The Conversation We Aren't Having

Since the days when Milton Friedman first cast his gaze on public education, education debates have been heavily influenced by a conversation we mostly haven't had.

Yes, there have been pushes to break the teachers unions. Yes, there has been lots of maneuvering to break the public system so that the parts can be sold off and the gazillion dollar edu-piggy bank can hoovered up by profiteers. Yes, there has been plenty of noise about accountability, plus, heaven knows, no end of debate about choice. And these days there's a whole other bunch of noise about parental rights. 

The thing is, as much as we talk about these topics, we're really talking-- indirectly-- about something else entirely. 

We're talking about rewriting the foundational principles of our public education system. We're talking about shifting the responsibility for children's education. 

Look at how we talk about school choice. There are many ways to provide educational choices, but choicers only really discuss one-- choice based on the idea of education as a commodity supplied in a free(ish) marketplace. 

In this conception, the community has no responsibility to educate your child. That's your problem, to be solved as the best you can with whatever resources you have at your disposal. The old promise-- that as a society we would get the best possible education to every single child, regardless of zip code-- would be null and void, and families would be left to rise or fall based on what they and they alone can bring to the table.

That major shift in How Education Works is masked a bit with the promise of vouchers-- a little money that families could use to pad their limited resources (though the advent of universal vouchers guarantees that the gap between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy will remain exactly the same). The major shift is also sold with decades of insistence that the traditional public system is broken, even dangerous.    

It's not that we have ever done a perfect job of fulfilling the promise of a decent education for every child. It's not even as if we started making the promise for strictly noble, egalitarian reasons ("Let's get those delinquents off the street"). But way too much of the education reform debate has not really been about fulfilling the promise, but about changing the promise.

This goes double for the MAGA crowd, for whom any sort of societal responsibility is anathema. Society is composed of layers, their premise goes, and no government should interfere with those layers naturally sorting themselves into winners and losers, based on what they deserve (because some people are, in fact, more deserving of power and privilege than others). There should be no SNAP or social safety net, because the poors should be left to their well-deserved fates. DEI should not be used to lift non-white folks out of their proper position of subordination to white folks. The government should not be supporting health care or pushing vaccinations, because those who aren't strong enough to deal with illness and disease should be left to their well-deserved fate. And the education system should not be some sort of socialist scheme for lifting all children.

This is the conversation we aren't having--

Do we want to try to for a collectively funded, owned, and operated system that tries to deliver an excellent education for every child, or do we want a system in which each individual parent must navigate a largely unregulated market in which they get whatever quality of education they can personally afford?

We really need to have that conversation, because it lurks and nibbles at the edges of every other conversation we have about education. We really need to have that conversation out loud, because we keep trying to have it without having it, and it makes much of the education debate more tiring than it needs to be. 

Three Guiding Principles of Alpha School

I've been following Alpha School ever since the days they were trying to launch a cyber school in Pennsylvania. The picture that emerged (here's the piece) was of some folks with tech expertise, finance skills, PR savvy, and absolutely no clue about education. I expected this snake oil operation to burn out quickly.

I was wrong. My collection of Alpha School PR links just keeps growing, people keep taking them seriously, and, most important to their business model, rich folks keep forking over huge piles of money.

God bless Todd Feathers over at Wired, who seems to have noticed that the emperor's wardrobe is a bit lacking. "Alpha School’s Ritzy New York City Campus Costs $65,000 a Year—but Isn’t Actually a School" looks at Alpha's decision to open a school in Manhattan, and then, when the state department of education denied its application to become an independent school, just pivoted to becoming a sort of homeschool hub-thing.

The basic Alpha School pitch is simple. Two hours of screen time are enough to teach students all the core content they need. The rest of the day can be "projects" and "activities" and just generally stuff to keep your child from having to come home by noon while allegedly learning grit and entrepreneurship. There are no actual teachers involved anywhere in the process (though as Feathers notes, MacKenzie Price, the face of the school, has said that they use the words "guides, coaches, teachers" interchangeably.

