Two Sigma Cyber-Tutoring For The Poors

Much of the US education policy has been driven by a simple enough issue-- a lot of people who would like to spend as little as possible educating other people's children. Especially when those other people are poor and/or of color. 

The last few decades of the school choice movement has been driven in large part by Milton Friedman's dream of a country where the government is not involved in schools at all and an education is a consumer good that parents are fully responsible for purchasing on their own. That would, as with any other market sector, result in tiers of service. The well-to-do would get nice schools, and the less well-to-do would get the Dollar Generals of education, and people located in certain communities would get the equivalent of food deserts for education-- little chunks of the market that no vendor wants to serve.

But the dream has some obstacles to overcome. One of the largest is that we like the idea of America as a nation that educates everyone, that schools are our great equalizing engine and we've worked hard to pursue that idea. It's hard to reconcile ourselves to saying, "From now on, you only get the education that your parents can afford, and if that's not much, well, now you know what your station is in life." To give up on equity in education for all is to give up on the whole "all humans are created equal" thing.

Yes, lots of folks have always believed that some people are better than others, and that the betters should rule over the lessers (and we're living with the effects of that right now)-- but it's still hard to say it out loud and admit that we aren't quite who we like to think we are.

So the attempt to install a tiered education system stalls on the messaging problem. How can we short-change the not-so-wealthy families of this country while somehow making it look like we aren't, that our cool new system is still making a quality education available to all?

One proposed solution is microschools. Microschools are the answer to the complaint, "What good does a voucher do me when there isn't a private school that will accept my child within fifty miles of me?" You can start a microschool with a computer, an internet connection, any adult to be a "coach," and a license for some set of software. Gather a few neighborhood kids around the computer desk and voila! You have your own private school! (The overlap between microschool fans and those still angry about COVID distance learning is a monument of cognitive dissonance).

The other idea used to paper over the inherent inequities of a market-based commodified education system is tutoring, Betsy DeVos liked to harken back to the days when Alexander the Great skipped public education and was tutored instead by Aristotle. Let's do that!

Specifically, we find folks touting  Two Sigma tutoring, a magical kind of tutoring that creates magical education achievement. There are tutoring companies waving the Two Sigma Tutoring flag all over the place, including Sal Khan presenting a TedX Talk on how his AI-flavored Khanmigo tutoring service would provide the Two Sigma Solution.

When you hear about Two Sigma tutoring, you're hearing about a 1984 essay by Benjamin Bloom that has become a classic. In it Bloom argues that super-duper tutoring can raise student performance by two whole standard deviations. That would mean, for instance, that students scoring in the 50th percentile would be moved up to the 98th percentile (God only knows what would happen if all students were given the 2 Sigma treatment).

If that sounds like it might be bunk--well, yes. Education Next has a new piece by Paul T. von Hippel that is the most thorough look at Bloom's work that you could ask for. Bookmark that puppy for the next time some tech company shows up to sell your district AI-driven Two Sigma tutoring. 

I'm not going to cover the whole article, but here are just a few highlights to keep in mind.

A chart often shown to illustrate Bloom's "findings" (including by Sal Khan) is not an illustration of actual data, but Bloom's hard-drawn illustration of "this is what it would look like."

Bloom's essay leans on the work of two grad students working with a tiny sample size. As von Tippel notes, these grad students, having supposedly discovered the secret of super-tutoring, did not go on to make it big in the tutoring world.

There was a lot more than simple tutoring involved. Extra tutor training, tests, feedback, and, most crucially, a focus on topics about which the tutees initially knew nothing; when student knowledge starts at zero, you have a lot of room to improve dramatically.

The two-sigma effects obtained in the 1980s by Anania and Burke were real and remarkable, but they were obtained on a narrow, specialized test, and they weren’t obtained by tutoring alone. Instead, Anania and Burke mixed a potent cocktail of interventions that included tutoring; training and coaching in effective instructional practices; extra time; and frequent testing, feedback, and retesting.

And for the purposes of all the AI-powered tutoring being hyped, Bloom's results relied entirely on tutoring by actual human beings. Though von Tippel doesn't get into this, I will-- any value of one-on-one tutoring includes a closer connection between tutor and student, increasing the tutor's ability to get a sense of what is going on in the student's head, which in turn makes it easier to address precisely what the student isn't getting. AI can't do that. 

What von Tippel does point out is that chatbots aren't necessarily very good at this. He found that a chatbots "quickly get lost when trying to teach common math concepts like the Pythagorean theorem." And he rightly questions how well students will engage with a chatbot tutor. Ultimately, he's pretty gentle with the two sigma promise of AI, calling it "rash," when perhaps "highly improbable" or even "bunk" might be accurate. 

But what can AI tutoring do? It can allow supporters of commodified education to point and say, "See? Top-quality education available at low, low prices, so we are absolutely fulfilling our promise to get every child a decent education." The supporters will probably not go on to say, "And I don't have to pay for it, which is awesome."

Every bit of the school choice "revolution" is about creating a multi-tiered system of education, pretty much like what we have for higher education (complete with the chance to take on crippling debt in hopes of getting ahead in life). 

AI just facilitates that, providing one more way to paper over the idea of abandoning the lessers. I will believe otherwise the day I see wealthy parents pulling kids out of elite academies and plunking them down with an AI tutor instead. "Why would I send you to Philips Exeter when you can get an equally awesome education here at home on your Macbook and AI-ristotle?"

This is the choice argument again and again-- not that choice won't usher in an age of upper and lower strata in education, but that the lower tiers will actually not be so bad. Separate, but equal, one might say, even if such claims seem rash. Or even bunk.

Moms For Liberty and the Salvador Gulag

We're all suddenly painfully aware of Nayib Bukele, the El Salvador dictator who has been subcontracted to run a gulag for housing whatever people the MAFA regime wants to offshore this week. But you know who was already buddies with Bukele? Catalina Stubbe, Moms for Liberty's head of Hispanic Outreach.

Stubbe was born in Colombia and is a former Miss World Colombia. She earned a sociology degree from the Sorbonne, and moved to the US about 16 years ago. She operates the Stubbe Ranch, and lists herself as a National Media Commentator, and has appeared on things like Lindell-TV, OAN, Newsmax, Telemundo, and Fox and Friends.

She lives, of course, in Florida, with four children and her husband Dr. Hermann Johan Stubbe. Dr. Stubbe practices family medicine, and he appears to be good at it. He graduated from med school in Puerto Rico in 1999. The couple appear to have filed for a business called Metaboliclife back in 2015. For what it's worth, the four children are mentioned far more often in her press than her husband is.

Stubbe was brought into the M4L fold in 2022, but she has been plenty busy since. She does plenty of speaking, like an appearance at the right wing Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, who praised her because "The pulse behind all her work is her profound love for her family and her Savior, Jesus Christ."

The Economist reported that at the 2023 M4L conference, well...

According to Catalina Stubbe, under the guise of sex education Florida schools are teaching boys to masturbate. This may be the result of demonic forces she saw at work in her own child’s classroom. When her seven-year-old’s maths homework repeatedly featured the number 666 (interpreted by some to signal the devil) she knew there were leftists behind it.

 She hung out with Heritage Foundation for their 50th anniversary. She went on the Matt Gaetz Show to argue for the end of the Ed Department. She went to the UN to talk about parental rights (of course, not if the parents are parents of LGBTQ kids, or if the parents are themselves some unfavored minority). She stumped for Dear Leader in 2024, and then posted this on the gram--

Our @POTUS is hands-down the greatest in history and let’s be real, the most handsome too! At 78, he’s defying time with a jaw-dropping glow and an energy that’s straight-up electric. Charismatic doesn’t even cover it, he’s got that magnetic charm that lights up every room, a sharp wit that keeps us all hooked, and a vigor that puts people half his age to shame. The way he commands attention with that dazzling smile and unstoppable drive? Absolute perfection. We’re witnessing a legend who’s rewriting what it means to lead with style and grace!

