AZ: Charter Shenanigans From Primavera

Meet Damian Creamer. His LinkedIn profile lists him as a "courageous innovator" and "future-ready leader," and if nothing else, he seems to have mastered the innovation of becoming a future-ready profiteer in the charter biz.

Creamer graduated from Brigham Young with a BA in Spanish back in 1995. There's a six-year gap in his LinkedIn CV, but in 2001 he landed on a pair of big ideas, launching Primavera Online School and Strongmind (which for some of us may have unfortunate echoes of classic Homestar Runner). 

Primavera is the cyber charter; Strongmind is the company that provides the actual education stuff. Primavera, owned by Creamer, collects that tuition payments for the students, then pays Strongmind, owned by Creamer (who is apparently the only shareholder), to provide the instructional programs. This is what we call a "related party transaction," and Arizona is a wild west playground for such shenanigans. A 2017 report from the Grand Canyon Institute found that 77% of Arizona's charter schools operate with related party transactions. It's supposed to be "efficient" and if your goal is to efficiently enrich the folks running these operations, well, then, sure. Maybe you imagine guys like Creamer having tough negotiation sessions with himself ("I'm not going to buy this service from me unless I can offer myself a 20% cut in costs").

A decade after launching his con-joined business children, Creamer did go back to school to the Thunderbird School of Global Management (ASU) and Harvard Business School Executive Education. 

Grand Canyon Institute gave Creamer his own report last year, explaining just how complicated this self-enrichment shell game can become.

Damian Creamer. an entrepreneur, oversees and profits from multiple entities, Primavera online charter school, a.k.a. American Virtual LLC, and operates under the for profit Management Group American Virtual, LLC, StrongMind, the software entity that he contracts with, and Verona Learning Partnership which was built on the nonprofit assets built by Primavera and now has Valor Preparatory Academy charter school under its umbrella. StrongMind even has another LLC in the Philippines.

Creamer also gets to play educational expert. Here he is opining about "learning science" with some great argle bargle like 

At the heart of this is StrongMind Intelligence, a foundational infrastructure layer that Creamer and his team are developing to enable learning systems to operate in accordance with learning science. “StrongMind Intelligence is not a feature. It is not a chatbot,” he explains. “It is the intelligence layer that models the learner continuously and supports real-time adaptation.”

Or this glowing interview on IdeaMensch with the "visionary education entrepreneur" prasising how "His work is grounded in the belief that autonomy, competence, and connection are essential psychological nutrients for learning, and that technology—when designed ethically and intentionally—can amplify, not replace, human impact."

In several interviews Creamer talks about how he makes all important decisions by 2 PM. He is just an action guy-- this next bit turns up in more than one Creamer interview:

Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. I bring ideas to life by pressure-testing them early and grounding them in purpose. If an idea doesn’t clearly improve learning, empower people, or move the mission forward, it doesn’t make the cut. Once the “why” is solid, I focus on the simplest possible version that can create real momentum. From there, it’s about getting the right people in the room—product, engineering, UI/UX, learning, marketing, operations—and creating shared ownership. The best ideas get better when they’re challenged.

I like to move quickly, but not recklessly. I believe in shipping, learning, and iterating. Progress beats perfection every time. We launch, we listen, we adjust and we keep moving.

 He is just loaded with tech bro bromides. He likes to stay "ruthless about priorities and intentional about focus." He stays productive "when I'm in flow and designing my environment to support it." His early career failure? "Not trusting myself to make decisions." He screwed up by listening to other people. He likes to listen to Joe Rogan.

And he's right there with the AI revolution. ChatGPT is his "thinking partner," and he's counting on agentic AI to help keep his learning software focused and adaptive. There is so much more, although none of it is about the actual nuts and bolts of education. Which is a real choice, given that cyber charters perform so poorly that even charter fans like the Fordham Institution scold them.

