Friday, January 31, 2025

FL: Blaming NAEP

It's been NAEP week, prompting all manner of data spasms among any education policy people who weren't already staggering under the weight of Trump's zone flooding. And Florida has a problem.

As long time readers know (hi, Mom!), I'm not one to get excited about scores on the Big Standardized Test, despite the claims that it will tell us How Schools Are Doing. There are lots of reasons to suspect that America's Gold Standard of Testing is not all the gold standardy. And there is one serious lesson to be learned, which is that having all this cold hard data doesn't actually change a damned thing-- everyone just "interprets" it to support whatever it is they wanted to do anyway. 

And if you want to see that principle really in action, let's head to Florida.

Florida has spent the last decade cranking up the voucher and charter volume, proudly came back fast from the pandemic shutdown of school buildings, boosted classical education, plugged the Science of Reading, and even tried to imitate Dolly Parton


Now it's worth noting that, as Billy Townsend told people repeatedly, Florida's success with NAEP fourth grade test scores was a magic trick whose effect would completely vanish by eighth grade; Florida's students would perform worse as they moved up.

So besides pointing at all the various reforms that Florida has thrown at its students, one might also conclude that this year's scores may have just gotten closer to reality.

But Manny Diaz, Florida's underqualified education chief, has another explanation.

It's the test. You see, they are awesome in Florida, but--
However, upon receipt of Florida’s 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, it is evident that the Biden Department of Education’s administration of what was the previously gold standard exam has major flaws in methodology and calls into question the validity of the results as they pertain to the educational landscape in 2024.This is why I sent incoming Secretary of Education Linda McMahon a letter outlining concerns and providing solutions so that together, we can make NAEP great again.

See, the problem is that over half a million Florida students are homeschooling or using their taxpayer-funded voucher to attend private school, so NAEP is only testing the students left behind in public school (this, somehow, is Biden's fault). Since 2022, Florida has gone from 165,000 voucher students to 524,000, and leaving them out has hurt the state score.

I'm not sure that Diaz fully grasps that he has argued here, in print, that Florida has made its public school system measurably worse. 

He also argues that the scores are too heavily weighted toward urban, high-poverty, high-minority districts, which, again, serves as a sort of admission that the state hasn't served those districts well. 

NAEP scores are used for a variety of poor purposes-- misNAEPery-- so I sympathize with Diaz. Who knows-- maybe he'll be able to interest McMahon in a little NAEP cookery. On the other hand, private and home schoolers may share some thoughts with him regarding how they feel about being compelled to take the federal Big Standardized Test.


Thursday, January 30, 2025

The White House Dreams Of Ending Radical Stuff

So this week brought us the executive order "Ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling." We have seen this movie before--twice, even. Which version will it be this time?

The State Version

The executive order is a federal version of the anti-critical race theory parental rights laws we've seen passed in various states, with an extra side of faux patriotism. 

Like those laws, it is vague and ill-defined. There are three possible explanations. 

1) It is vague because the offenses are vague in the minds of the proponents, who just want to wave disapprovingly in the general direction of race and gender stuff that makes them sad,

2) It is vague because saying exactly what they have in mind would be so nakedly racist and hateful that they would face backlash that made them sad.

3) It is vague because by being unclear about where the line is drawn, the proponents can achieve a maximum chilling effect as local authorities fall over themselves trying to comply in advance and in the process take the clampdowns further than the proponents could have dreamed.

Take your pick of any combination of the three.

The third option comes with another process attached. After someone takes it way too far, the folks who created the law can express outrage about the overreach and/or blame it on people trying to make them look bad. We have already seen this one, as the Air Force removed material about Black and female service persons from their training over some DEI content, followed by Defense Secretary Hegseth blowing a gasket and declaring, "Don't do that!" Last year in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis claimed that it was his opponents that were trying to make him look bad by banning books willy nilly (it was not). 

There are scary things in here. Teachers may not directly or indirectly support or subsidize the social transition of students, which could include something as simple as using the student's chosen name. Heck, when I was a yearbook advisor, we ran the chosen name of seniors, but I guess that would be a no-no.

Of course, all of the various restrictions and rules would need an enforcement arm. That's part of the edict--the Secretaries of Education, Defense, and Health& Human Services are to figure out how to punish schools for violating the edict. I wrote a few months ago that Trump couldn't both eliminate the Ed Department and also use it to force his will on local districts-- it looks like he has made up his mind. Once again, local control comes with an asterisk--you can have it if you agree to do what Dear Leader wants you to do.

But this brings to mind another old movie...

The Federal Version

The federal government decides to use all the levers (and money) at its disposal to force state and local education to teach what it wants them to teach the way it wants them to teach it. 

That would be the opening act of The Saga Of Common Core. That was followed by Act II: Conservative Supporters of Federal Power Grab Are Surprised When Grass Roots Conservatives Lose Their Damn Minds and Turn on the Core. The movie comes to a sort of anti-climax when federal authorities discover that trying to micro-manage classrooms from DC is a lot harder than they thought it would be. 

One new plot twist-- I'm betting that scrutiny over this edict will vary depending on whether the state is red or blue.

After the trailer

Right now, the edict amounts to nothing more than a preview of coming attractions. So much depends on the regime's ability to figure out how to work the levers of power and figuring out ways to track "federal sources and streams" of money all the way down to a local school districts. 

If they're going to do that, then the whole plan of turning Title I and IDEA funds into block grants to the state will have to go out the window as well. So the whole "states know best" thing is dropped. And, as has been usual, parental rights are only for parents who want what Dear Leader and the Heritage Foundation want them to want. 

In the end, this eo really only settles one thing-- would Trump throw his weight behind the Libertarian dream of smaller government, or behind the theocrat's dream of a nation forced to follow their preferred values. In education, it looks like the theocrats win this round. Local control, shmocal control.

America loses. No matter how imperfectly, this eo will drop a chilling blanket over schools and empower some awful people to be extra awful in their local district. In states that already have installed repressive China-style cultural revolutions, the impact will be minimal. But in other states, this, like the bill to implement school vouchers everywhere, means that state rights be damned--they get the policies they never asked for. 



What Is School Choice Week About

It's National School Choice week, as you will have heard from every right-winged organization out there, including Congress and the White House. But why?

As Truthout reporters Alyssa Bowen, Ansev Demirhan, and Lisa Graves, laid out in a recent article about National School Choice Week, this "school privatization PR stunt is a pet project" of some uber-rich folks like the Gleason and Koch families. It's a fine gig; Gleason heir Tracy Gleasons pays herself over half a million bucks in salary just to run the foundation that runs this single week.

Donald Trump supported the week and the school choice shtick in his first go-round, and he's at it again. And if you've ever wondered why, exactly, folks on the far right are so pro-choice when it comes to education, Trump has done you the favor of providing an illuminating context. Because it's that context that explains much of the "why" behind "school choice."

