Does McMahon Want To Let Teachers Teach?

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced this week (September 17) an initiative from her old buddies at the America First Policy Institute-- the Let Teachers Teach Coalition-- which appears to borrow from the Moms for Liberty playbook.

The headline at Fox News is "Pro-Trump group leads new coalition to undercut teachers unions." The America First Policy Institute is an advocacy outfit formed in 2020 as a sort of holding pen for Trump admin folks and other MAGA. McMahon served as a leader in that group for years. As for education--well, AFPI produced a paper in 2023 that rejects the notion of any sort of collective responsibility for educating all children argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That message is very much at the heart of the dismantling movement, which is all about a policy of "I'll take of my own kids and what Those People do is not my problem."

Currently, the chairman of the board is Larry Kudlow, with Greg Sindelar (of the Texas Public Policy Foundation) as interim president and CEO. They also have a bunch of sub-chairs, including Kellyanne Conway (Chair, American Child), Riley Gaines (Chair, America First Athletes Coalition), Bobby Jindal (Chair, Healthy America), and Erika Donalds (Chair, Education Opportunity and leading Florida privatization activist). Besides McMahon, nine other AFPI "alum" are in the current administration (including Pam Bondi). We could dig deeper, but you get the picture-- this is a big bucket of Trumpian MAGA stew. 

For all that, the rollout of LTT includes lots of rhetoric that doesn't sound so bad. Here's Erika Donalds announcing the new "coalition"

Great teachers enter the classroom to educate, inspire, and prepare the next generation, and often end up taking the blame for rogue school boards and woke mandates that they had no say in. The Let Teachers Teach coalition will elevate the voices of educators who believe in scholarly achievement, parental partnership, and putting students first. I am honored to be a part of this work to empower teachers and restore excellence in American education.

And that doesn't sound too bad if you aren't familiar with the rhetorical vocabulary of the MAGA crowd.

The mission, as listed on the coalition web page, is also pretty tame sounding:

Build a national coalition that elevates the voices of teachers and equips educators to drive change where many of the policies affecting their classrooms are decided, at the local school board and district level

 The policy priorities are okayish. For instance:

Reward Teacher Excellence

Advance local and state policies that recognize great teachers, expand opportunities for professional growth, and promote classroom discipline, school safety, strong academic standards, and student achievement.

Merit pay remains a dumb idea that has eternal appeal to some folks, despite the fact that it mostly doesn't work. And these priorities are starting to sound familiar, albeit anodyne.

Reduce Bureaucracy Burdens

Fight back against district-level mandates that take teachers away from teaching, reduce unnecessary paperwork and administrative burdens.

Sure, who doesn't love that idea.

Restore Classroom Freedom & Civics Education

Empower teachers to lead their classrooms and work with local school boards to keep political activism and divisive ideology out of the classroom and embrace civics education through a patriotic perspective.

Oh, well, now the dog whistles are getting louder. "Divisive ideology" is anything that disagrees with MAGA ideology (except that, or course, MAGA ideology isn't "ideology," it's just "common sense truth"). Political activism isn't, say, demanding release time for Sunday School classes or stamping out displays of anything with rainbows or crusading for book bans. Ideology certainly isn't demanding that only a "patriotic" view of history be presented.

And as long as they're letting the mask slip, there's this fourth policy priority

Put Teachers Before Unions

Ensure teachers, not political organizations, are the leading voices in school board, district, and state policy decisions affecting their classrooms and careers.

As long as these folks have been around, the refrain has been "teachers are just swell, it's those damned unions that are terrible," as if teacher unions have somehow grown up like mold, and not actually including real teachers at all.

LTT also prioritizes "local action." The whole thing is very Moms for Liberty, from the pretense of "we're just here to help" through the idea of imposing their view of education by harassing one local school board after another. While smiling, because LTT also seems to have taken the M4L lesson of trying not to say mean or obviously cranky things-- at least for a year or two until you get tired of pretending to be happy warriors.

The coalition will, they promise, identify districts that can be targeted by Founding Teachers and AFPI state chapters. Example: maybe a local teacher wants to incorporate "civics education" into the curriculum and-- wait, there's some district that doesn't incorporate civics education? Nor have a means for teachers to address curriculum development? But this district apparently has a school board that does make curricular decisions, so the LTT will take the issue straight to them. I wonder if this hypothetical involves a particular type of civics education.