In March pf 2024, she was at CPAC. So was Nayib Bukele, who at the time was mostly known for A) the kind of conservative dictatorship that has become popular on the right and B) his attempt to convert El Salvador's currency base to bitcoin, a bold idea that has turned into a demonstration of why that's a bad idea. (I'll let someone else see if there are dots to be connected between the failure of a grand cryptocurrency grift and the launch of a gulag-for-profit grift.)

While Bukele was at CPAC, Catalina Stubbe connected with him for some interview time.  

The results were reported by FSSPX News (that's the Society of Saint Pius X, a canonically irregular traditionalist Catholic outfit):

From February 21 to 24, 2024, the Salvadoran president attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) which was held in the United States. During the event, he was questioned by Ms. Catalina Stubbe, member of the Moms for Liberty organization – responsible for dissemination in the Hispanic community.

He explained that he thought it was “important that the curriculum does not carry this gender ideology and those types of things,” and assured that “parents should be informed and have a say in what their children will learn.”

He added: “I think it is important that God be reintroduced into schools, that morality and civics are reintroduced, that traditional elements – like mathematics and history – are taught. … Nobody is against modernization: what we are opposed to is the introduction of unnatural, anti-god, anti-family ideologies which have no place in our schools.”

The Minister of Education, José Mauricio Pineda, confirmed on social networks that “all traces of gender ideology have been removed from public schools.”

So while you're managing your anger over a third world dictator who throws around accusations while running a gulag for the US's unconstitutional rendering of whatever brown people they don't like this week, remember that this is yet another appalling ally for the "cheerful warriors" of Moms for Liberty. It is possible that in all my reading I missed the Bible passage in which Jesus said that we should round up people who bother us and stick them in some torturous prison. And M4L love for only certain parents is old news by now. 

Meanwhile, Moms for Liberty's website still features their bullshit origin fable about how a couple of moms just took $500 and a t-shirt design to launch their group, and not the actual story of how some experienced political operators got backing to launch their next attempt to mobilize GOP women. Along the way they've allied themselves with some pretty awful people, but cozying up with a dictator who hopes to get rich torturing political prisoners is an even worse look. 

Predicting AI Armageddon For Universities

Once again, the Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting some top-notch chicken littling about the coming  of our robot overlords. This time it's "Are You Ready for the AI University," from Scott Latham, and it is some top notch hand waving.

Latham is a professor at the Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts, with a background in tech and business, which certainly fits with the pitch he's making here. It's worth looking at because it leans hard on every marketing note we encounter in the current full court AI press.

The hyperbole here is huge. AI will be "forever altering the relationship between students and professors." Latham waves away mundane cheating concerns, the "tired debate about academic ethics" because students have always cheated and always will, so, I guess, never mind that ethics baloney. 

An AI arms race is under way. In a board room at every major college in America there is a consultant touting AI’s potential to lower costs, create new markets, and deliver more value to students.

Latham is certain of not only the inevitability, but the dominance of AI. And the FOMO is strong with this one. Here's just one of his broad sweeping portraits of the future.

Across the country some institutions are already piloting fully AI-instructed courses and utilizing AI to enable higher yields and improve retention, graduation rates, and job placement. Over the course of the next 10 years, AI-powered institutions will rise in the rankings. US News & World Report will factor a college’s AI capabilities into its calculations. Accrediting agencies will assess the degree of AI integration into pedagogy, research, and student life. Corporations will want to partner with universities that have demonstrated AI prowess. In short, we will see the emergence of the AI haves and have-nots. Sadly, institutions that need AI the most, such as community colleges and regional public universities, will be the last to get it. Prepare for an ever-widening chasm between resource-rich, technologically advanced colleges and those that are cash-starved and slow to adapt to the age of AI.

Yes, I am sure that wealthy, elite parents will send their children off to the ivies along with a note to the college saying, "Now don't try to stick my child with one of those dumb old human professors. I want that kid hooked up to an AI-driven computer."  

Latham seems to think so, asserting that 

Colleges that extol their AI capabilities will be signaling that they offer a personalized, responsive education, and cutting-edge research that will solve the world’s largest problems. Prospective students will ask, “Does your campus offer AI-taught courses?” Parents will ask: “Does your institution have AI advisers and tutors to help my child?”

I am the non-elite parent of two potential future college students, and this sounds like an education hellscape to me.

But Latham says this is all just "creative destruction," like when digital photography killed off film photography. He seriously mischaracterizes film photography to make his point, but there's no question that cheap and easy digital photography kneecapped the film variety. 

Latham argues that the market will force this, that the children of the Amazon, Netflix and Google generation want "a speedy, on-demand, and low-friction experience." Of course, they may also have learned that increasingly enshittified tech platforms are the enemy that provides whole new versions of friction. Latham also argues that these students see college as a transaction, a bit of advanced job training, a commodity to be purchased in hopes of an acceptable Return On Investment, and while I'd like to say he's wrong, he probably has a point here because A) that's what some folks have been telling them their whole lives and B) we are in an increasingly scary country where a safe economic future is hard to come by. Still, his belief in consumer short-sightedness is a bit much.

So they regard college much like any other consumer product, and like those other products, they expect it to be delivered how they want, when they want. Why wouldn’t they?

Maybe because somewhere along the way they learned that they aren't the center of the universe? 

Latham is sure that AI is an "existential threat" to the livelihood of professors. Faculty costs are a third of institutions cost structure, he tells us, and AI "can deliver more value at lower cost." One might be inclined to ask what, exactly, is the value that AI is delivering more of, but Latham isn't going to answer that. I guess "education" is just a generic substance squeezed out of universities like tofu out of a pasta press. 

If Latham hasn't pissed you off yet, this should do it:

Professors need to dispense with the delusional belief that AI can’t do their job. Faculty members often claim that AI can’t do the advising, mentoring, and life coaching that humans offer, and that’s just not true. They incorrectly equate AI with a next-generation learning-management system, such as Blackboard or Canvas, or they point out AI’s current deficiencies. They’re living in a fantasy. AI is being used to design cars and discover drugs: Do professors really think it can’t narrate and flip through PowerPoints as well as a human instructor?

 And here is why colleges and universities are going to the first to be put through the AI wringer-- there is a lot of really shitty teaching going on in colleges and universities. I would love to say that this comes down to Latham getting the professorial function wrong, that no good professor simply narrates through a Power Point deck, and I'd be correct. But do some actual professors just drone and flip? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they do.

In the end, Latham's argument is that shitty AI can replace a sub-optimal human instructor. That may be true, but it's beside the point. Can AI provide bad advising, bad mentoring, and bad life coaching? Probably. But who the heck wants that? Can AI do those jobs well? No, it can't. Because it cannot create a human connection, nor can it figure out what a human has going on in their head. 

Latham is sure, however, that it's coming. By the end of the decade, there will be avatars, and Latham says to think about how your iPhone can recognize your face. Well, 

Now imagine AI avatars that will be able to sense subtle facial expressions and interpret their meaning. If during a personalized lecture an avatar senses on a student’s face, in real time, that they’re frustrated with a specific concept, the avatar will shift the instructional mode to get the student back on track.

"Imagine" is doing a lot of work here, but even if I imagine it, can I imagine a reason that this is better done by AI instead of by an actual human instructor.

Beyond the hopeful expectation of technical capabilities, Latham makes one of the more common-yet-unremarked mistakes here, which is to assume that students will interact with the AI exactly as they would with human beings and not as they would with, say, a soulless lifeless hunk of machinery. 

Never mind. Latham is still flying his fancy to a magical future where all your education is on a "portable, scalable blockchain" that includes every last thing you ever experienced. It does not seem to occur to him that he is describing a horrifyingly intrusive mechanized Big Brother, a level of surveillance beyond anything ever conceived. 

