Lewis Black on AI in Education

Just in case you missed this bit from the Daily Show. As always with Black, language my mother would not appreciate. 

ICYMI: Call Your Senator Edition (6/29)

The Board of Directors here at the Curmudgucation Institute is excited because tonight summer cross country sessions start up, and they would like very much to start running endlessly through rugged terrain again. Cross Country was their first (sort of) organized sport, and it was a hit. 

Meanwhile, however, the Senate GOP rolled their new version of the Giant Bloodsucking Bill Friday after midnight and apparently plan to vote on it tomorrow, because when you're going to pass a bill that screws over everyone (including future national debt-bearing generations) except some rich guys, you don't want to do more in the light of day than you can avoid. 

Contact your senator today. I know it's unlikely to stem this wretched tide (hell, my GOP senator doesn't even live in my state), but if they are going to do this, they need to feel the heat. Put it on your to-do list for today.

Thanks, Supreme Court! It's now my right to prevent my kid from learning about Trump. 

I'm finishing up a piece about the Mahmoud court decision for the Bucks County Beacon, but this piece from Rex Huppke at USA Today nails it pretty well.

School choice, religious school tax carveouts run afoul of Senate’s Byrd rule

Federal vouchers are now out of the Giant Bloodsucking Bill. This piece from Juan Perez, Jr., explains why and how that happened (spoiler alert: not because Congress decided to make better choices).

Updated: Senate Parliamentarian Rejects School Vouchers in Big Beautiful Bill as Violation of Byrd Rule

Jan Resseger can take you through the federal voucher uproar in more detail here.

The Education Reform Zombie Loses (Again)

The school reform wing of the Democratic party has learned absolutely nothing over the years, and Jennifer Berkshire is tracking their latest attempt at a comeback.

Against Optimization

John Warner examines some of the strange assumptions our tech overlords make about an excellent life.

Schools Need to Prepare for Those Masked ICE Agents

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider addresses one of the great challenges of our day-- federal agent attacks on schools.

NC made vouchers open to any family, then many private schools raised tuition

Liz Schlemmer at WUNC reports on the completely unsurprising news that North Carolina schools taking taxpayer-funded vouchers are raising tuition.

Public Comment Opened on Bishop's Education Funding Ambush

Even in Alaska, there are legislators who would like to gut public education. Matthew Beck at Blue Alaskan looks at the latest play to gut funding.

Privatization Parallels for National Parks and Public Schools

Nancy Bailey on how school privatization is much like the attempts to undercut our national park system.

Bugs, Brains, and Book Pirates\

Benjamin Riley with not one, but three stories from the AI skepticism beat. A naturalist group stands up to AI, that anti-AI study you keep reading about is bunk, and a court rules on stealing books for training.

Florida’s “School Choice” Boom? Most Families Still Choose Public Schools

No state has worked harder to kneecap public education than Florida. And yet, as Sue Kingery Woltanski reports, that's still the leading choice of Florida families. 

Voucher Judge Recognizes Reality

Policy expert Stephen Dyer has been all over the recent court victory over Ohio's EdChoice voucher program. He has several excellent posts on the subject, but this one is a fine place to start. Also, this one about voucher lies. 

Why Does Every Commercial for A.I. Think You’re a Moron?

This New York Times piece from Ismail Muhammad is pretty great. "Ads for consumer A.I. are struggling to imagine how the product could improve your day — unless you’re a barely functioning idiot."

ChatGPT Has Already Polluted the Internet So Badly That It's Hobbling Future AI Development

At Futurism, Frank Landymore considers the prospects of an endless AI slop loop

The Black Box Myth: What The Industry Pretends Not To Know About AI

Eryk Salvaggio at Tech Policy Press gets a little wonky about considering what is behind the curtain, and what is just the curtain itself.

This week at Forbes.com I wrapped up the Ohio voucher decision. 

There is a thing that happens with musicians when you've performed the same stuff a million times-- you can just add bits and pieces and stuff while preserving the main thread of the performance. And if you are comfortable with each other, it's extra cool. Louis Prima and Keeley Smith and Sam Butera's band were the epitome of this; in live performance you everything from the record, and so much more. 

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Mattel Promises AI Toys

Today in our latest episode of Things Nobody Asked For, we've got the announcement that Mattel has teamed up with the folks at OpenAI to bring you toys that absolutely nobody has asked for.