LTT will give teachers training and tools to "take a problem from the classroom to local community leaders" which, I guess, is different from the political teacher activism we want to stamp out.

LIT will build local coalitions around teachers "advocating for change." For example-- and I am not making this up and I think maybe someone forgot for just a second to keep this pitch bland and seemingly harmless-- maybe a teacher wants to "push against a vaccine mandate at a board meeting."

LIT wants to "replicate policies that work" aka "cart pre-constructed model policies to various states for implementation."

LIT wants to "train teachers to become ongoing education-policy voices in their communities." Testify before school boards, connect with policymakers, speak to media, organize other teachers-- you know. Become political activists.

LIT is as if Moms for Liberty and the Freedom Foundation had a baby. I would not be surprised to discover Rebecca Friedrichs hiding around here somewhere. 

What is this a coalition of, exactly? That's unclear (as is what a Founding Teacher might be). But it smells as if this is meant to be one more anti-union, like Ryan Walters' Teacher Freedom Alliance and a dozen others that have come and gone because that trick never seems to quite work out. LTT differs slightly in that it is more focused on turning MAGA teachers into crusaders on the local political level, much like Moms for Liberty tried to weaponize a bunch of cranky moms. Or like Parents Defending Education used to want to weaponize MAGA parents to help them find lawsuits to file (and then decided to drop "parents" from its name).

In short, LTT smells like old wine in new skins, like another activist group that has been Frankensteined together by committee, a new recombined version of the same old parts in hopes that maybe this time it will actually work. Because underneath this is the hope that there is some great untapped mass of MAGA teachers who are just dying to rise up against the evil leftists indoctrinating and gender-swapping students. 

But we should not let this go without noting that if McMahon really truly wanted to make it easier for teachers to do their job, if she really wanted to cut through red tape and bureaucracy--well, she is sitting in DC with a big pair of scissors right there. Instead of dispersing Department of Education functions to other departments, thereby exponentially increasing the amount of federal red tape involved, so could combine and simplify those functions. She could rise up against the Big Standardized Test, a policy imposition from DC that has vastly increased the bureaucratic, curricular, and policy obstacles in the way of every classroom teacher. She could let go of her school choice fetish, a policy goal that both decreases the resources available for every teacher to do their job, and simultaneously fosters an atmosphere where teachers must be part-time salespeople. 

In short, the biggest tell that LTT is a big bunch of baloney is that Linda McMahon hasn't done a thing in the last umpteen years to suggest that helping teachers do their jobs is anywhere near the top of her list of policy goals. 

The Administration Roof

A manager's job is to create and maintain, as much as possible, the conditions under which their employees can do the very best work. 

That holds true for school administrators as well. 

The main function of school administrators is to create the conditions in which teachers can do their very best work. If education is work that goes on out skies that are, some days, spewing forth rain and sleet and snow. it is the administrator's job to be the roof that keeps the weather off the teacher's head so that the teacher can, in turn, do their job for the benefit of the students.

The Discipline Roof

Every teacher has the job of running an orderly and safe classroom where every student who wants to learn is able to. But to do so requires administrative backup. 

Last week, the New York Times asked who will enforce the new AI rules and concluded "probably teachers." Except teachers know exactly how this will go-- just like every other tech policy n(e.g. putting limits on phones). Some student will challenge the teacher and refuse to comply, or some parent will call in to protest the implementation of the policy. At that point, one of two things will happen-- the building administration will back up the classroom teacher, or the building administration will fold. If they fold, teachers will have slim-t-none chance of ever enforcing that policy ever again.

Likewise, when a student is sent to the office, every student in that classroom learns a lesson. The lesson is either 1) the rules are firm and you break them at your peril or 2) there are no consequences to crossing the line. They learn what the real rules of the school are as opposed to what the rulebook says.

