Fredrik Backman on Being a Writer

Two years ago at the Simon and Schuster centennial celebration, Fredrik Backman appeared to deliver a four minute talk about being a writer that is delightfully hilarious. Enjoy.

Why Does Writing Matter?

Today is the National Day On Writing, an event celebrated by the National Council of Teachers of English, which is a group I'm rather pissed at these days, but we'll get back to that later, because I think writing is hugely important. I've written a whole manuscript about it  and the following is in part adapted from that (if you're a publisher or agent who wants to give it a look, just let me know). 

One of the oldest challenges of being human is both simple and profound. We are each individually locked into our own fleshy container; we are filled with ideas and emotions and images and impressions and memories, things we’ve experienced and things we’ve learned that we want to share with other humans, and yet we have no easy way to do that. We cannot project our thoughts and experience into another brain directly.

We are mysterious creatures, wonderfully and terribly made, our minds and thoughts and feelings trapped inside our bodies, and we spend our whole lives trying to master the business of making ourselves intelligible to the other body-bound souls around us. So we created systems of symbols, first of sound and then, later, of marks on a page to represent those sounds and the symbols they represent.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King answers the question “What is writing” with a simple line.

“Telepathy, of course.” And later, “a meeting of the minds.”

We dream of telepathy, mind-reading, of magical or technological ways to bridge the gap between ourselves and the selves of others. We talk. We sing. We dance. We draw. We create entire languages and then expand and refine them in an attempt to make them better signifiers of everything bouncing around inside of us. And we write.

It is one of our most miraculous achievements. By making those marks on a page, we can cast our thoughts, our ideas, our feelings out across space and time.

But—and this is a big but—language, especially in written form, is both the most common and the most mysterious of human activities. It is an imperfect tool for making thought visible. We have no means to measure its effectiveness and accuracy, and we spend countless hours trying to interpret through the noise and parse the wording attempts of our fellow humans. “What did she mean by that?” can consume hours, even days.

That’s a central problem of education, where teachers are charged with reading the minds of their students. We can never be 100% certain that a student is truly and accurately communicating what’s in their head, because the only measure we have of what’s in their head is their communication. On any given day, we might be assessing what they hold in their head, or we might actually be assessing how well they are communicating it.

In many disciplines, we have worked our way around that central challenge. I can use straightforward objective measures to check for basic recall—do you recognize the desired piece of information when you see it? I can use performative tasks to create mini-artifacts of learning—what are the answers to these math problems?

But written language is the most complex and deep of human activities, and as soon as we try to reduce it to a simple performance or require that students produce an easily-measured artifact, we lose the plot. Asking students to perform a stripped-down version of writing, to write so that we can assess them (or worse yet, that some machine can assess them), is not the same as asking them to write for real.

Writing is thinking made concrete and visible. But by focusing only on the concrete and visible artifact of writing, and not the origin and process of its creation, the thinking behind it, we open the door to many other methods—non-thinking methods—to produce that artifact. And that’s where all our troubles, including those exacerbated by chatbots, began.

Writing is how we reach outside of ourselves, across distance and time, and so it is hugely powerful. Which is why it's sad that some people squander that power by using it not to communicate, but to coerce, control, and manipulate. Not to connect, but to grasp and push. 

Students deserve to experience writing as a very human way of connecting and communicating with other humans, not as an empty performance, the crafting of an artifact that has no meaning except to prove you can craft an empty artifact and trade it for certifications attesting to your compliance. It is this empty performative approach that made writing instruction easy prey for generative AI--a program that excels at constructing empty artifacts. 

If education is going to be about helping students grow into their best selves, taking hold of what it means to be fully human in the world, then it must include real writing. 

 

Chaos, Compliance and the Infallible Conditional of Education

Consider this formulation, proposed in a variety of forms, especially by reformsters of the past few decades. I give you, the Infallible Conditional of Education:

If every teacher does X, then all students will learn Y.

It is wrong, every single time. Doesn't matter what you plug into X and Y, it's always wrong. Doesn't matter if you're applying scientific research. Doesn't matter if you're scaling up a program that has worked for small groups of students with a particular teacher. 

It is wrong, every time. 

There are predictable results for trying to implement a program requiring all teachers to do X.

Some students will, in fact, learn Y. Some students will not, but since the program is premised on the proposition that teachers doing X must infallibly lead to students learning Y, people in charge will declare that either A) the teacher (either willfully or out of incompetence) is not implementing X with fidelity or B) the student is defective in some way. Thus the Infallible Conditional of Education leads to placing a high value on compliance-- if everyone would just behave the way they are supposed to, declare frustrated leaders, this would totally work!

