ICYMI: Busted Modem Edition (8/23)

It has been a real experience for most of this week, with the home internet appearing and disappearing in 5-10 minute intervals. I am waiting patiently for the Institute's provider to send new hardware, but in the meantime, getting work done in little microburst has been an adventure and a reminder the degree to which internet connectivity is now a basic utility and while not exactly a necessity, it certainly ties one's feet together to have it only limited capacity. Just reminder to maybe give your wi-fi connection a little hug and tell it how much you appreciate it today.

And now the week's reading list.

August 21, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, America's favorite on-line historian (and a Mainer, to boot) took a look at the history of school vouchers this week. 

We’ve Replaced School Security With the Creepiest Possible System

At Slate, so there's a paywall to contend with, but Nicholas Stewart takes a look at the horrifying state of school surveillance and "security."

FWISD put cameras in classrooms at struggling schools. Why?

And speaking of horrifying, intrusive surveillance, Fort Worth has stuck cameras in classrooms. Jacob Sanchez at Fort Worth Report has the whole awful story.

Controversial group that opened ‘Colorado’s first public Christian school’ will close after 13 years

Ann Schimke at Chalkbeat has the story behind the now-defunct group that launched Riverstone, a Christian charter school.

Parental Rights Bills Forgot Children Have Rights, Too

Bruce Lesley takes a dive into the legal questions surrounding the rights of parents-- and when the invocation of those rights imposes on the rights of children.

At “Quasi-Public” Private Schools, 100% of Students Get Tuition Vouchers. There’s Almost No Accountability.

Megan O'Matz at ProPublica looks at the schools that crop up to take advantage of voucher money in an unregulated marketplace.

Setting the Record Straight on ‘Parent-Led’ Groups Attacking Public Schools

Maurice Cunningham and Jeff Bryant team up for a look at those grass roots parent groups that are just big slabs of billionaire-serving astroturf.

Let's Try to Not Become Huge Dopes

John Warner reacts to a write who has proudly announced that he handles his summer reading list by having AI whip up some summaries.

Google Turns On Gemini A.I. for Students Using Its Classroom App

This should be a New York Times gift article, and if you have Google in your classroom, you need to know-- they've aimed AI straight at your students.

Data Centers are a Public Education Issue

Jennifer Berkshire looks at the overlap between public education support and data center opposition.

Some Thoughts about National Board Certification

Nancy Flanagan is a National Board Certified Teacher and she has some thoughts about what it takes-- and what politicians could leave alone.

Everybody Should Be Somebody’s Baby: How Americans Fail Early Learners

Nancy Bailey argues that we have a way to go if we really want to invest in the littles.

Fraught Trump Era Will Intensify Challenge for Teachers to Protect Students’ Rights and Serve Their Needs

Jan Resseger looks into the legal protections for students' rights, with some help from Derek Black

A College Just Cut Theatre Opportunities and Its Students Still Don’t Know Why

In Florida. But at least they still have a big expensive Innovation Hub. Chris Peterson reports for the On Stage Blog.

“Follow the Science” — Right Up Until It Asks an Inconvenient Question

TC Weber, as usual, covers a variety of topics, some very Memphis-related. But I don't want you to miss this section, so here's the excerpt, and maybe go read the whole post:

The other day, I was listening to a couple of young sports-talk radio hosts discuss how they learned about the football players of their generation.

They learned through the Madden video game.

Madden lists players and their skill sets. It assigns an overall rating, then breaks a player down into categories like speed, strength, awareness, agility, throwing power, and tackling. Those ratings are useful for playing the game, and they can be a good starting point for learning about players.

The fallacy comes when you decide the statistics truly define the player. Some players are better than their Madden ratings. Others seem unable to earn theirs when the real game is on the line. A player can possess every measurable tool and still fail to recognize what is happening in front of him.

My son, a high school quarterback, often talks about the difference between straight-line speed and football speed. The two are very different. Plenty of people can run a great 40-yard dash but somehow look slow on the field. They hesitate, take a poor angle, or need too much time to process what they see.

Football coaches quickly recognize the difference.

They understand that a number without context is only a number.

The same holds true when looking at student data. Test scores, attendance rates, discipline reports, grades, and growth measures can all provide insight. None should be treated as the be-all and end-all.