The MAGA/Heritage Foundation vision of government is simple. Government should protect private property (from threats domestic and foreign) and it should support private enterprise and the free market (except when powerful private enterprises demand to be protected from the free market). Government should not be in the business of helping people or trying to make their lives better-- they should take care of that themselves. It very especially should not be in the business of trying to lift people above their proper station in life, particularly people who aren't straight christianist white men. Mind you, they have no objection to those people getting to a better place if they do it the Right Way (by their own bootstraps and following the rules laid out by the people at the top of the ladder).

Much of what the Trump regime is whining about points directly to their guiding principles. When they say that it's okay for immigrants to get to this country as long as they do it the right way, they're also explaining their rules for social mobility and a social safety net. It's okay for Those People to get food and health care and a house and supplemental income when they're thrown out of work--as long as they do it the right way. DEI is, for these folks, just another open border, allowing all sorts of people to get into spaces where they don't belong and have no legitimate right to be. People who are Right should get to make the rules, and people who are Wrong should not get to interfere with those who are Right. 

In that context, is it any wonder that the same people who want to end social safety net programs and slam the door on DEI and stop the government from performing any sorts of functions outside of protecting property and enterprise--is it any wonder that these folks also want to dismantle public education? Since the days of Milton Friedman, it has been a far right dream to get government out of education.

Dismantle the system. Make everyone get their own kids an education, based on what best fits their proper place in society and what they are able to prove they deserve.

Except that people like the system, and "I don't want to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children" is not a winning political message.

So don't call it dismantling. Call it freedom! Yes, your public school is falling down, but here's a voucher that you can use (at any school that will let you use it). If you'd like to send your kid to a really nice, expensive school, well, you shouldn't decide to be poor. 

The Trumpian/Heritage vision of government seems to be a modern riff on feudalism, where the rich and powerful make the rules and clear away the Deep State, which seems best defined as folks who are inclined to follow the rule of law rather than the rule of what I say goes, and where all the lower clases are forced to contribute to the church. A public education system aimed at providing a good education for all students, no matter the background, has no place in a feudal system.

Now granted-- school choice has collected an assortment of supporters, including people who really believe the free market will make schools better and even people who see choice as one tool to make the larger education system better. Plus, of course, opportunists who see a good chance to make a buck as well as christianists who really like the idea of making taxpayers help fund the church (which is what Those People would be doing if they weren't Wrong). But none of those people are driving the school choice bus.

The dismantlers have a whole long list, which we're seeing rolled out via executive order. Public education just happens to be on it, and "school choice" is the fig leaf they place over the dynamite they want to load around the public school's foundation. 


Wednesday, January 29, 2025

PA: AI Cyber Charter Rejected--Hard

The Texas business couple who wanted to launch a Pennsylvania cyber charter that used 2 hours of AI in place of more hours with actual teachers has been denied, and denied hard, by the state department of education.

MacKenzie and Andrew Price have pioneered a new school model in which students spend two hours in front of screens and the rest of the day pursuing life lessons, all with no adult involved other than a "guide." The proposed school-- Unbound Academy-- involved a set of interlocking businesses all connected to the Prices. It was going to be a sweet deal allowing them to hoover up piles of Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars. (You can read all about it here.)

Arizona (the "We'll Try Anything Except Support Public Schools" state) said yes to the Prices. Three other states said no, and now Pennsylvania has joined the list of folks passing. The 25-page letter of rejection highlights just how amateur-hour the Prices' application was (You can view the application here). 





Pennsylvania considers five criteria when considering a cyber charter application. Writes the department:
While a single deficiency would be grounds for denial, the Department has identified deficiencies in all five of the required criteria.

0 out of 5! That's a hard fail. Let's break it down.

Criterion 1: Unbound Academic has provided no evidence of sustainable support for the cyber charter school plan by teachers, parents or guardians, and students.

Does anybody actually want these guys? The application contained no letters or petitions supporting the school, and no supporters took advantage of the period of public support. The Prices mobilized zero ground troops to show the commonwealth that someone really wanted one more cyber charter in Pennsylvania.

Criterion 2: Unbound Academic lacks the capability, in terms of both support and planning, to provide comprehensive learning experiences to students. 

This broke down to several points. For one, the school didn't have insurance. "We're working on it, and we are totally insurable," they claimed. But they didn't have any quotes other than numbers from their other schools, which are neither cyber charters nor located in Pennsylvania.

They also failed to show that their proposed location was adequate for their offices, especially in light of their proposed expansion. They claimed it was a co-working space. My googling research suggests that it's actually a FedEx where you can rent a mailbox. The department notes that the application was pretty thin on physical details about the office space. And they don't appear to have an actual lease (which is normal for mailboxes).

Most brutal here is the third point: "The Applicant fails to reflect an understanding of cyber charter school finances." They appear to have failed to distinguish between general and special ed student rates, and a bunch of the enrollment assumption data turned out to be suspect (and beyond their ability to explain at their hearing). Nor do their figures match what's happening in Pennsylvania's other cyber charters. The Prices do not appear to have done their homework. 

The state notes that the Prices project becoming the 8th largest cyber in the state within five years, but appear to not grasp how churn affects cyber charter enrollment. (Fun side fact-- the letter includes some data about other cyber churn rates, which averages 20% or higher, meaning at least one in five cyber students leaves every year).

Criterion 3: There is no compelling evidence that Unbound Academic’s proposed programs will enable students to meet academic standards

The Prices included precious little information about their actual curriculum with their magical 2HourLearning program.
The Applicant did not provide documentation or description of the curriculum framework which could have provided evidence that learning objectives and outcomes have been established for each course offering in the Application or during the November 7 Hearing. The Applicant also did not provide any information regarding the number of courses required for students, materials to be used, planned activities, or procedures for measurement of the objectives, nor did it adequately explain the amount of time required for students to be online in order to meet the course standards for offered grades.
The other schools run by the Prices are all private, high-tuition, entrance exam schools. Their cyber proposal was weak-to-empty on programs for special needs or other students from vulnerable groups. Nothing at all for English Learners. 

Nor do they have any plan for professional development of staff. And while the commonwealth has some requirements for inducting new staff into a school, the Prices had nothing at all in mind for meeting those requirements.
During the November 7 Hearing, the Applicant shared that the teacher induction plan builds upon itself, and training would be based on an observed teacher’s needs, using assessment benchmarks along the way to determine future employability.

The Prices haven't hired or worked with teachers before--their private school uses AI and guides, supposedly. Looking at their application, I was a little fuzzy on whether they intend to hire actual certified teachers for Unbound. If that was the plan, there was no plan for onboarding them.

Criterion 4: Unbound Academic’s Application is non-compliant with requirements of Section 1747-A.

This is formal governance stuff, and the letter lists 16 criteria--and how Unbound failed each one. 

Highlights include the need for a board. Unbound has a board of five Pennsylvania residents, but it has never met, and as of the hearing, it had no meeting scheduled. No curriculum. No mission. No actual admissions policies. No suspension or expulsion policies written down. No agreements worked out with local districts for student participation in extracurriculars (in PA, cyber students can still be active in local extracurriculars and sports). No official clearances for student-facing personnel. No clear explanation of how instruction will be delivered. No explanation of what actual hardware will students be issued. No procedure for how student attendance and school day will be defined. No technical support for parents and students. No explanation of how data will be protected. No explanation of how student work will be deemed authentic. No truancy policies. 

