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.
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.
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 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
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).
Ohio's EdChoice voucher program is a classic example of how these programs are planted and then grow. But a recent court decision suggests that EdChoice will suffer because of that growth.
EdChoice was launched in 2006 after the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth about poor students trapped in underperforming public schools. But for voucher fans, this is always only the beginning. In 2013, legislators came up with EdChoice Expansion, which upped the voucher ante to 200% of the federal poverty level and removed any "trapped in a bad school" requirement. They were encouraged by Simmons-Harris v. Goff, a 1999 case in which the state supreme court found the Cleveland pilot voucher program did not violate the state constitution because it was narrow, focused and cheap (but still lost because it was birthed by legislative shenanigans-- another voucher classic).
In 2022 some public schools and students sued the state for violating Ohio's constitution and its requirement to maintain "a thorough and efficient system of common schools." Legislators were unimpressed; in 2023 they went ahead and expanded the expansion of vouchers, offering vouchers to any family, regardless of income (if you were more than 450% of the poverty line, you only got part of a voucher). However, the program commenced to suck up $1.4 billion-with-a-b in taxpayer dollars.
Last year a Franklin County judge declared the voucher program unconstitutional. The state appealed to the Tenth Appellate District Court of Appeals, and last week that court agreed that, yes, the program violates the state constitution.
The court found a couple of problems. Bottom line:
EdChoice, as presently structured and funded, secures with taxpayer funds a competing system of uncommon schools that is not subject to the same obligations imposed on Ohio’s system of common schools. This system of uncommon schools violates the mandate of Ohio Const. art. VI, § 2 to secure “a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state.”
The court finds that EdChoice schools are not common schools for three reasons.
First, the schools--not the parents--choose which students to admit, without "any meaningful constraints on the schools' selection process. They "actually end up depriving families of choice." Second, EdChoice schools are available only in urban areas; rural students don't get that choice. Third, EdChoice schools are not "subject to any meaningful state oversight. " No fiscal oversight, no requirement for teacher licensure. And as noted in the first point, no meaningful anti-discrimination regulations.
The court also finds that EdChoice "undermines the financial integrity" of the state's public schools. Again, three reasons.
First, taxpayer funds are diverted to private schools instead of public ones. This is a particularly bitter pill in Ohio, where the courts thirty (thirty!!) years ago told the legislature that the school funding formula was unconstitutional and they needed to shape it up. The legislature dithered and ten years ago came up with a Fair School Funding Plan, which they have since failed to actually fund, or even act like they want to.
Second, EdChoice increases the per-pupil cost of educating the students remaining in public school, because voucher schools select the cheapest-to-serve students.
The third point is a more subtle one, and I'm a little impressed that the court got it. In Ohio, taxpayers get to vote directly on education tax increases (levies). The court correctly concludes that EdChoice makes local taxpayers less likely to vote for local tax levies. We've actually seen this movie before-- after Brown white parents pulled their children out of public schools and sent them to segregation academies, but then they also chopped taxpayer support for the schools their children no longer attended. Says the court-
We recognize that many factors influence whether levies pass or fail. However, the record supports the conclusion that EdChoice’s impact on public schools— through the extraction of resources and the erosion of the public’s incentive to remain invested in local schools—is among those factors that may affect levy support.
So EdChoice is, in fact, unconstitutional.
Is this the end? Of course not. Recognizing that this case will continue to climb the judicial ladder all the way to the state supreme court, the appellate court has allowed that the program can continue while the legal wrangling goes on. The law shops lined up to help the state include some Catholic school heavy hitters, including the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Clinic, which has gotten involved in some tax dollars for religious school business before.
Meanwhile, a House version of "Take The Dough, We Gotta Know" bill wants to add some transparency to the Ohio voucher landscape. The Ohio GOP really aspires to make Ohio the Florida of the North, and people just keep getting in their way. May their hard times continue.
Two years ago at the Simon and Schuster centennial celebration, Fredrik Backman appeared to deliver a four minute talk about being a writer that is delightfully hilarious. Enjoy.
Today is the National Day On Writing, an event celebrated by the National Council of Teachers of English, which is a group I'm rather pissed at these days, but we'll get back to that later, because I think writing is hugely important. I've written a whole manuscript about it and the following is in part adapted from that (if you're a publisher or agent who wants to give it a look, just let me know).