Latham has news for the other functions of higher ed. AI can replace the registrar. AI will manage those blockchain records that "will be owned by the student and empower the student" because universities won't be able to stand in the way of students sharing records. 

AI will create perfect marketing for student recruitment, targeted to individual students. AI will handle filtering admissions as well "by attributes that play to an institution's strength." Because AI magic! Magicky magic. 

This is such bullshit, the worst kind of AO fetishization that imagines capabilities for AI that it will not have. AI is good at finding patterns by sifting through data; it does what a human could do if that human had infinite patience and time. Could a human being with infinite time and patience look at an individual 18-year-old and predict what the future holds for them? No. And neither can AI.

AI is going to take over career services, which I suppose could happen if we reach the point that the college AI reaches out to an AI contact it has in a particular business. And if you think students want to deal with human career-services professionals," Latham has a simple answer-- "No, they don't. Human interaction is not as important to today's students." I guess that settles that. It's gonna suck for students who want to go into human-facing professions (like, say, teaching) when they finally have to deal with human beings.

AI will handle accreditation, too! Witness the hellscape Latham describes:

In our unquestioning march to assessment that is driven by standardized processes and outcomes, we have laid the groundwork for AI’s ascendancy. Did the student learn? Did the student have a favorable post-graduation path, i.e., graduate school or employment? Accreditors will have no choice but to offer a stamp of approval even when AI is doing all the work. In the past decade, we have shifted from emphasizing the process of education to measuring the outcome of education when determining institutional effectiveness. We have standardized pedagogy, standardized student assessments, standardized teaching evaluations, and standardized accreditation. Accreditation by its nature is standardized, and we won’t need vice provosts to do that job much longer.

Administration will also be assimilated (I guess the AI can go ahead and shmooze wealthy alumni for contributions). Admins will deal with political pressure by asking, “Did you run this through AI?” or “Did the AI engine arrive at a similar decision?” Because if there's anything that can deal with something like the politics of the Trump regime, it's an AI.

He's not done yet. This is all so far just how AI will commandeer the existing university structure. 

But that is only step one of a broader transition. Imagine a university employing only a handful of humans, run entirely by AI: a true AI university. In the next few years, it’s likely that a group of investors in conjunction with a major tech company like X, Google, Amazon, or Meta will launch an AI university with no campus and very few human instructors. By the year 2030, there will be standalone, autonomous AI universities.

Yes, because our tech overlords have always had a keen hand on how education works. Like that time the tech geniuses promised that Massive Open Online Courses would replace universities by, well, now. Or that time that Bill Gates failed to be right about education for decades. What a bold, baseless, inevitably wrong prediction for Latham to make--but he's not done.

AI U will have a small, tight leadership team who will select a "tight set of academic disciplines that lend themselves to the early-stage capabilities of artificial intelligence, such as accounting or history." Good God-- is there any discipline that lends itself to automation less than history? History only lends itself to this if you are one of those ahistorical illiterates who believes that history is just learning a bunch of dates and names because all history is known and set in stone. It is not, and this one sentence may be the most disqualifying sentence in the whole article.

Will AI U succeed? Latham allows that a vast majority will fail (like the dot-com bubble era) but dozens will survive and prosper, because this will work for non-traditional students (you know--like those predatory for-profit colleges did) who aren't served by the "one size fits all" model currently available, because I guess Latham figures that whether you go to Harvard or Hillsdale or The College of the Atlantic or Poor State U or your local Community College, you're getting pretty much the same thing. Says the guy who earlier asserted that AI would help select students based on how they played to the individual strengths of particular institutions. AI will target the folks who started a degree but never finished it. Sure.

AI U's secret strength will be that it will be cheapo. No campus and stuff. Traditional universities offering "an old-fashioned college experience complete with dorm rooms, a football stadium, and world-class dining" will continue, though they'll be using AI, too. 

Winding down, Latham allows as predicting the carnage is easy, but "making people realize the inevitable" is hard (perhaps because it skips right over what reasons there are to think that this time, time #12,889,342, the tech world's prediction of the inevitable should be believed). "Predicting" is always easy when it's mostly just wishful guessing.

Students will benefit "tremendously" and some professors will remain. Jobs will be lost. Some disciplines will benefit, like the science-and-mathy ones. Latham sees a "silver lining" for the humanities-- "as AI fully assimilates itself into society, the ethical, moral, and legal questions will bring the humanities to the forefront." To put it another way, since the AI revolution will be run by people lacking moral and ethical grounding in the humanities, the humanities will have to step up to save society. 

I have to stipulate that there is no doubt that Professor Latham is more accomplished and successful than I am. Probably smarter, and for all I know, a wonderful human being who is kind to his mother. But this sure seems like a lot of bunk. Here he has captured most of the features of AI sales. A lack of clarity about what teachers, ideally, actually do (it is not simply pour information into student brains to be recalled later). A lack of clarity about what AI actually does, and what capabilities it does and does not have. A faith that a whole lot of things can be determined with data and objectivity (spoiler alert: AI is not actually all that objective). Complete glossing over the scariest aspects of collecting every single detail of your life digitally, to be sorted through by future employers or hostile American governments (like the one we have right now which is trying to amalgamate all the data the feds have so that they can sift through it to find the people they want to attack). 

Is AI going to have some kind of effect on universities? Sure. Are those effects inevitable? Not at all. Will the AI revolution resemble many other "transformational" education revolutions of the past, and how they failed? You betcha-- especially MOOCs. Are people going to find ways to use AI to cut some corners and make their lives easier, even if it means sacrificing quality? Yeah, probably. Is all of this going to get way more expensive once AI companies decide it's time to make some of their money back? Positively. 

Would we benefit from navigating all of this with realistic discussions based on something other than hyperbolic marketing copy? Please, God. The smoke is supposed to stay inside the crystal ball. 

ICYMI: Abraham Lincoln Edition (4/13)

160 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln had his last full day. It was a full one-- Lee had surrendered just four days before and the war was wrapping up. But 160 years ago tomorrow, he would head to the theater for the evening, where actor and failed oil speculator John Wilkes Booth would shoot him.

We know a few things about Booth in my neck of the woods. The oil boom started here in 1859, and Booth actually lived in my small town briefly. He was an investor in one of the umpty-gazillion speculative oil companies that formed in these parts. His plan, apparently, was to strike it rich and use Yankee money to help finance the insurrectionist cause. He was a minor celebrity in town, by most accounts charming and popular. But his wells didn't come in, and he moved on to his next plan. The wells he had invested in did come in big later, which leads to one of those historical questions-- if the well had come in sooner, would Lincoln have lived? History sometimes turns on the smallest random details.

At any rate, here's some reading for the week. Remember to share!

Welcome to the Ohio General Assembly's Great Legislative Education Robbery of 2025

Stephen Dyer examines the latest piece of Ohio's attempt to become the Florida of the Midwest by siphoning funds away from public schools.

Who will stop them? LAUSD says "Hold my beer."

Jeff Waid gives credit to the Los Angeles school district, which has emerged as one of the districts brave enough to hold the line against ICE.

Attorneys Say It’s Illegal for Trump Administration to Extort Compliance with its Anti-DEI Ideology by Threatening to Deny Title I Funds to School Districts

Not that there's any reason to have doubted, but Jan Resseger has the word from experts on how not legal the extortion attempt is.

Why Book Bans Matter

Steve Nuzum provides another update from South Carolina's attempts to curtail reading. Because that's how you get rid of certain ideas, and maybe even certain people.

Breaking the Spell

Audrey Watters on resistance to AI panic. 

A Maine pole vaulter cleared the bar to win the state title. Waiting below was Donald Trump.

For Chalkbeat, Kalyn Belsha covers the ongoing federal attacks on Maine (because its governor wouldn't kiss the ring).

Strategic Alarm: How Fear is Being Weaponized to Undermine Public Education — and Who’s Paying the Price

Rob Rogers urges us to resist the fear being hosed into education circles and to be especially aware of the threat to students with special needs.