It's a "strategic collaboration," say the folks at Mattel corporate. The announcement comes with lots of corporate argle bargle bullshit:

Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at OpenAI, said: "We're pleased to work with Mattel as it moves to introduce thoughtful AI-powered experiences and products into its iconic brands, while also providing its employees the benefits of ChatGPT. With OpenAI, Mattel has access to an advanced set of AI capabilities alongside new tools to enable productivity, creativity, and company-wide transformation at scale." 

Josh Silverman, Chief Franchise Officer at Mattel, said: “Each of our products and experiences is designed to inspire fans, entertain audiences, and enrich lives through play. AI has the power to expand on that mission and broaden the reach of our brands in new and exciting ways. Our work with OpenAI will enable us to leverage new technologies to solidify our leadership in innovation and reimagine new forms of play.”

You'll note that the poor meat widgets who work for Mattel are going to have to deal with AI and the "new tools to enable productivity, creativity, and company-wide transformation at scale." 

As for play, well, who knows. Mattel's big sellers include Uno. If you don't have card-playing children in your home, you may be unaware that Uno now comes in roughly 647 different versions, including some that have new varieties of cards ("Draw 125, Esther!") and some that involve devices to augment game play, like a card cannon that fires cards at your face in an attempt to get you to drop out of the game before your face is sliced to ribbons. So maybe the AI will design new cards, or we'll have a new tower that requires you to eat a certain number of rocks based on whatever credit score it makes up for you.

Mattel is also the Hot Wheels company, so I suppose we could have chatting toy cars that trash talk each other. Maybe they could more efficiently make the "bbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrooom" motor noises quickly and efficiently, leaving children more free time to devote to other stuff. The AI could also design new cars; I'm holding out for the Datamobile that collects as much family surveillance data as possible and then drives itself to a Mattel station where it can download all that surveillance info to... well, whoever wants to pay for it.

But I think the real possibilities are with Mattel's big seller-- Barbie! Imagine a Barbie who can actually chat with little girls and have real simulated conversations so that the little girls don't have to have actual human friends. 

The possibilities of this going horribly wrong are as limitless as a teen's relationship questions. Which of course are being asked of chatbots, because they trained on the internet and the internet is nothing if not loaded with sexual material. So yes, chatbots are sexting with teens. Just one of the many reasons that some auth0orities suggest that kids under 18 should not be messing with AI "companions" at all. 

Maybe Mattel isn't going to do anything so rash. Maybe Barbie will just have a more 21st century means of spitting out one of several pre-recorded messages ("Math is fun!") Please, God, because an actual chatbot-powered Barbie would be deeply monstrous.

Scared yet? Just remember-- everything a bot "hears" and responds to it can also store, analyze and hand off to whoever is interested. Don't think if it as giving every kid a "smart" toy-- think of it as giving every kid a monitoring device to carry and be surveilled by every minute of the day. And yes, a whole bunch of young humans are already mostly there thanks to smartphones, but this would expand the market. Maybe you are smart enough to avoid giving your six year old a smartphone, but gosh, a doll or a car that can talk with them, like a Teddy Ruxpin with less creep and more vocabulary-- wouldn't that be sweet.

It's not clear to me how much AI capability can be chipped into a child's toy (do we disguise it by giving Barbie an ankle bracelet?) especially if the toymakers don't figure out how to get Barbie or the Datamobile logged into the nearest wi-fi. Best case scenario is that this mostly results in shittier working conditions for people at Mattel and toys that disappoint children by being faux AI. Worst case is a bunch of AI and child horror stories, plus a monstrous expansion of surveillances state (buy Big Brother Barbie today!). 

But I have a hard time imagining any universe in which we look back on this "team" and think, "Gosh, I'm really glad that happened."

PA: Cyber Charters as District Killers

The Wyoming Area School District is wedged in between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. It's not a particularly affluent district-- 80% white and 100% free and reduced lunch. And they are in financial trouble. The district has raised taxes three years in a row, and they will run a deficit this year., per reports from the Citizens' Voice and the Times Leader.

The source of their woes? Well, around almost $3 million in cyber charter costs sure aren't helping.

The proposed solution? At their last meeting, the board's vice-president Peter Butera suggested it's time to look at a merger with a neighboring district.

Decreasing property values spurred by a 2011 flood and rising health care costs are part of the issue, but the district's business manager blamed that last tax hike on cyber charter tuition costs. They now represent about 6% of the district's budget. 

