ICYMI: The River Is Rising Edition (3/8)

The Institute's grounds back up against the river, and the waters are rising. It has been a combination of rising heat hitting a lot of snow, and a steady rain. The river never rises all at once, but slowly and steadily, as combined forces drive it slowly and steadily over its bank. It's a natural process; as it rises, the waters will sweep away the garbage, detritus, and goose poop that have accumulated on the banks. We root for the river to rise far enough to sweep the area clean.

Meanwhile, a varied assortment of education reading this week. Have at it. 

Don't Talk to Me About the Factory Model of Education

Dylan Kane takes on everyone's favorite counter-factual education talking point. 

Experts liken potential Supreme Court reversal of school funding rulings to overturning Roe v. Wade

Hyperbole? Maybe-- but the New Hampshire Supreme Court is taking a whack at the landmark Claremont decisions, another of those court decisions that tell a state it can't keep half-assing public education funding. But the NH GOP would really like to just half-ass public education funding, so here we are. Jeremy Margolis reports for the Concord Monitor.

A Backdoor School Voucher Scheme That Sidesteps Civil Rights and Undermines Public Oversight

At The Century Foundation, Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra have produced an excellent explainer of the federal voucher program. Great for forwarding to that person who keeps insisting that the state ought to grab some of that free money.

State Law: Ohio's "Dropout Recovery" Charter Schools don't actually need to have any "dropouts". What they do need, though, is less accountability.

Stephen Dyer explains another charter school scam ripping off Ohio taxpayers. Saving dropouts? Not so much.

Nearly half of Ohio’s teachers say they may quit teaching; morale lags national average: Report

Speaking of Ohio, the new Ed Weeks survey suggests that Ohio excels in making teachers regret their career choices.

Zooming Out

Steve Nuzum explains what really drives all those book bans (spoiler alert: it is not deep concern for children).

The plot to replace teachers with tech

John Allen Wooden provides an absolutely blistering takedown of i-Ready.

Louisiana's 10 Commandments Law Marks a Critical Step Toward Christian Nationalism

Lorena O'Neil at Rolling Stone looks at 10 commandments laws in the context of rising Christian nationalism and its designs on schools.

Why Your School District Is Losing Its Leaders

Drew Perkins explains how the culture wars are driving leaders out of school districts.

The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment

The National Education Policy Center presents some research from Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza supporting what you already knew-- the constant attacks on public schools lead to policies that hurt those schools.

ProPublica Sues Education Department for Withholding Records About Discrimination in Schools

Good luck to them.

America’s teachers are working two jobs and barely getting by

CNN reports on a new survey that shows many teachers are having trouble getting by. In other news, sun expected to rise in East tomorrow. But Matt Egan does report some details and data.

Trump aims to shrink the Education Department — while Washington tightens its grip on schools

Matt Barnum captures the duality of this administration. On the one hand, they want to kill federal education oversight; on the other hand, they would like to micromanage local school policies that they don't like.

At least $7.2 million in taxpayer funds has been spent on LEGO sets through Arizona's school voucher program

Craig Harris ay 12News continues to dig deep and find out just how badly Arizona's taxpayer-funded voucher program is ripping off the taxpayers.

Florida Once Rewarded Academic Success. Now It Prorates It.

Sue Kingery Woltanski reports the latest Florida shenanigans, this time involving quietly cutting funds for a program that actually worked.

Ben Albritton’s priorities — rural spending and school voucher fixes — seem dead

Meanwhile, attempts to fix a system that can't even keep track of students will apparently stall once again.

The Backlash Against School Vouchers Is Showing Up at the Polls

Jennifer Berkshire continues to be a voice crying the wilderness that vouchers are a losing issue for elections, and maybe somebody ought to mention that in coverage.

"AI" is Yesterday's News

If you ever have a chance to hear Audrey Watters speak, do not pass it up. Here's a talk she gave to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and it highlights, with humor and unexpected connections, the hollowness of the AI education promise.

