ICYMI: Sugar Crash Edition (11/1)

Happy Day After. Now please, don't put up your Christmas decorations today. 

Here comes this week's list. 

Why Gov. Shapiro must say no to federal vouchers

A retired PA superintendent explains why the federal vouchers are a lousy idea.

Public Schools Are Prepping for Federal Choice Cash. They Still Might Not Get It

At EdWeek, Mark Lieberman addresses the continuing pipe dream that the federal vouchers will somehow infuse public schools with cash.

Empathy. Again.

Nancy Flanagan wonders why empathy is in the cross hairs again.

Commissioner Mack says competition is improving EVERYTHING. Show Us The Data.

Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at Florida's education honcho's delight in the privatization of education.

Was American education ever great? What Linda McMahon gets wrong about the past

Matt Barnum provides some historical perspective on Linda McMahon's ahistorical ranting.

It’s Time to Teach Students to Be Drivers of AI, Not Passengers

At The 74, two Newark teachers describe how they manage AI in their classrooms, and it's not the worst framework I've seen.

University of Minnesota report warns student AI use poses 'severe' threat to learning

More research to fill the vast gap that these researchers decry. Some of the conclusions are blindingly obvious (AI use for primary students is a bad idea), but hey, now there's actual research to back it up.

There Is No Alabama Miracle (But There Is a Lesson)

Bruce Baker explains why Alabama's results are nothing to get excited about.

Why Students Hide Themselves from Us

Alfie Kohn, on why students don't always let teachers or parents see who they are. 

One to the Other

Adrian Neibauer shares a learning experience with his students based on "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street."

Ed Reform is Dead — it’s Parent Choice or Public Schools

Ben Riley and Jame Shanahan offer a take on the history of modern ed reform. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but it's an interesting version of the history and though-provoking at that.

Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue Plans National Network of Religious Private Schools Paid for by Federal Tuition-Tax Credit Vouchers

Jan Resseger looks at one of the groups hoping to cash in on federal vouchers.

Selling Stories

Audrey Watters has a lot this time, including AI marketing, Democratic education leadership, and a host of valuable links.

Who Gets To Tell The Stories About Our Schools?

Jose Luis Vilson looks at the people telling all the stories about schools, and what it takes to have your story listened to.

The Slop is Creeping In

Michelle Banks writes about the frustration of arts communities rejecting AI "art" but still using those execrable AI posters for publicity.

More Than Music

I play in a community band, and a couple of my musical colleagues play in a larger community band festival. The conductor of their last one, Jari Villaueva, wrote this lovely tribute to community bands.

This week at Forbes.com, I reviewed Jen Jennings' excellent new book and also looked at the growing crisis in forced downsizing for districts.

Donnie Iris passed away this week. He was a Western PA icon of sorts, a regional star who peeked around the edges of national fame. This song is the closest he came to a real national hit (though the album King Cool has much of his best work).

The Imaginary One Size Fits All Education

It is one of the most-repeated myths of public education critics. Here's Linda McMahon spouting it again last summer:

We reject the one size fits all education approach. Parents, states, and local leaders know what’s best for our students! The Trump Administration is returning education decisions to those closest to our children. https://t.co/ItvHS7JxvB

— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) July 10, 2026

"We reject the one size fits all education approach." 

You and everyone else, ma'm. The American school system is not one size fits all. It is structured in a way that makes one size fits all functionally impossible. There are roughly 13,000 public school districts (plus private schools, plus charter schools) and each is controlled by its own local board, with each board making its own set of decisions that are then filtered down through individual building administrations. That's a whole lot of different sizes of education.

Which was, of course, the central complaint of the standards movement-- that there were too many districts and buildings and teachers doing all sorts of different things, and why don't we impose one size for all? Common Core was their best, biggest attempt to inflict OSFA on the nation, and it failed, a big clunky wave that shattered and fragmented on the individual rocks of a fragmented system. People with power tried, really hard, to make one size fit all in US education, and it didn't work, not even when the standards went into witness protection and took up residence in many states under an assumed name. 