That last tax hike was hugely unpopular, with 100 taxpayers showing up to oppose a proposal that barely survived by a 5-4 vote. 

The district is among the vast number of Pennsylvania districts that has come out in favor of funding reform in the state. In Pennsylvania we still fund cyber charters by means laid out for bricks and mortar charters over twenty years ago. It's nonsensical, inconsistent, and highly profitable, which is probably why Pennsylvania is the cyber capital of the country.

Now, the legislature has dealt with many almost-annual attempts to fix the system so that taxpayers won't get hosed. Right now a bill has passed the House and is waiting for Senate action., As I asked in a Forbes piece, "Will Pennsylvania Finally Reform Its Cyber Charter School System?"

The answer is probably, "No, they won't." 

Here's the thing. Watch some hearings oi talk to legislators-- you'll see impassioned arguments from those who favor reform, and you'll see cyber supporters repeat the same mantra. One part of the mantra is along the lines of "Neener neener, public schools do the same thing" (they don't). The other part is that any kinds of reform will kill the cybers-- just kill them dead, despite the fact that somehow every other state with cybers has a stricter system and yet cybers survive. And what you won't see at the hearing is an actual representative of a cyber charter, because they have legislators all lined up. 

So maybe the Wyoming district gets absorbed by another district because taxpayers aren't willing to shoulder the extra expense of supporting a cyber-charter leach attached to the district. And maybe the taxpayers of the district will be really upset if they lose their independent district, and they'll bitch and moan and complain, like many taxpayers across the state (including plenty in my own county).

But here's the dynamic in PA. The taxpayers will bitch and moan about the effects of letting cyber charters bleed the local district dry. But what the voters in these very Republican districts won't do is make their elected representatives suffer any consequences for their cyber charter support. Wyoming is red territory (65% for Trump in 2024). 

District leaders, both administrators and boards across the state, are trying to ramp up pressure for a rational system for cyber funding, but as always, it is limited in effectiveness. Maybe it's the severe gerrymandering in the state, or maybe it's that GOP voters are more worried about a trans kid playing sports in their district than they are about keeping the district open.

We'll see if Wyoming is a fluke or a canary in the educational coal mine. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Harrisburg to come to their rescue. 

ICYMI: Pride Edition (6/22)

This weekend my little under-50K county hosted its second annual Pride in the Park event, and it was a lovely day for it. Plenty of friends, many fun booths, some good food, live music--everything necessary for a fun park festival. A really nice way to get the summer under way.

The Institute's mobile office (aka my aging laptop) self-obliterated about a week ago, so purchasing and setting up the replacement has been sucking up time here. You really forget just how many apps and passwords and bits and pieces you have loaded into a machine until you have to replace them all. Meanwhile, I am really trying to keep my resolve to prioritize writing the book over posting and other ancillary activities, but sometimes the world makes it really hard. 

 A reminder that if you are reading on the original mother ship, there's a whole list of links to excellent writing about education. Now here's the list for the week.

Broad network of anti-student-inclusion groups impacts public education

The Southern Poverty Law Center takes a look at the groups and tactics working against diversity and inclusion in education. Not encouraging, but informative.

Can AI identify safety threats in schools? One district wants to try.

Karina Elwood at the Washington Post reports on one more leap forward in the super-creepy surveillance state. Omnipresent cameras plus only-kind-of-reliable AI. What could possibly go wrong?

Abstinence, patriotism and monogamy all required curriculum under new Ohio bill

Ohio's legislature is working hard to become one of the worst in the nation, what with mandating their own social ideology for students. Report from Katie Milard at NBC4.

What’s better than DEI?

One of the big brains at the U of Arkansas's department of dismantling public ed has some thoughts about DEI. Nancy Flanagan explains just how full of it he is. 

Bizarre WAPO Opinion Piece by Hanushek and Raymond

A reality-impaired op-ed from two old-school reformsters sends Thomas Ultican on a trip down memory lane, with pity stops to look at some of the bunkum that has appeared along the way. When folks use Michelle Rhee as an example of awesomeness, you know you're in Bizarro World.

AI Is Not the Inevitable Answer to What Ails Us: We've Seen Artificial Solutions Before

John Robinson reminds that we've seen this movie before, and the latest miracle cure is not inevitable.

It's Compassion That Gets Stuff Done

Teacher Tom explains that reason and logic aren't necessarily the tools that students need all the time.

