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. 

Robot Lips, Kiss My Blues Away

Allison Stanger is objectively smarter and more successful than I. She's a distinguished professor who has published books and articles in major outlets, testified before Congress, and just generally done a lot of impressive stuff.

And yet, I find her recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education just incomprehensibly terrible.

"Who Cares Whether Academics Use AI to Write?" is yet another one of those "I like AI just fine cause it's such a big help" articles that leaves me scratching my metaphorical head.

Stanger's basic point is that in the world of scholarly writing, an argument is "meant for readers to understand, contest, and/or deploy." And if the argument is solid and the point is worthwhile, then why should anyone care where it came from? So, scholarship without scholars? Stanger argues that writing can be judged by considering its ultimate purpose, but her implication is that the ultimate purpose of some writing does not require a human being on one end of the exchange. Which begs the question-- do we need a human on either end? If the AI extrudes an argument that logically makes a useful point, would it be enough if that scholarly insight was picked up by another AI to use in extruding the next piece of smartitude? Does the reader that understands, contests, and/or deploys the scholarly argument have to be a human reader? Can it just be another AI scanner? And if the argument is that it needs to be a human reader, why does it not have to be a human writer? If a gaggle of AIs crank out a series of scholarly arguments and no human ever sees or hear them, do they matter?

Stanger really wants to make an argument for collaboration. Exhibit A kicks off the article with the story of an article shed wrote for a professional journal which they wanted to have re-edited so it would include more of "her voice" and offered to do the work themselves, and she is correct to point out the bizarreness of having "strangers rewrite my sentences so that they would sound more like me."

But they weren't entirely her sentences. The article went through ten drafts that she worked on with Claude Fable 5.1 and "other large language models, as I now work on nearly everything." But she reviewed every line and rewrote most of them. "By draft 10," she writes, "I could not have said where the machine’s contribution stopped and mine began." Really? I find that assertion incomprehensible. And if you rewrote most of the lines, why have AI write them to begin with? But Stanger asserts that the editor liked the argument, evidence and structure just fine, without making a case for who or what provided those features. Maybe she doesn't remember, but how the hell do you write a piece if you haven't already worked all of those things out in your own head?

I don't get these sorts of pieces. What is the point of adding a janky plagiarism machine to your writing process. In the larger world, the pitch often provides a simple answer-- the work. "I wanted to write a book and it was just too hard but now ChatGPT can write my book for me and I can skip all the hard part." But for academics like Stanger, the answer is often hidden. And true to form, one thing that Stanger does not provide is some statement of "Now that I use AI, I am able to [fill in the blank] more effectively than I could working on my own."

I always want to ask these folks the same question-- what can you do now with the AI that you could never do before on your own?

Exhibit B is this very article, which she says she produced by the same process. Ten drafts? With "extended collaboration" with AI? The piece is just under 1300 words and zero academic features like cited sources. And it includes paragraphs like this one:

How we educate our students in this brave new world is a question unto itself. The student essay was designed to provide evidence of learning, which it no longer does; a novice writer cannot responsibly direct a tool whose output they cannot yet judge. Teaching therefore requires careful scaffolding, which can be constructed in myriad ways, including a ban on AI use.

I mean, that's not terrible, but it's not ten-drafts-with-a-gifted-collaborator either. 

There's one more point to note in this article-- the really bad news for students (I may have buried the lead here). Stanger says she now teaches with AI (whatever that means) "and that has meant replacing my old assignments with harder ones." After noting her devotion to some human activities like close reading, rigorous citation, and Socratic method, she drops this sentence:

Because AI speeds up the routine work, I can assign more of it, in more varied forms: research, outlines of arguments, revisions of their own prose, oral presentations, and slide decks.

In other words, she has designed a course so that an unaided human, a student who has chosen to avoid AI "assistance," faces an almost unmanageable workload. The answer to "What can I do as a teacher that I couldn't do before AI" appears to be "Bury them under a literally inhuman workload." This skips right past study of AI and digging into the implications of using it and jumps ahead to "use it or suffer the consequences." 

Stanger doesn't appear to have completely lost the plot. "For all forms of writing, readers are owed a human being who stands behind the work," she writes. "A byline has always signaled ethical and legal responsibility." But not unassisted composition.

It sure looks as if Stanger has wrestled with some of the above issues elsewhere- her next book is Who Elected Big Tech, and she is a founding member of the Digital Humanism Initiative. But I find articles like the one covered here just kind of sad and discouraging. Writing is, to me, a supremely human, almost sacred action, and I am no more convinced that genAI can enhance the experience than I am convinced that getting a robot to kiss my wife for me would improve our marriage. I am, however, convinced that if people keep telling themselves that they need a bot to help them write, they can make it so. And that makes me sad.

FL: MSM Catches On To Donalds' Charter Grift

The Miami Herald finally caught on. I guess it takes a big election to get them to pay attention.

Byron Donalds is running for governor of Florida; his wife has been a player in her own right as the queen of school choice in Florida.