About that School Trump Referred to in the State of the Union Address…

Nancy Bailey takes a look at Alpha School, a massive techno-scam that somehow keeps drawing glowing press.

A Simple Idea That Could Change Things for Kids: Child Impact Statements

Bruce Lesley has a great idea. Government will never adopt it--but they should.

Heritage Foundation Strategizes and State Legislatures Propose Laws to Deny Free Public Schools to Undocumented Children

Jan Resseger looks at the latest initiative from those big-hearted clowns at Heritage. One more court decision to overturn.

Test Scores Tell You Who Your Child Beat, Not What Your Child Knows

Akil Bello reacts to a recent Jill Barshay article chicken littling parental favoring of grades over Big Standardized Test results. It's a great critique of the grades vs. test scores debate.

No one wants to read your AI slop

Cory Doctorow on the habit of tagging in AI to rebut arguments. Worth it for this quote--"There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws."

Former UM president Seth Bodnar officially launches campaign as independent vs. Daines

Montana's Senate race is turning out to be a complicated mess, but allow me to endorse this guy. He's a former student of mine and you won't find a better human being on the planet.

At the Bucks County Beacon, I reviewed a new plan-shaped report aimed at sort of fixing the problems of recruiting and retaining teachers. 

This is from the memorial concert for George Harrison. Lots of layers here, but the performance itself is quite a reading of the song.

Subscription is free. I don't want your money-- give it one of the other fine writers about education. But your subscription raises my numbers which in turn increases my visibility and gets the word out. 

School Voucher Math

To hear some voucher fans talk, they just want their own money back.

For instance, here's Julie Emerson, former legislator and now Louisiana Governor Jess Landry's chief of staff, explaining the LA GATOR taxpayer-funded voucher program.

It’s this basic principle of your tax dollars that you send to the government to educate your child, and we want you to have more flexibility in how those dollars are spent. You’re all sending your tax dollars to Baton Rouge, and you all want your child to be educated the best way that you see fit, and you would like to see those dollars follow your child into that education situation of choice, because every child learns differently.

Except that this is all a lie. Let's use Louisiana as an example.

According to tax-rates.org, the median property tax in Louisiana is $243 per year (that's on a house worth the median value of $135,400). Using census figures, worldpopulationreview.com figures the median property tax rate across all 64 counties is $732. If we go county by county, the lowest median property tax is $199 in West Carroll Parish and the top median rate is in Orleans Parish-- $2,428. 

For 2025-26, the GATOR program will provide the following amounts to families--

Up to $15,253 for IDEA students
$7,626 for students whose family have an income below 250% of federal poverty guidelines
$5,243 for other eligible students

The federal poverty guidelines say that 250% for a family of four is $80,375. 

So let's say Mr. and Mrs. Median live in a median home and pay $300 a year in property tax (I'm rounding up to make the math easier). Let's say they live in that house for fifty years. That's a grand total of $15,000 paid in taxes. Let's say they have two little median children. We'll even assume they are "other eligible." That means $5,243 per year per child for 13 years, or a grand total of $136,318. Even I do this math with the top median tax amount of $2,428 for fifty years, I get a total tax bill of 121,400. 

In other words, property tax costs do not cover the cost of vouchers. The voucher program is not simply letting taxpayers decide where their tax dollars go-- they also get to decide where their neighbors' tax dollars go. The only scenario in which this becomes true is a couple with a very expensive home and just one child. For all other parents, the more kids they have (and the more special needs those children have) the more necessary it is for "your tax dollars that you send to the government to educate your child" to be supplemented by your neighbors' tax dollars

This example was Louisiana, but the point holds true in virtually every voucher state. Voucher users are not simply getting to control their own tax dollars, but also the tax dollars of many, many other people.

Also, if we are going to adopt the legislative principle that taxpayers should get to decide exactly what their tax dollars are spent on, I have a few thoughts about my tax dollars and the US military. 