Each of these items could have been addressed in either the application or the hearing before the board.

Criterion 5: Unbound Academic fails to substantiate that it will serve as a model for other public schools.

In all fairness to the Prices, I'm not sure any cyber charter in Pennsylvania meets this criterion. But the Prices were pretty much banking on the AI education thing (which, in their case basically seems to mean Khan Academy and the like). The board saw straight through this pitch.
Artificial intelligence (AI) presents unique opportunities that educators across Pennsylvania are exploring through effective, safe, and ethical implementation. However, the artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods, and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards. When questioned at the public November 7 Hearing, the Applicant stated that this model was used “in several private schools across Texas”, although the model has been used for Ukrainian refugees in Poland [both examples are other Price operations]. At the time of the November 7 Hearing, the Applicant had not been approved for a virtual charter school, so there is no data that supports the efficacy of this model.
In other words, AI is cool and all, but you guys have only used it on select live students, and since you've never tried it on a cyber-school, nobody knows if it works, including you.

And so

I wish that were the end of it, but the Prices do have the opportunity to revise and resubmit their application, so I suppose we'll see how badly they want this. But in the meantime, hats off to the department for doing their job. 



Trump Ends "Book Ban Hoax"

Amidst all the other slashing and burning of the new regime, we find a press release from the U.S. Department of Education, "U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax." Sure.

There are several things going on here, all worth noting.

On the surface, the action is mostly about dismissing 11 complaints filed with the Ed Department Office for Civil Rights, rejecting the notion that anyone can sue over the removal of certain books. If you're gay and your school district decides to eliminate every trace of other gay people from the district, it's an indefensible and hostile act, but is it a violation of your civil rights? That may be open to debate, but it barely scratches the surface of what's going on here.

The press release opens with reference to "so-called 'book bans'" underlining one of the banner points which is that it's not really a ban because you can probably buy the book somewhere if you really want to, and unless every copy of the book that exists has been thrown into the sun and anyone who tries to reproduce it is jailed, it's not really a ban. By the book banner definition of book ban, no book has been banned ever

But if instead of using a new definition of the word "ban," we stick with what native English speakers have generally understood the word to mean (a person in authority stands at the door and says "you can't bring that in here"), then book bans are what we have, from schools where the book has been barred from libraries and classrooms all the way up to Utah, where students are forbidden to bring even their own personal copy to school. 

So, yes, these are book bans.

The announcement also covers the elimination of the "book ban coordinator" who was to handle all these various cases.

The release also repeatedly describes book bans as a process of removing "age-inappropriate books" or even "age-inappropriate materials." 

That's a hell of a leap beyond the usual demand to remove a book because of "sexual content" or other Naughty Stuff. "Age-inappropriate" is a broad term that can be used to cover anything that authorities want to ban from schools. Anything you don't want children to hear about can be tagged "age-inappropriate."

All of this, of course, in the service of "the deeply rooted American principle that local control over public education best allows parents and teachers alike to assess the educational needs of their children and communities." Because the regime really believes in parental rights, unless those parents are LGBTQ or have LGBTQ kids or want their kids to learn about historic racism or support diversity, equality and inclusion or opposing banning books from the school or--well, they support just the parental right to agree with the administration. Otherwise, just hush. You don't need the right to disagree with the administration, just like your kid doesn't need the right to read anything that the People In Charge say they shouldn't read.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

AI Is For The Ignorant

Well, here's a fun piece of research about AI and who is inclined to use it.

The title for this article in the Journal of Marketing-- "Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity"-- gives away the game, and the abstract tells us more than enough about what the research found.

You may think that familiarity with technology leads to more willingness to use it, but AI runs the opposite direction.

Contrary to expectations revealed in four surveys, cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI.

That linkage is explained simply enough. People who don't really understand what AI is or what it actually does "are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes." 

The researchers are Stephanie Tully (USC Marshall School of Business), Chiara Longoni (Bocconi University), and Gil Appel (GW School of Business) are all academics in the world of business and marketing, and while I wish they were using their power for Good here, that's not entirely the case.

Having determined that people with "lower AI literacy" are more likely to fork over money for AI products, they reach this conclusion:

These findings suggest that companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development towards consumers with lower AI literacy. Additionally, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal, indicating that maintaining an aura of magic around AI could be beneficial for adoption.

To sell more of this non-magical product, make sure not to actually educate consumers. Emphasize the magic, and go after the low-information folks. Well, why not. It's a marketing approach that has worked in certain other areas of American life. In a piece about their own research, the authors suggest a tiny bit of nuance, but the idea is the same. If you show AI doing stuff that "only humans can do" without explaining too clearly how the illusion is created, you can successfully "develop and deploy" new AI-based products "without causing a loss of the awe that inspires many people to embrace this new technology." Gotta keep the customers just ignorant enough to make the sale.

And lord knows lots of AI fans are already on the case. Lord knows we've been subjected to an unending parade of lazy journalism of the "Wow! This computer can totally write limericks like a human" variety. For a recent example, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, Microsoft board member, and early funder of OpenAI, unleashed a warm, fuzzy, magical woo-woo invocation of AI in the New York Times that is all magic and zero information.

Hoffman opens with an anecdote about someone asking ChatGPT "based on everything you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like." This is Grade A magical AI puffery; ChatGPT does not "know" anything about you, nor does it have thoughts or an imagination to be used to create a visual image of your life. "Like any capable carnival mind reader," continues Hoffman, comparing computer software not just to a person, but to a magical person. And when ChatGPT gets something wrong, like putting a head of broccoli on your desk, Hoffman paints that "quirky charm" as a chance for the human to reflect and achieve a flash of epiphany. 

But what Hoffman envisions is way more magical than that-- a world in which the AI knows you better than you know yourself, that could record the details of your life and analyze them for you. 

Decades from now, as you try to remember exactly what sequence of events and life circumstances made you finally decide to go all-in on Bitcoin, your A.I. could develop an informed hypothesis based on a detailed record of your status updates, invites, DMs, and other potentially enduring ephemera that we’re often barely aware of as we create them, much less days, months or years after the fact.

When you’re trying to decide if it’s time to move to a new city, your A.I. will help you understand how your feelings about home have evolved through thousands of small moments — everything from frustrated tweets about your commute to subtle shifts in how often you’ve started clicking on job listings 100 miles away from your current residence.

The research trio suggested that the more AI imitates humanity, the better it sells to those low-information humans. Hoffman suggests that the AI can be more human than the user. But with science!

Do we lose something of our essential human nature if we start basing our decisions less on hunches, gut reactions, emotional immediacy, faulty mental shortcuts, fate, faith and mysticism? Or do we risk something even more fundamental by constraining or even dismissing our instinctive appetite for rationalism and enlightenment?

 Software will make us more human than humans?