Like those coaches, teachers are best positioned to interpret what the data means. If you spend all day with a child, you develop context. You know whether a score reflects ability, anxiety, hunger, exhaustion, growth, boredom, or a rough morning at home.

That knowledge is not a rejection of data. It is what makes data useful.

Unfortunately, both science and data are routinely manipulated to serve unrelated goals—goals that do not necessarily benefit children.

Jose Felicianoi had some extraordinary talent beyond signing a few pop songs. Here he is on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1966 playing the daylights out of that guitar.

AZ: A Setback for Accountability

A coalition of Arizona voters had created a ballot measure to force accountability on one of the sloppiest taxpayer-funded voucher programs in the nation. But voucher supporters used an assortment of cheap tricks and technicalities to invalidate enough of the 420,000 signatures thrown out by the state's supreme court (members appointed by voucherphile Gov. Ducey) that the measure ultimately lacked enough accepted signatures to make it to the ballot. 

The measure, which Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children called a "calamity," would have forced some basic accountability and transparency measures on the program:

Safety measures to protect students, including a requirement that voucher-funded schools follow fire and safety codes and require background checks for all staff.

Bans on use of voucher funds for luxury and non-education items.

Return of unused voucher funds to public school district. Currently, families can bank unused voucher funds indefinitely, so those taxpayer dollars can end up filling a family’s college fund. In July 2025, reporter Craig Harris reported that around 10,000 accounts had banked over $10,000; over $440 million was sitting in accounts.

Reporting requirement to show how much voucher money is going to the private schools that accept taxpayer-funded voucher money.

Creation of a subsidy cap. Require that taxpayer-funded vouchers be available only to those families with income at or below $150,000. Currently pretty much all families are eligible, no matter how wealthy. 

Require academic measures. Voucher-funded schools would have to administer and report results on the same sorts of standardized tests used by public schools. Currently, private schools have no requirements to show how well they are actually educating the students whose tuition is subsidized by taxpayers.

This was just too much for the voucher supporters to bear. It would be a calamity if families couldn't spend taxpayer-funded voucher dollars on ninja training, diapers and cosmetics.

A post from Save Our Schools Arizona outlines some of the tactics used by the voucher lobby. Lawsuits challenged thousands of signatures on technicalities, throwing 47 different categories of objections. In one case, over 10,000 signatures were thrown out because a petition circulator used a mailbox instead of her home address out of fear for her safety. In one of the most odious examples, pro-voucher groups circulated a fake version of a petition. About 20,000 people signed both the fake and the real to make sure they had their bases covered, but that opened up a double-count of "invalid" signatures. 

After picking and nibbling by the army of voucher lawyers and lobbyists, the petition was left about 12,000 signatures short. 

It sucks, but the voucher lobby has a long history of promoting their program over the objections of actual voters. And for all the talk of school choice trading accountability for autonomy, Arizona has aggressively resisted any sort of accountability for their taxpayer-funded voucher program. 

That is one of the major takeaways from this dustup. Voucher fans weren't resisting an attempt to end vouchers or shut down vouchers; they were fighting and kicking and throwing money to ward off an attempt to impose some basic accountability and transparency. AFC claims that "a super-majority want a program that both works for families and ensures responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars" and that the union (because they love to invoke the Big Scary Union) "will continue to exploit these sentiments to advance supposed reforms that gut the program."

Well, yes. But "gut the program"? Either that language is a gross exaggeration meant to inspire fear and panic, or it's accurate because the point of the voucher program is not education, but to give a bunch of taxpayer-funded entitlements to wealthy Arizonans to spend on whatever they want with no oversight or accountability. And if that's really the point of the program, then maybe gutting is in order.

The other takeaways? There's a great deal of grass roots opposition to the Arizona taxpayer-funded voucher grift, and therefore a huge amount of fear among the voucher promoters, a bunch of frightened folks on a throne of bundled money. Can big piles of money keep the uppity peasants away from the castle walls forever?

No state has done more to actively overrule the voices of actual voters on this issue; ironic as the state is one of the few that lets ordinary citizens propose ballot initiatives (though that capability is being slowly choked in a sea of red tape). Here's hoping that the hundreds of thousands of voters behind those signatures find other ways to make their feelings known in the state capital. 

"AI Companies Do Not Care At All About Writing."

You may not have been paying close attention to the noise surrounding the news that Anthropic has tweaked its text-extruding LLM Claude so that it will now extrude text strings with "watermarks."  But the whole business is worth a moment of your attention.