The couple got together while Byron was still with his first wife (a public school teacher who still seems a bit grumpy about the whole business). He hooked up with the Tea Party, and Erika became an investment banker. Her school choice origin story is that in 2013, her second child had some sort of run-in with a teacher at school, and Donalds, unsatisfied with administrative response, put the child in a private school and transformed into an advocate for school choice.

Donalds has had a hand in the founding of a multitude of groups. She helped start Parents ROCK (Rights of Choice For Kids). When Ron DeSantis took office in 2019, Donalds helped launch School Choice Movement, a group that pushed for policies that would cut the throat of public education, including one that said charters must be approved by the state, not a local district; the group has since gone silent.

Back in 2015, while she was still serving as a school board member, she helped launch the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, meant to be a conservative alternative to the Florida School Boards Association. They started with four members-- Donalds, Jeff Bergosh, frequent collaborator Shawn Frost, and Bridget Ziegler, future co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who called Donalds the face of charter schools in Florida. Tina Descovitch, another M4L co-founder, would later join FCSBM and was the president when they folded in May 2020, just a few months before the founding of M4L.

Donalds served on the Florida Constitution Revision Committee (along with Jeb Bush edu-pal Patricia Levesque), the group that tried to sell Amendment 8, yet another attempt to kneecap public schools. Fortunately, the Amendment was such a deceptive con job, a judge threw it off the ballot.

And she's the CEO of Optima Ed, a private ed biz that offers school management and works with a variety of partners, including Step Up For Students, the outfit that manages the money fueling school vouchers--and that outfit is chaired by John Kirtley, who reportedly runs DeVos-funded PACS (included American Federation for Children) and who allegedly provided support for the FCSBM. Optima Ed also operates a chain of Hillsdale-powered charter schools.

What the Miami Herald's Claire Heddles writing for the "Reality Check" series turned up is Optima's use of the classic sweeps contract. 

Florida requires charter schools to be non-profit. In practice, this law means less than the 55 mph speed limit on your favorite road. Donalds uses the classic management company dodge-- set up your "non-profit" charter school, then turn around and hire your charter management company to operate the charter school. Non-profit charter school collects taxpayer dollars and hands them all directly to the absolutely-for-profit charter management company.  And as Heddles notes, a bonus feature is that your privately owned and operated charter management company doesn't have to tell anyone doodly or squat about how they spend that money. Just like that, a pile of taxpayer dollars disappears into a big for-profit black box.

You could call this a "regulatory loophole" but since this loophole has been widely known and publicized for over a decade (Heddles links to a ProPublica article about it from 2014), I wouldn't call it a loophole so much as a deliberate choice to legalize this self-dealing money-grubbing grift. 

And Byron Donalds is running for governor. As Heddles notes:

Erika Donalds has promised that as governor, her husband will pave the way for an “economy of education” where “profit is not going to be a bad word.”

Heddles reports that the couple's money mostly comes from Erika's biz. If Donalds becomes governor, he will be in a great position to influence regulations controlling his own personal finances. Sure, he could get all ethical and recuse himself from state actions covering charter school finances. I will not be holding my breath. [Okay, alert readers inform me that it's not a done deal and I now see that many polls are calling the race against David Jolly a dead heat, so by all means-- go make a difference!] Byron Donalds, for his part, says he will follow the legal guidance and ethical requirements. But school privatizer Jeff Yass is among the out of state Rich Guys throwing money behind him. 

Byron has been active in the ed world before; Byron Donalds is the legislator who gave Florida the law that says all textbooks must be "balanced" and that any taxpayer can challenge course content.

Heddles and the Herald do a decent job of scratching the surface. But last year reporting from Will Bredderman at Florida Bulldog shows just how deep and twisty this mess gets.

In 2021, for the first and only time in all records to date, the Optima Foundation reported paying Erika Donalds a salary of $183,326. However, her husband did not report this income in his disclosures to the U.S. House Ethics Committee in either 2021 or 2022, despite filing an amended report the latter year.

But the congressman did report his wife earned more than half a million dollars in total salary between 2020 and 2022 from a firm called “Educator Solutions.” The Optima Foundation-run charter schools’ reports to the Internal Revenue Service show that they paid Educator Solutions $6,930,584 during those same years, while the foundation itself paid the company $2,783,216, all for “payroll services.”

State filings reveal that “Educator Solutions” is in fact a fictitious business name registered to ESI Technical Inc., a company founded by State Rep. John Snyder (R-Stuart), whose father William Snyder was the longtime Martin County sheriff until earlier this year. Snyder’s financial disclosures show he has earned nearly $700,000 from ESI Technical since 2020, the year he was elected, and he has consistently identified the Optima-linked charter schools as ESI’s biggest customers. Snyder has come under fire for promoting policies favorable to charter schools while profiting from their operations, but no outlet has previously reported his company’s financial relationship with Erika Donalds.

Bredderman also notes that in 2023, three of Optima's flagship schools fired the Donalds firm, apparently due to "deficiencies" in accounting. Heddles gets into this, plus an ongoing case in which Treasure Coast Classical Academy is suing Donalds' nonprofit foundation. 

