This works fine for voucher advocates-- gives them a whole constituency that will fight hard to keep their free state subsidy. They will also argue that, of course, the vouchers are going to start out by supporting students who are already in private schools. So what?
How do you answer that question? Here's a couple of so what answers.
Vouchers are bait and switch.
Taxpayer-funded voucher programs are advertised as a way to rescue poor students from "failing public schools." Backers argue "Wouldn't you like some tax dollars to help rescue students in need?" which plays a whole lot better than "Wouldn't you like some tax dollars to help subsidize the tuition costs of private school students?" We know the answer to that second question-- the voters repeat that answer every time they are asked to vote for a taxpayer-funded voucher system and say, loudly, "No."
Imagine you gave money to Save The Children because of those pictures of sad poor kids and it turned out your money was buying ice cream for rich kids in the suburbs. That's taxpayer-funded school vouchers.
In fact, vouchers may actually make private schools less accessible. In Iowa, Princeton University researchers found that vouchers spurred a private school tuition increase.
Vouchers increase state education costs.
"Let the money follow the child" is another standard voucher pitch. But when vouchers go to students already in private schools, that's not what happens. Instead, vouchers that go to students already in private schools adds on to the total cost for the state.
Say that in your state 100 students attend public school and 10 attend private school. The taxpayers are funding education for 100 students. The vouchers go in, and one kid leaves public school while 9 private school students sign up for vouchers. Now the taxpayers are funding education for 109 students.
If the voters had decided they wanted to do this, that would be a choice. But nobody has pitched taxpayer-funded school vouchers as "Since we are paying for the education of students in public schools, we think taxpayers should also subsidize the tuition of students in public schools as well."
Nor are vouchers simply giving private school parents their own tax dollars back to spend as they wish. Only the super-rich families contribute enough property tax dollars to fund their own children's vouchers (and not even those families if they have many children). Voucher funds require many taxpayers to chip in, not just the voucher-using families.
Taxpayer-funded voucher programs end up being "budget busters." They represent an increase in education costs for the state that are neither discussed honestly ahead or time nor properly budgeted for. Every taxpayer-funded voucher that goes to a private or home-schooled student represents an increase in the total state cost for education. That money has to come from somewhere.
There are many reasons to oppose taxpayer-funded school vouchers, and lord knows I get into plenty of them elsewhere, but for purposes of responding to those folks who think it's no big deal that vouchers mostly go to students who were attending private school anyway, the above two points are the answer to "so what."
Once a year, I'm the director of a local writing competition for high school students in the various school districts of the county. The competition is in honor of one of the giants of English teaching in our area; she graduated from here, worked in the original OSS, became a lady CEO, taught English, and left the classroom only because there was such a thing as a mandatory retirement age (you can read about her here).
The contest has run for thirty-some years, and it is precisely the sort of thing that cheatbots make challenging, though historically our winners write way better than bots do, and I work hard to design a bot-resistant prompt. But it's a fun time for me-- part of my duties include being first reader and culling the hundreds of entries down to a manageable stack for table judges.
So that has been my week. But I still have a reading list for you.
Maurice Cunningham peels back the masks on another Massachusetts assault on public education, and reminds us that National Parents Union is none of those three things.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nifty bar chart that lays out in quick and simple manner where the taxpayer-funded vouchers are actually going.
One of the nation's major charter school scams might actually result in jail time for the scammers who pocketed $22 million of taxpayer dollars in their massive fraud.
It's not just that the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department has decided only the civil rights of white guys are being threatened-- it's that they're being anti-transparent about what they are and are not doing. ProPublica has sued, and here explains why.
Johnathan Kantrowitz is talking about Australia in this post, but some of the description sure sounds familiar (including panic over declining test scores).
There has been a lot of noise and wrestling about with the New York City schools' attempt to craft AI guidance, and while I don't generally look to NYC for guidance on anything, these five objections from Leonie Haimson are an excellent guide to the sort of questions you should be asking about your local school district's attempt to cope with AI. If you want more, Chalkbeat covers the parent rebellion here.
Meet Schools for America. Well, more to the point, watch out for Schools for America.
This group was launched just a month or so ago. And despite the echo in the name, it is not related to Teach for America.
It's an "issue advocacy organization exclusively dedicated to rightsizing the regulatory barriers that prevent new schools from opening across the United States." Because if there's anything that education needs, it's a group that lobbies for less regulation of charter and private schools. The group is "laser-focused on a singular mission: unlocking new school supply."
And not just by lobbying-- they "partner directly with state legislators, committee staff, and governor's offices to introduce and advance reform legislation."
Before we draft a single bill, we conduct granular regulatory audits—identifying the specific zoning codes, fire marshal interpretations, and occupancy classifications that block new school formation in a given state. This isn't theoretical research. It's litigation-grade documentation designed to be dropped in a committee hearing.