Oak Ridge Schools Bows to Book Banning Legislation by the Tennessee Taliban

James Horn provides yet one more example of a gutless school district making absurd choices for books to ban from its libraries-- like medical texts and books about important artists like Donatello and Edward Hopper.

War Pigs

Audrey Watters offers a ton of great links this week, plus solid arguments against AI in education. You really should subscribe.

Trump’s ICE Raids Traumatize Children, Frighten Parents, Reduce School Attendance, and Undermine School Climate

Jan Resseger points out that maybe it's not great for schools to be repeatedly raided by the ICE thuggery patrol.

Code Red: How AI Is Set to Supercharge Racism, Rewrite History, and Hijack Learning

Apparently I'm reading a lot about AI these days. Here's a take from Julian Vasquez-Heilig to remind us that AI is not remotely objective.

Don't Buy the AI Hype

Have You Heard, the podcast from Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, hits its 200th episode with a stacked line up of Audrey Watters, Ben Riley, and John Warner discussing AI hype (there's a transcript here, too, if you're one of those). 

Plato was an AI skeptic

Benhamin Riley addresses the argument that opposition to AI is just like when Plato opposed writing, and we know he was wrong about that, so...

AI in the Classroom with Brett Vogelsinger

Of all the AI non-skeptics out there, Brett Vogelsinger seems to have the most thoughtful views on how to incorporate it in the classroom. This interview with Marcus Luther gives you a sense of what he's talking about (again, transcript for those who'd rather read than listen).

School Choice without equity is cover for inequality in our public schools

Jesse Turner talks to Robert Cotto (Trinity College) about the equity issues of school choice. 

I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment)

Not directly related to education, but I found this video fascinating. The guy at Smarter Every Day sets out to make a grill scrubber in America. The process shows some of the barriers, but it particularly illustrates the loss of tool and die workers and what that means to US industry. 

Is there a more extraordinary friendship than that between Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett in the end stretch of his career. Those final concerts, with 95 year old Bennett in the grip of Alzheimers, becoming himself again through the music, and Gaga supporting him through it-- I mean, damn. Somietimes we humans can be beautiful, and it's important to remember that. Here's a Cole Porter song from their last album together.

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Should AI Make Students Care?

Over the years I have disagreed with pretty much everything that Thomas Arnett and the Christensen Institute have had to say about education (you can use the search function for the main blog to see), but Arnett's recent piece has some points worth thinking about. 

Arnett caught my attention with the headline-- "AI can personalize learning. It can’t make students care." He starts with David Yeager's book 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. 

Yeager challenges the prevailing view that adolescents’ seemingly irrational choices—like taking risks, ignoring consequences, or prioritizing peer approval over academics—result from underdeveloped brains. Instead, he offers a more generous—and frankly more illuminating—framing: adolescents are evolutionarily wired to seek status and respect.

As someone who worked with teenagers for 39 years, the second half of Yeager's thesis feels true. I'd argue that both ideas can be true at once-- teens want status and respect and their underdeveloped brains lead them to seek those things in dopey ways. But Arnett uses the status and respect framing to lead us down an interesting path.

[T]he key to unlocking students’ motivation, especially in adolescence, is helping them see that they have value—that they are valued by the people they care about and that they are meaningful contributors to the groups where they seek belonging. That realization has implications not just for how we understand student engagement, but for how we design schools…and why AI alone can’t get us where we need to go.

This leads to a couple of other points worth looking at.

"Motivation is social, not just internal." In other words, grit and growth mindset and positive self-image all matter, but teens are particularly motivated by how they are seen by others, particularly peers. Likewise, Arnett argues that it's a myth that self-directed learning is just for a handful of smarty-pants auto-didacts. He uses Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as examples, which is interesting as they are both excellent examples of really dumb smart people, so maybe autodacting isn't all it's cracked up to be. But his point is that most students are autodidacts-- just about things like anime and Taylor Swift. And boy does that resonate (I have a couple of self-taught Pokemon scholars right here). I'll note that all these examples point to auto-didactation that results in a fairly narrow band of learning, but let's let that go for now.

Arnett follows this path to an observation about why schools are often motivational dead zones:

The problem is that school content often lacks any social payoff. It doesn’t help them feel valued or earn respect in the social contexts they care about. And so, understandably, they disengage.

And this

Schools typically offer only a few narrow paths to earn status and respect: academics, athletics, and sometimes leadership roles like Associated Student Body (ASB) or student council. If you happen to be good at one of those, great—you’re in the game. But if you’re not? You’re mainly on the sidelines.