One size fits all for education in this country??!! When I was still teaching, I wasn't even one size fits alling it for a single day. Each class needed its own fit. My vocational students didn't need to master MLA research format and my college bound students didn't need to wrestle (yet) with resumes and job reports. Certain students needed a different approach, and certain other students needed an even more different approach. And that's before we get to the occasional special class, like the class I once taught that was 75% teen moms. 

Nor was I one size fits all from year to year-- every year involved more fine tuning and editing and reframing what I had done before. 

One size fits all schooling is right up there with hasn't changed in a century schooling and factory training schooling-- they are all glib criticisms effortlessly deployed by people who don't actually know what goes on inside actual schools. These are also the same folks who think that one size fits all schooling is a great idea if they get to pick the size ("If all teachers did X, then all students would learn Y") and then get pissed off that they can't make the same t-shirt fit on every single teacher and student in the country. 

One size fits all education is, in fact, a terrible idea. Fortunately, it's an idea to which education is highly resistant. Unfortunately, it's an idea that amateur education reformsters never tire of A) leveling as an accusation or B) trying to impose. 

AI Not Paying Off Outside Tech Sector

Yeah, maybe not

The chief economist at a major "asset management" company says that AI is not paying off anywhere outside the tech sector. Nobody is benefiting from the damned botslop except the companies behind it.

Torsten Slok is Partner and Chief Economist for Apollo Global Management, an American asset management outfit that handles about $850 billion. In a post earlier this month, Slok makes a point of separating the Magnificent 7 tech companies (NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, and Meta) and the S&P 493 (what you get when you remove the big tech companies from the S&P 500). 

Slok's statement is pretty blunt: 

Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.

 No revenue per worker increases, no profit margin increases, and no productivity boosts for the S&P 493-- only the for the Mag 7 (that is apparently what we're calling them in the investment world). 

Can American corporations turn cheap "intelligence" into revenue growth and increased profits? Slok has his doubts:

AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins.

Emphasis his.

What a very human way to look at AI's utility (or lack thereof). The article comes with a series of charts that make his point with simple graphic clarity. 

Two points for the education world to consider. AI is failing to transform any sector outside of its own, which suggests that its ability to transform education is being grossly overstated. It also suggests that the inevitability argument-- that students must learn to work with AI or be left behind in the AI-centered future-- is being grossly overstated. For the zillionth time, education leaders would be wise to work a little harder at distinguishing between legitimate attempts to predict the future from disingenuous attempts to market a particular future into existence. 

Bad Writing Advice for Day of AI

If you are a high school teacher looking to incorporate genAI into your writing instruction, MIT has some really bad advice for you.

You may recall Hour of Code, the giant corporate-infested campaign to popularize coding (if not, I recommend Natasha Singer's Coding Kids). That has now become the Hour of AI, but apparently some folks want to extend that a bit. Powered by MIT RAISE and the "leading researchers in AI education," here comes the Day of AI, which comes equipped with a whole raft of units more appropriate for actually many several days of AI. Incidentally, RAISE stands for "Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education," so there's a sign of where this is headed.

The list of curricula is extensive and runs from pre-K through 12. For instance, there's a K unit "Machines All Around Us" that "introduces students to the foundational idea that machines are human-made tools designed to help people do work and solve problems." There are units about how to verify information and thinking critically about AI, and they are not at all terrible (not perfect, but not terrible). 

However, "The Writing Process in the Age of AI" for grades 9-12 is hugely problematic. 

Let's start with calling this the "Age of AI," as if AI is the dominant feature of our times. I'm willing to entertain an argument about that designation, but I'm not prepared to concede AI world domination as a fait accompli. I'm not able to see the educator guide or student resources (because I'm not going to give them my info), but I can see the slide deck that accompanies the week's worth of lessons. So let's take a look.

Lesson 1 is "Demystifying the Machine," and it does a nice job of making clear that LLMs do not use "thinking," but rather a process of predicting the next word. It sets up LLM prediction against human judgment, and that's fair. It also provides an age-appropriate but reasonably accurate explanation of what LLMs actually do. So we're actually off to a good start. It's not going to last.

