Hanushek Plays The Hits (Chicken Littling The NAEP)

The NAEP scores have inspired a great deal of handwringing and navel gazing and at least one more addition to the edu-panic vocabulary (make way for a "learning recession"). And it provides another round of attention to economists who specialize in education blarney.

So the Washington Post's consideration of NAEP math scores, comes the headline "Math scores remain lower than a decade ago. It's a bad sign for the economy."

The second part of that headline signals the return of Eric Hanushek, the economist who has followed fellow economist Raj Chetty to the assertion that getting the right elementary school teacher will lead the student to make oh so much more money as an adult. A decade ago, this was a popular argument for those who wanted us to use Value-Added Measures to find all the Bad Teachers so schools could fire their way to excellence. That was a dumb idea.

One might ask how, exactly, any scientist could come up with evidence that the right teacher would lead to adult riches. Was it some sort of empirical anecdotal evidence, like multiple class reunions where everyone noticed that all of Mrs. Swellteach's former students were rich and all of Mrs. Dullbutt's students were poor? It was not, though one would think that if Chetty and Hanushek were correct, such anecdotes would be easy to come by.

This may sound like a silly notion, but Hanushek has been pushing it for at least fifteen years. Here's a paper from 2011 where he lays out a very specific connection between a teacher's percentile and the exact number of lifetime dollars that a student will gather. Seriously. See for yourself:

Take a good but not great teacher, one at the 69th percentile of all teachers rather than at the 50th percentile (that is, a teacher who is half a standard deviation above the average). She produces an increase of $10,600 on each student’s lifetime earnings. Even a modestly better than average teacher (60th percentile) raises individual earnings by $5,300, compared to what would otherwise be expected. While those numbers are not trivial, they burgeon dramatically once we recognize that every student in the class can expect such increases in earnings. Consider, for example, a teacher with a class of 20 students. Under such circumstances, the teacher at the 60th percentile will—each year—raise students’ aggregate earnings by a total of $106,000. The impact of one at the 69th percentile (as compared to the average) is $212,000, and one at the 84th percentile will shift earnings up by more than $400,000. But there is also symmetry to these calculations. A very low performing teacher (at the 16th percentile of effectiveness) will have a negative impact of $400,000 compared to an average teacher.

This was music to the ears of the nominally-Democrat crowd of reformsters, the folks in the Obama/Duncan axis who insisted that if everyone in the country got an advanced degree, nobody would be poor. ("Masters degree??!" exclaims the Walmart manager. "Then we'll start paying you $35 an hour!"). 

Hanushek's whole shtick is to slice test scores into pieces of standard deviation. It's Hanushek and friends who came up with the "days of learning" which is just a slice of standard deviation on a test score. 

So how did he come up with this connection between good teachers and lifetime earnings? I'm going to over-simplify here, because we're talking about economist stuff here, but it goes pretty much like this: We know that a better teacher is better because their students get higher test scores, and we know that students with higher test scores go onto have generally wealthier life outcomes.

Hmmm. Well, first we've got to ignore the fairly small teacher effect on student success in school. And maybe high test scores cause higher earnings, or maybe it's that (as we already know) students from wealthier backgrounds do better on standardized tests, and that students from wealthier backgrounds tend to grow up to be wealthy adults? At this point, we can also call out the data that aren't there. We've had plenty of time to follow the students of high and low VAM teachers to compare how they're all doing and see if there's a pattern then. And somebody could have pursued the biggest question of all-- is there a shred of evidence that raising a student's test score raises their life outcomes? 

You would think all of that is more than enough to retire this baloney. But Hanushek has adapted to the new educational preoccupations. In February of 2020 (aka The Last of the Before Times) there he was, insisting that NAEP scores showed we'd have to get better teachers in classrooms soon, issuing a full-on policy analysis from the Hoover Education Success Initiative-- "The Unavoidable: Tomorrow's Teacher Compensation." The Initiative is a gathering of the usual suspects-- the executive committee is Hanushek, Chester Finn (Fordham Institute boss-emeritus), Paul Peterson, and Margaret Raymond (CREDO chief and Hanushek's wife). Only by using test scores to select and recruit the best teachers can we usher in an era of prosperity.

Now, six years later, for some reason Lauren Lumpkin gave Hanushek a call so that he could explain that today's graduates will earn an average of 8% less through their lifetimes. Because they have fewer skills, a thing he knows because of the NAEP math scores ("Oh, you're one of those," groans the Walmart manager. "We'll start you at 8% less than these older guys.")