So imagine a world in which an A.I. knows your stress levels tend to drop more after playing World of Warcraft than after a walk in nature. Imagine a world in which an A.I. can analyze your reading patterns and alert you that you’re about to buy a book where there’s only a 10 percent chance you’ll get past Page 6.

Instead of functioning as a means of top-down compliance and control, A.I. can help us understand ourselves, act on our preferences and realize our aspirations.

I am reminded of Knewton, a big ed tech ball of whiz-bangery that was predicting it would collect so much information about students that it would be able to tell students what they should eat for breakfast on test day. It did not do that; instead it went out of business. Even though it did its very best to market itself via magic.

If I pretend that I think Hoffman's magical AI will ever exist, I still have other questions, not the least of which is why would someone listen to an AI saying "You should go play World of Warcraft" or "You won't be able to finish Ulysses" when people tend to ignore other actual humans with similar advice. And where do we land if Being Human is best demonstrated by software rather than actual humans? What would it do to humans to offload the business of managing and understanding their own lives? 

We have a hint. Research from Michael Gerlich (Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability, SBS Swiss Business School) has published "AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking"* and while there's a lot of scholaring going on here, the result is actually unsurprising.

Let's say you were really tired of walking everywhere, so you outsourced the walking to someone else, and you sat on the couch every waking hour. Can we predict what would happen to the muscles in your legs? Sure--when someone else bears the load, your own load-bearing members get weaker.

Gerlich finds the same holds true for outsourcing your thinking to AI. "The correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking was found to be strongly negative." There are data and charts and academic talk, but bottom line is that "cognitive offloading" damages critical thinking. That makes sense several ways. Critical thinking is not a free-floating skill; you have to think about something, so content knowledge is necessary, and if you are using AI to know things and store your knowledge for you, your thinking isn't in play. Nor is it working when the AI writes topic sentences and spits out other work for you.

In the end, it's just like your high school English teacher told you-- if someone else does your homework for you, you won't learn anything.

You can sell the magic and try to preserve the mystery and maybe move a few more units of whatever AI widget you're marketing this week, but if you're selling something that people have to be ignorant to want so that they can offload some human activity then what are you doing? To have more time for World of Warcraft? 

If AI is going to be any use at all, it will not be because it hid itself behind a mask of faux human magical baloney, but because it can do something useful and be clear and honest about what it is actually, really doing, and not because it used an imitation of magic to capitalize on the ignorance of consumers. 


*I found this article thanks to Audrey Watters


OK: Walters Continues To Be The Worst

I have tried to stay away from Ryan Walters news, mostly because he is just so damned thirsty, and it's not just that he wants Donald Trump to tell him he's a special boy, but he seems to want his name on everyone's lips. But he's just so awful, and awful in ways that illuminate the moment we're living through. This education dudebro-in-chief for the state is one sad story.

Walters is under investigation by the ethics commission for so many bits of misbehavior, but they all fall under the same category--using his office and the resources of the state department of education to push political positions. He tweets under his official-not-personal account were MAGA electioneering and promotion of himself campaigning for Trump. There's also an ethics investigation under way concerning his use of campaign funds. 

And he's drawn criticism from many sides:

Honestly, with everything that’s transpired in the past several months, I’m not surprised. In 2024, we saw time after time where Superintendent Walters was focused on trying to increase his name I.D. Many of the provocative instances were to generate headlines… When it comes to a matter of one’s ethics, we should be held to a high standard.

That's State Representative Daniel Pae-- a Republican-- quoted by KFOR. In the same report, a former Assistant Oklahoma Attorney General points out that if the state's under-resourced, under-staffed ethics commission is bothering to open two investigations on Walters, that's a big deal.

But Walters is still a busy guy. He has proposed rules that would require parents to provide proof of citizenship or legal immigration status when registering students. The law still says (so far) that students who are undocumented must still be given an education, but Walters rule would essentially require each school to keep a list of undocumented families. That list would be super-handy when ICE comes to mount raids in schools, a prospect that Walters enthusiastically supports

His stated justification is a special brand of--well...

“For years the liberal media has been vilifying Republicans for separating illegal immigrant children from their parents,” Walters said in a news release Friday afternoon. “Now they want us to explain why we’d let ICE agents into schools. The answer is simple: we want to ensure that deported parents are reconnected with their children and keep families together.”

Apologies to my mother, but this is a special brand of bullshit. It captures the petulant own-the-libs neenerism of the MAGA faithful-- "You want to keep the families of These People together, so we'll just throw their kids out of the country, too. Howzabout that?" What elevates it to bullshit levels is the complete lack of honesty, without even the pretense that he's trying to come up with a plausible fig leaf for the policy. He doesn't believe this, and he doesn't expect anyone else to believe it, either. Nor does it have the MAGA troll deniability factor, the chance to say, "Haw! You really believed that I was doing a fascist thing. You sure look stupid now!" There's nothing here but a guy who doesn't quite have the guts to come out and say, "I want brown kids out of my state, and I want all the brown people we throw out to be so miserable and hurt by the whole experience that they tell all their brown friends and brown family to stay away from Oklahoma." 

How any of the MAGA faithful manage to hold onto such anger and meanness without burning up, and still manage to convince themselves that they are following Jesus-- it's a mystery. But Oklahomans voted for this guy and the governor who thinks he's just swell. Maybe Walters will wear out how welcome, or maybe Dear Leader will finally notice him and call him up to do damage on a national scale.

 

Taxation On Education

On the laundry list of ways the Trump administration is thinking of making life more unpleasant and difficult, add counting scholarships as taxable income. Yup-- that college scholarship your child landed could come with a big tax bite.

Like many of the actions being taken and under consideration, there is no particular theory of action to explain why we're supposed to think this would be a good idea. 

It's not clear yet what scholarships would count. Grants for students who show need? Those "scholarships" that involve the university reducing its sticker price?  But the National Center for Education Statistics says that 64% of undergraduate students get some sort of grant or scholarship. That's a few hundred thousand shy of 10 million students who would get hit with a new tax bill, and in some cases that could be pretty hefty. 

Common sense tells us that the students who most need the scholarships would be the ones getting the biggest tax bite.

What problem does this solve? The end result is sure to be fewer students attending higher education, which does seem to be a goal of some folks on the right. In terms of funding the government, it seems counter-productive; Uncle Sugar will get more money from a college-educated high-paying job than one more fry cook at Micky D's, but then, defunding the government also seems to be a goal on the right as well.

So maybe this does make sense for folks of a certain bent.

It does raise one question, however, because there is another type of "scholarship" out there-- vouchers for K-12 school, including the national voucher program that's still lurking out there. It's true that most voucher laws specify that the vouchers don't count as income, but we're ripping up the rules right and--well, right-- these days, so why not make school vouchers taxable as well? 

It's not the Most Awful Thing in front of us at the moment, but it's awful enough to use the power of the federal government to raise the cost of college so that fewer people will pursue higher education. Stay tuned.