Feather's article reminds me of three guiding principles that Alpha follows.

1) The ultimate Big Standardized Test result

When high-stakes testing accountability swept the education system, some schools adapted by cutting recess and reducing time in non-tested subjects like science and history and the arts. But what if you were willing to go whole hog and simply cut everything in your education program except test prep for the Big Standardized Test. I give Alpha School credit for just one thing-- dropping all pretense that they were delivering some sort of well-rounded education, and then offering as an academic brag their results on test scores.

2) The Trumpian approach to rules

Feather uncovered memos that show a clear priority-- get schools open quickly, even if you have to cut corners to do it. Trump's whole life has been organized around a particular approach to rules-- if people can't punish you for breaking them, then they aren't rules. And as many corporate bigwigs know, a fine is not so much a "penalty" as a "fee paid to break a rule." Student safety? How much do we have to pay to be exempt from certain requirements. One Alpha School is still operating in areas where they don't have occupancy permits from the fire department. Said one memo, "Opening date > safety > operability > cost efficiency > permanence." 

Another memo explained the need to move at "Alpha speed." 

The only reliable way to achieve Alpha’s opening timelines is subtraction: fewer approvals, fewer handoffs, fewer phases, fewer assumptions, fewer permanent decisions. If a step survives only because ‘that’s how it’s done,’ it is not neutral, it is actively sabotaging the opening date.

3) Selectivity as a marketing tool

Feather provides a picture of how marketing documents framed the approach:

To sway families in places like Miami, New York, and San Francisco, Alpha would need to “invert the power dynamic,” the document says. “We deliberately limit enrollment opportunities, create waiting lists even when capacity exists, and establish application windows that close regardless of capacity—triggering the scarcity psychology that accelerates decisions and enhances perceived value.” It goes on: “We must compress the entire decision process into 48 hours through a carefully orchestrated immersion experience that provides all necessary information, emotional connection, and social proof within a concentrated timeframe, culminating in a binary decision point with genuine scarcity pressure.”

Internal documents note the need to attract the "right" families. I have seen reports that Alpha also screens students for their ability to stay engaged with a screen for at least twenty minutes.

And, of course, the hefty price tag, ranging from $40K in Texas to $65K in Manhattan immediately filters out plenty of prospective customers, while fostering an image of an elite, exclusive operation. Phillips Exeter Academy tuition is $71,797 for students who also get room and board; $56,077 to be a day student at the exclusive prep school. For a school that offers two hours a day on screens with a few more hours being "coached" to price itself in the same league is astonishingly ballsy.

But then, astonishingly ballsy is very much the Alpha School brand. Some days, MacKenzie Price reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes-- repeatedly and charismatically claiming that things that are almost too impossible to believe are true. 

Price also brands Alpha as a school for rebels, badmouthing public education and arguing that she (and her husband and their gazillionaire partner) have cracked the code to making education swift and simple and easy and awesome, and it sure seems unlikely but, oh, wouldn't it be great if it were true, and after all, she's got a big following on social media and outlets keep running her claims and the schools keep spreading and parents keep forking over their money, so surely what's she's selling is real and true (even if Alpha has still avoided any sort of independent examination). 

I suppose it's possible that, somehow, Price is On To Something. But as hard as I squinty, I can't quite make out the emperor's wardrobe or screensaver or whatever. I appreciate writers like Feathers who help me believe I'm not crazy. 

Chesterton's Fence

There are plenty of laws that come up in discussions of modern education reform. In particular, we talk about Campbell's Law and Goodheart's Law, both of which focus on the idea that once you focus on mastering a measurement, that measurement becomes useless (e.g. once you organize your school around getting better test scores, those tests scores cease to provide any real useful data). 

But there's another fine model, known as Chesterton's Fence. It comes from author G. K. Chesterton, and the idea is simple--

Don't tear down a fence until you know why someone put it up.