But that's not what's happening here. Voucher users are most definitely not just getting their own tax dollars handed back to them; they are getting to appropriate the dollars of many other taxpayers, whether those taxpayers like the idea or not. Arguments like Emerson's are dishonest, but too rarely called out. 

Teach For Awhile For America

Wendy Kopp, the woman who hatched Teach for America, popped up in The Atlantic with an odd reflection on "first jobs" and teaching, and, well, there's a lot of subtext to unpack. After "four decades trying to inspire young people... to work directly with low-income communities," Kopp has some thoughts.

She opens with the story of Jack, who was trying to decide whether or not to go the TFA route, and jumps from there to bigger ideas:

Policy makers and philanthropists aren’t particularly focused on first jobs. But these choices matter—and not only for the individuals beginning their careers. If we want to address society’s most deeply rooted challenges—poverty, polarization, environmental degradation, geopolitical conflict—we need to encourage young people to work on these issues early in their careers, so they can grow into leaders capable of solving them.

In other words, going into teaching as a "first job" doesn't really help anybody, but it gives TFA members the exposure to issues so that they can move on to leadership roles where they can actually accomplish something. You know-- real jobs where the real work gets done. 

This is in line with the longtime criticism of TFA that it's for rich white kids from elite universities to get an "experience" being briefly exposed to the poors.

It also points to the less-acknowledged problem of TFA. Plenty has been said about TFA's disrespect for career teachers ("Step aside, Grandma, and let me show you how we smart Ivy Leaguers get the job done") and the absurd condescension of insisting that a top college kid can pretty much master the work in a five week training. But over time it has become clear that a wider danger of TFA is that it keeps producing a bunch of reformster amateur edu-preneurs who go into business and government claiming to have been "in teaching" because they spent two years in a classroom somewhere. 

TFA has certainly produced some folks who became real teachers and embarked on real teaching careers-- which I guess would be a disappointment to Kopp, who was rooting for them to zip through their two-year first job so they could get on to important leaderly jobs of solving the world's problems.

Her story of Jack defies parody:

While teaching in Harlem, Jack saw that a lack of resources made failure seem inevitable for the kids at his school. He also saw the incredible resilience and character of the students, families, and teachers. He realized just how entrenched inequity in education is, but he gained confidence in his ability to help address it. Jack is now in his first year at Columbia Law School.

Yup. Jack went face to face with the challenges of poverty, saw what strengths were there, grabbed ahold of the problems of teaching in a low-resource classroom and decided-- to go to law school. But don't worry-- Kopp assures us that he "hopes to litigate for increased funding for education and better compliance with anti-discrimination and disability-rights laws."

But Kopp just can't stop. "Research confirms that working close to the roots of social issues early in one’s career fundamentally reshapes a person’s beliefs and life trajectory." And she connects some of that research to TFA, showing that yes, TFA is great because it provides an important formative experience for the TFA members. The actual students should, I guess, be happy to provide a useful learning experience for those college grads. It's almost as great as if someone provided learning for those students.

Kopp reminds us that her generation was known as the Me Generation. But offering a "prestigious alternative to the corporate track" those college grads proved to be more "idealistic and civically committed than people assumed." So the trick was, I guess, offering a prestigious alternative like TFA and not a non-prestigious alternative like an actual teaching career. 

Kopp comes real close to some insights here--

In 2024, 35 percent of Yale’s senior class entering the workforce chose jobs in finance and consulting; add tech into the mix, and the share rises to 46 percent. At other schools—including Harvard, Princeton, Claremont McKenna, and Vanderbilt—at least half of the graduating class moved into those three fields. Meanwhile, the data I’ve seen on the share of students taking jobs close to inequity and injustice suggest a decline across the same period.

Ah, but Wendy-- those graduates going into those fields are taking jobs close to inequity and injustice. They're just close to the winning side of those issues.  