There are lots of reasons to fall for the fallacious ICE. Someone looks at research and says "This is how masters of this skill do it, so this is how learners must learn it" or maybe "This worked for a group of ten college sophomores, so it should work for a hundred high school freshmen." Sometimes the leaps are huge-- like the leap from "tutoring of small group of students by human tutors produced theoretical and highly dubious results, so clearly giving many students a computer program to sort-of-tutor them will yield great results."

But mostly I blame the continued attractiveness of ICE on the general public's failure to move out of the Newtonian world and into the modern world of chaos theory and quantum mechanics.

(Note: I am now going to grossly over-simplify complicated stuff. Don't @ me over details.)

The Newtonian world loves nice, linear equations. X + Y = Z. Push this lever with this amount of force and the load lifts that amount of weight. Actions have consequences, and given enough data, we can always predict exactly what will happen. Complex systems may require more data, but the idea is the same. We could, for instance (the Newtonian imagines), collect every necessary piece of data about an individual human being and that would allow us to predict exactly what job that particular human is perfectly suited for. Or, as now-failed Knewton once promised, if we had enough data about a student, we could tell her what to eat for breakfast on the day of a test. 

That's the linear premise-- if we could collect information about all the inputs, then we could predict all outputs.

But everything we've learned in the post-Newtonian world of chaos theory says that is not true for any complex system.

Complex systems are subject to a million tiny and unpredictable variables. The popular notion of chaos is the Butterfly Effect-- a butterfly flaps its wings in China and then it rains in California. Minute differences make huge differences further down the line. One of the granddaddies of chaos theory is Edward Lorenz who was actually a meteorologist. His big aha moment came when he needed to rerun a computer model weather simulation, but to save time he just took the numbers from a midpoint and started from there. He entered 0.506 as a condition instead of the full 0.506127, and the result was completely different. A minute effect resulted in a massive difference. 

Tiny differences have huge effects in complex systems, and virtually all systems built around human behavior are complex. You can have godlike knowledge of all the inputs and still not be able to predict exactly what the outputs will be. Likewise, you cannot design the inputs to create the exact outputs that you want. 

Does this mean complex systems are obviously random? Of course not. With chaos theory we get the idea of strange attractors. The results of a complex system will not graph perfectly onto a single line, but they may cluster around some central shape or area. There will be some wild outliers, but results within certain ranges will be more likely than others. One of the Lorenz strange attractor? It looks a lot like a fuzzy butterfly. (If you want to read more, I always recommend James Gleick's Chaos.)

I often think of Russell Barkley and a five minute video of him offering advice to parents. "You are not engineers," he points out. Further:

So, what we have learned in the last twenty years of research in neuroimaging, behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, can be boiled down to this phrase:

Your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.

So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQs and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true.

Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write.

...The better view is that your child is a genetic mosaic of your extended family. Which means this is a unique combination of the traits that run in your family line.

Be a shepherd, Barkley suggests. "Let them grow, let them prosper, please design appropriate environments around them, but you don't get to design them."

We can't design or engineer children, and the notion that we could, given enough data or enough science-flavored policies or enough making every teacher do X, is just wrong. We can absolutely implement pedagogy that improves the odds and increases the likelihood of outcomes we desire, but we cannot control the myriad of tiny details that have profound effects on this (or any other) complex system. 

We cannot treat students and teachers like machines, engineering outputs by controlling inputs. What we have learned (or should have learned) in the last half-century or so tells us that the world does not work that way. You strive in the direction of certain goals, and as a living human being you make a million judgements and adjustments along the way, never knowing for certain which will turn out to have massive effect somewhere down the road. 

It is human to tell ourselves (and others) that if one does X just as one is Supposed To, one will without fail arrive at Y (unless some evil party thwarts you). We like to make up rules and insist that everyone comply because then the world would work more smoothly.

It works just often enough to seduce us into believing "If X, Then Y" is a true and dependable rule of the universe, and it makes us feel very safe and secure to think it so. It is not. Nature, the world, our fellow humans-- none of them comply with our desires just because we insist we have discovered a formula that must result in our desired outputs. 

And in education, where we are working with a sample of 4 million teachers and basically every single young human, the formula is certain to fail (followed, too often, by all the wrong reactions to that failure). That does not mean we jettison every possible X or ignore any evidence we can collect about X's likely outcomes. But the Infallible Conditional of Education is a lie. 