Students want to be seen, and based on my years in the classroom, I would underline that a zillion times. 

The AI crew's fantasy is that students sitting in front a screen will be motivated because A) the adaptive technology will hit them with exactly the right material for the student and B) shiny! Arnett explains that any dreams of AI-aided motivation are doomed to failure. 

AI won't fix this

Arnett's explanation is not exactly where I expected we were headed. Human respect is scarce, he argues, because humans only have so much time and attention to parcel out, and so it's valuable. AI has infinite attention resources, can be programed to be always there and always supportive. Arnett argues that makes its feedback worthless in terms of status and respect. 

I'm not sure we have to think that hard about it. Teens want status and respect, especially from their peers. The bot running their screen is neither a peer, not even an actual human. It cannot confer status or respect on the student, nor is it part of the larger social network of peers. 

Arnett argues that this might explain the 5% problem-- the software that works for a few students, in part because 95% of students do not use the software as recommended. Because why would they? The novelty wears off quickly, and truly, entertainment apps don't do much better. I don't know what the industry figures say, but my anecdotal observation was that a new app went from "Have you seen this cool thing!" to "That old thing? I haven't used it in a while" in less than a month, tops. 

What keeps students coming back, I believe, isn’t just better software. It’s the social context around the learning. If students saw working hard in these programs as something that earned them status and respect—something that made them matter in the eyes of their peers, teachers, and parents—I think we’d see far more students using the software at levels that accelerate their achievement. Yet I suspect many teachers are disinclined to make software usage a major mechanism for conferring status and respect in their classrooms because encouraging more screen time doesn’t feel like real teaching.

From there, Arnett is back to the kind of baloney that I've criticized for years. He argues that increasing student motivation is super-important, and, okay, I expect the sun rise in the East tomorrow. But he points to MacKenzie Price's Alpha School, the Texas-based scam that promises two hour learning, and Khan Academy as examples of super-duper motivation, using their own company's highly inflated results as proof. And he compares software to "high dosage tutoring," which isn't really a thing.

Arnett has always been an edtech booster, and he's working hard here to get the end of a fairly logical path to somehow provide hope for the AI edtech market. 

But I think much of what he says here is valuable and valid-- that AI faces a major hurdle in classrooms because it offers no social relationship component, little opportunity to provide students with status or respect. Will folks come up with ways to use AI tools that have those dimensions? No doubt. But the heart of Arnett's argument is an explanation of one more reason that sitting a student in front of an AI-run screen is not a viable future for education. 

AI, Facing the Dark, and Human Sparknotes

The New York Times unleashed a feature section about AI, and it is just a big fat festival of awful.

There's a conversation between Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, hosts of the podcast Hard Fork, named, perhaps, after the object I want to drive into my own brain while reading this conversation. 

These days I read this kind of stuff for the same reason that I leave many far right voices unblocked on my social media-- because if you're going to face reality, you have to face the dark parts where people believe awful stuff. It's ugly, but it won't go away just because you ignore it.

So here's Roose saying that AI has replaced Google to answer questions like "What setting do I put this toaster oven on to make a turkey melt?" Or his friend who now gets through the morning commute by putting ChatGPT on voice mode and asking it to teach them about modern art or whatever. And "another person I know just started using ChatGPT as her therapist after her regular human therapist doubled her rates." 

The piece is loaded with quotable foolishness, like this:

But I confess that I am not as worried about hallucinations as a lot of people — and, in fact, I think they are basically a skill issue that can be overcome by spending more time with the models. Especially if you use A.I. for work, I think part of your job is developing an intuition about where these tools are useful and not treating them as infallible. If you’re the first lawyer who cites a nonexistent case because of ChatGPT, that’s on ChatGPT. If you’re the 100th, that’s on you.

Intuition? I suppose if you lack actual knowledge, then intuition will have to do. But this will be a recurring theme-- AI's lack of expertise in a field can be compensated for by a human with expertise in that field. How does that shake out down the road when people don't have expertise because they have leaned on AI their whole lives? Hush, you crazy Luddite.

Newton says he uses LLM for fact checking spelling, grammatical, and factual errors, and of course the first two aren't really AI jobs, but these days we just slap an AI label on everything a computer can do. Factual errors? Yikes. Roose says he likes AI for tasks where there's no right or wrong error. They both like it for brainstorming. Also for searching documents, because AI is easier than Control F? Mistakes? Well, you know, humans aren't perfect, either.  