The nuts and bolts of making money, however, are well addressed by Creamer. According to a 2025 report from Grand Canyon Institute by Dave Wells and Curtis Cardine. Some of their findings are stunning.

Arizona charter schools get a whopping 85% to 95% of the funding that brick and mortar charters get, and yet cyber charters, including the Arizona variety, get much worse results than brick and mortar schools. Primavera was great at hanging onto money; by 2015, they had accumulated over $45 million in assets. 

At the same time, Primavera was spending millions on curriculum, software and support purchased from Strongmind. Creamer has been passing a lot of money between his left and right hands.

Transitioning from non-profit to for-profit involved all sorts of new entities that appear to be simply Creamer putting on a variety of party masks. In the meantime, Grand Canyon computes that Creamer accumulated over $75 million in profits.

Meanwhile, the investigative team with Craig Harris at 12News found other ways that Creamer has been raking in the money. They found that 78% of all taxpayer dollars that went to Primavera went to "management." Meanwhile, there's a big fat "stockholder equity fund" with around $10 million parked in it-- that fund benefits "exactly one person: Damian Creamer." Since 2017, 12News computes that Cramer has paid himself $24 million. He did, however, managed to give some hefty gifts to Congressman Andy Biggs and State Senate President Warren Peterson, who have been vocal defenders of Primavera. 

But, hey-- if Creamer can actually deliver on all his talk about brilliantly leading to awesome conclusions, maybe he's worth all that money. So, is Primavera accomplishing great educational achievements with its students?

No. No, it is not.

Primavera is in the news these days because State Superintendent Tom Horne just rescued Creamer from the Arizona State Charter Board, which was about to shut Primavera down based on three straight years of a D grade. Creamer started laying folks off in anticipation of the impending charter revocation. Not that Creamer didn't have a Plan B-- Primavera can just switch to a private school and cash in on Arzona's taxpayer-funded school voucher program. They'll even give out free laptops, and no state tests to take, either!

The state board started the process of shutting Primavera down in March of 2025, and they were just about there when Creamer got Horne to back his "administrative error" argument. Which said that the school should have been judged as an "alternative school" rather than a "traditional" one. The school had been rated as an alternative school for many (but not all) years since the designation was created in 2012. Creamer says he made a mistake and didn't catch it because he was busy caring for his wife, and also COVID. 

I am wondering why Arizona has different standards for "alternative schools." Arizona defines such schools as those that "serve specific populations of at-risk students" or a student who "is unable to profit from a traditional school setting" and I guess the idea here is that alternative schools are expected to fail, so we'll lower the bar for them so that their failure is less obvious on paper. But if alternative schools are designed to create success in ways that traditional schools don't, that seems different than just saying "this is a school for students who probably won't succeed."

"We have the students who are already in academic trouble" is the common refrain of cyber charters, and it's a legitimate observation (though arguably less so since COVID drove some traditionally successful students into cyber settings), but that's the business you're in, so shouldn't you be better at it? Primavera has been at this for twenty-five years-- shouldn't they have figured out how to do better than the same failure rate that a traditional public school would experience with these students? Especially as I am led to believe, by cyber charter teachers who would rather not go on the record, that cybers work hard to cook the books for that special smell of success.

Oh well. Horne has retroactively declared Primavera an alternative school for the years its performance was subpar, and now that same performance is hunky dory. The state charter board is pissed, but Creamer is still rich and well-connected. Just another day in Arizona. 

IA: Choice Fan Calls For Actual Choice

It finally happened.

School choice fans virtually never campaign against the real obstacles to school choice. Those obstacles are not located in the public school system-- they are created and maintained by the private schools. Most voucher laws include language that specifically protects the school's ability to operate as they wish, including discriminating against aspiring students for any reason they choose-- or no reason at all. That includes exempting themselves from laws requiring IEP compliance for students with special needs.

It's almost as if the real purpose of voucher programs is not to provide choice for students, but to provide public tax dollars for private often-religious institutions.