Monday, January 27, 2025

Join Me At NPE 2025

The Network for Public Education was founded in 2013 by Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody with a mission "to preserve, promote, improve and strengthen public schools for both current and future generations of students." It's very much a network, connecting folks who are active on the national, regional, state, and local level to work in support of public education in this country. 

As part of that networking, NPE holds national conferences that feature a wide variety of panels and speakers and a wealth of information about what's going on in the world of public education. 

This work can be isolating. I'm a now-retired teacher living in a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania, and in my normal life I would meet pretty much none of the folks I read or who read me. The presentations and panels are great, inspiring, and energizing, but it's meeting folks face to face that really makes the weekend. 

The power of human connection is important, and we don't have many opportunities to build it. This conference is one of them. You can see here just some of the people who will be there, some of the organizations being represented. And beyond those folks you will find rooms full of people who all care about public education.

I will be there, sitting on a panel and mingling and chatting with a host of people doing the work, and I will come home from this conference once again energized and refreshed. This year the gathering is in Columbus, Ohio on the first weekend of April, and I have been registered for, like, nine months, because I look forward to this. And if you've never done a conference kind of thing, this is an easy one. Regsiter, show up, see some panels, hear some speakers, meet a whole lot of cool people, talk about some really important stuff.

You can register at this website. I hope to see you there. 

Sunday, January 26, 2025

ICYMI: Cataract Edition (1/26)

I am halfway through the process of cataract surgery (they go one eye at a time) and so far it has been not terrible. It's one of those minor miracles of modern stuff. They slice open your eyeball and replace the lens with a lens-shaped piece of plastic and voila! the world looks less like it's shrouded in a brown cloud. If only improving the view of other things were that relatively easy.

Here's the reading list for the week. 

We Got To Do Better

TC Weber has a one-two punch this week because he's A) way too close to the latest school shooting and B) way too knowledgeable about the new Deputy Secretary of Ed, Penny Schwinn, yet another reformster whose gift seems to be for failing upward.

Trump Nominates Controversial Penny Schwinn for Deputy Ed Sec

If you want some more details of the mess that Schwinn has left behind her in the past, the indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the receipts.

Ensuring Florida Leads And America’s First

Oh, look. Erika Donalds, an important figure in the gutting of Florida's public school system, has landed a job with America First Policy Institute, the thinky tank that Ed Secretary-designate Linda McMahon ran. 


Gary Rubinstein is a Teach for American vet who grew up to be a real teacher, and he's been the raspberry seed in their wisdom tooth ever since (that's Music Man). This post is lengthy, but manages both to put TFA in its historical context and to introduce the new TFA head honcho, who, it turns out, is loaded with red flags.

Republican Kids in Public Schools Also Lack Mittens

Nancy Bailey with some facts to remind the new administration that Republicans have poor children, too.

Mass. DESE Helps Jeb Bush Sell Out Public Education

Dark money expert Maurice Cunningham points out that Massachusetts education leaders are hanging out with the wrong crowd.

Please Don't Use Generative AI To Mimic Historical Figures

Tom Mullany argues that nobody is well-served by more AI mockeries of real humans. Meeting with an AI Anne Frank? Maybe don't.

'AI-driven' cyber charter school wants to teach Pa. kids core academics in 2 hours per day

I wrote about this last week, and it's great to see other outlets following the story of the Texas couple with a cyber-grift to see the state of Pennsylvania--and, in the meantime, a few other states and nations as well.


Thomas Ultican drills down on the recent attack on LAUSD reading instruction. More Science of Reading shenanigans.

No One Wants to Raise a Little A--hole

Teacher Tom argues in favor of teaching more than just academic content, and says that parents want that something else, too.

Civics

Nancy Flanagan posts on the value of civics education, with some surprising facts about which states do or do not require such education.

Trump Endangers and Marginalizes Innocent Children in Executive Order to End Birthright Citizenship

Jan Resseger has been working overtime cataloging the many ways that Trump policies pose a threat to the health and well-being of children in this country. Here's a look at his attempt to rewrite the Constitution to do away with birthright citizenship.

Ryan Walters announces update to OSDE’s history standards to include Gulf of America, Mount McKinley

There is nobody in this country working as hard as Ryan Walter to try to attract the attention of Dear Leader. He was ready to codify these dopey name changes within 24 hours. Now will come from DC please call him up to the Big Leagues? Pleeease?

AI Unleashed

Nobody connects the dots better than Audrey Watters. This post includes a variety of mini-stories about AI in a larger context. Read.

Trump executive orders on immigrants, transgender rights could echo in American schools

Some headline writer at EdWeek is angling for an Understatement Award. Erica Meltzer wrote the story that does a decent of laying out what's on the line (so far).

How To Read The News: A 5 Step Guide

Anya Kamenetz with some useful tips for navigating the ugly times to come.

The Price of Speaking Up in Trump's America

Parker Molloy looks at the MAGA squawking over the message from Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. Here's one of the important parts:
This matters because it's a preview of how the new administration and its media allies plan to handle dissent. They're not just disagreeing with Budde's message—they're trying to destroy her for delivering it.
Trombone Emoji 'Womp Womp' Sound Created By HCPS Students To Go Global

Meanwhile, one major gap in the digital world has been filled.

At Forbes.com this week, I looked at some work from NEPC showing that red states are more dependent on federal education dollars, and an update with context for the Supreme Court's decision to go after a few of the remaining bricks in the wall between church and state by hearing about Oklahoma's proposed Catholic charter school

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Thursday, January 23, 2025

Immigration Arrests At School?

There's an ugly new twist to Trump's ugly immigration policy, which seems to aimed at getting the maximum number of brown-skinned people out of the country (well, unless they work for one of Trump's billionaire buddies).

It was always going to be awful for children, once the administration decided that breaking up families was on the table, which makes sense-- if he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship, why not put pressure on birthright citizens to leave. I'm seeing teachers talk about new district policies--what if a student gets home from school and discovers that their parents have been deported? Families and school authorities are scrambling to deal with the various possible ugly outcomes of a deliberately cruel policy, meant to be so awful that not only will brown-skinned people get out, but they will not bother to come here at all.

But Tuesday, the administration found a way to make things worse. Historically, authorities have recognized the idea that certain locations are sensitive and protected-- schools, churches, and hospitals.

Well, screw that, says the Trump team. The sensitive location policy has been rescinded. Says a statement from Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman, “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest." 

You can mock this statement by pointing out that very few criminals in this country have successfully evaded the police by hiding in third grade classrooms, but that would miss the point that to this administration, every undocumented immigrant is a criminal. 

Soi now, on top of every other weight thrown on public schools, districts are now having to figure out how to respond when they are the target of an immigration raid. And that as Trump's Department of Justice plans to go after any state or local officials who get in the way of deportations. Makes you wonder who will be the first building principal of classroom teacher to get thrown in jail for trying to obstruct an attempt to drag a seven year old child out of school for deportation. 

In the meantime, the amount of stress and worry piling on the backs of children will be one more obstacle to learning. And the threat of turning school into a very unsafe space will be one more obstacle to attendance.