Some students, of course, feel they can’t afford to pursue less immediately lucrative careers. But if this was all that was holding graduates back, you’d expect to see more kids from wealthy backgrounds taking these jobs. Yet students from the highest-income backgrounds are the least likely to enter into public service and the most likely to pursue the corporate path.

Huh. Rich people don't want to help poor people, and don't even want to be around them? I feel like there's a really deep vein to be tapped here, but Kopp isn't going there.

Kopp points out that the corporate track has a well-funded recruitment arm and that colleges are eager to hoover up some of that money in a sort of collegiate product placement. 

Kopp also sees an opportunity in the AI onslaught. Maybe, since AI is going to do all the entry level jobs, companies could "push back their recruiting timelines" while grads go out and get some human skill jobs, in communities tackling social problems. Not, mind you, that she thinks the grads should stay in that first job:

And young people themselves, even those who might want to run a major company someday, would benefit immensely from devoting the early years of their careers to such challenges.

Get those humaning skills, then move on to your real job.

There are so many blind spots in Kopp's essay, like her observation that "High schools should inspire students to step outside of their comfort zone and wrestle with pressing social issues," as if there are thousands of high schools where the students wrestle with pressing social issues every single day. Philips Exeter Academy is not a typical high school.

But mostly is this whole notion that the direct social work of the world should be done by fresh-faced college grads who only stay for a couple of years before they go on to the real lifetime work of, perhaps, amassing money or political power by occasionally remembering the social issues that they observed up close for a brief time. What does a school system look like when it is staffed mainly by people who never stay long enough to actually get good at the work of teaching? And are those people really fit "experts" to lead the world of education policy? 

Takes me back to two classics from The Onion-- the point/counterpoint "My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids vs. Can We Please, Just Once, Have A Real Teacher" and "Teach For America Celebrates 3 Decades Of Helping Recent Graduates Pad Out Law School Applications." I'm going to reread those now to get the taste of Kopp's ideas out of my head. 

TX: They Don't Want School Choice

Texas once again provides proof that many school choice advocates do not actually want school choice at all.

A Muslim parent has taken the state to court in order to sue for access to Islamic private schools via taxpayer-funded vouchers. 

But wait, you say-- doesn't Texas have (after years of battling and political shenanigans) a taxpayer-funded school voucher program? Aren't we seeing stories about how gazillions of parents are signing up for it?

Yes, and yes. But in Texas, as in many states, the people who have fought so very hard for school choice don't actually want school choice. 

As I posted last December, the acting comptroller threw a wrench in the works before it even got in gear. Kelly Hancock was in the chemicals business when he decided to step up his political career from school board member to House of Representatives in 2006. After three terms in the House, he moved up to the Senate. His undistinguished career included his award from Texas Monthly for being one of the worst legislators in Texas in 2017. The 2021 gerrymander still gave him a safer district. Then in June 2025, he resigned the Senate so he could be appointed the acting Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts by Governor Greg Abbott. (He's planning to run for the office for realsies next year.)

Hancock entered the Acting Comptroller gig by asking if maybe he could just exclude some schools from the voucher program. Hancock argued that the accreditation company Cognia (in business since 1895) had hosted some events organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Governor Greg Abbott last November designated CAIR a "foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organization," because Islamophobia is a big selling point for Texas Republicans. The feds have not made any such charge, but Governor Ron DeSantis got Florida on that same bandwagon (and just lost the court case over it). Attorney General Paxton told Hancock to go ahead and shut off those private schools from the taxpayer-funded vouchers.

So because some schools know a group that knows a group that the governor says (without evidence) is tied to other bad guys, hundreds of schools have been locked out of the Texas voucher program. The schools include schools that serve Christian students and students with special needs, and those that serve Muslim students. 

So now a father has to sue the state to have access to the school choice program. “The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit states.

CAIR issued a statement about the events it hosts, “Know Your Rights” events designed to inform students about state and federal civil rights and protections.