Just because you don't understand why a particular process, procedure, or tradition is in place, that doesn't mean you can remove it without ill effect. Not until you understand what the original purpose was, and what removal or change would do to that original purpose.

Education has been plagued with reformsters who want to see changes, and they want to see them Right Now. They rarely want to try to understand how aspects of the system were put in place, even if there is history to show that systems are in place in response to failed versions of that same reform in the past (check out works by Adam Laats and Audrey Watters to see historical reform failures laid out in familiar relief). 

Individual schools also suffer from new administrators who make decisions based on the understanding that "kept things running as they always have" isn't nearly as sexy on a resume as "change agent." They will be quick to pick out fences they can tear down and may not even stick around long enough to build anything in their place. 

Chesterton's Fence does not suggest that no fence should ever be taken down; it may very well turn out that removing the fence is a great idea. But when you are contemplating the removal of a fence, it is wise to know what problem the fence was solving, what the current status of that problem is, and what might happen if the fence is removed. Some unanticipated results occur precisely because nobody took the time to try anticipating them. Nobody took the time to ask why the fence is there or what might happen when the fence is blown up. 

ICYMI: Canadian Smokehouse Edition (7/19)

We didn't get it as bad as places like Detroit, but we've been at a good, solid 200+ for a couple of days, and if that number doesn't mean anything to you, congratulations on being Not Downwind of the Canadian forest fires. What a fun summer. My town band canceled a concert for air quality issues, which is the first time that has happened in 170 years. 

It's been a busy time, but I still have a list for you. Remember to share.

Barns, Go-Karts, and Strip Malls: the Wild West of Private Schools that Collect Taxpayer Dollars

This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It.

How To Research Private Schools Like an Investigative Reporter

If you read just one piece on the list this week, let it be these. ProPublica took a look at the world of taxpayer-funded vouchers and the schools that profit from them. It's thorough, alarming, and hugely informative. Outstanding work from the team.

"Venmo government," administered by ClassWallet

Want to know more about ClassWallet, one of the companies cashing in on voucher administration? Steve Nuzum has the story.

Linda McMahon & How the Pledge of Allegiance Represents a Worse America

Jed Bookout at Frazzled explains how the administration's patriotism push is bad news for the country and education. 

She's So Sure

Audrey Watters with another explanation of what AI does not and can not do. 

Tennessee, Exemplar for Meritocratic Rot

James Horn breaks down some numbers to show that Tennessee is using testing to reinforce inequity in the name of merit.

Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price

I have my doubts about the time saving, but Jill Barshay at Hechinger gets the rest right. 

Counter-Narratives: Mississippi Reading Reform

Paul Thomas explains some different, better ways to understand the narrative of the Mississippi reading miracle.

Found Him in the Front Hallway

At EduHonesty, a look through old discipline referral forms provides some insights into the sort of issues that disrupt a classroom.

Dismantling the Department of Education: Ten Bills That Ask Zero Questions About What Happens to Kids

Bruce Lesley takes a look at those ten bills being used to dismantle the Department of Education, and what they don't say about the students.

Dangers Are Embedded in Federal Waiver Proposal Being Advanced by Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce

Jan Resseger looks at a proposed waiver that would allow Ohio to turn federal money into block grants, part of a troubling trend.

Dear Alpha School: I Hope You’re Right

I'm still baffled by the continued fawning coverage of Alpha School, but this week Robert Pondiscio provided a useful critique from the reformy side of the aisle.

Let's try something a little more soothing this week. Huntertones are proof that you can still start a band in college and keep it going into your alleged adulthood. 

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Communication Communication Communication

We've been having a couple of weeks of medical adventures here with my 92-year-old mother, and it has reminded me of some of the things we get wrong in public education.