And as we move forward, it's worth looking at this Congressional testimony from David Bier, from the Very Libertarian Cato Institute, explaining in some detail just how disastrous Trump policies were on immigration the first time around. That's Trump policy for you-- mean, cruel, and ineffective. It solves nothing, and yet, children are going to suffer because of it. 

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Against AI Theft

Among the many reasons to give Artificial Intelligence some real side-eye is the business model that rests entirely on plagiarism-- stealing the works of human creators to "train" the systems. Now a new paper attacks a defense of the AI cyber-theft machines.

"Generative AI's Illusory Case for Fair Use" comes from Jacqueline Charlesworth (who appears to be a real person, a necessary check that we all need to do now whenever we come across scholarly work because AI is cranking out sludge swiftly). Charlesworth was a general counsel of the US Copyright Office and specializes in copyright litigation


The folks hoping to make bank on AI insist that piracy is not their business model, and one of their favorite arguments to hide behind is Fair Use. Teachers are familiar with Fair Use rules, which tell us that we can show movies if they are being used for legitimate teaching stuff but not for entertainment. 

But as Charlesworth explains it, the Big Boys of AI argue that while the programs are copying the wo4rks used for training, the AI only "learns" uncopyrightable information about the works. 
Once trained, they say, the model does not comprise or make use of the content of the training works. As such, they contend, the copying is a fair use under U.S. law.

That, says Charlesworth, is bunk.

The 42 page paper combines hard-to-understand AI stuff with hard-to-understand law stuff. But it includes lots of useful insights and illustrations of AI's lack of smartitude. And Charlesworth is a clear and incisive writer. And she dismantles the defense used by Big AI companies pretty thoroughly.

Despite wide employment of anthropomorphic terms to describe their behavior, AI machines do not learn or reason as humans do. They do not “know” anything independently of the works on which they are trained, so their output is a function of the copied materials. Large language models, or LLMs, are trained by breaking textual works down into small segments, or “tokens” (typically individual words or parts of words) and converting the tokens into vectors—numerical representations of the tokens and where they appear in relation to other tokens in the text. The training works thus do not disappear, as claimed, but are encoded, token by token, into the model and relied upon to generate output.
Furthermore, the earlier cases don't fit the current situation as far as business aspects go-
The exploitation of copied works for their intrinsic expressive value sharply distinguishes AI copying from that at issue in the technological fair use cases relied upon by AI’s fair use advocates. In these earlier cases, the determination of fair use turned on the fact that the alleged infringer was not seeking to capitalize on expressive content—exactly the opposite of generative AI.

Charlesworth also notes that in the end, these companies fall back on the claim of their "overwhelming need to ingest massive amounts of copyrighted material without permission from or payment to rightsholders." In other words, "Please let us steal this stuff because we really, really need to steal this stuff to make a big mountain of money."

Charlesworth does a good job of puncturing the attempts to anthropomorphize AI, when, in fact, AI is not "smart" at all. 

Unlike humans, AI models “do not possess the ability to perform accurately in situations not encountered in their training.” They “recite rather than imagine.” A group of AI researchers has shown, for instance, that a model trained on materials that say “A is B” does not reason from that knowledge, as a human would, to produce output that states the reverse, that B is A. To borrow one of the researchers’ examples, a model trained on materials that say Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel in space may respond to the query, “Who was Valentina Tereshkova?” with “The first woman to travel in space.” But asked, “Who was the first woman to travel in space?,” it is unable to come up with the answer. Based on experiments in this area, the research team concluded that large language models suffer from “a basic inability to generalize beyond the training data.”

Charlesworth gets into another area-- the ability of AI to reconstruct the data it was trained on. One of her examples is one that shows up in the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, in which, with just a little prompting, ChatGPT was able to "regurgitate" nine paragraphs verbatim of a NYT article. This ability isn't one we often seen demonstrated (certainly it is not in OpenAI's interest to show it off), but it certainly creates a problem for the Fair Use argument. They may not have a copy of the copyrighted work stored, but they can pull one up any time they want.

And she notes that the cases cited in defense are essentially different:

Pointing to a handful of technology-driven fair use cases, AI companies and their advocates claim that large-scale reproduction of copyrighted works to develop and populate AI systems constitutes a fair use of those works. But Google Books, HathiTrust, Sega and other key precedents relied upon by AI companies to defend their unlicensed copying—mainly Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., A.V. v. iParadigms, LLC (“iParadigms”), Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. (“Sony Computer”) and Google, LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (“Oracle”)—are all in a different category with respect to fair use. That is because these cases were concerned with functional rather than expressive uses of copied works. The copying challenged in each was to enable a technical capability such as search functionality or software interoperability. By contrast, copying by AI companies serves to enable exploitation of protected expression.

There's lots more, and her 42 pages include 237 footnotes. It's not a light read. But it is a powerful argument against the wholesale plagiarism fueling the AI revolution. It remains for the courts to decide just how convincing the argument is. But if you're trying to bone up on this stuff, this article is a useful read.


Sunday, January 19, 2025

Supporting Teachers

How do we help teachers be better?

Robert Pondiscio is fond of pointing out that A) you go into battle with the army you have, not the one you wish you had and B) with around 4 million teachers in the country, many are likely to be just regular human beings and not super-teachers.

He's not wrong. On the national, state, local, and building level, the teacher corps includes some very excellent teachers, some pretty good ones, some average ones, and a small but non-zero number of not very good ones. (My argument remains that it's not a simple bell curve because the majority of people who would be bad at it either never try or give up fairly quickly.)

Policy and reformy folks have tried to deal with this distribution in a number of unproductive manners.

Firing our way to excellence.

A favorite with the technocrat crowd. this was the plan whereby test scores soaked in VAM sauce was going to create hard data that could be used to make hiring and firing decisions (or, in some cases, merit pay decisions). But sure-- if we just fire all the terrible teachers, we'd be left with nothing but the good ones. 

There are numerous problems with this, starting with the lack of a valid or reliable way to evaluate teachers. The Big Standardized Test is its own kind of sham, but Value-Added Measures can only dream of someday working their way up to junk science status. 

Sardine Superteacher

The flip side of firing to excellence. This idea was to find the super-duper teachers and plunk them in classrooms with a couple hundred students. (There was a time when they also liked the idea of hooking the super-teachers up to computers, but COVID took some of the bloom off the distance learning rose.)

Rendering

Another idea was to take the Highly Effective Teachers and move them to the low-achieving schools. This idea lost traction on the slippery idea that teachers had to be convinced, somehow, to take the different job. More money? Sort of. Send a team to grab them, drop a hood over their head, and throw them in a van? Probably illegal. 

All of these have the same problem

It's not just that it's really difficult to quantify how good a particular teacher is. It's that teacher effectiveness is dependent on context and environment. A teacher who's effective with 20 students is not necessarily equally effective with 200. A teacher might be very effective with one type of student and not with another. And despite being the best work at being "professional," sometimes teachers bring their own lives into the classroom. Plus, what are we asking them to teach? I found that I was actually better with multiple preps in a day than just teaching the same thing, but some of my colleagues struggled with that kind of grind. And there's just the influence of time and experience; I taught for 39 years, and I was not the same teacher every one of those years.