In other words, a bill mill. Write the bill and hand it off to a cooperative legislator.
They target some particular sorts of legislation. Zoning blocks schools form being opened in some neighborhoods. Fire codes are too strict ("A 15-student co-op in a church hall isn't the same fire or occupancy risk as a 500-seat campus") Occupancy classifications are too hard on tiny schools ("a 15-student learning pod shouldn't require a $500,000 renovation").
You see the pattern here. Small "schools," like the microschool in your neighbor's rec room or the church basement, should be able to set up a "school" without having to follow school rules. At LinkedIn they declare, "Demand for new schools—microschools, homeschool cooperatives, private schools, and innovative learning models—has never been higher."
And if you have any doubt of where they want to head, there's a tab on their site-- The Florida Blueprint, honoring Florida's new law that makes it easier to set up your pop-up-and-cash-in school in the Sunshine State. She worked as a staff assistant for Representative Paul Ryan in 2011, then went to work for the Romney Presidential campaign.
SfA's executive director is Jane McEnaney. According to her LinkedIn McNaney is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross with degrees in Political Science, Latin America, and Latino Studies. Then she went to Illinois, where she worked for Illinois Policy Institute, then worked for Governor Bruce Rauner for three years. She served as midwest director for TechNet ("the voice of American innovation" aka advocacy group for our tech overlords). She helped found ReDirect Chicago, an organization that seems to have existed to promote "direct education funding" in Chicago and push privatizer and upward-failing Paul Vallas in the 2023 election.
After that she went to work as Director of Education Policy Initiatives for the State Policy Network, that delightful network of right wing thinky tanks, dark money distributors, and advocacy groups. After that, she landed at Schools for America as ED.
LinkedIn does list her as a founder for SfA, but hers is the only name appearing anywhere on the site. A promotional launch video includes a glowing endorsement by Ryan Delk, a silicon valley start-up guy who currently is running Primer, a micro-school start-up outfit that pushes teaching through the "timeless foundations of American education" aka old elementary school primers. Delk lists himself as a member of the SfA board.
But the privatization of schooling has always been partly driven by the real estate business, so advocacy to make the commandeering of real estate easier seems right on brand. On the dead bird app, privatization fans like Alpha School's MacKenzie Price bemoan how sad it is that public schools are so reluctant to transfer taxpayer-owned assets to edupreneurs.
So I'm guessing this outfit will be active, whether helping write and pass bills to replicate Florida's "Schools of Hope" program to help private operators take public school real estate, or clearing away all those regulations getting in the way of the latest pop-up school scam. Keep an eye peeled for them in your neighborhood.
Oliver plays this one as close to straight as I've ever seen him do, I suspect because he seems seriously and deeply angry about the damage being done by chatbots. This is worth a watch, but there are two points well worth underlining-
One, these bots were rushed to market long before any guardrails or responsible oversight were worked out (and really, our tech overlords don't seem in any hurry to work on them).
Two, the chatbots number one job is to get you to keep using the chatbot. They need you to upgrade to a paid version, and then they need you to stay with that bot as long and as often as possible, because that's how they maximize revenue. Again, the main job of the chatbot is to keep you talking to the chatbot.
As always, there is language of which my mother would not approve. But some of this is shocking-- I knew most of these stories, but to see it laid out, and hear the quotes from the techbros-- it's all very alarming. And a reminder that these bots should be nowhere near children.
Ben Riley has pulled a lot of attention lately for the story of his father, who turned to AI for advice on how to manage his cancer, and died because of it. Riley gets into the experience of being a New York Times story subject in a recent post, and looks into the reporters idea to show oncologists the advice the AI was providing. Riley shares their responses, and even for AI, it is shockingly, horribly wrong.
A trained cancer doctor would recognize that it was nonsense. An amateur might be fooled by how AI manages to mimic the look and feel of s real medical report.
This points to a recurring theme in AI use. The "human in the loop" principle is all about including a human being who can actually understand--and check-- the AI output. Or consider one of the more popular AI assignments for students-- have a LLM write about a topic you know well, and count up all the mistakes it makes. In other words, experts.
Large Language Models can perfectly mimic form and confidence. They have, literally, no shame, less than even the most shameless bullshit artist that ever sold you some Florida real estate or a White House super-duper ballroom. They are elegantly mechnized Dunning-Kruger machines.
I recently sat and talked to someone who works in the computer tech and coding world and describes himself as a power user of AI. AI does save him and his team time, but there are caveats. AI doesn't remember what it has done. "It's like talking to a smart person with Alzheimer's." And it is not trustworthy. The project has to be broken down into chunks, and then each chunk has to be run through testing, designed by and/or involving a human coder in order to determine if the code actually does what it is supposed to do. The resulting process is still faster than the old all-human approach, but it still requires the involvement of humans with expertise to check the work, go back, re-do, check again, and on and on. It is most definitely not "Press a button and an hour later a fully-completed project is ready to go."