Here is Northwestern PA, most medical care comes one way or another through the folks of Unimaginable Piles of Money Collected. There are advantages to dealing with such an institutional behemoth, most notably a digitized medical record that is up-to-date and available to the patient and the family. It is routine for my sister to see and share test results before the doctor can make it around to the room to talk to us about them, and this is invaluable in terms of coming up with useful questions to ask. 

Hospitals deal with people who are extremely vulnerable, and that makes communication important. Our hospital quality check folks who sometimes amble into the room to ask questions about how well your health care professionals are communicating with you (best question asked-- "Do you know what you are waiting for?")

But this time we went through some real communications whiplash. We knew what they were doing, what they expected, what the goals were-- and then one morning we were moving--rapidly--in a whole other direction. Not because of any new change in the patient's condition; just in how the hospital was responding to it. No real communication about the what or why, catching both us and the facility on the other end of these choices flatfooted. It was an odd moment-- for about 24 hours, while nothing really changed for Mom, it still felt like we were handling an emergency situation.

It sucks enormously to be in a vulnerable medical situation and have nothing communicated to you beyond "We know what we're doing, so just sit there and trust us." It's frustrating and alarming, and if you have a family member who's good at interrogating the functionaries involved, you may make some progress.

The education world should take all of this to heart.

While it may not be a life and death situation, it feels hugely vulnerable to hand your child over to the care of others-- especially if you don't know those others personally. And it surely doesn't help if the school's answer to "What are you going to do with my child" is a hand wave and vague, "You know, school stuff." 

Many districts have an administration-level policy that opposes communication. Not that they phrase it quite that way, but the basic principle is "If we tell people about this, I will get phone calls, so let's just not tell them." This trick never works. Years ago my district contemplated closing an elementary school and decided to deal with the anticipated fallout by keeping the whole business quiet as long as possible. All they got for their trouble was members of the public who were angry about the proposed closure AND the lack of communication.

And it doesn't count as communicating if what you are really trying to do is use a carefully crafted line of baloney to "manage" the public. That is the opposite of communication, and its shiftiness is not hidden if you wrap it in shiny AI slop.

After roughly 100 very lonely parent open house evenings, I absolutely get that attempting communication from the school side can feel like shouting into the void. And we have made progresses-- the pressure to keep that digital gradebook up to date may be annoying some days, but from the parent side, it is a huge blessing. Digital gradebooks, e-mail, even those damned learning platforms-- it is easier than ever for parents to hunt down the information they want.

But none of that means that school districts, school buildings, and classroom teachers cannot do better at communicating to parents. Asking parents to add yet another app to their phones doesn't count. Information passed through channels that are already available and easy does count. For districts and buildings, this may mean spending some money. It is astonishing to me how many school websites do NOT have current information, but I know why it happens--because website maintenance has been assigned to someone who is expected to do updating work in spare minutes between the demands of their actual real job. I know how much time it takes to keep a website current; many school administrators have not a clue.

It is easy, living the dailiness inside the bubble, to imagine that the whole world is awash in the information of what's going on, what people are doing, what is the Usual Stuff of the school. When I passed out of that bubble at retirement, even I was surprised at how little information makes it outside of that bubble. (I wrote to my old district's leadership and board about the issue. "Do you want to do the job," they snarked back. No, because one, I'm retired and two, it needs to be done by someone inside the bubble.)

If you are a district administrator, a building administrator, or a classroom teacher, and you are not reaching outside the bubble at least once a week, you aren't doing enough. Talking to your students doesn't count-- they are inside the bubble with you. For the love of God, do not have an AI agent do it, because the resulting bloated bland and boring product is just noise. You have to let people know what you are doing.

Yes, I know-- lord, I know-- that you don't have time for this. But I am telling you that you can't afford not to take the time. It is how you build trust and support and partnership in your community. It is how you reduce the total amount of unnecessary fear and uncertainty and anxiety in your community (and really, these days, we all need less of that). Will you sometimes get pushback? But the correct response to pushback is to A) examine your premises and practices, B) make your case, and C) listen to the cause of the pushback and decide if it might be worth considering.