Roose notes that skeptics say that the bots are just predicting the next word in a sentence, that they aren't capable of creative thinking or reasoning, just a fancy autocomplete, and that all that will just turn this into a flash in the pan, and Roose has neatly welded together two separate arguments because A) bots aren't actually thinking, just running word token prediction models and B) AI will wash out soon-- those are not related. In fact, I think I'm not unusual in thinking that A is true, and B is to be hoped for, but unlikely. Anyway, Roose asks Newton to respond, and the response is basically, "Well, a lot of people are making a lot of money." 

Roose and Newton are not complete dopey fanboys, and at one point Roose says something I sort of agree with:

I think there are real harms these systems are capable of and much bigger harms they will be capable of in the future. But I think addressing those harms requires having a clear view of the technology and what it can and can’t do. Sometimes when I hear people arguing about how A.I. systems are stupid and useless, it’s almost as if you had an antinuclear movement that didn’t admit fission was real — like, looking at a mushroom cloud over Los Alamos, and saying, “They’re just raising money, this is all hype.” Instead of, “Oh, my God, this thing could blow up the world.”

"Clear view of the technology" and "hype" are doing a lot of work here, and Roose and Casey fall into the mistake of straw manning AI skeptics by conflating skeptics and deniers (a mistake Newton has made before and to which Ben Riley responded well). 

The other widely quoted chunk of the discussion is this one from Roose:

The mental model I sometimes have of these chatbots is as a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time. But also, the bar of 100 percent reliability is not the right one to aim for here: The base rate that we should be comparing with is not complete factuality but the comparable smart human given the same task.

But the bots don't have Ph.D.s, and I don't want to work with someone juiced up on ketamine, and if bots aren't any better than humans, why am I using them? 

The article is entitled "Everyone Is Using AI for Everything," which at least captures the concerning state of affairs. 

Take the re-emergence of disgraced author and professional asshat James Frey (the guy who was shamed by Oprah for his fake memoir) who just put an AI-created book on the Book of the Month list. If that seems like a problem, Frey explained why he was happy to let AI do most of his work back in 2023.

I have asked the AI to mimic my writing style so you, the reader, will not be able to tell what was written by me and what was generated by the AI. I am also not going to tell you or make any indication of what was written by me and what was generated by the AI. It was I, the writer, who decided what words were put on to the pages of this book, so despite the contributions of the AI, I still consider every word of this book to be mine. And I don’t care if you don’t.

And there's the other article in the NYT section, a piece about using NotebookLM, a bot designed to help writers.  "AI Is Poised To Rewrite Hostory," says editorial director Steve Wasik. He talks about how author Steven Johnson used the bot (which he had helped build) to sift through the research and generate story ideas. Muses Wasik:

Like most people who work with words for a living, I’ve watched the rise of large-language models with a combination of fascination and horror, and it makes my skin crawl to imagine one of them writing on my behalf. But there is, I confess, something seductive about the idea of letting A.I. read for me — considering how cruelly the internet-era explosion of digitized text now mocks nonfiction writers with access to more voluminous sources on any given subject than we can possibly process. This is true not just of present-day subjects but past ones as well: Any history buff knows that a few hours of searching online, amid the tens of millions of books digitized by Google, the endless trove of academic papers available on JSTOR, the newspaper databases that let you keyword-search hundreds of publications on any given day in history, can cough up months’ or even years’ worth of reading material. It’s impossible to read it all, but once you know it exists, it feels irresponsible not to read it.

What if you could entrust most of that reading to someone else … or something else?

On one level, I get it. I do a ton of reading. Did a ton of reading when I was teaching so that I could better represent the material. I do a ton of reading for the writing I do, and yes-- sometimes you tug on a string and a mountain falls in your lap and you despair of reading enough of it to get a picture of what's going on.

But, you know, working out is sweaty and painful. What if I could entrust most of that exercising to someone or something else? Keeping in touch with the any farflung members of my family is really hard and time consuming. What if I could entrust most that work to someone or something else? Preparing and eating food is time consuming and not always fun. What if I could entrustmost of that work to someone or something else? 

Humaning is hard. Maybe I could just get some tech to human for me.