On top of that, teaching involves a teacher and a student, and that connection is also variable. Pick any teacher in your local school, one that you are certain is terrible, and I guarantee you that we can find students who will praise that teacher to high heaven. Likewise, pick someone known widely as a wonderful teachers; we can find students who will tell you how awful they are. 

I'm not going to argue that judging teacher quality is impossible. I am going to say that it is heavily influenced by context and environment and factors that shift regularly, making it hugely difficult to quantify teacher quality in such a way that the measures can safely and accurately be used to make major decisions about teaching careers. 

And even if you could...

What are you going to do? Fire a bunch of teachers and replace them with...? How much more practical is it to take the folks you have and help them be the best they can be. Will there be a non-zero number of non-salvageable teachers who have to be shown the door? Certainly. But can you direct (or re-direct) staff to be better? I think that's not only possible, but necessary.

So how?

We've seen bad ideas about this, as well. 

Carrots and sticks and sticks and sticks

There's a whole family of reformy ideas that starts from the premise that teachers know how to get the high-achieving results that policy makers want, but those teachers have been keeping the secrets of Teaching Well locked in their filing cabinets, waiting to be either bribed or threatened into finally unleashing all the awesome.

It's a premise that is both insulting and myopic. The vast majority of teachers are doing the best they can with the tools they have. But some reformsters (looking at you, Arne Duncan) treat teachers like the main obstacle to educating children instead of the people who are actually in classrooms trying to get the work done. 

Teachers and their students face a variety of obstacles, but reformsters got into the nasty habit of dismissing these explanations of real hurdles by calling them "excuses" rather than, say, "challenges that maybe we could try helping teachers meet." 

De-professionalizing the Profession

For some reformsters, the dream has been the teacher-proof classroom. Set out a curriculum so specific and pre-programed that whoever your teacher is, you just hand them the program, tell them to implement it With Fidelity, and voila!-- an educational program that a trained monkey could implement effectively. Maybe it's scripted. Maybe it's just a day by day, minute by minute guide. Maybe it's a computer program, or a series of videos. 

Some reformsters see this as an opportunity to cut personnel costs. Turn teaching into a job that anybody can do, as long as they follow instructions, means that the labor pool is huge and the meat widgets hired for the classroom can be easily (and inexpensively) replaced. These are the folks who are so excited about AI "teachers" that they barely bother to pretend that such a move would foster better teaching. 

De-professionalizing teaching is the fast food model of education. But the promise of standardization in a McDonalds is not that you can always get excellent food there, but just the promise that you probably won't get terrible food. People who want excellent food go somewhere else, where the chefs are chefs and not assembly-line food prep meat widgets.

Maybe forcing your less-gifted teachers into a program to implement With Fidelity will improve schools on the bottom end (though I'm not convinced that someone with limited teaching ability can really implement one of these scripted programs effectively). But by stripping teachers of autonomy, you will inevitably hamstring your best teachers. You can argue that their superior teaching skills will allow them to find ways to put their personal spin on the mandatory teacher-proof program, but I'd say you're just arguing that they can still be great to extent that they work around, ignore, and otherwise find ways to escape the mandatory program. 

Removing teacher authority may or may not help your mediocre teachers, will hamstring your better teachers, and will make the profession less attractive to people who would be a real asset.

Testocracy

We are already reaping the problems created by a new generation of teachers who have never known anything in school except test-centered prep work. Too many have learned that you check the standards, google for "exercises" aimed at those standards, hand them out, drill them down, and that's supposed to be teaching (Daniel Koretz writes about this in The Testing Charade). 

Okay, have you got anything other than complaints?

The job of a school administrator (of any manager) is to create the conditions under which staff can do their best work. Most folks who work in schools already know that teachers are overworked, overstressed, and overburdened with a whole bunch of responsibilities. Many attempts to improve teaching and/or sell new education-flavored products are built around the idea that we could take X off teachers' plates. 

The crazy thing about this is that these attempts are all marked by one feature--the people behind them have decided on teachers' behalf what it is that teachers need. Let me suggest a crazy new approach--

Ask the teachers. 

I've talked about this before (see "The Seven Most Powerful Words in Education") but not enough since. Just ask staff, "What can I do to help you?" 

Now, sometimes this will be tricky, because teachers, as different individual human beings, will want/need different things. And sometimes they will want things admins can't give them. But administrators have to be better. One former colleague of mine pissed off our administration by asking, after being given yet another new responsibility, "What do you want me to stop doing so I have time to do this?" It's a legitimate question, and one that every teacher in that room was thinking, but asking it was Forbidden Not A Team Player naughtiness.

Ask your staff what they need. Don't just jump to "I have decided that what you want is a program to manage grades" or "I have decided that you want PD about apps I'm sure you want to use." Ask.

Provide high quality materials and resources.

But do not mandate how they must be used. Involve staff in the collection or creation of these materials, and revisit the collection annually. There will be eternal debates about which materials are high quality, just like there are eternal debates about what belongs in the canon. These debates are eternal because the answer keeps changing because of the times, the context, the available materials. But the fact that these debates can't be settled conclusively is not a reason to abandon the work of getting the very best materials available to your staff. 

Provide structure and scope and sequence, but don't set it in cement.

Your newer teachers should be able to find a useful answer to "What should I be working on next" and your experienced teacher should be comfortable adjusting the scope and sequence to fit the class, and all staff should feel safe adding their own special educational touches.

Flexibility is a local thing

Note that every mandate that comes down from the state or federal government tends to reduce flexibility, particularly since so many of them are wrongheaded variations on "If we make all teachers do X, all students will learn Y," a statement which is always wrong, no matter what you plug in. Policy makers need to ask one simple question-- does the proposed policy provide support or a straightjacket?

Teacher training and peer support

Too many undergraduate teaching programs waste too much time. For secondary teachers, there should be far more emphasis on the content of the subject area they plan to teach. For all teachers, there should be far more support through the student teaching experience, and hefty support should also be present through the first couple of years in the classroom. 

Some folks like the mode school model, with professionals working their way up as interns etc etc. Schools don't have to look exactly like that, but supports need to be in place. In most schools, whether a teacher has good support in their first few years depends on random factors like which other teachers have lunch the same shift. That early mentoring needs to be deliberate, intentional, and carefully considered. 

Peer support should continue. It should be easy for teachers who work in the same department or who work with the same cohort of students to collaborate and consult. If policy makers want to encourage this, there is one thing they can offer--money. Schools don't build more deliberate mentoring programs because such programs depend on time during the work day which equals money (sometimes there's also a lingering attitude that teachers are only really working when they have students in front of them).

Nothing else-- not PD, not merit pay, not threats, not scripted instruction-- will work to turn a new teacher into a good teacher better than regular support and mentoring by capable colleagues. 