Never have we heard a pro-choice legislator stand up to say, "For real choice, we have to require that voucher-accepting schools must serve all comers."

But that rare unicorn of a legislator just turned up in Iowa, of all places.

Iowa is one of the voucheriest states in the country. 99% of the private school students in Iowa are getting taxpayer dollars to subsidize their education (and most of them were private school students before they got the taxpayer-funded voucher). Every private school in the state is being subsidized to some degree by taxpayers. 

But here comes U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra, a Trump-backing businessman and politician.

Feenstra dropped this school choice bomb at a recent talking-to-conservatives event. As reported by Katarina Sostaric for Iowa Public Radion:

“I am supportive of the idea of ESAs,” he said. “I just will say this, that every school has to make sure they take every child, right? If we have to compete on a level playing field, the playing field has to be level all the way. That’s so important.”

“When we start looking at raising all boats, we have to make sure that all schools can take all kids,” he said. “If you have a child that has an IEP, and you’re a parent, the parent should decide, ‘Hey, I want my child to go to that school,' and the school should accommodate.”

This is extra special because Feenstra is running for governor, though he could offer no specifics about how exactly he would make his wild idea an actual policy.

It is rare (like Yeti-riding-a-unicorn rare) for a choicer to call for actual choice. Some folks on the right have been warning about this for a while, arguing that vouchers are just a long=game way for government to get its grubby hands on private schools. 

They may have a point. Or Feenstra might actually have thought through the real implications of calling for school choice. Or he may be trying to make taxpayer-funded vouchers more palatable to the voters (voters have never ever, given the choice) approved school vouchers. 

Don't get too excited about this guy. On the same occasion, he argued that teachers should be freed from paperwork so that they can focus on "teaching fundamentals, like math, reading, science and 'the correct history.'” And if you have any doubts about what that means:

“But I’ll say this also, God is in control, right?” Feenstra said. “We have to always remember who is in control of this great country, this great world, and it’s our God, right? Kids have to understand that.”

When asked about that comment, Feenstra said the question was “misrepresenting” what he said.

“I’m just simply saying that parents should decide where they want to go to school, private or public,” he said. “And it’s whatever a parent’s faith believes, they should be able to send their child to the school that they want that child to go to.”

Feenstra also wants to lower and freeze property taxes and fund schools with fairy dust. Just kidding. He didn't offer an idea about how to fund schools.  

So, not a friend of public education, but also willing to call out one of the central lies of the taxpayer-funded school voucher movement. 

There are four other GOP candidates for governor, so we'll have to wait till June to see if Feenstra is impressing voters, in which case the school choice movement might have to figure out how to deal with someone who wants to offer actual school choice instead of the faux choice that is the norm. 

AFT Shares Bad AI Advice

AFT made plenty of folks sad when they decided to jump on the AI bandwagon last year (kind of reminds me of the days they were resolutely on the wrong side of Common Core). They haven't shown any signs of slowing their enthusiasm, with items like this puff piece from the AFT site about "Harnessing the nest of AI," which is right up there with "Embracing the advantages of cholera." 

In this piece, three teachers share some of their "tips for saving time and boosting creativity" with AI, and oh boy. 

The three teachers have 23, 6 and 30 years of experience. They teach K, 4th and 5th grade special ed, and math. I'm not going to call them out by name because they are out there trying to do the work, and teachers take enough crap for doing that, anyway. But I do want to highlight some of these highly dubious ideas.

LV regularly uses "ChatGPT to create curriculum and lessons, as well as to differentiate lessons." And while "uses" can mean many things here, I cannot say hard enough that there is no chatbot that knows more about content or instruction than a teacher does. None. Because a chatbot doesn't "know" anything. It doesn't understand the content, doesn't know what would be the best instructional approach, doesn't know anything about bridging information and young human brains. Lesson planning is the perfect time to conceptualize chatbots like this-- If you ask it to write a lesson plan about the Civil War, it processes that as "what would a Civil War lesson plan look like?" It can create something that looks like a sort of average of every lesson plan that is has been trained on, but it knows nothing about good or bad instructional design, and it is making up everything it says about the content (some of it will be accurate, some of it won't, but all of it is made up). 