And that's not all--

He estimated the combined effect of those losses will cost the U.S. $90 trillion through the year 2100.

He explains

“People don’t get very concerned about this, in part because it’s sort of like blood pressure. It’s the silent killer you don’t notice until you notice it,” Hanushek said of the way math achievement will affect the economy. “What it comes out to is a huge number that we have to pay attention to because it affects our position in the world, frankly.”

 And I shouldn't just pick on Hanushek, because other economists are out there chicken littling about this, too. 

Thomas Kane and a crew at the National Bureau of Economic Research are predicting a lifetime earning loss of $900 billion for all the students enrolled in the 2020-21 school year. Kane is the Harvard GSE guy who stumped hard for Common Core and testing and once published a terrible analogy about how you can't diet without a bathroom scale and a mirror (really). 

These guys all have big ole credentials and big-time jobs, so maybe I'm just not smart enough to follow their lines of reasoning. But it sure looks like a big old pile of baloney to me. And yet somehow it just keeps coming back, floating on zombie air. 

The Fundamental Challenge To Public Education and School Choice

There has always been an obstacle to public education in this country. It's real, its effects are punishing and far-reaching, and school choice doesn't provide the slightest solution.

Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Jessica Poiner is recycling an old reformster falsehood that is baloney wrapped around a kernel of truth. "Traditional public schools aren't open to everyone," she declares. The "So there!" is mostly silent. 

Poiner spins the pro-public ed statement into a "falsehood" by interpreting it as "All traditional public schools are open to all students," and she is absolutely correct that such a statement is absolutely false. Her assertion, however, doesn't really advance the argument because nobody has ever tried to make that argument.               

Poiner goes on to make the argument that between different schools and school districts we find considerable difference in quality and resources, and that access to the "better" schools is inequitable because of the American system ties school attendance to buying a house. Economic inequity is bakes into the US public education system; doubly so in areas where redlining (historically explicit or currently implicit). Poiner appears to be super-pissed that Ohio's voucher program, EdChoice, has been successfully challenged in court by public school districts, suggesting that districts hypocritically trap families so that adults can enjoy the benefits of the public system; students can't just go to the better schools because their parents didn't buy a house in the right place. 

I don't know of anyone who denies that some schools are better supported than others (though there's a whole discussion to be had about how we "know" that East Egg schools are better than West Egg). This points us to one of the most fundamental, long-standing problems of education-- how are we going to provide a good (enough) education for Those People's Children?

There have been a variety of solutions on the table:

1) Guarantee that every single child, no matter where they live, falls within a school district that must provide that child with an education. The use a system of state and federal taxation to even out the disparities between local tax bases.

2) Attach to every family some money and let them search out a school that they'd like to attend, public, private or charter. 

3) Do nothing. Let people sort it out on their own. And maybe cut everyone's school taxes.

Well, 3 is not an actual solution, but it's the MAGA way. Cut all government support for health care, food and nutrition, and education. Some people will end up on the bottom-- sick or ignorant or even dead-- but that's just nature's way of separating the meritorious from the undeserving, and we should not be interfering with God's Plan. But we need to acknowledge 3 because it is not only current federal policy, but it can also easily infect solutions 1 and 2. 

The trouble with 1 and 2 is that they share a critical problem-- both of them require taxpayers with money to help pay the education freight for families with much less money. When that doesn't happen in the public system, the result is schools without enough resources to fully serve their students. When that doesn't happen in a choice system, students just don't get a choice. Which is really the choice supporters' complaint. After all, we have always had school choice; the choice movement has not been about creating choice, but about getting tax dollars to subsidize it. Well, some of it. For some students.

The obstacles to school choice are not policy or bureaucrats or teachers unions or entrenched adult interests. The main obstacles have always been high cost and discriminatory policies.  

Poiner puts it this way:      

The bottom line is this: If you’re rich enough to buy or rent a home in a high-performing district, your kid gets to go to an excellent school. The world is your oyster. If, however, you can’t afford to pay your way into one of these districts, then most—if not all—high-performing public schools are closed to you.