Teachers should collect the best tools, the best Xs, that they can, and lean on those most likely to produce the most desired results. But they should also be prepared to adapt, improvise, read the room, change course, and just generally try to be the best butterfly shepherds they can be. 

ICYMI: Chilling Season Edition (10/18)

We finally got some serious cold here. It will inevitably bounce back, but it is finally sinking in that autumn is here, and I am delighted. It's my favorite season.

A reminder that you can do your part by sharing pieces (particularly from their original source). It's a tough world out there on the interwebs and it takes a lot of sharing to break through the noise and the algorithm, so please take the time to pass on some of these excellent pieces.

In Conversation: Reflections on Sold A Story Season 2 (Ep. 1-2)

Tevor Aleo and Nick Covington have a very useful and illuminating conversation about the first few episodes of Emily Hanford's newest foray into the world of educational haranguing. Read them before you listen to her.

‘Title I for rich kids’ and other predictions for the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit

Outstanding look at the federal voucher program from Jon Valant at Brookings. Share it with someone who thinks these things are a good idea (including your favorite governor).

All The Things You're Not Allowed To Say in Texas

Of course, the only way to preserve freedom is to censor college professors. Adam Serwer writes for The Atlantic about how that's going.

Vouchers are set to get more than half of Miami-Dade’s state per pupil funds

Florida's work for defunding public education is going just super-duper, with more state money going to vouchers than to public schools. Austin Horn covers this for the Miami Herald and even quotes friend of the institute Sue Woltanski.

As Public Schools Struggle, Private Schools That Once Fought Integration Poised for Taxpayer-Funded Windfall

Daniel Mollenkamp writes for The Emancipator about how Tennessee vouchers have been a real boon for segregation academies. 

Parents have always had choice. Donalds opposes guardrails

Crystal Etienne has the nerve to call out Erika Donalds, Florida's privatization queen, as she tried to fend off any sort of basic accountability for Florida voucher schools. 

Back-to-Basics (Again): Lorin Anderson and Essentialism to Understand Knowledge and Direct Instruction

Lots to unpack here, but come for Paul Thomas's explanation of how people are using Bloom's Taxonomy incorrectly (and how he knows what Bloom actually had in mind).

Being a US Consumer Sucks, Yet We’re Turning K-12 into a Consumer Good

Powerful and thorough argument from Anne Lutz Fernandez that just as US consumerism is becoming a mess, privatizers are trying to extend that mess to education. Another must-read on the list this week.

Texas Gubernatorial Candidate Gina Hinojosa Saving Public Schools!

Not all Democratic candidates are good for public schools, but Nancy Bailey explains why Gina Hinojosa might break that trend.

BREAKING: Ohio Appellate Court finds vouchers unconstitutional

Stephen Dyer shares some special moments from the Ohio court's ruling against vouchers.

Have Definitions of ”Success” and “Failure” in U.S. Public Schools Changed?

Well, yes. But Larry Cuban gets into some historical detail on that answer.

Frequent abdominal pain in children associated w/school-related stress/ peer harassment

Johnathan Kantrowitz with some research that will not come as a shock, but still, it's evidence.

Before We Revamp the FEFP, Let’s Understand It

Florida's school funding formula is a mess. I know-- shocking! Sue Kingery Woltanski offers some details about the twists and turns of the process that is over a half-century old.

Deskilling the body

Intriguing and sometimes-technical-in-a-biology-sort-of-way essay by Melanie Challenger that looks at the effects of technology on our body's ability to do stuff (and why it may matter more than you think).

Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

Ted Gioia is writing about the tech overlords who want to control all media, but since these are the same tech overlords who want to control education, it's worth including here.

This week at Forbes.com, I got into the Texas school that canceled a production that dared to cast a girl as a guy and point out that this sort of thing happens in school and community theater all the time. 

Rhiannon Gibbons and Silkwood Ensemble have been finding some fascinating overlap between Black roots music and Chinese musical traditions. Just kind of let this wash over you.

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Duncan and Spellings Just Can't Quit Testophilia

Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan are caught in some sort of black hole, a time loop that will not let them escape their dreams about federally-driven test-centered education reform. And they're back again at EdWeek with the same old baloney, pretending that agreeing with each other represents some sort of bipartisan landmark. 

Why now? Well, the opening franken-sentence tries to construct a current events hook for the tired rehash. 

With students back in school and Nikole Hannah-Jones’ first person account of her struggles with the education system lighting up social media, education is back at the top of the national conversation.