LV also uses Google's GEM tool, which is basically a tool that lets you set up your own chatbot which only accesses what you have fed it. LV is the math teacher, and I think that matters a lot here. They say the GEM can be "limited" to provide hints for the next step rather than the answer, which strikes me as more functional for solving an equation than exploring themes in Song of Solomon.

CS uses AI for small tasks, including differentiation, building rubrics, and to "refine the wording" on IEPs. And to make substitute plans. Differentiation comes up a lot, and I can see the appeal, but the time it takes to really, precisely prompt the bot strikes me as canceling out the time saved. If you are letting the bot determine what the differentiation should be, that's malpractice.

EL is in a school district that adopted Copilot as its "AI platform," which is its own kind of dopey idea. But this teacher thinks it's cool for creating games and scavenger hunts. And this comment --

As a veteran teacher, it’s easy to teach the same thing over and over again; AI is helping me get outside of my comfort zone and do some different things with the kids.

If you only get outside your comfort zone because some bot has made it super easy, have you really gotten outside of your comfort zone. I try not to be too judgy (just judgy enough) but I really do judge people who can't even work up the ambition  to scroll down the search engine page past the often-wrong AI results to see search results. Is Googling for lesson ideas (which was never a great approach) really too hard for some folks now? 

But that's not as alarming as this quote about a colleague who is "not very good with technology" but just "bloomed" with ChatGPT:

He became interested in having it generate passages for his students to read and then started adding topics that they like, such as dinosaurs and Power Rangers. Now these AI passages are a reward in his classroom—when kids complete their work, they can ask for a personalized passage. One child asked for a story about playing soccer with the Argentine star Lionel Messi.

Just stop it. Stop. It. Is he checking every one of these for accuracy? Because I'm betting a teacher who doesn't have the time to hunt down real pieces of writing by live human authors also doesn't have the time to make sure some child isn't getting a "bonus" reading about how dinosaurs used to help cavemen work at Mr. Slate's gravel pit. There are so many bad messages here, leading with the devaluing of human writing. Just stop!

LV uses a GEM to help students edit an end-or-semester project, and that has led to a concern that students "may start to optimize their writing to please AI instead of writing for a human reader." You think? Of course they will. LV has a solution-- "I’m trying to instruct the Gems to give objective, rubric-based feedback without altering the students’ voice, tone, or style. I want AI to support their thinking and not reshape their writing." Good luck with that, given that the bot is not well-equipped to identify voice, tone, or style, let alone preserve it.

And if it seems as if writing the instructions for a GEM would be rather intricate and time-consuming, well, can you guess how LV solved that? But having ChatGPT do it. 

All three use AI to communicate with parents, and some of what they have to say is surreal, like EL explaining that when they're tired and frustrated, the bot "helps me send notes to families about behavior challenges that are clear and kind." I don't know what to do with the notion that a human needs a bot to help them be more human, but I do not how I would feel as a parent if I were getting notes from a bot instead of my child's actual teacher (the answer is "pissy.") EL also uses AI to generate activities for families to use at home. 

The "interviewer" does ask the three if they have concerns. EL is concerned that middle and high school students use it too much, to the detriment of their thinking, but she doesn't have those concerns as a kindergarten teacher, and I am wondering if her students see her having AI do parts of her job for her, because that might matter. And she's sure that AI won't replace her, because AI can't hug five-year-olds or meet their social and emotional needs. Sigh. First, if you think that's the only thing AI can't do, you need to rethink what you bring to the job. Second, if that's all you do that AI can't, you can in fact be replaced with an AI augmented with a minimum-wage aid who handles the hugging and social-emotional stuff.