“Hosting civil rights education for students is lawful. So is teaching students about their rights under the U.S. and Texas Constitutions,” a spokesperson with CAIR Texas said. “Any attempt to penalize schools for learning about their civil rights from an organization Greg Abbott happens to dislike would raise serious First Amendment concerns.”

It sure looks like Texas would like to provide taxpayer dollars only to certain schools that are connected to certain religions. For the umpteenth time, we get school choice advocates who only support choice when it involves families making choices of which they approve, which inevitably involves the State deciding which religions are legitimate, and that ought to alarm people on all sides of religious debates.

This father should win his suit, and I'll be interested to see what the "pro-choice" leaders of Texas do next.  

A Hurricane in Indianapolis

Indiana is facing hurricane level takeover of its public school system without the use of an actual hurricane.

Brandon Brown, CEO of The Mind Trust, a group of business-minded reformsters who have attached themselves, leechlike, to Indianapolis schools. Brown has spent 17 years "in education," which translates to a two whole years in Teach for America followed by various reformster groups. 

In The74, Brown can be found delivering a bunch of corporate argle bargle about HEA 1423.

Brown opens by citing the example of post-Katrina New Orleans, which became the first major city to "restructure its school system." Kind of like the way rockets sometimes employ "rapid unplanned disassembly." "In the two decades since, however," writes Brown, "no city has attempted such an ambitious structural reform." It's true, just as few rocket makers have deliberately pursued rapid unplanned disassembly. 

But Brown is happy to announce that the Indiana General Assembly is on its way to replicating the effects of a natural disaster with the bill's "dramatic restructuring of public education."

Brown's description of the vast benefits of this rapid unplanned disassembly of the district is remarkably vague and free of plain language, but there are two major pieces that one can glimpse dimly through the fog of jargon.

The bill would establish the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, a nine-member board appointed by the mayor. The IPEC would be the super-boss-daddy of all Indianapolis schools, both public and charter. It looks a lot like the old portfolio model, which Mind Trust has been pushing and expanding in Indianapolis for years. The model is based on the idea of an investment portfolio, where you keep juggling investments in and out of the portfolio depending on how well they pay off. (Longer explanation here.)

I wrote this next paragraph in 2019:

Portfolio models are privatization writ large. In places like Indianapolis, the portfolio model has been pushed and overseen by a group of "civic-minded" private operators. The Mind Trust of Indianapolis flexed its political and financial muscle and elbowed its way into "partnership" with the public school system, pushing for the expansion of charters in a manner perhaps calculated to destabilize the public schools and create financial peril for low-scoring schools. There is a certain gutsy aggressiveness to how portfolio models are established. Step One: Bob sets up a snack vending stand in the lobby of a local restaurant. Step Two: When the owner complains about how Bob is draining business, Bob smiles and says, "Look, let's just become partners under one brand. And I just happen to know a guy who would be great to run it."

Now we're at the step where Bob says, "You know, there's no reason I shouldn't get paid the same amount for my popcorn balls that your restaurant charges for steak. Also, how about some help with this dinky stand I'm stuck in."

Because the IPEC has a couple of mandates under the bill. One is to "create a unified transportation plan." Another is "Developing a system-level facilities plan that would maintain, and potentially own, buildings for all schools that choose to opt in." IPEC should also levy property taxes "for both operating and capital costs so that all public schools within IPS boundaries benefit equally." And also creating a "unified performance framework" so that persistently low-performing schools would be shut down (see Portfolio Model). 

Says Brown, "The changes will effectively put charters and traditional public schools on the same footing — both in terms of the money spent per student and the consequences for poor performance." Or as he says later in the piece, "IPS will now become another school operator alongside charter schools, and district schools will compete on the same playing field and be held to the same accountability standards."

So taxpayers will now get to fund charter schools directly, as well as provide transportation. The IPEC would get to close down public school buildings, or hand them over the charter operators. Between the lines, it appears that IPEC would have all operational and financial power, and school operators would just manage the teaching part (until, of course, someone with their hands on the purse strings decides they have some thoughts about the teaching part).