Feds end a civil rights agreement on treatment of Native students, citing DEI

The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has been looking into the question of why Native American students in Rapid City, SD, were so much more likely to be disciplined, but under the new regime that investigation will be dropped. Laura Meckler covers it for the Washington Post.

Collective conference myopia

Benjamin Riley went to the ASU-GSV summit and ed tech super-fair, and was pretty alarmed by what he saw and heard there. 

Are Public Schools the Problem or the Solution?

Andru Volinsky asks a basic question about education, and he has some answers from our national past.

A Texas school leader says material about diversity in state-approved textbooks violated the law.

The state's GOP board of education had already stripped all that modern learnin' from the textbooks, but that didn't go far enough for other officials who objected to stuff about vaccines and polio and the United Nations, among other non-medieval items. The Texas Tribune and ProPublica team up again.

New York and the Fight for Truly Public Schools

Jose Luis Vilson considers what puts the "public" in public schools (or keeps it out).

NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, was supposed to be safe. It’s not

Jill Barshay at Hechinger has some more news about the cloudy fate of NAEP.

A city responding to a lead crisis in schools reached out to the CDC for help. The agency’s lead experts were just fired

All that DOGEing is working out just great for children. Send it back to the states, indeed.

The Reason We Still Need Conferences

Nancy Flanagan was at the NPE conference last week (and I was lucky enough to get to say hi). Here she explains why these are such a good thing.

A College Professor Teaches High School Classes

In 1960, a college professor volunteered to in a high school for a semester, and boy did he learn some things. Larry Cuban reprints this trip down memory lane that will seem not unfamiliar.

This week at Forbes.com I wrote about Andru Volinsky's new book about New Hampshire's landmark Claremont decisions and the American Library Association's annual report.

Here's another astonishing new video from OK GO. If you're really intrigued by this one shot video, here's a "making of" video. Humans are so amazing. "We made this so that you can feel that."

Join my newsletter to get all the stuff conveniently in your inbox. Always free.

Where Do Book Complaints Come From? The State of the Library Report

It's National Library Week, a perfect time for the American Library Association to publish its annual report, a look back at what was happening in 2024, including some striking data points..

Well, you already know what has been going on, but the cover of the report gives a clue. The two find-it-inside headlines are "Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2024" and "Censorship by the Numbers."

 

Inside we find a one page intro from Leslie Burger, the interim executive director of ALA. She identifies three major trends from the year-- censorship, AI, and sustainability, which seems to mean how libraries help communities be sustainable. On the next page Cindy Hohl, ALA president, points out the many things that libraries do that are important to communities. 

Then Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, gets three pages to talk about the battle over the freedom to read. Censorship attempts are actually down from 2023 (821 vs. 1,247), but that's still the third-highest number ever. She notes that the numbers don't really capture the degree to which librarians and library workers are themselves weathering attacks and a general atmosphere of fear. She also notes some positive news, like the courts that are overturning bans. And as with many issues, much depends on which state you're in. 

Then we get to the data portion of the report. 

There are the top 10 most challenged books of 2024. No big surprises here. All Boys Aren't Blue leads the list, followed by Gender Queer. Bluest Eye and Perks of Being a Wallflower tie for third. Ellen Hopkins makes the list twice, and John Green's Looking for Alaska is still there. Old classics like Huck Finn are nowhere to be seen.

Next the things you probably only suspected.

Where do the challenges to books come from? Turns out only about 16% come from actual parents. 10% come from elected officials/government. 36% come from school boards or administration. Only 26% are listed as from "pressure groups" like your local Moms for Liberty chapter, but who do you imagine is leaning on board members and elected officials to get in there and ban some Naughty Books. So we've got 72% of book challenges coming from someone other than actual parents. Librarians, teachers, and staff account for 1%.

That 72% represents a major trend. in 2020 only 25% of challenges came from pressure groups (or the people that pressure groups were pressuring). In 2021 that soared to 65%., coinciding with the launch of Moms for Liberty (and right wing crankiness about Trump's defeat, and the invention of critical race theory as an issue). The 72% is a dip from 2023, so I suppose we can hope that's the start of a trends.

While school libraries have gotten most of the attention, in 2024 the public libraries led in the amount of challenges: 55% of 2024 book challenges were in public libraries, with school libraries accounting for 38%. 

What was actually challenged? 76% of the challenges were for books and graphic novels. 6% objected to displays. 6% skipped the complaint and went to vandalism and theft of materials. 3% threatened access to the library by threatening to cut funding, close the library, or blow it up (because bomb threats are still a thing in 2024).

The remainder of the report gets back to the main business of libraries (which is not actually fending off folks suffering culture panic). mantal health. Read to Recovery. NASA workshops. Finding ways to provide access, and just generally being a place where persons can connect with a larger world of knowledge and information with a local center for community. They are figuring out how to cope with AI, and meeting civic responsibilities with broadband and infrastructure, even as they brace for funding hits from the regime of Dear Leader.

I don't know when the report was actually written, but of course the slashing of library funding has already begun, which sucks. I've been a library guy my whole life. When we moved here, we had a library much more easily accessed than when we lived in the boonies. My mom would take us weekly, carrying a picnic basket with which we carted our selections back and forth. Getting to a book store was a rare treat in those days, but the library was always there, and I could sample all sorts of stuff and read my way through huge series. Between the public library and my school library, I had access to a whole world of stuff, and I took advantage. 

When I grew up (ish), I discovered the research section of the library and the miracle of newspapers on microfilm. I spent thirty years reading page after page, scouring the paper for details about our local band and constantly wandering down side trips; eventually a book came out of that. It became enough of a Thing for me that when I decided my honors students needed to do research from primary (ish) sources, the answer was local history, because I already knew what was there. For years, the public library was part of my curriculum. I volunteered to sit in that room on Saturdays and help people find what they were looking for (it was usually a family member).

A public library is a great thing, a community institution that lets every citizen have resources that would ordinarily be reserved only for the wealthy. Makes you wonder why some people are so bent on attacking libraries, an institution whose greatest sin is simply trying to serve as many people as it can. 

PA Tells Trump To Back Off In Slickest Way Possible

Some days I love my commonwealth's current administration.

Here's the sequence. First, the US Department of Ed had a civil rights office, the purpose of which was to make sure that states did not violate student civil rights, which mostly meant standing up for students with special needs and pushing back on Certain Parts of the country where some folks have never really stopped trying to get out of providing poor students and students of color with a fully-funded quality education.

The Trump 2.0 repurposed the same department. They kept much of the language of the original mission:

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

But in one weird trick that right wingers like to use, they have reinterpreted that to mean "don't deny any white guys cool stuff that other people get," grouped those naughty behaviors under the DEI label, and tried to back it up by brandishing the SCOTUS decision for SFFA v. Harvard-- the one that struck down Affirmative Action. 

Having decided that simply declaring their new version of the law was not enough, the regime has declared that every state and local district must sign a loyalty oath, saying they have reviewed the regime demand and admit it's a requirement for federal financial support. This is an attempt to get state and local educators to comply in advance, as if the courts have already agreed with the regime's assertion that DEI is actually illegal. 

Many Democrat-led states and districts have pushed back hard. California and Vermont told districts to go ahead and ignore the loyalty oath demands. Chicago's mayor said, "See you in court." 

Pennsylvania has simply employed ju-jitsu or a double-reverse or whatever you want to call it.

First, the latter from Executive Deputy Secretary of Education Angela Fitterer was sent via e-mail, like the regime's demand, because if the regime doesn't know how to manage major pieces of business, we can play that game to.

Second, the PA letter is addressed "Dear Sir or Madam," underscoring the fact that the regime's edict was sent out unsigned. 

Third, the letter affirms that Pennsylvania follows Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1864, always has, always will. So no problem here. It ignores the attempt to re-interpret that language and simply addresses the issue that the feds pretend to raise--whether or not people are following Title VI. 