Many teachers point to ideas like treating misbehavior as communication or systems that emphasize restoring and supporting problem students, but none of these more empathetic approaches are incompatible with consequences for misbehavior, nor are they incompatible with protecting the educational rights of the rest of the students in the classroom. You need both. A school with no consequences is impossible to teach in, but a school focused on a culture of compliance breeds resentment and rebellion. As with so much in education, balance is needed. But it takes building administration to pull it off.

The Parental Roof

There is a special kind of demoralization that comes with working in a building where any decision you make in the classroom will be automatically overruled if a parent calls the office. I have worked for principals whose main policy was aimed at avoiding any parent phone calls ever. When you work in a setting in which parents always take precedence over classroom teachers, you start self-editing. The chilling is palpable and real, as is the sense of powerlessness (raise your teacher hand if you've ever told a parent, "I agree this is a problem, but you should make the phone call because they will listen to you far more than they will listen to me.")

This has only gotten worse as the MAGAfied "parental rights" movement has convinced parents that they should loudly demand that every detail of curriculum should be subject to their approval and revision. 

Parents should absolutely be involved in their children's education, and their legitimate concerns should never be ignored or minimized by the school. A good administrator knows when parental concern approaches harassment of the classroom teacher, and a good administrator backs his people (that includes taking the teacher's word that the perfect child who "would never do something like that" did, in fact, do something exactly like that). 

The Staffing Roof

There's a prevailing myth that teachers rush to protect bad teachers. Wrong. Nobody wants bad teachers in a school less than the other teachers who have to work with them.

W. Edwards Deming, the management genius, had an invaluable observation about dead wood in an organization. If someone in your organization is dead wood, he pointed out, that means they were either dead wood when you hired them, or you hired them and then "killed" them. Either way, dead wood is a management problem.

As an administrator, you support your teachers by hiring capable teachers to work with them. That means hiring processes that don't depend on mere luck. That means providing the time and resources and time (yes, I did that on purpose) for meaningful mentoring; many teachers start out as neither awesome or awful, and it's the support they get at the beginning of their career that will make the difference. 

If a teacher is failing to perform well, it's an admin's job to deal with that. Help them get better, and if you can't, make the case for removing them. People like to bitch about union's "protecting" bad teachers, but all they are doing is requiring the district to follow due process-- and that is administration's job. As I've said since my days as a union local president, "Behind every bad teacher who keeps her job is an administrator who isn't doing theirs."

The Time Roof

Without knowing a thing about your school, I will absolutely guarantee this-- no teacher in your building has enough time. 

So. Do. Not. Waste. It.

No meetings that could have been emails. No meetings with the full staff that should have been a meeting with one or two specific staff members. 

Time is the most precious resource your teachers have, and as an administrator you should preserve it as if it were diamonds and gold. That includes protecting their time from lengthy meetings or requests just to "talk to their class for a few minutes" and from disruptive announcements during class time. I'm not saying there's never ever a good reason to take some of their time, but make sure it's a damned good reason. 

The Administrative Roof

Sometimes, some of your fellow administrators are the problem. Maybe it is a special department head on your same level who is trying to commandeer some of your people for her special project (and boy howdy-- one of the under-discussed factors that makes special ed an unappealing field is having to work for two not-always-in-synch bosses). Maybe one of your colleagues has been unleashing directives as part of a resume-building exercise (that will fall apart shortly after they move on to their next job). Maybe your district has a superintendent is an untrustworthy SOB whose technique for downsizing staff is to try to make certain targeted teachers as miserable as possible. Maybe one of your administrative colleagues is just really bad at their job. 

Those folks have power over teachers that those teachers are poorly equipped to combat (particularly if your union is also largely powerless). Whether you want to or not, you are going to have to choose a side in a fight you didn't start or look for. Yes, the choices you make are going to affect your career (probably why you are polishing your resume). It sucks, and teachers may sympathize with your plight, but they still want to know whether they can trust you or not. 

Some buildings are also hit by Central Office Syndrome, a condition in which the people who work in the main office start thinking that the work that goes on in that office is the main work of the district. This doesn't result in just an annoying attitude that communicates to teachers that when they ask for support they are interrupting Important Work; it also results in policies where classroom teachers are asked to take on extra duties in order to make life easier, more streamlined, for the front office. 