She's not wrong. My problem is that modern taxpayer-funded school choice programs don't really change that at all. Your voucher dollars aren't enough to get you into East Egg Academy. Worse, East Egg can reject you for any reason. The public school system promise is that wherever you are, there is a public school that must provide for your education; wherever you live, there is no charter or private school that has to provide for your education.

I posted that last bit on the dead bird app, and Derrell Bradford replied with an alternative reformster view. 

Wherever you live there is a public school with the power of compulsory attendance and the ability to tax based on your inability to leave or choose no matter how near or far you are from it.

Bradford leads choice advocacy group 50CAN and works with pretty much every other pro-choice group out there, and he's about the most civil reformster out there (sort of the anti-DeAngelis). And here he pretty much encapsulates the point of view that views a local public school as a "have to" instead of a "get to," an infringement on rights rather than a means of exercising them. On this, we disagree. 

What I see as a commonality between the two views is the need for more resources. I've seen one true school choice program in the country, in tiny Croyden, NH, where the deal was that, lacking a local high school, the district would pay full tuition to any school of a student's choice. But I only learned about the program because the local Libertarians were trying to chop its budget. Meanwhile, voucher programs

A choice program that fulfilled the promise of an good education for every child, would A) cost a bunch of money, B) require charter and private schools to stop discriminating against students they wanted to reject and C) require useful measures of "good education." A public school program that fulfilled its promise would take whatever steps necessary to make sure that every school in every was providing a good job, which would A) cost a bunch of money and B) require useful measures of "good education."

Both visions are up against the same challenge-- people whose approach to education is some version of, "Yeah, education is important, but can't we do it for a lot less?" And if you let them keep talking, some version of, "I don't mind educating my own kid, and I welcome government help to do that, but I don't want to pay taxes to make a nice school for Those Peoples' Children." Also, a suggestion that compulsory education is a bad thing.

It has never not been an issue, going back to the days when many folks just didn't need a fancy education for anything (in 1950, 34.3% of Americans over age 25 had a high school diploma) all the way through to the days when Brown v. Board of Education spurred white taxpayers to bitch and moan about the Communist plan to take their money to educate Those Peoples' Children all the way up through recent history when states argued that students on the McDonald's track don't need courses like algebra. As a culture, we wave vaguely in the direction of the importance of education, but we'd rather not pay for it for Other People (see also: health care, food, families, and children). 

There are many many more issues to wrestle with in the larger education debates, but I'm trying to focus on just one point. Economic inequity is manifest in our education system. Modern choice programs, welded to free market ideology, do not offer a real solution to that inequity, and in many ways promise to make it worse. 

ICYMI: Counterclockwise Edition (6/14)

Several decades ago, my brother and I played in a strolling dixieland band at Conneaut Lake Park, a delightful small amusement park that has since fallen on difficult times, and one of the things we noticed at the time was that small children would "dance" to our music by running in little counterclockwise circles. Lo and behold, researchers have discovered that turning counterclockwise is an unexplained but real human thing. We humans truly are a mysterious species. 

Here's your reading list for the week. Read it in whatever direction you like.

Why Schools Keep Relearning the Same Lessons

Matt Brady on how schools have an unfortunate tendency to simply lose expertise and institutional history.

Excerpts over excellence: How Seattle Public Schools is preventing middle school teachers from teaching full-length books

Julie Letchner provides a specific, local example of how one district confuses compliance with quality, and how full length books are kept out of the classroom.

The Screen Time Lies Powering i-Ready's Ed-Tech Crisis Response

Part 4 in series of posts at Epostasy looking at how i-Ready is a mess, and how they are trying to spin their way out of trouble.

K-12 Educational Reform: Always a “Silver Bullet”

Greg Wyman takes a look at reform history all the way back to A Nation At Risk, and the search for an education silver bullet.

What About All Those ONLINE Science of Reading Programs?

Nancy Bailey questions the use of more screen time to improve reading.

Florida AG Says School Boards Must Let Students Leave Class For Religious Instruction

Lifewise has come for Florida's students, and the state is only too happy to hand them over. 

Education voucher funds for college? Arizona ESA spending raises new questions for growing program

Craig Harris continues to be an absolute beast in covering Arizona's voucher grift. Here's yet another variation on this theft from taxpayers.

ACT and SAT---Sophist Wastes

Thomas Ultican looks at the resurgence of standardized testing support in California.

The ‘Generational Collapse’ in Literacy

Nancy Flanagan responds to the complaint from college professors that their students can't read. 