Lesson 2 is "from ideas to argument." This section highlights where the first place the creators think AI fits in the writing process, and it begins with the dubious advice that "AI is a good tool for brainstorming, questioning, and organizing." It adds the caveat that AI can give you more ideas but can't decide which ideas matter. The slides suggest that you prompt the AI, then annotate the results, weed out the ones that are weak or with which you disagree. They do not add "get rid of ideas that are actually wrong," which strikes me as the most time-consuming part of this approach. The rewrite the one you pick. 

"Choosing, revising, and rejecting" are "where the thinking is" is the claim here, and while I agree that that's where some think could happen, I have seen this movie before in the classic shake and bake high school "research" paper. Student locates however many sources you required, looks for the one that's easiest to turn into the assignment, and tries to rewrite something so that it says the same thing in a non-plagiarizey way. No thinking is required for any of it (which is why I stopped making that assignment).

Could this AI version of brainstorming involve thinking? Sure. Will it? Probably not.

Lesson 3 is "from prompt to persuasion," and it continues our trip through the writing process, and now we are headed way, way out into the weeds. Ever get stuck getting an essay started? AI can write that draft for you, "especially if you give it a high quality prompt." By "high quality prompt" you should include the sections you want in the essay, the arguments you have developed, counterarguments (if you're doing that, I guess) and other aspects of the essay you want to specify. I am trying to imagine a universe in which a writer has thought through all of the content and organization of an essay and yet somehow the actual writing escapes them. I cannot. If you have developed all the elements of the "high quality prompt," the actual placement of words on the page is barely work at all. 

The creators of this slide show remind you that AI can give you a draft, but you have to revise and rewrite to "make it yours." But let me share this: in 39 years of teaching human high school students, I found that getting them to do meaningful rewrites and revisions on their own rough drafts was by far the hardest part of the writing process. But the creators of this show want students to revise the AI draft "so it is accurate, sounds like you, and says what you want it to say." But if you know what you want it to say, why wouldn't you just start by writing it yourself? 

There's another layer of bad here-- this is training students to be accountability sinks. Instead of being creators themselves, this approach trains them for a role in which they do not create, but accept the responsibility of fixing whatever the bot extruded. 

And of course the reality here is that students will have the AI do everything and make nominal attempts to pretend to "make it their own." This is a framework for formalized cheating.

Lesson 4 is "name the process" which is about documenting the many ways that you used a bot to do the work. The lesson works through the details required-- it's not enough just to say you used AI, but specify which brand bot, record your prompts, and "reflect on how the use of AI affected your writing--this is your chance to show your authorship." You're going to show how you an author by writing insights about the essay that the bot wrote for you. 

Lesson 5 is "deciding when to use AI." This lesson talks about cognitive effort and cognitive debt and encourages students to think about how using AI to avoid thinking is probably bad. It cites research that shows that students who wrote essays with genAI tools could not reproduce a version of those essays later on their own. "It was like their brains hadn't stored the information." No shit. 

The best way for a classroom teacher to use this unit would be to go straight to Lesson 5, maybe throw in a bit of Lesson 1, and explain, "And that is why we are not even going to bother with the rest of this unit."

What is the benefit of using a bot to do most of the work of a writing assignment? Who knows. This unit is a solution in search of a problem, or more to the point, a product in search of a use case.
 

College Readiness Panic for a New Decade

High school graduates aren't ready for college! The articles about this problem are popping up all over (here, here and here). Chad Aldeman, who I think of as a relatively level-headed member of the reformy crowd, just dropped a piece passing on UC's increasing number of math-failing froshies. 