Hold teachers accountable

The myth that teachers are all about defending low-achieving teachers is bunk. Second only to parents, nobody is more bothered by a low-quality teacher than the teacher who has to teach those kids the following year. What teachers fear is not accountability, but random irrational bad-faith harassment and mistreatment trying to pass itself off as accountability. 

So when a teacher wanders into the weeds, go help them get back. Yes, maybe they won't be helped, but you need to try first because firing just means starting over from scratch (if you can even find somebody). Give them extra-intense mentoring, coaching, daily assistance--whatever you think will get them back on track. But don't just leave them out in the field flailing. 

The non-answer answer

There is no one single simple answer to finding and developing good teachers, but we have more than enough experience to know that "Hire some people and hope for the best" is not the winning approach. Provide and surround them with access to top quality materials. Provide them with personal support. Treat them like grownups. Provide a supporting structure that holds them up without choking them off. 

If you want a metaphor, here's one I'm sure I've used before. 

Let's call teaching the classroom version of playing jazz. To pay jazz, you need a couple of things. For one, you need a solid rhythm section; a solid rhythm section makes everyone else sound better, plus it gives you a foundation on which to play. On that foundation, you have plenty of freedom, but you exercise that freedom within a framework--a best, chord changes, maybe even the basic tune of the song. Ignore the beat and the chords at your peril; you can't just do whatever the hell you want. Find good people to play with, and you will play better. And when you are really good, you can actually bend and defy the framework of beat and chords--but you have to really know what you're doing. It's part inspiration and gut, but it also requires technical skill and control and a good piece of equipment on which to play. Also, some songs are way better to play on than others (depending on who's on the stand tonight), so have a big book to select from. And especially also, you have to pay attention to your audience and where your own playing is in that moment, and adjust accordingly.

I have no idea how many jazz trombone players there are in the US, but if there were 4 million, only a small number would be a Jack Teagarden or a George Brunis or a Gunhild Carling. But given the right tools and the right support, the rest could do a good job. That's teaching. 


ICYMI: Here Comes The Arctic Air (1/19)

 Here at the Institute we are hunkering down and preparing for a blast of arctic air over the next two days. The Board of Directors gets tomorrow off in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., which is the only thing happening tomorrow that I expect to pay attention to. 

A reminder that you can always help amplify stuff by posting it throughout your various social media channels. As someone who's able to track activity through at least one of my outlets, I can tell you that one just never knows where a particular post or article will catch fire. Your share could make a big difference in how widely something is read. Help folks out and share their stuff.

I am also happy to get recommendations. I read a lot, but I don't read everything, and I don't always get everything I've read into this weekly digest. So suggestions are always welcome. I had originally dreamt that maybe the comments section of these posts would fill up with "You should also read--" comments, and that hasn't happened, but the dream still lives.

In the meantime, here's this week's list.

‘Their Kind of Indoctrination’

In the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch on the kinds of attacks public schools can expect under the new Trump regime.

3 myths about rural education that are holding students back

Awkward structure aside (the three items are truths that debunk the myths), this is a welcome look at a more accurate picture of rural education.

‘Bless his heart,’ says Pulaski superintendent after ‘school choice evangelist’ sues KY district

Corey DeAngelis is butthurt that a Kentucky superintendent blocked him from attacking the district for supporting the anti-voucher measure that Kentucky passed. The superintendent is not impressed.

On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools

Alec MacGillis looks at the story of how Ohio set out to get public money into Catholic private schools. Choice was just a tool. This is well-researched and detailed and a bit alarming.


Jan Resseger, a retired Ohio educator, reacts to MacGillis's article.

Jeff Bezos Wants to Go to the Moon. Then, Public Education

Dominik Dresel at EdSurge and a convincingly scary look at Bezos and his long term plans for privatizing education.

The Uber Rich Are Funding “National School Choice Week” to Attack Public Schools

We'll all be hearing about School Choice Week soon, At Truthout, Alyssa Bowen, Ansev Demirhan, and Lisa Graves explain who's really behind it, and what they're after.

Volusia School Board member vows to stay despite Moms for Liberty chapter chair's threat

In Volusia County, Florida, the Moms for Liberty chair is opposing a former ally for being way too racist and insulting and mean. 

Defunding Public Schools is Really Unpopular

Jennifer Berkshire, blogging at The Education Wars, takes a trip to New Hampshire to watch democracy once again put the smackdown on an attempt to undermine public schools.

A new governor sets her agenda.

Also in New Hampshire, Andru Volinsky looks at the agenda of the state's new governor.

The Far Right’s Plan to Force Teachers to Lie About Race

Jesse Hagopian in The Nation outlining the threat of the Trump administration toward teaching a more authentic United States history.

I'm Not Sure Schools Can Teach Creativity

Can schools teach creativity as a sort of disembodied transferable skill? I don't think so, and neither does Chad Aldeman.

Measuring Artificial IQ

ChatGPT did a Thing, even a cool thing. But what does that mean, exactly? Benjamin Riley considers the question.

Top scholar says evidence for special education inclusion is ‘fundamentally flawed’

Is there any more reliable pendulum in education than the swing back and forth between putting students with special needs in regular classrooms vs. giving them a specialized separate room of their own? Jill Barshay at Hechinger reports on new research that will keep the debate going.

Are Today’s Students Really Less Independent Than Previous Generations?

At EdWeek, Arianna Prothero is really reporting about SEL program effectiveness in schools, which is also a topic worth discussing.

The MAGA Think Tank Behind Linda McMahon’s Education Agenda

Linda McMahon has been running a think tank that has served as a holding tank for Trump administration members waiting for their second chance. What that think tank has been saying may tell us what to expect from McMahon as Ed Secretary. Christopher Lewis and Jacob Plaza report for The Nation.


Thomas Ultican digs into the latest in internation standardized math test scores. How bad are they, and do we really need to care?

Heroes, Hypocrisy, and Hubris

There's more on the ground detail here from TC Weber about Tennessee's new voucher push, but mainly there's a story about a teacher who has been put through hell and deserves to have his "not guilty" verdict published high and low.

Why Senate Cabinet Hearings are a Lesson for Schools

Nancy Flanagan and the problem of character and power.

Banned Book: Normal People

Steve Nuzum has been closely following the South Carolina committee charged with book banning for the entire state. Here he takes a close look at one particular book they chose to ban, searching for some hint of what their actual criteria might be.

AI Is Like Tinkerbell: It Only Works If We Believe in It

At Futurism, Jathan Sadowski suggests we think "of AI futurism as a sophisticated form of check kiting — cashing a check today and hoping the money will be in the account later." Predictions as marketing.

Know how to read cursive? The National Archives wants you

Really. If you are a master of this arcane art, the National Archives have tons of manuscripts they need to have translated into legible English. And you do it from home.

At Forbes.com this week, I looked at a new survey that shows, once again, people would rather fund public schools than vouchers. 

And an unusual week at the Bucks County Beacon, with two pieces-- a look at NPE's report on the massive failures of charter schools, and a piece about the attempt to launch an all-AI, no teacher cyber charter in Pennsylvania. 

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