LV correctly notes that AI is actually worse than plagiarism for students because AI can do the whole job without students even glancing at the work. AI can oversimplify and push formulaic patterns. "Students miss out not only on building knowledge but also on developing curiosity and their voice." LV makes students do handwritten assignments twice a month for an "authentic picture."

CS notes concerns about environmental impact of AI and replacing human joy, like art. CS calls these "on a personal note" and I am wondering why that's not a professional note. Fears about student learning are valid "But the more I use it, the more I realize that if educators don’t know how to use it, then we can’t help our students learn to use it responsibly." I am imagining a high school coach explaining, "Yes, I use steroids, because how else can I help my students learn how to use steroids responsibly."

And language like this really concerns me:

My last thought for my fellow educators is that getting started with AI is a lot like having a conversation with a new colleague. You introduce yourself and your goals, and it provides suggestions—sometimes good, sometimes bad. But unlike a colleague, it has no feelings, so I can say plainly that I like one section of a lesson plan but not another. Plus, it works instantly; I can provide a critique and get a revision immediately. The key for me has been treating AI as a partner in the creative and planning process, not a replacement for my judgment.

No no no. AI is not a partner, not a colleague, not a thing you can have a conversation with. It's a tool.

Look, I get the need for finding more time? I really do. One of my most widely-read pieces was about exactly that. But I am suspicious of AI times savings, given the amount of time needed to craft a prompt and run the result through multiple revisions, I'm unconvinced. 

Nor am I convinced that getting into a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do situation with students will end well. "Today, I had AI generate a lesson plan so that you can learn to not use AI to just do your work," is going to be a hard sell. And this line from CS--

As professionals, we use AI to save time and enhance our work—but we’re still doing the thinking and using a mix of resources. Too many students are using AI to think and do their work for them.

You can tell yourself that, but I'm not so sure. Yes, AI is worse for someone with no background of knowledge at all, but how many teaching muscles are you not using when you use AI to take care of all these various functions? Maybe you're still doing some of the thinking, but you definitely aren't doing as much as when you hammered out lesson plans by yourself. 

There are some worthwhile cautions folded in this AFT puff piece. There are plenty of professional conversations to be had (with other humans) about these issues, but when they come wrapped in big-tech-financed AFT packaging, they aren't a conversation-- they're an advertisement, and an advertisement designed to swoop us right past the whole Should We Do This At All question. I expect better from teh second-largest teacher union in the country. 

 

Dollars And Cents And AI And Sense

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece for the Bucks County Beacon in which I suggested some questions that you should ask your local district when they start making noises about incorporating AI into your district's schools. But I realized afterwards that I left a big question out, so I'd like to amend that earlier piece right here. 

How committed is your district to paying the actual price?

This hit me in the midst of one of those on line conversations in which a journalist tried to explain that she doesn't use AI for, you know, the important parts of the writing, but just for things like research and fact-checking and proof-reading and editing. I suggested that this seemed like a bad idea, that AI was not particularly good at any of those things, and then I heard, from many posters, a new counter-argument.

I'm thinking of 2023 AI. The new, advanced super-duper bots are so much better. I needed to get my head out of the old, free bots.

The AI that just anyone can use, they seemed to be admitting, is inadequate. You have to step up to get the good stuff.

Now, I'm inclined to disbelieve assertions that newer, better AI can do human thinky stuff. But let's pretend the newer better AI is really newer and better in ways that matter. 

This is, of course, a well-established computer tech model. You can have the free version, but it's, you know, broken. Here's a cool new app that will only work, sort of, for the 90 minute trial period. Here's a game that is really an ad delivery system. Here's photo editing software with no features. 

It's a relatively new invention, this model. It used to be unimaginable that a dealership would sell you a new car that had some cool features that are broken until you pay extra to unlock them. Imagine buying a house and then discovering that none of the doors actually work (unless you hire some carpenters to come in and fix them). 

Or, in a school setting, imagine buying a new set of textbooks, then discovering upon delivery that they are all missing several chapters, which you can purchase from the publisher for an extra fee. 