The Policy Roof

When No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Race to the Top, and the Big Standardized Test shambled onto the scene, administrators placed themselves somewhere on the Collaborators spectrum. On one end were admins who said, "We are going to redirect all of our resources to meet these policy demands. New aligned teaching materials. Weekly data meetings. The key question for all decision-making will be 'will it improve test scores?'" On the other end were admins who said, "Do the best teaching you know how to do and don't worry about any of this other stuff." 

How much Common Core messed up your school depended almost entirely on your local admins. They might have stayed devoted to providing a full education for every student, or they might have used practice tests to identify on-the-line students who then lost recess and arts and science and history so they could sit in extra math and reading classes all day. Those kinds of choices were entirely local, and they told every teacher a great deal about what their administration truly valued-- compliance and appearances, or actual education. 

We don't talk enough about the role of bad administrators in school problems large and small. Schools weather a variety of storms, both broad national ones and noisy local ones. In any case, it's the job of administrators to maintain the roof that keeps the classroom teachers warm and dry enough to do the best job they can do. It's not a fun job, to be up there working in the rain (that's why admins get the big bucks). But without that roof, teachers are at the mercy of the storm. 

ICYMI: Back To Class Edition (9/13)

Yesterday I spent a day talking about writing for a local literary group, and it was interesting. It's always cool to work with actual grownups-- definite change of pace for me. 

Some real must -reads in this week's list, so if you usually just kind of skim and run, I encourage you to sample some of this week's assortment (if, in fact, you missed these when they appeared this week). Remember to share.

SPECIAL REPORT: My So-Called Alpha School

Many of us have been poking around the Alpha School grift, but Ben Riley went and committed some real journalism in digging into the outfit and its students. Don't miss this story or the follow-up, in which Alpha students respond to his piece. 

Florida’s New Education Commissioner Doesn’t Want Government to Run Schools

Sue Kingery Woltanski thinks Floridians should pay attention to the new Commissioner of Education, who is saying the quiet part out loud-- let's just do away with public schools.

An education plan for Democratic governors

Josh Cowen makes the case for an actual education plan for Democratic governors, which would certainly be a change of pace.

The Backlash Against Too Much Tech in Schools is Good for Democracy

Anne Lutz Fernandez hist some of the highlights in the battle against ed tech, and why that backlash is good for the country.

Who Will Enforce the New A.I. Rules? Probably Teachers.

James Barron at the New York Times with the unsurprising news that New York's new AI policy will probably end up being one more burden on teachers.

Vouchers Promise Students With Disabilities a Path to Private School. Parents Say That’s Not the Reality.

Jennifer Berry Hawes and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica explain that vouchers are actually really lousy at providing education opportunity for students with special needs. It's schools' choice. This is a great, well-sourced piece about the illusion of choice. 

More than 1 in 10 Ohio Charter Schools suspected of “testing anomalies”

Stephen Dyer continues to dig into the news about "testing anomalies" (aka "cheating") in Ohio schools. One more way charters are just like public schools.

Success Academy Sues NYSED For Inadvertently Exposing That They Have Been Gaming The US News & World Report Rankings For Years

Gary Rubinstein has been tracking Success Academy shenanigans for a long time. Here's the newest one-- they're upset that their technique for gaming the US News rankings has been undercut by the state.

The Edu-Optimists, Part II: CREDO, the Pro-Charter Research Shop That Won’t Take No Effect for an Answer

I've explained before how CREDO's "days of learning" is a bullshit metric, but Freddie deBoer offers a really detailed explanation of some of the data massaging that CREDO uses to make charter schools look way more effective than they actually are.

Steady Education Privatization Advancing in California

Thomas Ultican takes a look at the big picture of privatization in California. 

Yes, the Youth-Sports Industrial Complex Is Bad for the Kids in It. It’s Even Worse for the Kids Left Behind.

At Slate, Rebecca Onion takes a look at the youth-sports industry (currently being strip-mined by private equity. And while travel sports have begun making absurd demands on young athletes, Onion also notes that these demands get in the way of ordinary socializing and connection-building. Can't hang out with your friends-- or even make friends-- if you've got Soccer every single night and all weekend.