One of the oldest challenges of being human is both simple and profound. We are each individually locked into our own fleshy container; we are filled with ideas and emotions and images and impressions and memories, things we’ve experienced and things we’ve learned that we want to share with other humans, and yet we have no easy way to do that. We cannot project our thoughts and experience into another brain directly.
We are mysterious creatures, wonderfully and terribly made, our minds and thoughts and feelings trapped inside our bodies, and we spend our whole lives trying to master the business of making ourselves intelligible to the other body-bound souls around us. So we created systems of symbols, first of sound and then, later, of marks on a page to represent those sounds and the symbols they represent.
In his book On Writing, Stephen King answers the question “What is writing” with a simple line.
“Telepathy, of course.” And later, “a meeting of the minds.”
We dream of telepathy, mind-reading, of magical or technological ways to bridge the gap between ourselves and the selves of others. We talk. We sing. We dance. We draw. We create entire languages and then expand and refine them in an attempt to make them better signifiers of everything bouncing around inside of us. And we write.
It is one of our most miraculous achievements. By making those marks on a page, we can cast our thoughts, our ideas, our feelings out across space and time.
But—and this is a big but—language, especially in written form, is both the most common and the most mysterious of human activities. It is an imperfect tool for making thought visible. We have no means to measure its effectiveness and accuracy, and we spend countless hours trying to interpret through the noise and parse the wording attempts of our fellow humans. “What did she mean by that?” can consume hours, even days.
That’s a central problem of education, where teachers are charged with reading the minds of their students. We can never be 100% certain that a student is truly and accurately communicating what’s in their head, because the only measure we have of what’s in their head is their communication. On any given day, we might be assessing what they hold in their head, or we might actually be assessing how well they are communicating it.
In many disciplines, we have worked our way around that central challenge. I can use straightforward objective measures to check for basic recall—do you recognize the desired piece of information when you see it? I can use performative tasks to create mini-artifacts of learning—what are the answers to these math problems?
But written language is the most complex and deep of human activities, and as soon as we try to reduce it to a simple performance or require that students produce an easily-measured artifact, we lose the plot. Asking students to perform a stripped-down version of writing, to write so that we can assess them (or worse yet, that some machine can assess them), is not the same as asking them to write for real.
Writing is thinking made concrete and visible. But by focusing only on the concrete and visible artifact of writing, and not the origin and process of its creation, the thinking behind it, we open the door to many other methods—non-thinking methods—to produce that artifact. And that’s where all our troubles, including those exacerbated by chatbots, began.
Writing is how we reach outside of ourselves, across distance and time, and so it is hugely powerful. Which is why it's sad that some people squander that power by using it not to communicate, but to coerce, control, and manipulate. Not to connect, but to grasp and push.
Students deserve to experience writing as a very human way of connecting and communicating with other humans, not as an empty performance, the crafting of an artifact that has no meaning except to prove you can craft an empty artifact and trade it for certifications attesting to your compliance. It is this empty performative approach that made writing instruction easy prey for generative AI--a program that excels at constructing empty artifacts.
If education is going to be about helping students grow into their best selves, taking hold of what it means to be fully human in the world, then it must include real writing.
Consider this formulation, proposed in a variety of forms, especially by reformsters of the past few decades. I give you, the Infallible Conditional of Education:
If every teacher does X, then all students will learn Y.
It is wrong, every single time. Doesn't matter what you plug into X and Y, it's always wrong. Doesn't matter if you're applying scientific research. Doesn't matter if you're scaling up a program that has worked for small groups of students with a particular teacher.
It is wrong, every time.
There are predictable results for trying to implement a program requiring all teachers to do X.
Some students will, in fact, learn Y. Some students will not, but since the program is premised on the proposition that teachers doing X must infallibly lead to students learning Y, people in charge will declare that either A) the teacher (either willfully or out of incompetence) is not implementing X with fidelity or B) the student is defective in some way. Thus the Infallible Conditional of Education leads to placing a high value on compliance-- if everyone would just behave the way they are supposed to, declare frustrated leaders, this would totally work!
There are lots of reasons to fall for the fallacious ICE. Someone looks at research and says "This is how masters of this skill do it, so this is how learners must learn it" or maybe "This worked for a group of ten college sophomores, so it should work for a hundred high school freshmen." Sometimes the leaps are huge-- like the leap from "tutoring of small group of students by human tutors produced theoretical and highly dubious results, so clearly giving many students a computer program to sort-of-tutor them will yield great results."