Yeah, some AI agent told them that NHJ's piece was spurring all sorts of responses, so hop on that bandwagon! And pivot immediately to some classic reformster chicken littling:

What remains clear is that parents and educators are experiencing unprecedented confusion about our education performance and direction while millions of students are unprepared to face a rapidly changing economy.

"Unprecedented confusion"!! Wow, that sounds bad.

They note that the nation has been "adrift on education policy for a decade," and I'd argue that Trumpism hasn't been so much adrift as ploughing aggressively through the weeds and toward a sheer cliff, but metaphors aside, I can agree that the last decade has not been great for education policy. But their implication that education policy was super-duper prior to the last decade is just self-serving fantasizing baloney.

They point to a "false argument" about who's in charge-- feds, states or parents-- and it is a false argument, but only because the feds want to stay in charge, just in an inefficient spread-over-several-departments privatize public education way. But Spellings and Duncan have to parse their criticism of the current administration carefully, because when it comes to privatizing education, there's not much space between Spellings/Duncan and DeVos/McMahon.

Spellings/Duncan offer one of the more breezy arguments for federal control I've yet seen:

However, Washington can’t simply send dollars to states and call its job done.

Well, it totally could.

But Spellings/Duncan think the feds should "reestablish" a commitment to "education excellence—setting ambitious goals for student outcomes, investing in research, preserving measurement, and ensuring parents and taxpayers can see whether students are on track."

"We've done it before," they claim, invoking No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which is the part where I yell loudly at my screen, "No, you have not." 

But this is the cherished fantasy of the corporate privatizer wing of reformsterdom-- the fairy tale that under these two testophiliac programs were some sort of golden age of educational progress.

Based on that fantasy, Spellings/Duncan argue for third-grade reading proficiency, financial and technical literacy, and just generally "clear federal goals and strong accountability." China's beating us! The duo call for putting "student achievement back at the center of the nation's agenda."  And "back" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. 

Look, some of what they call for is perfectly lovely a reasonable. But their blind spot is, as always, a total, unquestioning faith in the Big Standardized Test. That faith allows them to completely skip over one of the most challenging questions in education-- how can we effectively measure actual student knowledge and skill? How do we measure the parts of learning that require time and reflection (like reading a whole novel and mulling it over to draw conclusions and insights)? How do we measure that habits of mind that pay off both now and ten, twenty, thirty years from now? How do we measure a student's ability to apply critical thinking to a body of knowledge from science or history or literature? How do we measure their ability to incorporate an appreciation for the arts into their lives? How do we measure the breadth and depth of their content knowledge across multiple disciplines, and further measure their ability to build connections between different parts of that body of knowledge? How do we measure their ability to communicate effectively with written or spoken word? How do we measure their ability to fully integrate their acquired knowledge and skills into a holistic view of the world and what it means to be fully human in it? And how do we adapt any of these measures to reflect the individual achievement of a student who has chosen to pursue achievements along their own particular individual path? 

To all of this, Spellings/Duncan say, "Give the kid a single multiple-choice math and reading test. That'll tell us everything we need to know."

NCLB/RttT were extended experiments in proving Campbell's and Goodhart's Laws. Attach high stakes to a narrow measure and pursue those scores, and you distort everything and measure nothing. And under NCLB/RttT, policy leaders exacerbated the problems by using lousy tests.

Every piece of their preferred policy rests on the groundless belief that the Big Standardized Test accurately measures what they want it to measure. The whole business is a process of deciding we want to measure something, inventing a proxy for that measurement, then practicing getting better at the proxy instead of the thing itself. 

Spellings/Duncan also want us to worry about impending doom. The future of the US economy and your child's employment will be threatened unless we get education fixed. And lord knows I believe that education is important, but corporate reformsters have been ringing this bell since they manufactured A Nation at Risk forty-some years ago. And yet, the disaster hasn't quite manifest. Yes, our economy is stuttering in some areas, but the fingerprints on that mess look a lot more like the greasy handprints of Donald Trump and not any failures of education. And NCLB and RttT both made big promises to the economy and students; if they were such a fabulous success, that should be manifest in a generation of students who were able to reach new economic heights, even lift themselves out of poverty, thanks to those programs. If Spellings/Duncan want to pretend their programs were successful, that's what they should be pointing to-- not BS Test results.