So here's what you need to know from your district. When the super-cool features that sold your superintendent or tech procurement committee on this AI whiz-bangery in the first place, is your district committed to paying the new fees. When the teachers who are supposed to actually use this AI tool discover that real utility comes with an extra cost, will the district cough up the money? Or is the district's expectation that teachers will somehow make use of a piece of broken software?

Or will wealthy districts get the fully unlocked programs, while poorer districts will have to limp along with the demo model? 

And when this year's model is supplanted by next year's hot new thing, will the district be committing to throwing more money at it? And what other funding will they cut in the district to get the money to feed their new AI habit? Because once FOMO gets in your blood, it's hard to kick the habit, and you can bet that vendors will keep right on warning that schools dare not get left behind by the newest inevitable shiny thing of tomorrow.

So that's the other question to ask your district when they start gazing longingly at AI-- just how far are they willing to go, and do they intend to keep shoveling money into the program, or will they ask teachers to get on the cutting edge with the broken version of last-year's already-cooling-off Hot New Thing.

Mind you, that's not the only question to ask (there are more here), but you cannot get a real answer to "What do we expect to actually get out of this, and is it worth the cost" if you don't take an honest look at the cost. Because whatever your district thinks the cost is, it's way more than that. 

ICYMI: Spring Arrives Edition (4/12)

Spring does not officially arrive in Northwest Pennsylvania until we've had at least one snow after Easter, and this year that milestone arrived quickly. So now we're into the days of Spring, when one needs a coat in the morning and shorts in the afternoon and an umbrella and mud shoes all the time. Not my favorite season, but it has its charms. 

Here's some reading for the week. If you do not do so already, consider subscribing to some of these folks. 

Inside the Latest MAGA Attack on Undocumented Children in Public Schools

Josh Cowen takes a look at Stephen Miller and his targeting immigrant children as a way to punish them and their parents, because Stephen Miller just does not want those brown people around here. What a miserable man.

Old Dog, Old Tricks

Teacher Kate Roberts with a wonderfully eloquent argument for remembering and humanity.

If Astronauts Can Attend Public Schools. . .

Dear Bubbie reminds us about the connections between astronauts and our public schools, and the threats to those schools (particularly in Florida).

DeSantis signs Florida law to label groups as terrorists and expel student supporters

You may remember when Florida tried to declare the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. Then a federal judge told them to knock it off. So now DeSantis and company have passed as new law that lets them call anyone a terrorist supporter they want to, and throw students out of the state. The AP has the story.

When a teacher ditched screens, class got harder. That may be why it worked.

Bookmark this piece by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat. A teacher got rid of his computer assistance, and it made his job harder--but it worked better. Almost like speed, efficiency and ease are not critical needs for educational achievement.

Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez at Fortune with the story of ed tech regret.

It’s Not about Cheating

Nancy Flanagan explains-- it's not about the cheating, but about the learning.

Primavera Online Charter School avoids shutdown for abysmal grades after State Superintendent Tom Horne steps in for multi-millionaire owner

The fairy tale that free market forces will provide accountability and excellence in the school choice world takes yet another hit. Turns out if you are a billionaire donor in Arizona, you can get an official to run interference for your crappy cyber-charter. Craig Harris at 12News continues to do exceptional work.

The Federal Voucher Program Is a Costly Illusion

Denise Forte at EdTrust explains why the federal voucher program is a snare and a delusion. Share this with your friend who keeps asking about the free federal money.

Legislators Imagine that Teaching the “Success Sequence” in Schools Will Stamp Out Poverty

Some legislators just can't fall out of love with the Success Sequence (aka "if you're poor it's because you made bad choices") and in Ohio, they'd like to make it mandatory teaching in public schools. Jan Resseger explains why that's not such a great idea.

Earlier ADHD diagnosis linked to better education

Not sure there's a big surprise here, but this study from Finland is worth noting. Johnathan Kantrowitz explains what they found.