It is entirely possible that something is really happening here. But this is not the first time that the issue of college readiness has been used for some education policy chicken littling. A dozen years ago I was writing responses to the same blaring alarm, only back then the lack of college readiness was being used to whip up support for the College Core. Here are some of the figures from back then looking at the amount of students who needed remediation:

The National Center for Education Statistics has a paper that looks at those numbers for 1999-2000, 2003-2004, and 2007-2008, and while it breaks them down a variety of ways, the overall conclusion is that 1999-2000 was worse than either of the other years sampled, and all of the numbers hovered around the twenties, low or high. But this article from Chicagoland says that over a third of students entering college need remedial help, based on 2008 stats from the government-- same as the previous report. A Harvard professor looking at a 2003 study comes up with one third as well. The Inside Higher Ed Bridge to Nowhere report throws around a 30% number. And I would swear that I recently heard 46% tossed into the remediation soup as well. Most of these sources do not compare the current figures to any from the alleged golden age of non-remediation. So can I at least suggest that the numbers are "controversial" or "contested" or maybe even "pulled out of a variety of different orifices"

Apparently today's freshmen were not saved by an entire educational career spent under the guidance (more or less) of Common Core. But before we start using the success rate of college freshmen as an indictment of high school quality, let me suggest a few more factors to also consider.

Admissions process: As the generations entering college get smaller and smaller, and more and more people decide college isn't worth the bother and/or expense, colleges are doing their best to fill up with students who possess a warm body and can write checks that don't bounce. Lowering the bar is going to result in students with less college ready capabilities. 

Measuring remediation needs: If we're talking about students who need remediation, we need to talk about how the college is identifying that need. Because sometimes it's a not-very-good assessment test.

Marketing: One of the big policy pushes, especially from neoliberals dems, has been to get everyone to go to college. "Get a college education, or you will be doomed to living in a van down by the river eating cat food on a hot plate!" has been a big message, and it has scared a lot of people into college who might have been better served by a trade school or another post-high school option. 

And perhaps most important is this last one, because if we're seeing an actual dip in educational attainment, I can think of one factor that distinguishes the education of the generation now entering college that is different from the generations that came before.

Test-centered education is not great: Today's college freshmen got thirteen years of more-or-lee (depending on their state) Common Core flavored education, which in practice has meant thirteen years of getting prepped for the Big Standardized Test. If we are questioning the quality of the K-12 system, it seems only sensible to look at the policy that has taken control of K-12 education in this country. Maybe centering education on passing a single mediocre math and reading multiple choice test is not a great idea.

There is an extraordinary irony here. Many of the folks now saying, "Boy, you public school teachers are really messing up your job" are the same folks who spent the last twenty years saying, "Here, public school teachers-- we are going to tell you how to do your job and you're going to listen to us or else." This is an old education story-- "accountability" never means "accountability for policy makers."

We could dig up a few other responses, like questioning why "just raise expectations" is a useful prescription for high schools, but not for colleges.

And there is always the possibility that this is one more faux crisis. But if there is an issue here, it would be useful to look at it more closely than simply declaring that Kids These Days are graduating from high school with underdeveloped thinky parts and it's probably the fault of Those Damned Teachers and their lousy public schools. 

Look At This AI Dystopia: The Tech Exec Who Doesn't Want To Human

It is rare that one single article can capture so much astonishing boneheaded inhuman technobaloney, but Alexandra Alter has done it with her profile of Marissa Mayer in the New York Times. I can't remember the last time my jaw hit the floor so many times in succession. And before we get into this, I want you to remember all the times you thought, "Surely, they can't expect AI to take over the very human parts of teaching students." Because the answer is these people think outsourcing your humanity is a desirable thing.

The headline is a tip-off that we're headed No Place Good-- "Maybe We All Need an A.I. Wife" was likely chosen by an editor, but still. The piece kicks off with this story--

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

How sad for her daughter. And how sad for a grown woman to be unable to complete a simple parenting task-- and then to be impressed by a bot that pulls off the very low-bar-iest of answers. But it just gets worse and worse.

Mayer has a start-up that is pushing an AI personal assistant, an AI tool "that can handle everyday hassles, like buying a pair of pants you took a photo of, or finding a birthday present for your picky spouse." Because God knows you don't want to be trying to pick out a present for your spouse on your own. The special twist for Dazzle (that's the product's name) is that it will root through your camera rolls to manage tasks that a barely conscious human should already be able to do.