First, we need to know what the "watermark" is, because it's not what you think it is. It's not some sort of sort-of-visible marking that anyone with eyeballs can spot. Claude will not extrude text that has "Claude" printed on it in large-but-transparentish print. Nor will there be invisible text or a special note in the metadata.

No, as Anthropic explained, the "watermark" will actually be a change in how the program strings words together. And as Jason Koebler points out at 404 (headlined with the quote in this post's title), it demonstrates the degree to which Anthropic has no real respect for or interest in the actual work of writing. Just in case you had imagined otherwise.

The watermark is not visible to readers. No hidden characters, no additional text. Just a "nudge" in the selection of the next probable word. Here's part of their explanation. 

Large language models like Claude work by generating one word at a time. Each time the model decides on the next word, it chooses among a list of potential candidates, ultimately selecting the most sensible or likely based on the preceding text. Take the sentence “The weather today was cold and…”. The next word is very unlikely to be “sugary.” But it is quite likely to be “overcast” or “grey.” Under most circumstances, it doesn’t matter much to the reader which of these latter two words the model ultimately chooses—the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way. In cases like this, the choice is settled by a random number.

Watermarking uses low-stakes choices like these—which occur many times over a piece of generated text—to leave a pattern in Claude’s responses. That pattern is undetectable to the reader, but is detectable to anyone who has a key that encodes it.

Emphasis mine.

But "overcast" and "grey" are different words, with different meanings. Koebler points to an essay by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and another by journalism academic Jeff Jarvis, in which he claims Anthropic “devalues writing” which confirm that, yes, word choice does matter. In making this choice, “Anthropic declares words fungible, language random, choice meaningless,” Jarvis writes.

But Koehler rightly sees an even more troubling foundational issue here.   

It does not matter to me, necessarily, whether the output of Claude’s garbage AI text is one way or is a slightly different way. But it does matter to me that AI data scientists at huge tech companies think that word choice doesn’t matter, or that it is possible to statistically use synonyms wherever without fucking with the meaning of a sentence.

Anthropic's post talks about writing as if it's a random generation of words or numbers. It is, in one Anthropic example, just a random roll of the dice.  

What Anthropic makes abundantly clear is that the question of how human writing happens, the company isn't even on their radar. They are working on an entirely different problem-- how to get a pair of dice to generate a sentence that more-or-less mimics strings of words in their training data. It is pointless to discuss chatbots as if they are just not far enough down the path to qualify as real writing tools because they are not even on that path. Anthropic wants AI-generated code to be exactly correct, but with words, one is pretty much as good as a bunch other.

The "watermark," visible only to Anthropic-created software, is meant to comply with the letter of the European Union's AI Act if not the actual spirit (See, Anthropic? Sometimes the exact wording matters!). And programmers have already figured out how to avoid it. 

It all reminds me of the great Mark Twain quote: The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

But mostly it's the umpteenth reminder that AI LLMs don't write in any human sense of the word, nor do their corporate overlords actually aspire for them to write in any human sense of the word.                                            

Shock Gloves Used On Students

We had barely had a chance to register outrage over the plan to spend $20 million taxpayer dollars on shock gloves for ICE (so they can be more abusive in less obvious and photographable ways) when the news dropped that Omaha public middle and high schools are already deploying the gloves for use against students. 

The Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (G.L.O.V.E.) is similar to a taser but doesn't break the skin with darts (because abuse that doesn't leave a mark is easier to hide). Compliant Technologies ("#1 in hands on de-escalation") has loads of demonstration videos. They were out plugging this thing three years, simultaneously arguing that on the one hand it will bring quick compliance and control and on the other hand is kind of like that thing chiropractors use on patients.

GLOVE is being used by school resource officers in Omaha and were purchased and deployed by the Omaha police department. McKenzy Parson for KETV passed along this delightful quote:

"What we've seen thus far is immediate compliance," Jason Cvitanov said. "That's a benefit to everyone involved, because it is such a low level of force being utilized by officers, which is the goal in every situation, gaining control, using just enough force to accomplish that task. And this would be after de-escalation attempts as well as verbal commands being provided."

Cvitanov appears to be both an Omaha police officer and a consultant with a group of "elite level professional combat athletes, law enforcement, military, and medical professionals." The Omaha police department spent about $60K on 40 gloves.