We'll see how this plays out. Maybe someone at the federal ed department will actually sign a real letter saying, "No, we need you to swear allegiance to our cockeyed new definition of Title VI." Or maybe they will just say, "See, Pennsylvania also agrees to follow Title VI" and pretend that people don't mean two entirely different thing when they talk about Title VI. Maybe they'll get pissy and yell, "No, you have to agree that Title VI only means what WE think it means and not what people have thought it meant for the last sixty years." 

It's not as feisty as some states, nor as subservient as others, but it puts Pennsylvania on the right side of this issue. I do love a display of passive-aggressive non-compliance, and anything that puts MAGA "clarifying" and reasserting their racist intentions is better than the obsfucatory bullshit they've been employing.

"We're just demanding you follow Title VI," they said, pleased with their own cleverness at owning the libs by turning their own laws against them.

"What a coincidence," says Pennsylvania. "We have been following Title VI all along and have every intention of continuing to do so. So glad we agree on this."

We'll see what the next move is. 

Wendell Berry's Rules for New Tech

 Wendell Berry was born in 1934 and grew to be a writer across a wide number of forms, as well as working as an activist and farmer, mostly in rural Kentucky. He opposed the Vietnam War, debated Then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, and published a critique of George W. Bush's post-9/11 strategy. When he was 76 years old, he and 14 other protestors got themselves locked in the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop removal coal mining (strip mining on steroids). And he's still at it, delivering hearing testimony in 2022. 

Berry came up with rules for things; you may very well have seen some over the years. There are his 17 rules for a sustainable local community, and his 9 rules for consumption, but today I'm looking at his 9 rules for technology. Blogger Ted Gioia reminded me of these rules; Berry whipped them up as a response to friends who were trying to convince him that a computer would be a step up from handwritten copy typed up on a thirty-year-old typewriter  ("Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer," 1987).

The rules have many applications, but they fit very nicely for the conversations we continue to have in education, particular the heavily-pushed AI. So let's take a look.

The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

Part of what is driving the AI love (like many innovations before it) is the dream of replacing expensive teaching professionals with something cheaper. Curriculum in a box appeals to those who want to de-professionalize education, doing for teaching what McDonald's did for cheffing.

AI promises these same folks something even more exciting-- replacing teachers with software that will be cheap and, better yet, never talk back or unionize. 

Is AI really cheaper? We don't know yet; right now, AI companies are trying to conquer the market amazon-style, forgoing making money until after they've planted their flag on the education summit. But at some point they are going to want to make money. Then we'll see the real price.

Probably still cheaper than a human, but then, price paid to the company will be only part of the cost. There's the giant sucking up of electricity, and the blowing through a gazillion gallons of water to cool servers. Plus the cost of students under-educated, because while Musk and Gates can insist that AI can do a teacher's job, they make that claim only because they don't understand what a teacher does or how education works. 

It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

Computers have been taking teacher ed tech in this direction for years, from the giant computer set-up of twenty years ago to the run-everything-from-a-tablet tech of today. Students, however, have been pushed in the other direction. A book, a tablet, and a pen or pencil are far more compact than a desktop, and a netbook barely competes, particularly because the netbook requires plug-in (and the school's network to be working properly). 

Is AI more small scale than a human teacher? I guess they win on that one.

It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

Hoo boy. Enshittification has meant that even things that used to meet this start to fall behind. Is Google better than the card catalog or reference books in your library? Well, it used to be. Now if Google (or dozens of other search engines) even correctly interprets what you have asked, you must scroll past mountains of advertising and paid-for search results.

This is perhaps how AI marketeers keep hope alive, because ChatGPT can do better work than your worst teacher or your worst student (as long as it doesn't present too many flat out errors) but cannot keep up with good teachers and students. 

But "do work" is performing feats of Olympic weight-lifting status here, because, yes, if you think the work is to research and write an essay, ChatGPT can mimic that task. But if you think the work is to acquire and synthesize understandings and insights, then no-- ChatGPT can't do any of those things at all, and its performance of those tasks instead of students studenting means the work wasn't done at all.

It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

Oh, no. AI is gobbling up the power supply and only getting worse and worse.

If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

As suggested above, Berry was not a fan of coal burning for generating electricity. But the shift to solar isn't happening in any large scale way, and certainly not with AI.

It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

We've moved steadily backward on this one in many ways. Computerizing tech creates barriers to repairability, but companies have taken other steps. John Deere infamously led the way by forbidding its customers to work on the tractors that they had bought with their own money. There's your annoying printer that now won't work unless you buy the company's official more-precious-than-hold ink. 

AI adds another level to this problem--not even the people who work with LLM and generative AI fully understand what exactly the computer is doing, nor can they necessarily fix it-- though they do have access to ways to push the tech in one desired direction or another. 

It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.

Berry was writing forty-ish years ago, so I'm not sure how he would have interpreted the ability to order and download stuff when it comes to this rule. AI can, of course, be wherever you want it to be--certainly more so than possible or desirable with a human teacher. Though use of platforms has allowed teachers to extend their "presence" to students 24/7.

It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

Not happening. Wasn't happening back when Berry was writing. 

It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

As Gioia writes, "This may be the biggest tech failure of them all." Tech has been written to exploit creators and manipulate users deliberately and sometimes dangerously. And "disrupt" is of course one of the tech world imperatives. Why? Maybe they just want to work out long-lived anger that they didn't get to sit at the popular kids table, or maybe they feel it's their right to rule over the lesser beings whose understanding is so clearly inferior to their own. 

Whatever the case, anyone who has taught for more than one week is familiar with the teacher "training" for a new solution where the undercurrent (sometimes not all that "under") is "You guys are doing it wrong and we are here to straighten you out." 

"Move fast and break things" is the opposite of what Berry's ninth rule favors, but it's a beloved tech-lord mantra. It would carry a lot more heft if the "things" we were talking about weren't the parts of the system that delivers education to young humans. Berry's rules might seem a little quaint, but I don't think it would hurt us much to pay attention to them.

Dangerous Learning and Culture Panic

Derek Black's new book Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy is absolutely worth the read. I've talked about it at Forbes.com in my best fake journalist tones. But I want to go back to the book because A) I heard Black talk about it last weekend and B) this book is damned awesome and I can't say "damned awesome" at Forbes.com.

There many damned cool things about the book. First, there's a clearer picture of the story we all think we know. We tend to think that teaching enslaved persons to read and write was just always illegal and frowned on and that's it. But Black points out that, in fact, there was a point early on when lots of folks taught Blacks to read and write-- missionaries, some who held enslaved folks, etc. 

Shutting down literacy was, as Black portrays it, a response to particular events, led by some extraordinary individuals. That starts with Denmark Vesey, who really deserves an entire book of his own, which should then be turned into a movie. Extraordinary man with an extraordinary life that leads him, eventually, to lead at slave revolt in Charleston. Except that the revolt doesn't quite some off. But the planned attempt gets peoples' attention. Then come David Walker and Nat Turner (all well before the Civil War) with increasingly scary slave revolts.

This is what kicks off a huge culture panic in the South. This weekend Black used the word "paranoia." 

The revolt of enslaved persons is seen as a threat to the South's way of life. And at this point history starts to seem awfully damned familiar. It's not just that Blacks are forbidden to learn to read and write. Southern authorities start clamping down on any sort of avenue for subversive ideas. They try to get Northern states to clamp down on the folks printing subversive pamphlets. They start scrutinizing schools for teachers and textbooks for any hint of Forbidden Stuff, only instead of searching for CRT or gender ideology or divisive concepts that might be indoctrinating their children, they're looking for Northern Ideas. And they tried to guarantee that anything that slipped through would not be caught by enslaved persons. The lesson they took away was that a literate Black person was a dangerous one.