It's not just that this is a takeover of the public system (also, any charter schools that don't want to play in this game don't have to). This gives us once again one of the major features of privatization under the fiction of school choice--

Disenfranchising the taxpayers.

IPEC will be appointed, not elected, and it will in turn make sure that charter schools, run by boards that are not elected, will get a hefty share of the taxpayer money. What do the taxpayers get to say about how their money is spent? Not a damned thing, particularly if they don't have any school age children. Brown promises "greater efficiency and coordination," but not accountability, transparency, or a voice for the people who pay the bills. 

Brown promises "a single point of accountability," but the reality is that a portfolio system, run by nine mayoral appointees, has no point of accountability to the taxpayers. 

Brown says he hopes this model catches on and spreads to other cities. Just think-- you, too, can have your own corporately manufactured natural disaster. 

Small Town Accountability

One of my mother's nurses is a former student of mine who now works at the assisted living home where Mom now lives.

My car used to be serviced by a former student. When we eat out, we're often waited on by a former student. I taught side by side with many former students. Yesterday, the Board of Directors had a playdate with their friend, who is the son of a former student. I go to church with former students. I meet former students in the grocery store. 

My lawyer is the father of one of my former students. So was my previous doctor. So was the presiding judge in county court. We could discuss a whole category of families where I have taught multiple generations. The guy whose company painted our house is the father of former students, and is married to a former student.

I could go on and on. This is teaching in a small town. 

Not everyone cares for it. Some teachers deliberately live away from the community in which they teach, hoping for some privacy and a life that is separate from their teaching work. 

It's a level of transparency and accountability that no system cobbled together in a big urban school district will ever match. If parents (or other taxpayers) want to ask you, to your face, why you are doing X or what was the point of nY, they can do it. As a teacher, you have to live with the knowledge that you may have to really explain and justify yourself. And as your students grow up and graduate, many leave, but many stay, and even the ones who leave come home for family holidays. You get to have conversations with former students while they are in college, talking about what they did or did not find themselves prepared for. And the challenge becomes personal, too. If you were an unbearable jerk to your students-- well, you are going to be living around them literally for the rest of your life. Are you a highly effective educator? There are a whole lot of people who have an assessment, and they have shared it. A VAM score is a tiny fart in a big wind compared to, "My kids and my grand-kids had her for class, and she was absolutely [insert adjective here]."

Your students do not apear out of the mysterious mists, to return to some great unknown at the end of the day. They are real humans who live in a real neighborhood.

This can also help you do your job. When you know more about the family's challenges, you can better appreciate where your students are coming from and what they're carrying with them on the journey.

When folks talk about teachers not bringing their personal stuff into the classroom, small town teachers chuckle. You want LGBTQ persons to stay closeted and invisible? Lots of luck. In a small town, your students know where you go to church, who you marry--heck, who you date, where you go to eat or drink. Unless you never mention your politics to a soul, they know that, too. I've been writing a local newspaper column for almost 28 years. For many years, one of the social studies teachers in my school was also the mayor of the town. 

It's not always a great thing. Rumors can fly, and you may at times wish for the space and privacy to deal with your own problems and mistakes. And sometimes you have to watch some of the process play out in front of you. Here's a real conversation from my classroom many years ago:

Me: Expressing some admiration of a female artist

Student: Watch out. You'd better not let Mrs. Greene hear you talking like that.

Another student: He's divorced, you dummy.

Being closely tied to a small community can also be difficult if it's a community that does not collectively value education all that much ("My family has never needed all that book learning.") But at least you know what you are working with (or resigning from).

I have never been able to think of how to scale up the small town model of accountability, to create a system where teachers and administrators have to deal face to face, on a daily basis, with the taxpayers that they serve. I sure wish I could. It's more personal, more immediate, more effective than trying to collect a bunch of "data," mold it into some sort of consumable shape, and that get those data patties served to people who ought to care. 

