foundation is laid.