Like our current culture panic crowd, they are searching for something so vaguely defined that it covers a very broad area. But those Southerners achieve something that, so far, is only a dream for the modern culture panic crowd-- they managed to shut down all dissenting views. Black makes the argument that there was a variety of views about literacy and Northen Stuff in the South, but the culture panic shut all discussion down. And as Black said this weekend, once that dissent was silenced, an ugly outcome, even war, was inevitable.

This all illuminates why I stay away from the phrase "culture war." A war implies to combatants both charging the field to attack their enemies. But in the struggle for Black literacy (and I'd argue in our present-day attempts to shut down discussions of race and LGBTQ and Naughty Sex stuff), only one side is trying to attack the other. That other side is just trying to live their lives and make a better future for themselves. But for them to have that future is seen by the combative side as a threat to their way of life. 

There's lots more to find in this book. The story of secret schools that managed to deliver education t0o Blacks even when it was illegal--and dangerous to be caught. Plus the always-depressing tale of how things unspooled under Reconstruction and Jim Crow. 

It's a hell of a book. Black combines deep and thorough research with compelling narratives. I came away with more knowledge about things I hadn't known and a better perspective for things I had known. And the way that this earlier moment echoes our current one gives the book a sharp edge of relevance. If you have not already done so, grab a copy of this book. 

ICYMI: Columbus Edition (4/6)

Greetings from the NPE conference in Columbus, Ohio. It's also  the first time in quite a while that the CMO and I have been out without the board of directors. So it's a great weekend, even if Columbus reminds me very much of a big concrete hamster tunnel run. I've still got some reading for you. 

Naval Academy removes nearly 400 books from library in new DEI purge ordered by Hegseth’s office

Book banning for the military, because if there's anyone we want to have a limited view of the world...

If You Thought Mike DeWine Hated Public School Kids, Wait'll You Meet Matt Huffman

Stephen Dyer traces the source of Ohio's newest school budgeting failures.

Connecting the Dots

Why is Trumpworld so obsessed with education? Jennifer Berkshire has an answer for that question, and a suggestion for edu-journalists.

No Future in Our Dreaming

Audrey Watters spins off the Berkshire piece, plus other bonuses.

Teachers warn AI is impacting students' critical thinking

Ivana Saric at Axios with some of the least surprising news ever.

Will Religion’s Remarkable Winning Streak at the Supreme Court Continue?

Adam Liptak at the New York Times reminds us what's at stake with the upcoming SCOTUS take on a Catholic charter school.

The Battle Over Church and State Could Take Down the Charter School Movement

Adam Laats at the New Republic makes the case that this Supreme Court case is really a lose-lose moment for the charter industry.

Oklahoma Democrats file joint resolutions to disapprove social studies standards

Not that Oklahoma Democrats have a lot of say, but there's a fight continuing in that legislature over the proposed christianist nationalist social studies standards.

Columbus parents, leaders express frustration over student name changes

Columbus schools surprised students and parents with a little comply-in-advance rollback of name use.

West Virginia teachers unions vote to combine and form ‘Education WV’

AFT and NEA merge for the first time in West Virginia, where any little bit of gain in teacher power is a big deal.

Protect Funding for College & Career Readiness Programs—Take Action Now!

Florida is, as always, in the forefront of terrible education choices. How about slashing the heck out of CTE, AP, and a host of other programs? Sue Kingery Woltanski has the details.

So it's 'lawfare' to question paying $80 million to a 'D'-rated charter school?

In Arizona, a failing charter is being shut down, and wining about it. Laurie Roberts offers a blistering op-ed.

Boys

Nancy Flanagan looks at the question of what has happened to boys.

With Trump’s Education Department, Public Schools Can’t Count on Previous Federal Funding Commitments

Trump's old personal policy of stiffing people for their work is now federal policy. Jan Resseger looks at the new normal of the feds reneging on contracts.

Mortal Thinking

Well, this is pretty damn awesome. Audrey Watters and Benjamin Riley together for a podcast.

The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes

Tressie McMillan Cottom for the New York Times with a take that I hope turns out to be the right one (and which pissed off all sorts of techbros on line), which is that AI is just mid.

This week at Forbes.com I took a look at Derek Black's new book, and you should, too. 

Have some George Harrison.

And as always, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter, a slightly more reliable way to keep updated in this wonky webby world.

Maybe It's The Racism

I want to return to West Ada because I think there's more to learn here, and not just foir folks in Idaho.

Quick recap. Sarah Inama is a 6th grade world civilizations teacher in West Ada School District (the largest district in the state). She had two posters in her classroom. Here they are.

She was told to take them down. She did. Then she went home, thought about it, and put the second one, the one with many skin tones hands, back up. She's been told to get rid of it by year's end. She took her story to a local reporter, and then all hell broke loose.

We know a lot more now thanks to some stellar reporting by Carly Flandro and the folks at Idaho Ed News, who FOIAed 1200 emails surrounding this. You should read the resulting stories (here and here). I'm going pick out just a few points. 

The district had Inama when she disobeyed the order; the word "insubordination" was used. In my local union president days, the standard advice in situations was "comply, then grieve" because once you refuse to comply, you are insubordinate. Inama's high profile made disciplining her a PR nightmare for the district,  but it also seems the district admins and board couldn't really decide where they wanted to go with this.

Inama was told the poster was divisive, that it was "not neutral," that the problem was not the message, but the hands of v arious skin tones. Teachers shouldn't have political stuff in the classroom.  Inama nails the issue here

“I really still don’t understand how it’s a political statement,” she said. “I don’t think the classroom is a place for anyone to push a personal agenda or political agenda of any kind, but we are responsible for first making sure that our students are able to learn in our classroom.”

And yet many folks within and outside the district saw this as a political issue. How could anyone do that? Meet district parent Brittany Bieghler, who was dropping her kids off the day that parents were chalking the "Everyone is welcome here" message on the sidewalks.

“The ‘Everyone is Welcome’ slogan is one filled with marxism and DEI, there is no need for those statements because anyone with a brain knows that everyone is welcome to attend school, so there is no need to have it posted, written or worn on school grounds,” she wrote. “My family and I relocated here from a state that did not align with our beliefs and we expected it to be different here, but it seems as time goes by, its becoming more like our former state, which is extremely disheartening.”

"Anyone with a brain" might begin to suspect that everyone is not welcome here under these circumstances. And the school board itself couldn't decide what to respond, drafting an assortment of emails that tried to show conciliation to those that were defiant and defensive, including one complaining in MAGA-esque tones that Inama was naughty for going to "new media."

But I want you to look at the offending poster again. The curent Trumpian argument is that all this Marxist DEI naughhtiness is bad because it unfairly elevates people of color above white folks, that white folks are being discriminated against and denied what they deserve. The new Ed Dpartment civil rights office is dedicated to rooting out discrimination--against white folks. But look at those hands, the ones that make this poster controversial. The hands are all the same size, all have the same prominence and weight in the poster. It's not as if the Black and Brown hands are dominating the frame. Is it political to suggest that they are somehow equal? What could explain that?

Maybe it's the racism.

What would be the acceptable alternative? White hands given greater prominence and weight in the image? No hands at all so that folks can imagine whatever relationship between tghe skin tons they prefer, even if what they imagine contradicts the message of the poster? 

Inama has also been the target of district concern trolling, the whole "Of course we agree with the message, but we don't want to see our teachers embroiled in controvefrsy like this" thing. But that's an admission that given the choice between making children feel welcome in your district and maintaining the comfort of racists, your district chooses the comfort of racists. That is not a great district policy, no better than folks who suggested that Black students should not try to show u at newly-integrated sc hools because there would just be trouble. 

The district also says that it took this action because of Idaho's anti-diversity bill, which parallels the anti-diversity edicts comeing out of DC. While the Trump edict on DEI in education has been vague as hell, if this is how it's going to be interpreted, things are going to get extremely ugly. If it's discrimination against white people to admit that people of color exist and have just as much value as white folks--well, what would explain such a viewpoint?

Maybe it's the racism.