The gloves have apparently been used twice in the last year. NPR figures about 50 police departments are using the devices in about 20 states. Fortune reports "The CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E. products deliver shocks ranging from 324 to 362 volts and have a hard operational limit of 380 volts. By comparison, a taser can reach between 1,200 and 1,500 volts."

There are so many differences between a cop operating in a situation where someone has broken the law and an SRO operating in a situation where a student is being non-compliant, but here's one that doesn't get discussed often enough. A police officer collects someone who has broken the law and puts them into the legal system, and the two may never interact again as they each move on in a multi-level, many-parted world.

But to claim that using force -- electrical or otherwise-- against a student will never qualify as de-escalation, because the school is a small, closed system, and the use of force to solve a problem changes the student's relationship with the school and all the parts of it. That was part of the concept of SROs in the first place-- instead of the faceless scary authority of a uniform and badge, students could develop a daily relationship with Kindly Officer Krupke that would, hopefully, make it easier for Kindly Officer Krupke to intervene in positive and de-escalating ways. I know there are other reasons to oppose SROs, but I've seen this particular aspect work, sort of, in my old school.

But if Kindly Officer Krupke is going to become the guy who slammed a kid's head into the floor or gave her the old grab-and-zap for not complying with directions quickly enough, the school is building a different sort of relationship, and it's not helpful to anyone. If we're going to move the most dysfunctional sort of police-citizen relationship into schools, one based on forced compliance and authoritarianism, that will be bad for the culture of the school and the education of the students.

GLOVEs are worse because they are so easy. Now adults who already outclass students with size and strength don't even have to work up a sweat. Kid pisses you off? Just grab and zap. It's lazy authoritarianism, cheap and easy compliance culture.

GLOVEs don't belong anywhere, but they especially don't belong in schools. We unquestionably have issues with discipline and student conduct in schools, but this is not the way. Sure hope it doesn't spread.  

TX: DEI and National Board Certification

Texas previously created an incentive program for National Board Certification of Teachers, complete with $$ "reimbursement" for districts, but it may scuttle that because of scary DEI.  NBTC hasn't been hugely successful in Texas-- only about 1,178 out of 320,000 teachers have the certification. But it looks that's 1,178 too many for some legislators. Because "tolerance."

The state is pushing the National Board to comply with Texas's version of a "Don't Say Gay" law.  The Texas State Board of Education is worried about the diversity, equity and inclusion content-- especially when it comes to gender and sex stuff, as reported by Jaden Edison for the Texas Tribune.  

“About 10% of the training that a teacher would go to is based on DEI, gender identity and sexual orientation — and how to help transition children — which violates our state law and violates parental rights,” board member Julie Pickren said during the April meeting.

Pickensd shared some of the offending passages:

Teachers design and implement lessons that help students develop awareness of, sensitivity to, and respect for others. For example, accomplished teachers are aware that children may begin to question their sexual identity at a young age. Teachers know that acceptance of their curiosity will make them feel safe and secure. In such instances, teachers may feature children’s literature in which diverse gender roles are portrayed.

Yes, that sounds just terrible. Students wrestling with questions about their sexuality should understand that their curiosity and confusion is unacceptable, and they should not expect to feel safe and secure at school. 

Edison has continued to follow this story; I wish more reporters were doing so. I won't pretend the issues here aren't complicated and difficult, but the moment policy makers decide that parents have all the rights and children have none, they've embraced a "solution" that is simple and wrong. Children are not chattel.

It makes me wonder-- if parents have thrown their LGBTQ child out of the house for coming out, would a school district be contradicting parental choice and thereby violating one of these parental rights laws by trying to help the student deal with homelessness? 

ICYMI: Breathless Edition (8/15)

I swear-- I'll be back up to speed soon. But in the meantime, I wouldn't dream of leaving you without the week's reading recommendations. 

Facebook Billionaires Walk Out On Impoverished Students

If you haven't yet heard the story of Zuckerberg dumping yet another education-flavored project, Thomas Utican has it for you.

OMB and Russell Vought Receive 497,000 Comments on Controversial New Universal Grants Guidance

Jan Resseger reports that the Trump administration is getting some pushback on their latest hairbrained idea.

Humans understand what AI cannot

Helen Keller, AI, and teaching. From Ben Riley.