Robert Sweet’s Early Influence on The Science of Reading

Nancy Bailey with a valuable explainer of one of the early influencers on the "science of reading." Along with a whole bunch of other folks who weren't reading teachers, either.

The Mississippi Reading Reform Multiverse (And Lessons Ignored)

Paul Thomas responds to yet another attempt to lionize the Mississippi not-exactly-a-miracle.

And I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too If It Weren't For Those Pesky Kids

Audrey Watters looks at the Matt Barnum piece about Sal Khan and his failed revolution.

I Don’t Want to Be Teacher of the Year

Matt Brady on why some of the folks doing the best work are not going to be winning the awards.

Billionaire Thinking Has Harmed Public Schools

Thomas Ultican on science, edtech, rich amateurs, and the freedom to teach. 

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

A case study in how swiftly and easily AI can pollute the information ecosystem. Christ Stokel-Walker writing for Nature. 

This week at Forbes.com, I wrote about a Louisiana court case that ended up okaying a charter school's power to discriminate against students with special needs. 

I am not generally a fan of folks showing off their kids on youtube, but this classic is just so sweet, and the father so centered on the child. They had just watched fireworks, the story goes, which is why she keeps stopping, just in case. And this song was built for ukelele. 

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Sal Khan Still Clueless

Matt Barnum's piece for Chalkbeat in which Sal Khan unsuccessfully reflects on his latest education misfire, has opened the door for plenty of folks to take a swipe at Khan and his consistently bad ideas, but lordy, the man deserves all of it. Probably only Bill Gates has managed to be so consistently wrong about education and yet so often hailed as a visionary thought-leading wizard of golly-whiz-bangery. 

Khan deserves to be examined and dissected every time he pokes his head out, because he so consistently embodies what the Ed Tech Overlords get wrong, over and over and over and over and over again.

Sometimes he gets so close. Early on, Barnum offers this quote about the flop of Khanmigo, the Khan Academy chatbot that was supposed to be a tutor:

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Good first step. Lord knows that lots of ed tech salesmen didn't even get this far in looking at the fate of their shiny product. But Khan can't get to the crucial next step, which is to make a serious inquiry into why his targeted customers didn't want to use his product.

Barnum, God bless him, knows the issues here:

Khan’s comments are an acknowledgement that AI has not quickly allowed for the creation of an effective super-tutor, as some initially hoped. It’s an early indication of the limits of AI to drive massive learning gains, long an unrealized goal of various technologies. While Khan remains optimistic about various uses of AI in education, he’s also come to see its limits.

But rather than examine the question, or the assumptions behind his use case, Khan indulges in another classic ed tech behavior-- moving the goalposts.

“I just view it as part of the solution; I don’t view it as the end-all and be-all,” says Khan, the guy who literally wrote a book about how AI "will revolutionize education" thereby being a be-all and end-all. 

It is, as Audrey Watters has laid out a zillion times, fundamental to ed tech wizardry to be fully ignorant of the history of failed ed tech. Khan launched Khanmigo citing Benjamin Bloom's 1984 essay about "Two Sigma" tutoring, a magical kind of tutoring that would leapfrog student learning, except that folks like Khan who like to trot this out don't seem to have looked at it very carefully. Education Next ran a new piece by Paul T. von Hippel breaks it down effectively. I recommend it as an antidote to folks trying to sell you 2 Sigma tutoring, but here are just a few facts about the article that Khan skimmed over. The chart that Khan and others like to use to illustrate Bloom's "findings" is not an illustration of actual data, but Bloom's hard-drawn illustration of "this is what it would look like." The actual data comes from work of two grad students who worked with a small number of subjects, tutoring them to prepare for a very narrow, specific test. Oh-- and the tutors were humans. 