There's one more layer here, and the district seems to be missing this entirely. There's a world of difference between never putting that poster up in the first place and taking it down after it was already up. The latter is a pretty explicit rejection of the message, and it makes matters far worse.

West Ada is a bad harbinger of what's to come. If a public school system can't bring itself to say unequivocally, "All students are welcome here, and that means students of every race, religion, and creed" then we are in a bad place. If a school leader can't identify racism when we see it and call it wrong, they have really lost their way.

Trump, McMahon, and Gollum's Lie

They couldn't resist. Faced with a choice between either sending education back to the states in the form of unrestricted block grants or using the power of that big pile of money to force states to bend the knee, the administration just could not throw the Ring of Power away. Especially when they can use The Precious to force their most favorite thing in the world-- making someone bow to them and kiss the ring, acknowledging that Dear Leader is their master, and they will do as Dear Leader tells them to.

So the Department of Education will require every school and state to sign a statement certifying that they will absolutely comply with the administration's demand that they never, ever touch that nasty DEI stuff. Otherwise, the administration will withhold the money. Dance, puppets! Dance!

This is yet another probably-illegal Trump move; the federal government is expressly forbidden to dictate to local schools how they are going to do business. But Trump wouldn't be the first President to look at that obstacle and say, "I'll bet we can work around this." No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top wore that obstacle down to barely a speed bump.

So rather than wait for the courts to weigh in and then Trump to ignore them and then for them to weigh in again, I have an idea about how districts can deal with this. 

Lie.

Pinky promise that you will never ever touch the dirty DEI. Make the pledge. Sign whatever piece of paper they concoct. And then go back to doing what you know is right.

I mean, lying is the Trump way. Say whatever the hell you want, make whatever claims suit you, and then go back to doing whatever you intended to do. Breaking agreements and welching on contracts is the Trump business way, and given the amount of government contractual obligation being cut off in mid progress, it's apparently the Trump government way as well. 

And Trump and McMahon are lying right now with this demand. The administration continues to be coy and vague about what, exactly, about DEI they want stopped. One reason is because having clear rules reduces the dependence on Dear Leader. It's not just that the chilling effect will lead to people over-complying in advance. It's that having a clear rule would mean that people wouldn't have to constantly turn back to Dear Leader for approval. "There are no rules," says the authoritarian ruler. "Not even rules I make. There is only me. Don't ever take your attention away from me."

The DEI rules are also vague because even these guys know that saying out loud, "The nice things must always be only for the white people. You must never give attention, privilege, or support to non-white people that is more than what white people get."

See, they are lying about what this edict requires. 

If you are a long-time regular reader, you know that I am not a fan of lying. I hate lies. Lying is a toxic activity, and it always comes with a cost.

They are lying about what they want, about what they are demanding schools to do. What they appear to want is A) for every school and state in the country to acknowledge that Dear Leader is the boss of them and B) stop trying to give nice things to people who aren't white. 

I hate lies. But schools are now in a lose-lose, lie-lie situation. Either they accept the lies implicit in the edict, or they lie about what they are going to do. One of those lies allows for mistreatment of students and erosion of the independence and local control of schools. The other lets educators do the work they are supposed to be doing. 

Gollum could not willingly give up the ring of power, and he used it for terrible purposes. Would it have been wrong to lie to him? These are the kinds of moral dilemas we face these days.

I was about halfway through my career when I concluded that teaching is a sort of guerilla battle in which one pursues the work and does whatever one must to circumvent obstacles, even if those obstacles are things (and people) that are supposed to be supporting you. How many teachers dealt with requirements to tag every bit of every lesson plan with the specific standards it would address by simply adding whatever tags filled up the space and then went back to work, paperwork requirements met. Schools could do that again. 

Difficult times call for difficult choices. I'm just saying.

OK: Another First Amendment Lawsuit

Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-Chief just loves him some lawsuits, so he's decided to launch another one, this time going after the Freedom From Religion Foundation in a federal lawsuit that pushes back against a challenge to his efforts to inject Christianity into Oklahoma classrooms.

The triggering event for Walters appears to have been a cease and desist letter sent to Achilles Public School on behalf of a parent who objected to a beginning the day with a mandatory prayer and teachers reading Bible verses to students. Walters says this is about more than a single school, but does not name other schools in the suit. FFRF surmises that these may be references to other complaints against Oklahoma schools that were peacefully settled in previous years. 

Walters statement about the suit boils down to "We won't let these out-of-state atheists try to erase faith from public life." FFRF is based in Wisconsin.

The sequence of event laid out by the complaint puts the letter in the context of his drive to address the “dismantling of faith and family values in public schools.” It notes that he made his Bibles-in-classrooms directive, then opened the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, and so, in line with that, an APS teacher started using Bible verses in lessons, and the school started including prayers in morning announcements. Shortly after that, the superintendent received the letter regarding “unconstitutional school-sponsored prayer and bible readings.” FFRF requested that the school knock it off.

The actual argument cites the "trendy disdain for deep religious convictions" line from Espinoza. It argues that Oklahoma is super-religious (therefor, I guess, they want religion injected in schools). OSDE and Walters are doing their job of determining what Oklahoma students should learn, and FFRF 

has interfered with and continues to interfere with Superintendent Walters’s and OSDE’s statutory duty to oversee Oklahoma’s public schools and their duty to implement curricular standards, investigate any complaints levied against an Oklahoma school, and advocate for its students and parents.

 There is the usual dismissal of the wall between church and state:

FFRF claims as its basis for such interference as its desire to “promote the constitutional principle of separation of church and state.” Curiously, neither the word “separation” nor the word “church” appears anywhere in the text of the United States Constitution. By contrast, the Declaration of Independence makes reference to God, a “Creator,” a “Supreme Judge,” and “Divine Providence,” thereby solidifying the notion that a complete “separation of church and state” was never the intention of the Nation’s founders.

The complaint also paints FFRF as just annoying busybodies, going all the way back to their response to the 1996 Oklahoma bombing. The audacity.  

In reality, their actions are nothing more than the very prejudice, hatred, and bigotry they pretend to despise hidden behind a thinly woven cloak of constitutional championship.

Finally, Achille is a small town and FFRF has 40,000 members. So FFRF, argues the complaint in "an analogy sure to draw FFRF's ire, is Goliath picking on a David. 

And while the plaintiffs face "irreparable injury," not so the FFRF

as the Defendant has no interest in how the State of Oklahoma chooses to govern its citizens, how the duly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction performs the duties of his office, or how Oklahoma’s public schools implement curriculum and standards set forth by the OSDE and the State Board of Education. Granting an injunction weighs in favor of public interest. If the citizens of Oklahoma are unhappy with their elected officials, the solution is at the ballot box, and not in the hands of an out-of-state organization with little else to do but issue non-stop cease and desist letters to rural and independent school districts in states that are half a country away from them.

I include all these quotes just to give a sense of how angry the lawsuit is. Walters, like many MAGA christianists, just seems so angry and unhappy. 

The lawsuit can't quite make up its mind about what's going on here. This Bible reading shouldn't be a big deal because the Supreme Court has long recognized "the secular value of religious texts, including the Bible, in school settings" but also the court should enjoin FFRF from interfering with the school faculty, staff or students "exercising their rights under the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment." So, there are no religious practices going on here, and also, how dare you interfere with these religious practices. But they're correct in mentioning the First Amendment, because if Walters' various Religion (But Only My Religion) In The Classroom policies aren't a violation of the Establishment Clause, I don't know what is. 

So here we go-- one more case to pry apart the First Amendment and batter the separation of church and state. Who knows how this will turn out, other than resulting in one more Ryan Walters media blitz. But in the meantime, if you'd like to join or contribute to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, you can do that here. 

Where Does AI Fit In The Writing Process

Pitches and articles keep crossing my desk that argue for including AI somewhere in the student writing process. My immediate gut-level reaction is similar to my reaction upon finding glass shards in my cheeseburger, but, you know, maybe my reaction is a just too visceral and I need to step back and think this through.