Any day now

I know. It's not a simple issue. I wear glasses and, in fact, have plastic lenses inserted in my human eyeballs. I drive a car. I enjoy a variety of technological aids that help me do my humaning both personally and professionally. But there's a line somewhere, and some of these folks have uncritically sailed past it, cheerfully pursuing a future in which they can hand off so many tasks to the AI that they can... what? Settle down to a happy life as a compact, warm ball of flash in a comfortable plasticene nest, lacking both cares and autonomy?

At what point do folks say, "No, you can't have that. That business belongs to me, a human."

But back to the specifics at hand.

I don't know how one separates the various parts of writing into categories like Okay If AI Cuts This Corner For Me and This Part Really Matters So That I Should Do It Myself (or, like Frey, simply decide that none of it is important except the part where you get to sign checks). Brainstorming, topic generation, research-- these are often targeted for techification, but why? I am often asked how I am able to write so much and so quickly, and part of my answer has always been "low standards," but it is also that I read so much that I have a ton of stuff constantly being churned over in my brain and my writing is just the result of a compulsion to process all that stuff into a written form.

That points to a major issue that Roose and Newton and Wasik all miss. Using the bot as a research assistant or first reader or brainstormer can only hope to be useful to a human who is already an expert. Steven Johnson can only use what his AI research bot hands him because he is expert enough to understand it. The notion that a human can use intuition to check the AI's work is a dodge-- what the human needs is actual expertise.

That may be fine for the moment, but what happens when first hand experience and expertise are replaced by "I read an AI summary of some of that stuff"?

At least one of Wasik's subjects wrestles with the hypocrisy problem of an educator who tells students to avoid the plagiarism machine and then employs the same bots to help with scholarship. But I wish more were wrestling with the basic questions of what parts of writing and reading shouldn't be handed over to someone or something else. 

In some ways, this is an old argument. I talked to my students about Cliff notes and, later, Sparknotes, and I always made two points. First, what you imagine as an objective judgment is not, and by using their work instead of your own brain, you are substituting their judgment for your own. Not only substituting the final project, but skipping your own mental muscle-building exercise. Second, you are cheating yourself of the experience of reading the work. It's like kissing your partner at the end of an excellent date-- if it's worth doing, it's worth doing yourself. 

No doubt there are some experiences that aren't necessarily worth having (e.g. spending ten years scanning data about certain kinds of tumors). But I'd appreciate a little more thoughtfulness before we sign everyone up to use sparknotes for humaning. 

What Do We Do Now?

When things get wonky in the country, teachers invariably find themselves driven back to the question, "What are we supposed to do in times like these?"  How do we teach students when the atmosphere is filled with so many problematic ideas and impulses (including, it has to be noted, in their homes). 

We struggle with the question as citizens. How do we navigate contentious and toxic times? But teaching adds a whole other layer. If the work is to help students figure out to grow into their best selves and understand how to be fully human in the world--well, how does a context like the present affect the work?

When there is violence and hatred, when the discourse is soaked in bullshit and falsehood and stuff that is being spun so hard that it generates more heat than light, how does a teacher run a classroom? Stick to just the facts (whatever they are this week)? Seek to liberate students-- and does that mean teach them about tough political ideas or teach them how to read and write on their own? Media literacy? 21st century skills? Critical thinking? 

I think there's a guiding principle beyond and underneath the questions of content and methods, and as I watch one event after another (Los Angeles, Padilla, No Kings Day, Minnesota Murders) get blown up into something even worse than the badness they already embody. I watch the Dems flail about trying to come up with a strategy for "winning" while the GOP gaslights endlessly, insisting that we aren't seeing what we are plainly seeing. We are soaked in media that is designed to alarm rather than inform. The outrage machine (which is wired up to the money machine) is goosed repeatedly.

What are we missing? Certainly honesty and certainly love and concern for fellow human beings. Certainly we've seen too much of the idea that some people really are worth more than others. And the hyperbolic bullshit is massive, epic, and numbing. But underneath it all, we're suffering from a destruction of trust. Much of it has been deliberate--one of the tools of authoritarianism is to break people's trust in experts, journalism, scientists--anything and everything except whatever Dear Leader says.  

Distrust kills relationships. It short-circuits communication because if you can't trust what a person is saying, then you haven't much to go on except your own ideas about what the person is up to, Distrust leads to overreactions, which aid the cycle. You say it's raining? Since I distrust you, I'll go ahead and say it's not raining at all. Then when I go outside and get wet, I look like a fool and the folks on your team have all the more reason to trust you and not me. 