But mostly I blame the continued attractiveness of ICE on the general public's failure to move out of the Newtonian world and into the modern world of chaos theory and quantum mechanics.
(Note: I am now going to grossly over-simplify complicated stuff. Don't @ me over details.)
The Newtonian world loves nice, linear equations. X + Y = Z. Push this lever with this amount of force and the load lifts that amount of weight. Actions have consequences, and given enough data, we can always predict exactly what will happen. Complex systems may require more data, but the idea is the same. We could, for instance (the Newtonian imagines), collect every necessary piece of data about an individual human being and that would allow us to predict exactly what job that particular human is perfectly suited for. Or, as now-failed Knewton once promised, if we had enough data about a student, we could tell her what to eat for breakfast on the day of a test.
That's the linear premise-- if we could collect information about all the inputs, then we could predict all outputs.
But everything we've learned in the post-Newtonian world of chaos theory says that is not true for any complex system.
Complex systems are subject to a million tiny and unpredictable variables. The popular notion of chaos is the Butterfly Effect-- a butterfly flaps its wings in China and then it rains in California. Minute differences make huge differences further down the line. One of the granddaddies of chaos theory is Edward Lorenz who was actually a meteorologist. His big aha moment came when he needed to rerun a computer model weather simulation, but to save time he just took the numbers from a midpoint and started from there. He entered 0.506 as a condition instead of the full 0.506127, and the result was completely different. A minute effect resulted in a massive difference.
Tiny differences have huge effects in complex systems, and virtually all systems built around human behavior are complex. You can have godlike knowledge of all the inputs and still not be able to predict exactly what the outputs will be. Likewise, you cannot design the inputs to create the exact outputs that you want.
Does this mean complex systems are obviously random? Of course not. With chaos theory we get the idea of strange attractors. The results of a complex system will not graph perfectly onto a single line, but they may cluster around some central shape or area. There will be some wild outliers, but results within certain ranges will be more likely than others. One of the Lorenz strange attractor? It looks a lot like a fuzzy butterfly. (If you want to read more, I always recommend James Gleick's Chaos.)
I often think of Russell Barkley and a five minute video of him offering advice to parents. "You are not engineers," he points out. Further:
So, what we have learned in the last twenty years of research in neuroimaging, behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, can be boiled down to this phrase:
Your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.
So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQs and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true.
Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write.
...The better view is that your child is a genetic mosaic of your extended family. Which means this is a unique combination of the traits that run in your family line.
Be a shepherd, Barkley suggests. "Let them grow, let them prosper, please design appropriate environments around them, but you don't get to design them."
We can't design or engineer children, and the notion that we could, given enough data or enough science-flavored policies or enough making every teacher do X, is just wrong. We can absolutely implement pedagogy that improves the odds and increases the likelihood of outcomes we desire, but we cannot control the myriad of tiny details that have profound effects on this (or any other) complex system.
We cannot treat students and teachers like machines, engineering outputs by controlling inputs. What we have learned (or should have learned) in the last half-century or so tells us that the world does not work that way. You strive in the direction of certain goals, and as a living human being you make a million judgements and adjustments along the way, never knowing for certain which will turn out to have massive effect somewhere down the road.
It is human to tell ourselves (and others) that if one does X just as one is Supposed To, one will without fail arrive at Y (unless some evil party thwarts you). We like to make up rules and insist that everyone comply because then the world would work more smoothly.
It works just often enough to seduce us into believing "If X, Then Y" is a true and dependable rule of the universe, and it makes us feel very safe and secure to think it so. It is not. Nature, the world, our fellow humans-- none of them comply with our desires just because we insist we have discovered a formula that must result in our desired outputs.
And in education, where we are working with a sample of 4 million teachers and basically every single young human, the formula is certain to fail (followed, too often, by all the wrong reactions to that failure). That does not mean we jettison every possible X or ignore any evidence we can collect about X's likely outcomes. But the Infallible Conditional of Education is a lie.
Teachers should collect the best tools, the best Xs, that they can, and lean on those most likely to produce the most desired results. But they should also be prepared to adapt, improvise, read the room, change course, and just generally try to be the best butterfly shepherds they can be.