Ohio Legislature Keeps Advancing School Reforms that Don’t Work but Fails to Fund the Public Schools

Jan Resseger keeps track of Ohio education shenanigans, including the legislature's fondness for leaning into failed policies while refusing to support the public school system.

The One-Room Schoolhouse

TC Weber is a busy guy this week, with observations about everything from discipline to nostalgia

(Teacher) Life Work

Adrian Neibauer spins off from Donald Hall's book Life Work, into a layered and layered look at life, work, and teaching. Quite a nice read.

Tough Times for an Education Budget Hawk

Not sure I've seen this take from anyone on any side. Frederick Hess asks why bother with education cuts if we're just going to blow a mountain of money and saddle the next generation with mega-debt?

AI Ain’t So Smart

Russell Frank, columnist for StateCollege.com, thinks maybe his AI devices are not doing great work. Best line:

The Machine can do a lot of things that we mere mortals cannot. But it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, which means it may be artificially intelligent, but it isn’t artificially wise.

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

Nothing like a good rant. This rant by Brian Phillips is pretty delightful. Thanks to Benjamin Riley for highlighting this in his fine Punk is anti-AI post.

The Federal Assault on History

The Organization of American Historians has released a report that attempts to summarize all of the current administration's attempts to rewrite or erase history.

This week at Forbes.com I took yet another pass at explaining why federal school vouchers are bad news. It's not just the money-- it's the fundamental change to the public education mission. I'd be delighted if you shared this one with your favorite elected state official. 

If you were a band kid in the early seventies, you listened to Maynard. We were lucky enough to see him live at Edinboro University every summer for a buck. When he scored a semi-hit with "Gonna Fly Now" that marked the end of MF Horn Maynard (concert closer: "Hey Jude") and the beginning of disco Maynard (concert closer: "Maria") but we didn't begrudge him his success, and later he moved back around to cool stuff like this:

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Fordham Institute Almost Figures Out Testing

When someone from the other side of debate announces that they Get It finally, you can find yourself torn between reactions. A sarcastic "No shit, Sherlock" wrestles with a sincere, "Why that's an excellent insight. Good job."

So here's part of the opening paragraph from a recent post by Dale Chu at the ever-reformy Fordham Institute. It opens with a discussion of a new drive by states to come up with what we're calling "through-year" assessments. 

Through-year assessment is appealing because it promises to address multiple longstanding frustrations with existing state tests. But growing enthusiasm for it rests on a shaky assumption: that a single assessment can simultaneously satisfy accountability requirements, improve instruction, provide timely feedback, reduce testing burden, preserve local flexibility, and produce valid statewide comparisons. It slices, it dices, it even juliennes!

No shit, Sherlock. I mean, that's an excellent insight. One of the major problems with the state Big Standardized Tests, from all the way back in the No Child Left Behind era, is that they are advertised as slicing dicing and juilienning. 

The BS Test is supposed to provide teachers with information about how students are doing and where there are "gaps" in instruction. They are supposed to provide schools with data on how well their curricula are designed and working. They are supposed to provide an accurate instrument for evaluating both teacher and school performance. They are supposed to provide useful "customer" information for parents choosing a school. They are supposed to provide "accountability" information for at least three different constituencies-- taxpayers, state and federal. They are supposed to provide a measure that facilitates comparison across space and time. And that's all before we get to less-explicitly-discussed purposes like exerting control over local curricular choices.

As Chu writes-

It is the same dilemma captured in the classic Saturday Night Live commercial for “New Shimmer,” a product advertised as both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Through-year assessment has something of a New Shimmer problem: It is being asked to function simultaneously as an accountability instrument and an instructional tool, as a system for comparability and a system for flexibility—design goals that do not naturally coexist in a single product.

Chu also points out, "Assessment experts have been warning about this dynamic for years." If by "assessment experts" he means "assessment experts, actual teachers, and plenty of parents," then sure. That's an excellent insight. 

More instructional utility often comes at the expense of comparability across students and schools. Additional testing windows may yield more information but increase logistical complexity. Faster feedback requires sacrifices elsewhere in the system, most commonly in the depth and breadth of what the assessment can cover.

These tradeoffs are not simply technical problems that can be papered over through more sophisticated psychometric design.

What an excellent insight. 