As with many such charter and education management organizations, the Optima brand is a twisty set of relationships, with OptimaEd, the Optima Foundation, and Optima Management services all part of the empire. Bredderman further uncovered an address connection between OptimaEd and Optima Management Services with Quest Educational Foundation, which is run former state education chair Tim Brady and Ed Morton, former chair of Florida Gulf Coast University Foundation. Quest operates the Freedom Institute of Collier County, a private school that markets to home schoolers.

In December 2023, Erika Donalds tweeted an endorsement of the Freedom Institute’s “customized homeschool hybrid experience for high school students on a path to economic freedom,” and touted it to her followers as a “great option” for their state-funded education savings accounts.

But it turns out (thanks to more digging from Bredderman) that the Optima family of businesses are in turn controlled by a company called "Onesto, LLC" whose sole owner is Erika Donalds.

It's great that the Miami Herald picked up on much of this story. It's especially timely because Donalds is breaking into the hugely profitable cyber school business. And of course that whole election thing-- Byron could cement her standing further, though Heddles quotes him as saying that he will draw a clear distinction between his wife and himself. 

“Erika is a successful entrepreneur with deep experience in education policy and school operations. I value her perspective, which she has earned through her own work,” he said. “There is only one governor.”

Certainly the Donalds power couple will help Florida continue the work of fully dismantling public education. Good luck to the families and students in the state— may the Donalds actually lose this thing.

NCTE Sells Out To AI

NCTE had a chance to choose between human writers and bots. They chose to defend the bots.

The story was laid out at Inside Higher Ed, told by some members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. CCCC tried to produce some critical resources for dealing with genAI, and by some remarkable coincidence, NCTE then decided to "dissolve" the 4Cs (whose members got to learn about the axing of the group of 2,500 members on social media). 

The executive committee of NCTE offered some bureaucratic argle bargle to justify the move-- struggles with “fiscal sustainability, declining participation and governance challenges” and a step "necessary to more effectively serve the college English and writing and composition community and NCTE membership as a whole." But Melissa Ianetta, a CCCC officer, reported she was told that the "culture" of CCCC threatened NCTE's nonprofit status.Ianetts resigned on the spot and posted about the meeting on facebook. This move, she wrote, will allow NCTE "to exert the greater control they desire while maintaining the CCCC revenue stream."

Now, there's no politics like the internal politics of academic organizations, so lord only knows whose toast was burned enough to prompt this. But Jennifer Sano-Franchini , Kofi Adisa , Megan McIntyre and Maggie Fernandes report that the CCCC Special Committee on Generative AI in College Composition and Writing Studies had created two resources around genAI, including

    A primer on generative AI for student writers

    Guidelines for writing teachers regarding issues of academic integrity, plagiarism and generative AI.

Which they then submitted to the CCCC executive committee for review. But instead of immediate feedback from the committee, they report that this happened next. The NCTE presidential team raised "concerns" including concerns about “the reality of instructing students to opt out” of AI use, referencing situations where it may be “impossible or impractical to do so.” But the committee had only recommended that the option be available. And it gets worse:

In addition, the feedback we received requested more guidance to help students use generative AI “in appropriate and ethical ways.” To this end, they suggested that more useful framing might present AI as a “‘coconspirator’ and/or ‘ally’”—a position we find troubling for how it humanizes and encourages trust in LLM chatbots through the use of metaphorical language in ways that had been critiqued within our own disciplinary scholarship. Finally, they held that the documents should be inclusive of the range of perspectives regarding AI given our wide audience and purpose. We believed the documents succeeded in relation to the last point given that they did not encourage one blanket position with regard to generative AI but rather made refusal one viable option, among others, that readers might select.

Sigh. I have some thoughts about trying to use a plagiarism machine fueled by huge ecological and economic costs, but the committee went back to revise their work. They forwarded their revisions and waited in vain for response. However, a few days later, NCTE announced that it was teaming up with Google to award grants to develop a framework for "responsible AI use." Apply only if you are an English language arts teacher grades 6-12 who wants "to shape the future of AI in the field." 

That was December. By the end of March, the two revised documents had been reviewed and published-- with an added disclaimer that the views expressed were those of the authors only, plus a big preamble and call for responses, all features not included in other NCTE documents on other topics. CCCC pushed back, and some of these scalawags even introduced a resolution for the convention supporting the right of students to reject AI. 

Which brings us all of the way back around to the dissolution of the 4Cs. A new "transition team" will handle what comes after the end of CCCC including the work to “create resources for teaching digital literacy as a foundation for generative AI literacy in college writing courses, with special attention to students from diverse educational and linguistic backgrounds.”

As Natasha Singer outlined in Coding Kids, this is the industry model. "Partner" with the people who deliver education so that you can get them to skip right to "how to implement my product" and skip over "is this a good idea" or "how can we teach students to be critically examining the use of this product." It is supremely disappointing to see NCTE selling out to an industry whose whole business model is to undervalue human writing (even as they continue to celebrate the Day of Writing, when everyone is supposed to write something or, I guess, have their AI agent do it for them).