Despite their rhetoric, Private Schools aren't dramatically boosting teacher salaries with their unconstitutional, taxpayer funded windfall

Ohio's taxpayer-funded vouchers were supposedly going to boost private school teacher pay. Stephen Dyer has some actual facts to show that doesn't seem to be happening.

Does Alpha School Work for Regular Kids?

Short answer: no. Dan Meyer has a longer answer involving Alpha's sub-business called Unbound.

Tennessee School Privatization Group Seeks to Build Propaganda Machine

Somebody in Tennessee is hiring, and Andy Spears has some details. Anybody want to be a privatization PR shill?

"Outsourcing Discrimination"

It's not enough that religious schools want taxpayer funding-- they also want to leave their discriminatory practices in place. Josh Cowen explains the problem and looks at one possible solution.

Supporting Teacher Growth Through Trusting Relationships

Randi Brown writes for edutopia about a hot new concept-- maybe if admins treated teachers like human beings...

Improvisational theatre, meditation, and games support anxious teens

I taught theater, including improv, so this bit of research reported by Jonathan Kantowitz caught my eye. 

(Not) Everything Changes

"This changes everything!" Audrey Watters reminds us that this is pretty much never true in education.

Just a photo this week. This is Sabbaday Falls in the White Mountains, a sort of mini-Flume right off the Kancamagus Highway. It takes a long time for water to cut through rock like this, but nature is patient. May we be the same.

Federal Voucher Money Will Not Go To Public Schools

Remember "backpacks full of cash"? It was a phrase coined by reforster Jeanne Allen that captured the way that taxpayer-funded vouchers turned private school students into couriers, bagmen who simultaneously delivered and laundered taxpayer dollars so that public money could be directed to private religious schools. We may someday be nostalgic for the era in which such manipulations were necessary-- "Once upon a time, not only was the government not required to fund religious organizations, but they were actually rquired NOT to."

Vouchers were always an elegant solution to the question of "How do we get public money to private schools?" Private schools were already funded by a stream of students carrying backpacks stuffed with their parents' cash. To get government-to-school funding going would require a whole other stream to be created, but vouchers could just hop onto the stream that already existed. Parents could stuff the backpacks with taxpayer dollars as well as their own. 

It's important to keep this model in mind when discussing one of the hot issues around the federal voucher system.

Voucher fans argue that federal vouchers will benefit public schools, which is a careful choice of wording because the federal vouchers will not go to schools-- they will go to families, to shove into their child's cash backpack.

For private schools, that's a distinction without much difference, because vouchers pack new cash into the same old funding stream. But for public schools, it's a completely different issue.

The public school funding stream is taxpayer to government to school district. There is no public school version of a funding stream fed by individual students carrying backpacks full of cash. That is, in many ways, antithetical to the public school mission.

In the private school backpack model, the size of the student's backpack determines where they can go with that load of money. A large backpack full of loads of cash? You get to go to Philips Exeter. A fanny pack loaded with a small, lonely stack? You gete to go to Bob's Strip Mall Academy. 

How the market treats you depends on how big and how stuffed your backpack full of cash is.

The public system is designed to work differently. All the cash comes into one big pool, and every student gets to swim in it regardless of what their familiy's contribution might have been. (Does it work perfectly? No, particularly because of the ties to housing. The irony here is that the public mission is undermined by market forces in the housing market).

Point is-- federal voucher dollars are not going to go to public schools unless the public schools can figure out a way to create the new funding stream for students carrying cash backpacks, and that create a whole new set of issues. If a special tutoring program is available to Susie because she has a backpack of federal voucher money, then why shouldn't that tutoring be available to any or all students, regardless of backpack status? 

Addendum: If a district already has a program that charges fees, then the federal voucher would help families pay that fee, but that would result in zero new revenue for the district.

If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to pay for a basic service, how do we square that with the mission of providing the same basic service for all? If a public school sets up a program for backpack-bearing students to "buy" an extra service, how do we justify only providing that special service to some students?

These dilema are unavoidable because, again, the federal voucher program will not give money to schools, but to students. For private schools, that will mean business as usual. For public schools, that will mean a new business model that will have to somehow co-exist with the traditional public service mission. There are undoubtedly some public districts out there well-positioned to wrestle with this issue, but it would be great if governors and districts put some real thought and discussion into the issue, because federal voucher dollars will only make it to public schools via a new and potentially troubling path.