Federal Vouchers Mean Federal Control

Andy Spears amplifies and extends a point I made here at the Institute

Charters As Well As Vouchers Continue to Threaten Public Education in Ohio

Jan Resseger reminds us that vouchers aren't the only major threat to public education in Ohio.

The Charter Money Trail

Education funding expert Bruce Baker lays out how to trace the money that goes to, and through, charter schools. Especially useful if you have been trying to figure all this out for your local charter school. 

Former Tucson charter school director charged with theft and forgery

Yes, this kind of stuff is still going on. Noor Haghighi reports for AZPM news.

“Eye-dology”

Steve Nuzum explains how standards about "ideology" make great cover for discriminating against art (and policies and people) that you just don't like. 

Labor Day. Happy Birthday to Me.

Friend of the Institute Nancy Flanagan just had a birthday, and as always, she finds the connections between the personal and the larger picture.

I've spent most of my life in or near the marching band world, but this is another thing entirely. Humans are really something else.

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Milton Friedman's Ghost

We've discussed, many times (e.g. here and here) Milton Friendman's ideas for education, pretty simply described as "burn down public schools and replace them with a private free market for education." Nancy McLean summed it up like this in 2021:

He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Friedman liked the idea of vouchers, but mostly as a way to get the free market mainlined into the nation's education system. And to really understand what that means, we need to understand how Friedman saw the free market.

Many public school supporters (including me) have argued that Friedman's free market love is misplaced because of course a free market would choose winners and losers in a system with multiple tiers. Don't you get it, we have brayed lustily-- A free market education system would result in all sorts in inequality for students in school and society at large. 

The ghost of Milton Friedman replies, "Don't threaten me with a good time."

For Friedman, the free market was not a magical engine for equality and uplifting one and all. Instead, it was a system that perfectly suits a world that is-- and ideally ought to be-- filled with inequality between people.

Society is filed with winners and losers, and the free market is an excellent way to sort them out. Society is inevitably, and correctly, hierarchal and unequal. Friedman wrote in Free to Choose, "Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned," without any sense that government might have had a hand in creating that unfairness. Nor could Friedman ever really grasp the notion that power imbalances were self-perpetuating by the system and not some sort of natural and just occurrences (Friedman never, ever came up with a convincing free market answer for racist elements of business and society). 

Friedman often expresses a remarkably simpleminded view of society and commerce. He liked the example of Marlena Dietrich's legs and Muhammed Ali's fighting skills, arguing that they were gifted and therefor entitled to get rich from these gifts. But as Kim Phillips-Fein points out in Country of Lords (we'll be talking about this book soon), Friedman doesn't say anything about Dietrich's agents or managers or the people who created her movies, nor does he discuss Ali's managers, or the fight promoters and networks that helped make him rich. 

As Jimmy Rising writes in "Inequality in and beyond Friedman." the capitalist ethic Friedman describes is 

“to each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces”. Property rights are absolute and complete. If the instrument is a factory, and he manages to convince workers to work for him for less than their work might otherwise be considered “worth”, the better for the factory owner, and the laborer gets exactly what he deserves.

Friedman's view of the free market is that it rewards those who deserve to be rewarded, and leaves behind those who deserve to be left behind, and that this dynamic is natural, normal, and desirable for society. To try to interfere would be "inefficient."

So despite the insistence of some choicers that the free market would unleash competitive energy that will lift all boats, Friedman didn't believe that's how the free market actually does or should work. Society should have hierarchies, and the free market is a mechanism to establish and maintain those hierarchies-- in the opinion of Friedman's ghost, a particularly efficient one. 

So when Friedman's ghost says that schools should operate under a free market, they are calling for tiers, for hierarchy, for a society that follows the principle that some people deserve a full, rich, what-we-used-to-call-good education, and some deserve basic vocational training so they can take their proper place as meat widgets serving their Betters. Friedman's ghost says we should let everyone buy the education they can afford, which, says the free market, is the education they deserve. They're free to try to make a million dollars, thereby proving they deserve more, but all in all, it will be better for everyone if they just accept the status, the tier, the class to which they rightfully belong.

And schools? Schools are just there to start the sorting process early on. Don't waste people's time trying to get schools to do anything else, and don't waste peoples' money trying to help Those Peoples' Children try to escape their proper place. That's the free market education that Friedman's ghost favors.