If we were better at this in education, reformsters over the last forty years would have heard a lot more, "I don't know what you're going on about. I know what my school does and your claim that they are a disasterific mess are just wrong!"

It's a big ask. It's one more damned thing. But right now I'm living through the difference between navigating with clear complete communication and being left to fumble through opaque and spotty communication, and the difference just feels really huge and the world, including the education portions of it, would be a much better place with less of the latter and more of the former. Inside the bubble, it may not feel like a big deal, but outside the bubble, it's huge. 

NY: District Will Install Teacherbot For the Fall. Yikes.

It is, of course, a rural district, a district located on the Seneca Nation reservation in Western NY.  The Salamanca City Central School District enrolls roughly 1400 students K-12, roughly a third of whom are Native American. 

And they're getting a "humanoid robot" teacher. 

There are so many red flags flying around this story. Take this description from Melissa Manno at New York Focus who talked to Andrew Siguel, CEO of Toronto-based Realbotix (more about them in a bit):

The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.

The "female" robot? Robots do not have gender, as far as I know. Students will use a unique id code to announce themselves to the bot, so the bot can id with whom it is speaking. Place your bets now on how many nanoseconds until students decide there is fun to be had by switching id codes. 

The robot will be tied into the school's tech curriculum, which was developed by Steve Sozniak "to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs," and I sure hope they aren't referring to all those coding jobs that are now being handed over to AI.

But hey-- nothing like waving jobs and technology at rural, marginalized districts (the district has roughly 79% low-income students) in an attempt to get them to sign up to be some tech bro's guinea pig.

And it won't just help students, who might, for instance, "upload photos of homework for feedback, ask the avatar to generate lessons on topics that interest them, or receive real-time translations in over 100 languages." You know. Cheat. But teachers benefit, too-

If a teacher loses their place during a lesson or needs a prompt on what comes next, Kiguel said, they can ask the robot for guidance because it has been loaded with the district’s curriculum.

Good lord in heaven. How the hell does a teacher "lose their place" in a lesson, unless it's in a district that is so tightly scripted that teachers are required to memorize the script? Maybe she turned two pages at once? And what the heck does it do to student respect for the teacher if they get to watch the teacher be redirected and corrected by a bot??  

Teacherbot will cost $57,590, but it will not come with some of the advanced features of Realbotix's other products, and if you're thinking "What features" or "How do this company think it's ready to make a roboteacher, anyway," well, hold onto your hat.

Realbotix is already in the humanoid robot business. Specifically, the humanoid sex robot business. 

Realbotix used to be Tokens.com, a crypto company (which let you rent real estate in Zuckerberg's Metaverse) that bought Simulcra, the company behind RealDoll, in 2024, into That was merged with RealBotix with the intent to expand above and beyond the sex robot biz into AI and other robots. That move was funded in part by investor Arthur Hayes, a crypto-bro with legal problems of his own (to add to the confusion, Bed Bath and Beyond just bought the Tokens.com domain). Realbotix also wants you to know that they make companion robots, intended to fight the loneliness epidemic (but not, apparently, with sex). 

The "how did this even happen" part is its own little story. Manna reports that Salamanca's superintendent Mark Beehler says that the "partnership with Realbotix began after a former colleague met an investor at a dinner and discussed the possibility of bringing the company’s robots into the education sector." 

The company provided a demo of the teacherbot "counseling" a child who has been bullied, with basically, "I'm sorry that happened to you. You should go tell a trusted adult." 

And you may be wondering about the wisdom of getting teaching support from AI and its tendency to just make shit up. Realbotix thinks it has that whole "hallucination" thing under control. 

To avoid AI-generated inaccuracies, Beehler said Realbotix trained the robot and avatar to say, “I don’t know,” instead of generating fabricated or misleading responses known as “AI hallucinations.”