Look, teachers have been saying this for year, all the way back to NCLB and then the Common Core tests that were designed by prioritizing could be measured over what was important to measure. Teachers have pointed out now for decades that when they are literally forbidden to see the questions that students answered or to know what the students responses were, but are simply given a single score, usually months after the students have left their classroom-- that is an absolutely useless test from an instructional standpoint (but hey--protecting testing companies' valuable IP is more important than any educational goals).

Chu frames this whole piece as a discussion of what states are trying to set up for the future. But he comes really close to the most important insight. 

The challenge, then, is not a lack of good intentions or even a lack of innovation. It is that state assessment systems are being asked to solve multiple problems at once, requiring choices that satisfy no purpose fully and inevitably sacrifice elements of each. In the process, states may be required to spend more time, money, and resources on unproven assessment models—and probably add to students’ total testing burden—at a time when there is little, if any, appetite for doing so.

Yes, these limits of testing utility and accuracy are a hurdle, and states may "mistake an unavoidable tradeoff for a design problem that can be engineered away."

But Chu isn't describing a possible pitfall for future testing-- he is describing the fatal flaw of the state testing that is going on right now. The current program of BS Testing in the states has not even pretended to grapple with the problem of balancing different purposes for the testing, and so we've been saddle with a tradeoff that exchanges the generation of easily-managed numbers masquerading as data for -- well, everything. In pretending to do everything, state tests do pretty much nothing useful at all. 

So yeah-- these are some great insights. Please catch on to the other implications, and could somebody please forward these testing insights on to all the people who think we can fix the "learning recession" by leaning harder into test and punish policies of the past. Because when your tests are too multipurpose to be useful, "test and punish" feels a lot like "punish randomly." And I don’t want to wait years for some folks to have that insight.

Google's Classroom AI Rage Bait

Nobody likes to train teachers like Google, who, like tobacco companies, understand that if you can lock those customers in while they're young, you'll get to keep them for life. Hence, Google's pre-eminence in training teachers to use whatever damn thing they've come up with. The "pipeline of future users" memo was turned up by NBC journalist Tyler Kingkade. Kingkade just came back from a free two-day Google training camp for pushing Gemini, Google's house brand of odious AI, and the resulting piece is exactly the sort of thing I'm not supposed to read unless I wash it down with a double order of blood pressure medication.

But here, in one place, we can find so much of what is wrong about the AI-in-the-classroom boosterism. I've read this so you don't have to, but it's going to be neither short nor sweet. God bless Kingkade for suffering through the whole thing.

Kingkade opens with a group of k-12 educators "sitting in an atrium on Google's campus" trying to imagine what pushback they'd get from some old fossil of a colleague, the kind who is upset that cursive is no longer taught. She might "yell" that AI is just another shiny fad. "What’s next, she might ask — robots teaching kids how to read?" Oh, that whacky old fossil.

Where do they turn to get help with this dinosaur? Why, they ask Gemini for tips, of course. 

They would win over this skeptical English teacher by explaining what generative AI could do for her: create classroom materials for phonics lessons, reducing what would normally be hours of work to just two minutes. The key, the educators agreed, was to avoid getting into an argument or letting this AI critic unload all her fears uninterrupted.

Got that? Don't listen to her-- don't even let her finish talking. Instead, act like a computer program, not a human colleague. And certainly don't treat her concerns as if they are legitimate. Focus on "pain points" says one leader, and how Gemini can take away your pain. And I have to tell you-- in my youth, I went through training for how to handle penitent peers who had answered an altar call, and some of this "training" seems very familiar.

“It’s not as scary if you’ve taken something off of my plate versus giving me a new thing that I have to then go out and learn,” Winston Roberts, director of an AI initiative at ISTE+ASCD, a nonprofit education group that worked with Google to develop the training, told educators from a stage.

When a non-profit is pushing a particular profit, you have to ask who is paying the bills. In this "partnership," somebody has invested a lot of their marketing budget. Teachers get way way wayyyyyy too much of this kind of "training" that is actually marketing masquerading as "help" for teachers.

Kingkade takes a moment to note the considerable growing backlash against AI in general and screens in classrooms in particular. Then we are back to the session.

We meet an English teacher from Hawaii who notes that AI is now part of student vocabulary; the example is that students use AI to call things fake, which ought to tell us a valuable lesson right there. And then she offers this comparison: 

“If a student’s running in the hallway, you don’t take away the hallway — you teach them the proper behavior for the hallway.”