 

Five Great Questions For "Evidence-Based" Programs

At EdWeek, Larry Ferlazzo ran a guest post by Rene Grimes that focused on the "science of math" and the programs that are supposed to be based on it. Between the EdWeek part and the "math" part, some folks may have missed the really good set of questions that Grimes proposes at the end of the piece:

*What question did the original research actually investigate?
*Which students, settings, and outcomes were studied?
*Does the evidence directly support this recommendation, or is the recommendation partly an interpretation?
*What limitations or unanswered questions should shape its use?
*What evidence will show whether this approach is working for our students?

What a great batch of questions.

Imagine, for instance, if anyone backing Common Core had tried to answer these questions. Blanks all around.

What question did the original research actually investigate?

So much education "research" asks only one question-- if we do this thing, will students get a higher score on the Big Standardized Test this year? Lots of folks really want to use that as a proxy for asking questions like "Will students have a higher level of reading comprehension" or "Will students be able to have an increased ability to solve complex problems." But those aren't the same question at all. Sloppy and inexact questions lead to sloppy conclusions.

Which students, settings, and outcomes were studied?

I remember the days when it seemed like every time you peeled back a piece of education research that said "this is how students learn" you found a "study" performed on a dozen college sophomores at a private university. This has always been a problem for education because educators are correctly reluctant to use students as guinea pigs. 

Some private and charter schools make claims about their effectiveness, but these are once again bits of research done on a very select group of students. That research isn't nothing, but it doesn't apply to a general student population.

Does the evidence support this sales pitch recommendation, or is the recommendation partly an interpretation?    

Boy is this one an issue. Every single piece of evidence based on Big Standardized Test scores involves interpreting those test scores to mean all sorts of things that they don't necessarily mean.

What limitations or unanswered questions should shape its use?

It is always a red flag when neither limitations nor unanswered questions are even mentioned. One of the Common Core red flags was that there was no mechanism at all in place for talking about limitations or questions arising from classroom deployment. 

There is no bit of legitimate science or evidence-gathering that declares "This question is now definitively solved and we don't need to look at it or question it ever again." And yet how rare is it that a new program is launched in a school and the Powers That Be say, "Now, here are some issues we want you to keep an eye on, and some questions that we are still looking to answer." In education, it's far more likely that every great new program is meant to be the end of the conversation, and uppity teachers who want to ask questions get a big round of administrative stinkeye.

What evidence will show that this is working for our students?

Again, the all-too-common default is that evidence will not be collected because it might not provide the evidence the Powers That Be want to find. No administrator wants to hear, "We've been trying your new program for a year and we have no evidence that it is working for our students." Should any teacher make that comment to admin, or any educator make that comment to a policy maker who mandated the Great New Thing, and they will get that old familiar refrain-- "You're implementing it wrong."

I love these five questions, and I hope more educators will use them more often-- including for every damned AI doodad that comes down the pike.  

                                                                

Does AI Tutoring Help?

There's a whole wing of the edu-wonk world pre-occupied with "high-impact tutoring," whatever that is presumed to be. The field serves as a successor to the notion of "accelerated learning," the idea that learning gaps could be closed by teaching the students who were behind by teaching them more, faster, than the other students-- an idea that stunk for a variety of reasons.

"High-impact tutoring" is also a successor for "two-sigma tutoring," another idea that rested on a single very small, narrow, and largely debunked study. 

What all of these ideas have in common is that they are super-appealing to techbros anxious to sell some version of AI tutoring. Lauraine Langreo over at EdWeek took a look at some studies about the various ways AI can be deployed for tutoring, and she opens with what has been the guiding principle for all of these operations. 

High-impact tutoring has been heralded as an evidenced-backed solution for addressing the significant academic gaps that schools are facing. But scaling and sustaining these programs are challenging for schools because they require a lot of human tutors, time, and money.

"Has been heralded" is doing a lot of work here, but the idea that it takes a lot of humans spending a lot of time (and wanting to be paid for it) is spot on. That crucial fact about tutoring smells a lot like money to AI companies. "However," as she notes, "research on the effectiveness of AI tutoring models is limited and still emerging."