But ed tech whiz guys don't just ignore the past. They also are committed to ignoring evidence from the present. It was Barnum who went back to one of the early adopters of Khanmigo to see how that was going. It's not. She found "that students didn't really care for the bot" and that "If students don’t engage with the material enough to know what they’re looking for, then an AI like Khanmigo doesn’t necessarily help." In a really key observation, she notes that "there's more enthusiasm for the product among administrators than teachers."

When ed tech overlords do encounter evidence that their shiny thing is not working out well, they inevitably fall back on one of two explanations. Kristin DiCerbo is the Chief Learning Officer for Khan with zero hours in a classroom-- she worked two years as an elementary school psychologist, then worked for Cisco, Pearson, and now Khan Academy. She explains to Barnum that Khanmigo can only respond to what students ask, and students are bad at asking questions. This time, nobody tried to blame teachers as well. This is the ed tech pitch since the dawn of time-- "This tool is great, but you need to change yourself to fit how it works rather than expecting it to fit the way you work." We have redesigned hammers, and these will be great hammers if carpenters will just replace their hands with spiral bungee cords.

Khan is disappointed that students don't seek out more help from Khanmigo, but doesn't seem to reach the obvious conclusion that students do not find it useful, and so cannot move on to the question, "How could we make this more useful?" Instead, they are just going to try force feeding Khanmigo to students by incorporating it in Khan Academy. It's the same AI business model that keeps shoving AI into every app and software that we use, like someone who thinks that if they keep setting pieces of cold liver all around the house in hopes that the kids will finally pick it up and eat it and love it. 

Ignorant of the past, ignoring the present, and dedicated to making the products they want to make first and trying to figure out what use the product could be to actual humans second-- it's the same old ed tech hustle, even for the rich and famous. 

Federal Science of Reading Bill?

Oh, that crazy House of Representatives.

Check out HR 7890, brought to us by Rep. Erin Houchin of Indiana, along with Rep. John Manion of New York and Rep. Kevin Kiley of California. The bill-- The Science of Reading Act-- wants to federally mandate Science of Reading stuff. It has the effect of creating a federal definition of SoR that captures the general vagueness of the term:

The term ‘science of reading’ means an interdisciplinary body of evidence-based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing that—

(A) identifies instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing as essential components to skilled reading;

(B) demonstrates the importance of background knowledge, oral language, the connection between reading and writing, and strong writing instruction;

(C) explains why some students have difficulty with reading and writing; and

(D) does not use a three-cueing model.

Hope that clears it right up for you. If you're fuzzy on three-cueing, we get a federal definition for that, too. It has to do with A) using context, pictures, or syntax as primary basis for teaching word recognition and B) "teaches visual memory as the primary basis for word recognition." So, sight words? Sight words are bad now? 

Anyway, under the bill, only programs that are aligned with SoR get grant money under the grants to "entities in support of kindergarten through grade 12 literacy," The bill would add to the directions that states are given for distributing the grants. Which makes me wonder if these GOP Representatives missed the meeting where the regime explained that these kinds of grants were going to be toast anyway.

That's pretty much the whole bill, other than it's not allowed to limit any of the protections of students under IDEA or the ADA. The best part is at the very bottom of the page where the bill explicitly says that the bill absolutely does not

authorize any officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school’s specific instructional content, academic standards and assessments, curricula, or program of instruction.

Somebody was wrapping up the bill and remembered that the feds are not allowed to dictate curriculum or instructional programs. Conservatives remembered that really well back when President Obama and Arne Duncan were extorting state compliance with promoting Common Core, but seem to have kind of forgotten now.

So that's the bill. It directs states to push a particular ill-defined un-supported possibly-nonexistent instructional methodology, and then promises that this bill does not authorize the feds to push a particular instructional methodology. It went to the House Committee on Education and Workforce, where the committee voted 33-0 to report the bill. Should this bill escape its well-deserved death, I expect its major effect will be to influence education grant paperwork, but let's hope it just sits on the steps up on Capitol Hill and quietly fades away.