With all due respect to my Hawaiian colleague, no. If a student is shooting at things with a gun, you take away the gun. You don't let them drive a car until they are 16 and have passed requisite tests of competence. 

Google rolled out it's "free" online training that includes "guidance about creating study guides, crafting lesson plans and analyzing where students are getting stuck," but not arguments for why AI might be a bad match for those tasks. Crafting lesson plans? That should be done by someone who knows the material and the students- AI knows neither. Analyzing where students get stuck? I'm unconvinced that AI can do that at all, but even if it could, the important question is WHY students get stuck. That is one of the most basic teacher functions-- working out what mistakes in thinking are taking the student into the weeds. Simple repeating, "Yeah, you are in the weeds again" is no help; students need help figuring out what wrong turn they took.

The training materials describe Gemini as “an engine for high-quality instruction” to do the “heavy lifting” for designing classroom lessons. “As an educator, this shift moves you into the role of a ‘learning conductor,’” one slide states.

Learning conductor? Learning conductor??!! Time for another blood pressure pill. Gemini is not an engine for high quality instruction because high quality instruction involves a human. Nor can Gemini design high quality lessons; it can only mimic and average the lessons it has input. And wait a minute-- isn't "learning conductor" a fancy update of "guide on the side," a version of teaching that is widely and justly mocked?

“It’s really, really important that we use it,” Joseph South, chief innovation officer for ISTE+ASCD, "because Google has bet a shit-ton of money on this, and we need these kids to grow up into paying customers." Okay, he didn't say that last part. “We can’t just ignore it, we can’t ban it, we can’t keep it out of our schools — that’s not gonna prepare us for the future.” That may be at least partly true, but "just lie back and let it roll over you" doesn't seem like great future prep, either.

Kingkade reminds us about the "pipeline" memo and reminds us that Google is company that convinced every that schools needed Chromebooks ("What if a laptop, but broken") which we're now thinking, maybe not. Kingkade has watched a 2018 presentation about keep Google atop education mountain includes this great quote

“Educators are sitting on a growing goldmine of data,” the presentation said, but they needed help organizing and making sense of it. If Google designed ways for schools to use student data, it would set “the stage for us to reinvent the education system through data.”

Goldmine of data indeed. Also, shades of our data overlords, who used to be so sure that if they had all the data, they could control the world. Remember the claim that given access to all the data, the company could tell the student what to eat for breakfast on test day? Or that students wouldn't have to take the SAT because we'd already know what they were going to get? Yeah, that company is now toast, but the notion that a "data-driven" ed system would be awesome (and profitable and provide a digital profile of future meat widgets that corporations would love)-- apparently that kind of creepy Big Brother thinking still has a home.

Speakers at the training emphasized that humans should always stay involved with any AI use and that technology shouldn’t replace teachers [or, you know, learning conductors]. They focused instead on how a teacher could use Gemini to create a comic strip that explains how greenhouse gases trap heat, for example, or how elementary school children could use AI to generate more realistic depictions of their ideas than they are capable of drawing.

What the hell is wrong with these people??! Yes, the most important part of a third grade project is how realistic the rendering of the art is! After these last few years, Google, with all of its millions, is still struggling to come up with a non-stupid use case for AI in a classroom. But hey-- let's have a heavy dose of irony  --

Casey Cuny, a high school English teacher in a Los Angeles suburb, described asking his students to debate their takeaways from readings — like the concept of “doublethink” from “1984” by George Orwell — with Gemini before discussing them in class.

“It’s the best discourse I’ve seen in years on some of these Socratic seminars I’ve been running in my classes,” he said. “It does push the thinking when used intentionally and strategically. And remember that I’m still using teaching methods — I’m not just putting it on the AI and walking away.”

Yes, class, turn and talk to your surveillance plagiarism machine about themes in 1984. Time for another blood pressure pill. You know what else is good for pushing thinking intentionally and strategically?? Human teachers and students! But it's good to know that when he turns on the AI, he still stands right there. Many of these AI boosters remind me of the Common Core days when teachers would self-own with variations of "I couldn't do my damned job until I had the Common Core Standards to tell me what to do." Sigh. I'm sorry. Cuny is probably a lovely human being and maybe a fine teacher, but I cannot begin to describe the rage I would feel if I found out that this was what was happening in my child's classroom.