What's the plus? Besides offloading all that pesky humanning? Mayer is excited that something that used to take hours or minutes can now get done in seconds. Perhaps you could use the newly freed-up time to go introduce yourself to your spouse and children.

Mayer thinks this will especially appeal to women, who she imagines are more visual. So the bot will look at all the pictures and then “It essentially understands your personality, your likes, your dislikes, because it knows what you think looks good.”

And maybe what overextended professional women need is an A.I. wife, an emotional labor bot that can plan a birthday party and knows when it’s Crazy Socks Day or Crazy Hat Day at the kids’ school, because it has photos of the fliers that came home crumpled in a backpack.

Yes, parenting is hard. So very hard. Mayer has noticed that AI (like every other aspect of modern tech) is mostly guy stuff, and she's not wrong to call out the ambient baked-in sexism. But is the solution really to draw women in with a chance to offload human behavior? 

This start-up has ten engineers presently, which suggests that, despite Mayer's history as a successful tech overlord, this piece might be a bit premature. 

But Dazzle's mission statement-- “To close the gap between what people want and what people can do with A.I.”-- is this stuff really what people want? Mayer rattles off her uses in what Alter calls her "be-Dazzled life." 

She’s used it to find a family activity during a vacation in Venice (Dazzle proposed a Venetian mask-making workshop that the whole family loved); to plan a play date for one of her twin daughters (Dazzle knows Marielle is into magic, and suggested visiting a magic shop in San Francisco); and to choose a theme for her son Macallister’s 14th birthday party (Dazzle recommended a glow-in-the-dark pool party, and found glowing pool toys and corn hole).

“He was like, ‘Mom, I don’t want to hit the theme that hard,’” she said. “I just can’t help myself.”

Well, yes. It appears that she literally cannot help herself and must instead get a bot to help her do exceptionally ordinary parent things. She has also asked it for advice on what to wear and Halloween costume ideas. It suggested dressing up like a cake, because it "knows" she loves baking and art. 

Mayer considers outsourcing mental load to machines an okay thing, though I'm wondering how she feels about outsourcing emotional and interact-with-human loads. Alter reports that Mayer at one point "mused enthusiastically about the potential efficiency gains of having her A.I. assistant talk directly to her husband’s A.I. assistant." Yes, by all means. It would be most efficient to have your bot talk to everyone else's bot and while the bots are simulating human life, the humans could go lie down in the basement and start decomposing early. Efficiency!!

And Alter, God bless her, asks the right question and captures the telling answer:

When I asked Mayer if it’s somewhat depressing to imagine a frictionless future when birthday celebrations, holiday gifts and family vacations are planned by A.I., she seemed caught off guard.

“I haven’t really thought that through,” she said.

Clearly she has not.

Well, Mayer is rich and has had plenty of success. She is also relatively sanguine about sexism in the industry, even though she took a lot of unearned grief for taking only a two week maternity leave. She agrees that women are underrepresented, but doesn't agree that gender is a barrier to success in techworld.

Her hopes for Dazzle lean in part on developing an app that doesn't require technical skill to use. And she cites promising early feedback, noting that some power users are "interacting more with Dazzle than their spouse." Good God, if that's success, then may we all be happy failures. I will note that Alter sits in on a meeting of Dazzle staff and developers, who do in fact meet in person and not by having their bots exchange data with each other.

So remember-- the next time you're arguing that surely nobody thinks that bots could be used to replace live human beings in the classroom, there are people out there who think it's possible-- and desirable-- to have a bot manage your relationships with every human you come in contact with. There is nothing remotely appealing about this vision, and I wish our rich tech overlords would knock it off right now.

ICYMI: Pumpkin Cutting Edition (10/25)

Better get on the stick-- it's time to start chopping those big orange gourds into something scary or at least amusing because the clock is ticking on the sugariest of holidays. The board of directors already has their costumes, and we'll be continuing to select the best in candy-distribution events in the area. There will be, of course, profit sharing arrangements with upper management. May you have fun in your neighborhood.