The conversation raised lots of questions for me. If the AI is doing all the entry-level grunt work under the watchful expert eye of human accountability sinks, then where will the future expert eyes come from?
I'm also thinking of all those folks happily burbling "I use AI to write my journalism-flavored content" or "I use AI to write my lesson plans," and wondering if their process looks similar, if they are taking the bot through building up a lesson plan step by step, carefully examining each product every step of the way with their own expert eyes. Because I'm betting not.
Because while coding involves a lot of time-intensive grunt work hours that can be collapsed by AI, writing things does not. Doing the thinking work (outlines, brainstorming, etc) is how you get ready for the writing work, and that includes writing a lesson plan. If you have the AI write the outline, you still have to do the thinking part. In short, if you use the bot to write your lesson plan in a responsible, professional manner, I don't see it saving you any amount of time.
In fact, if you really are an expert, I'm betting lesson plans or writing by bot, if done well, will actually take more time than just doing it yourself. The people who are finding it botting their way through the work are, just like the students using cheatbots, the folks least qualified to use the bot without producing junk.
It is the central irony of AI is that it's really only safe to use if you are already an expert in your field. And that's a terrifying thought when you consider that AI has the potential to completely gut the pipeline that would ordinarily produce experts.
Mind you, expertise is not a guarantee of well-used bots. AI repeatedly encourages users to trust its illusory expertise. Last week CNN reported that a top-ranked lawyer at "one of the most prestigious firms on the planet" became the latest in a long string of lawyers tripped up by AI error. He had to send a letter of apology to a judge after submitting a filing loaded with errors-- it took three pages to highlight and correct all of them. The mistakes were caught by opposing counsel.
All of this underlines one clear idea-- of all the people who shouldnt be using AI, students shouldn't be using it the most. Jessica Winters, in her recent New Yorker article, cites a host of experts who point out the many ways that AI is not a useful, appropriate, or even safe tech to include in education. But it is already oushed heavily in all manner of K-12 education.
The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination.
There are so many reasons to keep AI away from students. At the very least, we should be replacing all the cute little "become an AI expert" lesson plans helpfully provided by AI corporations with lessons about what AI is not and can not do, and nwhy children should avoid it like they avoid strangers in vans offering them candy.
Winters asks what it will take to push AI out of schools, and the answer, I think, is a whole hell of a lot because a lot of very powerful people have bet a very large amount of money that they can push AI everywhere, regardless of what harms it will do. It is as if the wealthiest corporations in the world have bought a vast supply of very powerful crack and they now are desperate to move it into any market they can think of.
AI is not for amateurs in any field, and I only grudgingly accept that in some forms, it may have some use for some experts. In education, I think it will be awesome for cranking out lesson plans that administrators demand but don't read and teachers generate but don't use. For anything else, educators had better be prepared to use it like grown-ass experts in their field and not like a 14-year-old trying to generate a term paper ten minutes before it is due. And if using it like an expert in your field turns out to create a process that is longer and less productive than the non-AI version, well, experts should know how to get the job done.
The Board of Directors is trying soccer this spring and their first match was yesterday, in the rain. They have not yet revealed any special aptitude for the game, but it does involve a lot of running hard up and down a field, and that is their preferred sporty activity. It gets us all outside and moving around while breathing air and touching grass and just generally interacting with real things and other humans, and that seems like rather a huge win.
We have been a low-screen household since they boys were born. They have no phone, no tablet, little tech at all, and watch only a tiny bit of tv. Most of their screen time happens, as you might guess, at school. I'm at peace with that, for now, because they do need some basic computer literacy to deal with the world, and confining it to school seems like an easy way to put guardrails around it. We'll see if my old district (where the board attends school) will get more restrictive about this stuff.
The hard part of a school's tech policy is parents, so I am hoping that we don't-give-my-kid-a-phone parents will be growing in numbers (because if you want your child's school to have a policy restricting smart phone use, you could help by not giving your kid a smart phone).
Here's the reading list for the week. Enjoy it in good health.
The 74 invited some folks to write a response to a Derrell Bradford piece plugging the federal voucher program. Jenny Muniz, Nicole Fuller, Ashley Harrington, and Hal Smith replied with this piece that absolutely nails the point contained in this sentence--
“Choice” is a compelling slogan, but with private school vouchers, it’s the school’s choice, not the families.
Jennifer Berkshire notes that Arne Duncan and the usual gang of reform-loving nominally-Democrat privatizers have decided to shill for Donald Trump's federal voucher program. Shame on the lot of them. She writes, "Ten years later, they’re back, armed with another pig and plenty of lipstick."