When Spellings/Duncan say that we need to get education fixed, I don't disagree. But since they led much of the breaking, I'm not ready to take advice from on the fixing. Given a magic wand to wave at education policy, the very first thing I would do is end test-centered accountability and send policy leaders back to the accountability drawing board. We do not need to move backward to the failed policies of the past.

Yes, I've said all this many times before, but if Spellings/Duncan are going to keep repeating their same old baloney, I can repeat myself, too, to rail against their failed and damaging ideas. But I'd rather move forward, and I wish they could leave their testophilia behind. 

Here Comes Direct Instruction, Again

Emily Hanford is back with another story to sell about a story someone's been sold. This time is apparently pumping direct instruction, and in talking to Alexander Russo, she pitched this frame:

This season, which is about teaching and about direct teaching in particular, just taps into a lot of questions about fears that certain kinds of teaching or teaching kids in a very direct way is somehow gonna squash their independence or not allow them to be independent.

Sigh. So we're going to try to reopen one of the fauxest debates in education-- the direct instruction vs. discovery debate. Let's hit a couple of points here. 

1) I call this a faux debate because I have never encountered, in person or otherwise, a single capable teacher who believed that they needed to use all of one or the other. It's strictly mix and match, depending on the content. I have never so much as heard of, for instance, an elementary teacher who thinks that students should just sort of discover the multiplication table. OTOH, there are people in leadership positions, thought leaders, administrators on local and state levels, and various edupreneurs who adhere to one side or the other, but actual teachers in the field are in general more practical than ideological.

2) Direct instruction covers a wide range of possibilities, from super-strict scripting to handing out a times table and telling students to commit it to memory to explicitly instructing a student after face-to-face analysis of what brick is missing in the student's building.

Look-- both direct and discovery instruction have very definite limits. 

Students have a limited ability to discover things about subjects of which they are ignorant. And when the question at hand has a clear, known answer, it's just annoying as hell for someone to demand that you "discover" the answer and wait for them to tell you whether you're right or not (which is, in fact, just a twisty way of delivering delayed direct instruction). Make me go look it up? That's just having me get direct instruction from a book. 

And lord knows we need knowledgeable filters. Have we not seen a universe of people who "did their own research" in a flurry of internet-based discovery self-instruction and thereby arrived at utter and complete baloney? Never tell me you "learned more from the kids" than they did from you-- if you, the certified teacher, are not the most knowledgeable expert in your classroom, then why are you there? You're no more useful than one of those "guides" at an AI school.

But direct instruction can't do it all, either. It's not so much that endless direct instruction robs students of agency and autonomy; it's that you, the adult teacher, are not going to enjoy the ways that your supremely bored students find to exercise their agency and autonomy. 

Students are not simply buckets into which information is easily poured, and "thinking" is not simply the act of retrieving little data chunks from the bucket. And I am frankly suspicious of folks who think everything is a settled Truth that needs only be collected and repeated (looking at you, classical education folks).

And when we enter the world of interpretation and analysis, direct instruction simply doesn't cut it. There is no reason for students to have to "discover" the dates of major events in The Great European War, but direct instruction is inadequate for learning about the causes of the war. There is no reason for students to "discover" the setting and characters of Hamlet, but direct instruction is inadequate for grappling with just how mad Hamlet may or may not be.

Too much direct instruction in a classroom and students zone out, learning that their only task is to collect and retrieve whatever the teacher wants them to collect and retrieve. Too much discovery in a classroom and students feel aimless and abandoned by an adult who is somewhat useless. To guide students successfully through the learning landscape, you don't make them follow in your exact footsteps, step by step, and you don't just turn them loose with a "Good luck, hope to see you on the other side."

At this point in the debate, some advocates of either school are going to pipe up and object that I have mis-described their preferred mode of teaching, and they will proceed to describe the "true" version of discovery or direct instruction, and they will describe a mode that is, in fact, a blend of both, at which point I will grasp at one of my remaining hairs because that is my frickin' point.

I sometimes look at back at my 39 years in the classroom and try to decide where my teaching lands in this dichotomy, and I land on a third possibility-- exploration and examination.

To explore the learning landscape of whatever content you're dealing with, the student needs both some direct instruction about the fundamentals of the landscape and some freedom to range about it. We can't get to a useful and enriching conversation about the themes of Hamlet without some hard foundation in what the text does and does not say-- but we can't stop there. It's hard to examine what we don't know, but once we have that knowledge, we need some freedom to sift through it, turn it over, see what we can find in it. It's hard to grapple with advanced math if you haven't memorized your times tables, but you can't memorize your way through every math problem you ever encounter.