You will find small town school systems out there trying hard to act like they're big city districts, working to be more impersonal and cold, on purpose. That seems backwards to me. But then, most of modern education reform is aimed directly at large city school systems and is poorly suited to small town education (but that's another post). 

I'd love to see a day when large districts try to learn from small ones. We could have an education conference, do meetings in local fire halls, house attendees at a couple of local hotels, eat at some local restaurants. I know a few people who could help set it up. 

ICYMI: Oh Great A New Frickin' War Edition (3/1)

It's hard to really capture the many levels on which the US attack on Iran is just stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. I'm not going to get into it here-- there is plenty of press about it and you probably couldn't miss it if you wanted to. But I surely hope that you are badgering your Congressperson.

In the meantime, the business of helping a country be less stupid remains super-important, so we will continue to pay attention. Here's your list for the week.

Center for Christian Virtue is the new White Hat Management, just as Jesus intended

You may remember White Hat Management, an outfit that really mastered the art of scamming their way to rolling up taxpayer dollars via school choice. Stephen Dyer says someone else is also showing that kind of self-enriching skill-- but with more Jesus.

Ohio school district bans ‘Hate has no home here’ poster from classroom

One Ohio district apparently doesn't want to get caught discriminating against the haters. Cliff Pinckard reports for Cleveland.com.

Private-school owners: Florida’s biggest voucher-funding group is hurting us

Florida's voucher-funding system is a mess, and some private school operators are getting big sad about it. Natalie La Roche Pietri reports for the Miami Herald.

Senators find out what you get when you ask for "disruption" in education.

South Carolina legislators wrote themselves a big ole taxpayer-funded school choice law, but now they are sad that some folks are getting money that the legislators didn't intend to give money to. Steve Nuzum explains.

Overselling the Mississippi Miracle

Jennifer Berkshire reminds us that while Mississippi may have helped its fourth graders get better reading scores, it is still a systemically bad place for children to grow up.

The Great AI-in-Education Paradox

Paul Thomas looks at one of the mysteries of the great AI push for education-- if students learn about AI by using AI, how do they learn anything?

Public School Profiteering in Stockton

Thomas Ultican takes us to Stockton, CA, for yet another demonstration of how to get rich in the charter school biz.

Lost in the Noise: A Major Shift in Florida School Choice

It was certain to happen-- turf wars over the highly profitable school privatization biz in Florida. Sue Kingery Woltanski has the inside scoop.

The 100-Point Scale Is a Design Flaw

Matt Brady explains why the 100 point grading scale is a flawed design. 

Gifted and Talented Redux

Nancy Flanagan considers the proper role of gifted programs (and why it's such a touchy subject for some folks).

Secret Agent Man

Audrey Watters offers a wealth of links this week, looking through the world of Ai and training and literacy and other messy ed tech detritus. Have you subscribed to her newsletter yet, because you should.

McMahon Continues Dismantling Dept. of Education. Will She Succeed?

Jan Resseger breaks down the latest rounds of assaults on the education department. 

Google and ISTE+ASCD announce new partnership to destroy US education

I covered this news, but Benjamin Riley really brings an appropriate amount of rage to the discussion.

Massachusetts Board of Higher Education Betrays Working Class Students

Maurice Cunningham looks at the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education's plan to offer second-rate degrees to working class students. Not a great idea.

Meta patents AI that keeps users posting after they die

I used to joke that I would teach until death and then have my body stuffed and mounted with animatronics so I could keep working in my classroom. Apparently META is now on the case. Once again I am struck at how little superficial data they feel they need to replicate you. Ick. 

This week I was in The Progressive, looking at a group of Democrats who might actually support, sort of, public education. And at F9orbes.com, a look at one more school choice defeat in Kentucky, and a Pew survey with information about teens and AI. 

I am not really a Sufjan Stevens fan, but I do love this song which just hits me somewhere in here. 

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