That seems both unlikely and inadequate.

Look, I would not be particularly concerned if my child's teacher was a former sex worker, but I would sure as hell be concerned if it weren't even human. And I would be doubly concerned if that non-human was given a bunch of synthetic humanoid features designed to trick my children into thinking of it as a person rather than a plagiarism-fueled next-token-predicting machine. 

It would also be super if all these Frankenstein wannabe's stopped unleashing their ideas on poor, rural families who lack the clout to push back. Behhler says he'll assess the success of this nightmare fuel through "qualitative feedback" from teachers and students. And Ryan Schaaf of Notre Dame told Manna he's optimistic, but that it will require "thoughtful implementation" (yikes) and lots of teacher monitoring and guiding student interaction with the bot (in other words, another new tech making more work). Here's hoping this doesn't waste a whole year of student's learning.                                   

Chatbots Can't Read Your Essay (Part 1,299,437)

This is one more example of how a chatbot will NOT read your writing and provide useful insights into what you have created. I referenced this piece of mini-research before, but it deserves its own post (partly so I can find it easily when I want to reference it again).

Adam Kucharski is, according to his bio, a mathematician/epidemiologist. He wrote Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty, and his work has appeared in Wired, Guardian, and New Scientist, among others. 

Back in May, he published an account of a simple experiment. It started with a simple question-- how good is Copilot at finding insights in a data file. 

To test it out, I asked Copilot to look at differences in how people in US and UK expressed emotions in an Excel dataset that contained thousands of survey responses.

Copilot found all sorts of deep insights. The responses differ "mainly in tone, intensity, and wording style," the bot typed. And it went on to provide deeper analysis. "US responses were typically more direct and emotionally amplified, while UK responses were more restrained." or how about "UK responses use more poetic, metaphor-rich phrasing; US responses favor plain, action-oriented wording." And even "UK wording reflects understatement and nuance; US wording emphasizes clarity and emphasis."

Wow, that is some deep and nuanced analysis. 

Except that the dataset wasn't real-- and it wasn't different. Kucharski explains his technique:

First, I’d created 2000 free-text responses and labelled them ‘UK’. Then I copied and pasted the exact same 2000 responses but labelled these ‘US’. Finally, I combined them to create a dataset of 4000 total responses, and jumbled them up.

So Copiloty looked at two identical data sets--not made by a human in any country-- and found all these nuanced differences between them. It's almost as if the chatbot is just making shit up.

So he tried it again:

This time, I got an LLM to simulate 200 statements about career aspirations. Then I duplicated the dataset five times, labelling each one ‘US’, ‘UK’, ‘France’, ‘Germany’, ‘Italy’.

Again, the bot found a variety of differences and nuanced distinctions between the five different countries. It even generated a chart that shows the likelihood of people in a particular country pursuing particular careers-- In France, they are twice as likely as the UK to pursue a career in the arts. US citizens are most likely to pursue a career in business, and way more likely to pursue one in medicine. 

Again-- all this analysis is based on identical datasets generated by a bot that is not a citizen of any country. 

Kucharski's post gets into some specifics and offers links to his datasets. Plus some updated follow-ups by other folks who took a stab at the same experiment. And it addresses a bit the question of "Well, if you used a different process..." You know who doesn't have knowledge of the best ways to trick the bot into doing the thing for real? The kind of folks who think the computer is smart and will help them with their writing.

Any time someone tries to tell you that a chatbot can be a useful tool for analyzing your writing, you should be thinking of this (and many other) actual demonstrations of how badly bots do at this task. 

One of the most useful checks I've seen came from anonymous writer online who suggested that the best way to think of a prompt is that you're not asking "Do an X for me" but instead "What would an example of X look like?" The bot is not going to do an actual analysis-- it's just going to extrude an example of what an analysis would look like based one whatever stolen analyses it was trained on. 

It is not reading your work. It is not analyzing your work. It is most definitely not your writing partner or editor.