I don't know what the new season of Hanford's work will bring, though I'm sure that once again a whole world of education amateurs, journalists, thought leaders, policy wonks, politicians, etc etc etc will have many discussions about it. No doubt various teacher examples of one failure or another will be unearthed (because in a group of 4 million, you can find a couple of examples of anything). Meanwhile, I expect that the rest of the actual teachers in actual classrooms will continue to continue working on a balanced blend of what actually works for them. 

Guide on the side or sage on the stage? How about a guide who is knowledgeable enough to periodically stop and deliver some sage advice, and who is wise enough to know when to lead and when to get out of the way? It won’t sell many stories, but it will get the job done.

MAGA Moms Sic AI On School Districts

In the midst of their current summit (cleverly scheduled for the end of Banned Books Week), Moms for Liberty unveiled a new AI tool. M4L AWARE (a name that looks much like MAL-AWARE which is a little on the nose) will flag "DEI contracts, gender policies and curriculum changes every 12 hours to mobilize parents," says Fox News, which was the first outlet to share the scoop.

AWARE is supposed to stand for Agenda Watch, Alert, Response, and Engage. Sure. M4L itself announced "school boards put on notice," as if school boards do not already operate under laws that require transparency, including things like publishing the agendas of future meetings. 

Co-founder and CEO Tina Descovich handled the rollout herself. Co-founder Tiffany Justice recently finished her brief fling with the Heritage Foundation; her linkedin now says she's self-employed as a "conservative activist, strategist, and donor advisor," so I guess the "ordinary mom at the kitchen table selling t-shirts" mask is fully off now.  Meanwhile, co-founder Bridget Ziegler hasn't been very busy since her own bi-sex scandal (other than suing the city) and chose not to run for re-election to the Sarasota School Board this year (her husband was booted from his party chairmanship gig).   

There was a time when, if you squinted hard, M4L looked like a conservative parental activism group. These days they're just an unabashed estrogen wing of MAGA. So of course Descovich, when rolling out the new surveillance AI, invoked Joe Biden. "The Biden admin targeted our parents for showing up to school board meetings," Descovich claimed, echoing a new report from Trump's Weaponization Working Group, part of Dear Leaders use of the Department of Justice to target and push back on anyone who was ever mean to him or his allies. Back in 2022, when M4L and other MAGAs were aggressively attacking school boards, the National School Board Association asked law enforcement at every level for some help for its members and used the phrase "equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism" in their letter, which has been a PR gift to the MAGA crowd ever since.     

M4L's AI agent will, apparently, scan school board agendas looking for any particular words or phrases that indicate Naughty Policies "buried deep within school board agendas." Because "it's incredibly time-consuming to sift through thousands of pages in agendas each week," says Descovich, "and school districts count on that." Because school boards are the enemy. Do any school boards have thousand-page agendas? Or is it the main M4L office that's scanning them, in which case, can't local M4L chapters scan local agendas? Is this initiative lazy, or is it trying to weaponize roving bands of MAGA moms to be deployed to whatever district the AI says needs spanking?

Using AI to track down objectionable DEI stuff (plus anything else these snowflakes think might harm them) has certainly been tried before. ChatGPT has become a popular tool for generating book banning lists, even as it puts books on the list that make no sense (The Life of Fredrick Dounglass? Les Miserables?)  And DOGE famously tried this on a large scale to find spending cuts, like cutting HVAC replacement as DEI and just generally doing such a bad job that the courts reprimanded them. In Texas, university professors must now submit course content for AI scanning. 

So MALAWARE promises at least some instances of a bunch of angry MAGAs showing up to protest a high school auto shop unit on transmissions because ChatGPT reported a lesson on trans stuff, which would be entertaining if anyone in MAGA world was capable of saying, "Ooops, we made a mistake" and not "Let's just keep repeating our original story even though it has no more evidence than the stories about litter boxes in schools." 

Maybe the main idea here is to use technology to make up for M4L's flagging membership in some areas. 

At any rate, one more way for MAGA moms to agitate the base while facilitating the harassment of school boards across the country, whose members are elected from their own communities and, in most cases, paid little or nothing for their trouble. Look, I'm all for local taxpayers speaking up about the actions of their school boards, but there is something lazy about this approach, which does not encourage people to pay attention to what their school board is doing all the time, but to wake up and squawk only when the AI tells them something is happening they might not like, with no context or background provided. MALAWARE is not here to facilitate involvement-- just attacks. Not involvement or engagement— just intimidation and undermining.