Well, Stephen Dyer is pretty sure they're dumb as rocks, and he uses some colorful language to explain why the guys trying to get rid of Ohio's property tax are absolutely and spectacularly in the wrong.
Rachael Gabriel is a professor of Literacy Education at U of Connecticut and co-editor-in-chief of The Reading Teacher, so it's likely that she knows what the heck she is talking about, which puts her ahead of so many people pushing the science of reading these days. So go ahead- read one more piece about SoR. This one's at The Progressive.
Speaking of Floridian grift, don't forget Schools of Hope, the program that allows charters schools to just take buildings from the public school system. It was supposed to only affect the low-achieving public schools, but-- surprise!
Lauren Brown offers ideas about favoring content over the vagueness of teaching "reading skills." Not sure I agree with every single word of this, but it's worth thinking about.
Well, there's no actual bloodbath, but this is the New York Post coverage of Episode #1,659,437 of Why Education Should Not Depend Upon The Kindness of Rich Guys.
Look, no school should be held "accountable" via Big Standardized Testing. But Tennessee lawmakers decided that since tests weren't showing voucher schools to be doing better than, or even as well as, public schools, the solution was to just not make voucher schools take the test. So much for accountability via an informed free market.
Dan Meyer writes about the misalignment between humanity and edtech companies, as well as the misalignments between people who want to teach and people who want to learn.
George Evans reached out to me to say that he had written something I might like to read and by damn he was right. This is a layered essay about the reach of teachers and the ways things come back to us later. I am always happy to find new writers that I hadn't previously found and wish more folks would send me recommendations, self- or otherwise. One thing about the interwebs and the people who write about education on them is that those writers tend to cycle through quickly. Of the people I was reading and sharing with umpty-ump years ago, only a handful are still at it. So I'm always excited to meet new folks.
James Horn reports on the Pennsylvania school district that has decided that students may not opt out of screens-- even though they have an opt-out policy.
Jonathan Kantrowitz reminds us that having small humans use devices designed for grown humans opens the door to all sorts of problems. So maybe let's rethink using those AR headsets with third graders.
Have you heard of Emily Hart, the nurse who loves God, guns, and making "illegals" go away? She's a darling of the MAGA crowd, with a huge online following. And she doesn't exist, but she is helping put through school the 22-year-old med student who created her. From EJ Dickson at Wired.
Noah Hawley writing for The Atlantic tells of his strange encounter with the very rich. And while it's all worth reading, there is this--
It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.
This week at Forbes.com I looked to Ohio, where one more school board wants folks to understand that hate does, in fact, have a home in their district. And they're getting sued for it.
Trombones and Danny Elfman-- what else could a person need.
Subscriptions are free now and forever. Well, probably not forever. But as long as I'm alive and doing this.
Then there was that time in 2017 when the district decided they'd drop $80 or $90 on a bunch of cool software, including a program (I am not making this up) recommended because it was a big hit in Uruguay.
But this school year something happened. Maybe it was the tide shifting nationally, maybe parents had had enough. Maybe the fact that LAUSD followed the national trend and completely banned cell hones from classes. But parents started putting pressure on the district.
Actually, I could believe it was the device ban. It took effect in February 2015, and it was one of the toughest ones in the country-- no personal devices, including not just smart phones but also smart watches. And that ban just made the presence of the iPads stick out. As NBC quoted one parent, who found their child was using the school-issued iPad to watch Youtube and play Fortnite--
“It makes no sense to me,” Byock said. “We’ve banned the cellphones, but it doesn’t matter, because the kids are using the school-issued devices in exactly the same way.”
Exactly (Also, if you haven't come across this one yet, students years ago figured out that you can "chat" via a shared Google document).
The district doesn't have a policy in place yet, but they have passed a resolution to get it done. Minimize the screen time, eliminate it entirely for earliest grades, encourage the use of paper and pen assignments. It states in part:
While access to and developing skills in technology are critical in a digital world, excessive screen time can be associated with vision problems, increased anxiety and depression, addictive behavior, reduced attention span, difficulty managing emotions, lower academic achievement, and weaker cognition, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. A growing body of research indicates that excessive and unstructured screen use can negatively impact student attention, mental health, and overall wellbeing and can be particularly harmful for younger students. Research indicates that children 8 to 11 years old who exceed screen time recommendations are at higher risk for obesity and depressive symptoms and have scored lower on cognitive assessments.
The ability to stand up to tech companies and computer-related FOMO is coming just in time, just as Silicon Valley is hell bent on trying to convince us that schools should be packed to the rafters with awesome AI crap. It's inevitable! You don't want your students to be left out!
Well, yes. I kind of do. It is ironic that LAUSD, with its history of boneheaded tech moves, is the first major district to make a conscious attempt to dial back the screens for students. But it would be great if they were the leading edge of a new wave that minimized screen time for the next generation.