Kingkade notes that the indoctrinees knew they'd be facing "challenges in evangelizing for AI." But one tech teacher said the training equipped him to "show skeptics how AI could be beneficial to learning-- not just for cheating." And “They may not like it, but I don’t think that’s going to change things,” he said. “The naysayers are not going to stop it.”

Yeah, you can't do AI marketing without just insisting that it's inevitable, which is admittedly so much easier than trying to provide compelling reasons that a teacher with a free will and professional conscience should choose to incorporate it. 

Google and ISTE+ASCD are planning a host of these trainings across the country so that teachers can learn that using Gemini is awesome and great, also, how to roll over those terrible old-timey teachers who want to question whether there's any actual good reason to hand the class reins to Gemini while they become learning conductors. Because "training" here means not teacher training, but unpaid field sales evangelist training. I'm going to go do some deep breathing exercises now. 

 

John Oliver Looks At New College

You may recall Governor Ron DeSantis's attempt to turn a tiny Very Liberal Arts college into the Hillsdale of the South, a project that was going to be a proof-of-concept for red state governors across the country. He even enlisted that great culture panic soldier, Chris Rufo, whose whole thesis is that back in the sixties, lefties took over higher education as a start to taking over the entire culture.

I've checked in on the story from time to time, but this week, New College got the John Oliver treatment. As always, there is language Not Suitable For Work, but it's a pretty sharp take on the whole fiasco, and provides lots of screen time for our old buddy Christopher. Well worth a watch to see how badly this was botched. As Oliver correctly points out, it's not impossible to have a Very Conservative college-- but dear Lord, not like this--

Federal Anti-LGBTQ Students Bills

I wish it were more complicated than this, but it isn't.

For cultural right-wingers, the idea is that the dominant culture in this nation should be white (European), male, (a certain type of) Christian, and unfailingly straight.

Add "with wealth and poverty flowing towards those who deserve them" and you get right wing free marketeer.

Add "because God says so" and you get Christian nationalist.

And to get MAGA, you add anger and vengefulness aimed at anyone who ever dared to contradict any of the above.

We've seen the varieties of anti-LGBTQ bills championed on the state level, from censoring books that dare to mention that such persons exist to requiring schools to force all students to perform straight identities, regardless of how true those may be.

Unfortunately, we're seeing more of the same baloney on the federal level, especially in the House.

Back in May, the House passed a bill entitled "The Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act" (so..um.. SIPKA?). It's short and simple. 

For one, it would forbid any ESEA funds being used to teach "gender ideology," and if you're wondering what exactly that is, the bill refers you to Donald Trump's executive order Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, which defines "gender ideology" in part as "the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one's sex." That's part of a long rant that boils down to "biology and science say there are just two sexes and so your gender is determined by your genitals period the end shut up" which ignores the actual science of sex. But opposition to "gender ideology" is a particular type of marker, indicating someone who doesn't want to argue that LGBTQ people do not actually exist, and that anyone who claims otherwise is delusional or stupid or evil.

The other part of the bill requires schools to obtain parent permission before making any accommodations for "gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name on any school form" for a student in elementary or middle grades. Works fine except for all those students whose parents do not support or accept them. 

House Education and Workforce Committee also reported out HR 8705-- "Civics and History Advancement to Restore Learning, Integrity and Education Act" (CHARLIE Act, because they are determined they really think they've got something with that guy).  Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah tossed this one out there, and it's more of the same--                          

The bill says "no funds may be used for discriminatory equity ideology or gender ideology." You may have missed the part where Dear Leader tossed out "Discriminatory Equity Ideology" as an alternative meaning for DEI, but it's once again the notion that anything that tries to push straight white male Christians out of the spotlight on center stage is Very Bad and is, in fact, discrimination. 

But by censoring any piece of history education that doesn't center straight white Christian men, these guys hope to restore balance and fairness. They are so sure that they lost that center stage spot because evil lefties took over education and started indoctrinating children-- so the obvious solution is to get in there and start indoctrinating children to the right way of thinking. 

"We just want neutral instruction," say the supporters, believing in their hearts that a truly neutral view of American history and society would present straight white Christian men in a central spot.\

Well, none of this is new, but it's worth noticing that these kinds of attempts to enforce the culture right's ideology on students is now getting pushed at the federal level (you know-- the level where MAGA says they want to send control of schools back to the states). Now is no time to stop contacting your elected representatives, no matter who they are.