Well, that's kind. Sal Khan has taken a good hard look at his own products and discovered that-- surprise--when you plunk a young human in front of a screen and say, "Go ahead and use this program to teach yourself math," by far the most common response is "I wonder if I can get regular Youtube on this thing." Students simply don't use it.

Langreo is looking at a "brief" from Stanford that considers how AI might be used.

SCALE, part of Stanford's Accelerator for Learning (yes, that again), has a brief out that looks at the ways AI can be used, and well...tutoring by a human has a "robust evidence base." After that, every evidence base is "emergent," a research term that means roughly "there is no actual evidence of this in sight, but we kind of smell the possible concept of a piece of the beginning of a sprig of evidence just about to appear, but it's not here yet."

SCALE likes a human tutor with AI supporting the tutor behind the scenes, which they call "potentially as effective, or more effective" as an actual unaided human. This would, of course, depend on the human. But if Human plus AI gets you the same results as Human alone, that suggests at the very least that the extra cost of AI is a waste of money. If the problem your leaders are trying to solve is "How do we incorporate AI into our program," maybe this looks not so bad, but if the problem you're trying to solve is "How do we best tutor these young humans," then adding AI seems like a non-starter (even before we start considering, as SCALE does not, the various negatives associated with AI.

"AI tutoring with human support," which has been the model of computer-powered schools, from Summit to Altschool to Alpha School-- the emergent evident here suggests that implementation matters, because it's only a shade removed from AI-only tutoring, which SCALE declares has "unknown effectiveness." Sad news for everyone who thought they could just swap out an actual human tutor for some AI program and get "high impact" results.

Look, we know the most effective means of tutoring-- one teacher, one or two young humans, repeated a few times a week. It's not a mystery. But there are two longstanding responses to this. One is the eternal education response from leaders and taxpayers: "That sounds nice and I can see it would make education better, but I don't want to pay for it." The other is corporations looking at it and thinking, "I bet we could make money pretending to fix this problem."

But if you want to get some actual tutoring done, you are going to have to hire a knowledgeable human being to do it, not a bot. 

One More Reason for States to Avoid Federal Vouchers

The Trump administration has ratcheted up its attack on discrimination in schools-- by which they mean, of course, discrimination against white guys.

They have hung their interpretation on Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, arguing that it means that there can be no programs or benefits that white guys can't have. This has been the rationale for a widespread attack on all manner of college and university DEI wokitude.

Now they would like to come after high schools. Here's the opening paragraph from the IRS press release:

The Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have issued proposed regulations to end federal tax-exempt status for private schools that engage in racial discrimination, delivering on President Trump's Executive Orders ending discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.

But they are also coming after elite public high schools, as covered by Liam Knox and Erin Hudson for Bloomberg. The threat here is to come after admissions practices that discriminate based on race (i.e. preferences to anyone but white guys). 

The threatened punishment is to cut off federal funding if the school is found to be violating the administration's funhouse mirror of civil rights law. 

But there's a problem with that. As Knox and Hudson point out:

But public high schools receive far less federal money than most colleges, giving the administration less leverage over their admissions practices without action from the courts. Bronx Science, for instance, received around $44,000 from the federal government last year, and Stuyvesant got a little more than $160,000 — less than 1% of the budget at both schools.

To really get leverage over public schools, the feds need strings to pull. Specifically, purse strings. For "regular" schools, Title I and IDEA provide an opportunity (though not if they successfully convert them all to state block grants) to control local schools, particularly those who serve many non-wealthy or special needs students. 

So federal school vouchers provide another opportunity for the feds to get tighter control over local schools, including those that aren't so dependent on Title I or IDEA funds. Particularly if they adopt some of the ideas of Marguerite Rozas and use those voucher funds to finance important programs. Imagine if Bronx Science was used to taking in a couple million in federal voucher funds.

And for the MAGA crowd that thinks this would be just swell, I ask you to imagine what the power of that program might do in the hands of President Hilary Clinton or President Zohran Mamdani. You didn't like how the feds used federal purse strings to push Common Core (neither did I)-- do you really want to see that movie again?

Federal vouchers represent, among their many shortcomings, a real chance for the federal government to gain more leverage for controlling local school districts. It's a bad idea.