In the meantime, here's the reading from a week in which people really did write about something other than Alpha schools and the new season of Sold a Story.

Don’t Be Fooled by Claims That Tax-Credit Scholarships Can Help Public Education

At EdWeek, former Ed Secretary Miguel Cardona has an actual strong opinion about something (and Robert Kim of Education Law Center helps him write it up). Pretty good explanation of why the federal vouchers are a bad idea.

New Federal School Vouchers Are Likely to Exacerbate Inequity and Injustice

Jan Resseger has been reading up on the federal vouchers, and she is also unconvinced that they are going to lead to good things. 

5 ‘Good’ AI Use Cases That Are Actually Bad for Students

At EduTopia, Paige Tutt and Stephen Merrill talk us through five supposedly good uses for AI that are, in fact, damaging and just generally not a great idea. Just ask yourself which skill students were supposed to be developing before you handed the job to AI.

Experimenting With Our Children: Who Answers to the 18-Year-Old the Voucher Failed?

Bruce Baker has been on a tear lately, and this piece from the school finance expert asks an important question--where does an 18 year old whose education was sacrificed to vouchers turn for "accountability"?

These Parents are Taking on Big Tech (and Winning)

Jennifer Berkshire shares seven tales of parental victory over ed tech incursions into classrooms.

Her 6-year-old brought home an AI-generated photo from school. This mom isn’t having it

Speaking of parents and AI, this South Carolina mother was not happy that AI was used to tell her daughter what her future would look like.

Scripted Curriculum (Direct Instruction): Research Contradicts the Story Being Sold

Paul Thomas has noticed that Sold a Story 2 is continuing the revival of the myth of the bad teacher. He would rather talk about bad faux scholarly journalism.

Selling a story that’s lost the plot

Ben Riley is not listening to the new Sold a Story, but he is thinking about direct instruction and what it is and is not.

Updating My Grading Policy Because You're All Using AI All The Time

Dan Meyer takes a new approach to grading. Listen up, students.

AI Will Never Care About Me

Adrian Neibauer considers a scary question-- should you let AI observe your teaching and offer feedback?

In the age of AI, I'm teaching my students how much of writing is not writing

So much this. Johnathan Fitzgerald let AI handle the parts of writing that aren't writing-- and then decided those parts really are parts of writing and should be handled by humans. 

Are Florida’s Proposed Science Standards Another Step Toward Classical Education for All?

Sue Kingery Woltanski brings us up to date on the latest round of shenanigans in the Free-ish State of Florida.

State spends more than $35,000 of your tax dollars for each new Ohio private school student since 2018

Meanwhile, in the Florida of the Midwest, Stephen Dyer explains how voucher costs have gotten really out of control.

‘We should not have to choose’: Alaska Native education specialists say culture and academics go together

Arguing for both quality and culture in Alaska.

He Tried to Set Limits on His State’s School Vouchers. Billionaires Helped Bankroll a Campaign to Unseat Him.

Vernon Criss helped create the voucher program, and he wanted to put some basic guardrails on it. The West Virginia Republican soon found himself in a battle against his own party.

Bruce Springsteen makes surprise appearance at Steven Van Zandt’s inaugural Teachers Hall of Fame Gala, Pete Davidson emcees

Little Steven continues to be a huge teacher booster.

Ramaswamy’s ad exposes MAGA’s obsession with parental estrangement

This Amanda Marcotte piece has nothing to do with education. Except that this parental estrangement fear and anger among the olds of the GOP is the same fear and anger behind educational parental rights movement and the belief that schools are breaking the ties between children and parents (who should be able to control their children completely).

This week at Forbes.com I wrote about Jen Jennings' new book (you should read it).

The film adaptation of Sweet Charity yielded some great Bob Fosse moments, but it also included this number from Sammy Davis Jr complete with late-60s groove.