So let's do that. Let's consider the different steps in a student essay, both for teachers and students, and consider what AI could contribute.

The Prompt

The teacher will have to start the ball rolling with the actual assignment. This could be broad ("Write about a major theme in Hamlet") or very specific ("How does religious imagery enhance the development of ideas related to the role of women in early 20th century New Orleans in Kate Chopin's The Awakening?"). 

If you're teaching certain content, I am hoping that you know the material well enough to concoct questions about it that are A) worth answering and B) connected to your teaching goals for the unit. I have a hard time imagining a competent teacher who says, "Yeah, I've been teaching about the Industrial Revolution for six weeks, but damned if I know what anyone could write about it." 

I suppose you could try to use ChatGPT to bust some cobwebs loose or propose prompts that are beyond what you would ordinarily set. But evaluating responses to a prompt that you haven't thought through yourself? Also, will use of AI at this stage save a teacher any real amount of time?

Choosing the Response

Once the student has the prompt, they need to do their thinking and pre-writing to develop an idea about which to write. 

Lord knows that plenty of students get stuck right here, so maybe an AI-generated list of possible topics could break the logjam. But the very best way to get ready to write about an idea starts when you start developing the idea. 

The basic building block of an essay is an idea, and the right question to ask is "What do I have to say about this prompt?" Asking ChatGPT means you're starting with the question, "What could I write an essay about?" Which is a fine question if your goal is to create an artifact, a piece of writing performance. 

I'm not ruling out the possibility that a student see a topic on a list and have a light bulb go off-- "OOoo! That sounds interesting to me!" But mostly I think asking LLMs to pick your topic is the first step down the wrong road, particularly when you consider the possibility that the AI will spit out an idea that is simply incorrect.

Research and Thinking

So the student has picked a topic and is now trying to gather materials and formulate ideas. Can AI help now?

Some folks think that AI is a great way to summarize sources and research. Maybe combine that with having AI serve as a search engine. "ChatGPT, find me sources about symbiosis in water-dwelling creatures." The problem is that AI is bad at all those things. Its summarizing abilities are absolutely unreliable and it is not a good search engine, both because it tends to make shit up and because its training data is probably not up to date.

But here's the thing about the thinking part of preparing to write. If you are writing for real, and not just filling in some version of a five paragraph template, you have to think about the idea and their component parts and how they relate, because that is where the form and organization of your essay comes from. 

Form follows function. If you start with five blank paragraphs and then proceed to ask "What can I put in this paragraph, you get a mediocre-at-best artifact that can be used for generating a grade. But if you want to communicate ideas to other actual humans, you have to figure out what you want to say first, and that will lead you straight to How To Say It. 

So letting AI do the thinking part is a terrible idea. Not just because it produces a pointless artifact, but because the whole thinking and organizing part is a critical element of the assignment. It exercises exactly the mental muscles that a writing assignment is supposed to build. In the very best assignments, this stage is where the synthesis of learning occurs, where the student really grasps understanding and locks it in place. 

So many writing problems are really thinking problems-- you're not sure how to say it because you're not sure what to say. And every problem encountered is an opportunity. Every point of friction is the place where learning occurs.

Organization

See above. If you have really done the thinking part, you can organize the elements of the paper faster and better than the AI anyway. 

Drafting

You've got a head full of ideas, sorted and organized and placed in a structure that makes sense. Now you just have to put them into words and sentences and paragraphs. Well, maybe not "just." This composing stage is the other major point of the whole assignment-- how do we take the thoughts into our heads and turn them into sequences of words that communicate across the gulf between separate human beings? That's a hell of a different challenge than "how does one string together words to fill up a page in a way that will collect grade tokens?" 

And if you've done all the thinking part, what does tagging in AI do for you anyway? You know better than the AI what exactly you have in mind, and by the time you've explained all that in your ChatGPT prompt box, you might as well have just written the essay yourself.

I have seen the argument--from actual teachers-- that having students use AI to create a rough draft is a swell idea. Then the student can just "edit" the AI product-- just fix the mistakes, organize things more in line with what you were thinking, maybe add a little voice here and there. 

But if you haven't done the thinking part, how can you edit? If you don't know what the essay is intended to say--or if, in fact, it came from a device that cannot form intent-- how can you judge how well it is working?

Proof and edit

The AI can't tell you how well you communicated what you intended to communicate because, of course, it has no grasp of your intent. That said, this is a step that I can imagine some useful of computerized analysis, though whether it all rises to the level of AI is debatable.

I used to have my students do some analysis of their own writing to illuminate and become more conscious of their own writing patterns. Some classics like counting the forms of "be" in the essay (shows if you have a love for passive or weak verbs). Count the number of words per sentence. Do a grammatical analysis of the first four words of every sentence. All data points that can help a writer see and then try to break certain unconscious habits. Students can do this by hand; computers could do it faster, and that would be okay.

The AI could be played with for some other uses. Ask the AI to summarize your draft, to see if you seem to have said what you meant to say. I suppose students could ask AI for editing suggestions, but only if we all clearly understand that many of those suggestions are going to be crappy. I've seen suggestions like having students take the human copy and the edited-by-AI copy and perform a critical comparison, and that's not a terrible assignment, though I would hope that the outcome would be realization that human editing is better. 

I'm also willing to let my AI guard down here because decades of classroom experience taught me that students would, generally speaking, rather listen to their grandparents declaim loudly about the deficiencies of Kids These Days than do meaningful proofreading of their own writing. So if playing editing games with AI can break down that barrier at all, I can live with it. But so many pitfalls; for instance, the students who comply by writing the most half-assed rough draft ever and just letting ChatGPT finish the job. 

Final Draft

Another point at which, if you've done all the work so far, AI won't save you any time or effort. On the other hand, if this is the main "human in the loop" moment in your process, you probably lack the tools to make any meaningful final draft decisions.

Assessing the Essay

As we have noted here at the institute many, many times over the years, computer scoring of essays is the self-driving car of the academic world. It is always just around the corner, and it never, ever arrives. Nor are there any signs that is about to. 

No responsible school system (or state testing system) should use computers to assess human writing. Computers, including AI programs, can't do it well for a variety of reasons, but let's leave it at "They do not read in any meaningful sense of the word." They can judge is the string of words is a probable one. They can check for some grammar and usage errors (but they will get much of that wrong). They can determine if the student has wandered too far from the sort of boring mid sludge that AI dumps every second onto the internet. And they can raise the philosophical question, "Why should students make a good faith attempt to write something that no human is going to make a good faith attempt to read?"

Yes, a ton of marketing copy is being written (probably by AI) about how this will streamline teacher work and make it quicker and more efficient and even more fair (based on the imaginary notion that computers are impartial and objective). The folks peddling these lies are salivating at the dreams of speed and efficiency and especially all the teachers that can be fired and replaced with servers that don't demand raises and don't join unions and don't get all uppity with their bosses. 

But all the wishing in the world will not bring us effective computer assessment of student writing. It will just bring us closer to the magical moment when AI teachers generate an AI assignment which student AI then generate to be fed into AI assessment programs. The AI curriculum is thereby completed in roughly eight and a half minutes, and no actual humans even have to get out of bed. What that gets us other than wealthy, self-satisfied tech overlords, is not clear. 

Bottom Line

All of the above is doubly true if you are in classroom where writing is used as an assessment of content knowledge. 

This is all going to seem like quibbling to people who having an artifact to exchange for grade tokens is the whole point of writing. But if we want to foster writing as a real meaningful means of expression and communication, AI doesn't have much to offer the process. Call me an old fart, but I still haven't seen much of a use case for AI in the classroom when it comes to any sort of writing. 

What AI mostly promises is the classroom equivalent of having someone come to the weight room and do the exercises for you. Yeah, it's certainly easier than doing it yourself, but you can't be surprised that you aren't any stronger when your substitute is done.