So all the navel gazing and study and vivisecting of society is great and all, but what do we do. What do we actually do?

Trust more? I suppose we could try, but putting your trust in someone who is deliberately untrustworthy is foolish. My classroom rule was always to trust students until they gave me a solid reason I couldn't. Or maybe two or three. But deciding to put our trust in people who have proven untrustworthy dozens of times-- that's just asking for trouble.

So maybe earn trust. But you can't control whether or not someone chooses to trust you, and in fact as a public school teacher, there are a lot of folks delivering the message that you can't be trusted. 

So maybe the north star has to be this-- act in a way that is deserving of trust. Honesty, integrity, respect, and a dedication to getting the material right-- those all come under the heading of principles that deserve trust in a teacher (or any other human being). They build trust in the organization, and as Edward Deming pointed out at great length, an organization powered by trust is a healthy one and an organization without trust is in trouble.

It is easy to slide into the idea that ends can justify means, and therefor if those means involve sacrificing principles and thereby making yourself less trustworthy, that's okay. But we very rarely accomplish our ends, so we end up being defined by our means. 

The thing about being trustworthy is that it allows for a broad range of beliefs and practices. But if you find that pursue particular beliefs or practices you have to using lying and manipulation, if you have to drop integrity and respect, then maybe consider that these are ends not worth pursuing. 

But more than ever, students need teachers they can trust (whether they choose to or not), and of course many (if not most) students already have a trustworthy teacher in the classroom. But as teachers are buffeted about by various claims and demands and suggestions about how to respond to the country's current messiness, and if holding onto the idea of trust as an anchor helps--well, it may not seem like much, but in the long run, it is everything. 

ICYMI: Kingless Edition (6/15)

I hope your day yesterday was a good one, regardless of what you did with it. What times we live in. 

I'll remind you this week that everyone can amplify. If you read it and think it's important, share it. Also, subscribe to the blog, newsletter, or whatever. Bigger numbers mean greater visibility. And it doesn't hurt to throw in a little money for those who depend on their writing to help put bread on the table. Clicking and liking and sharing are not quite up there with getting actively involved, but they can provide the information and motivation that get folks out there. 

So here's what we've got this week.

New data confirms NC school voucher expansion disproportionately benefits wealthy private school families

Gosh, what a surprise. North Carolina school vouchers are not a rescue for the poor, but a hand out for the wealthy. Kris Nordstrom explains the findings.

12News I-Team finds Arizona's $1 billion voucher experiment hurting high-performing public districts and charter schools

A news team discovers that besides subsidizing wealthy private school patrons, Arizona's voucher program helped students "escape" top-rated public schools.

Trump and Republicans Want Taxpayers to Fund Their Pet Project: Private Schools

Jeff Bryant reports for Our Schools on the HOP goal of taxpayer-funded private schools.

What a Difference Teachers Could Make With $45 Million!

Nancy Bailey points out that $45 million could buy many things more desirable than a military parade for Dear Leader.

Teach Your Children Well

Nancy Flanagan reflects on the No Kings protests and our responsibilities to each other.

Bird of Pray

Audrey Watters hits it again.

We have bent education – its budgets, its practices – to meet the demands of an industry, one that has neatly profited from the neoliberal push to diminish and now utterly dismantle public funding.

Some Thoughts about Science Education Reforms in the Past Century

Larry Cuban looks into the conflicts involved in teaching science. What are we trying to teach, and how are we trying to teach it?

Trump’s Policies Would Undermine Public School Equity and Launch Costly Federal School Vouchers

Jan Resseger looks at the threats to public education in the Trump budget ideas. 

The Myths of GPA in College Admissions Explained

Akil Bello, testing and college admissions guru explains that your GPA isn't what you-- or the college you're applying to-- think it is.

The Lunch Ladies are Not Smiling

Thank goodness that lawyers like Andru Volinsky exist to plough through the legal esoterica of legislative attempts to avoid funding schools for Those Peoples' Children. New Hampshire school tax law takes an odd turn with the latest court decision.

Brief FEFP Budget Update

And speaking of funding esoterica, Sue Kingery Woltanski tries to keep tabs on the funding shenanigans in Florida, the laboratory where the nation's worst education policies are nursed to life.

Fuel of delusions

Banjamin Riley with a heck of a personal story about AI and delusions and what we really need to know.

At Forbes.com, I looked at the latest attempt to fix Pennsylvania's cyber charter funding, and a little-noted Supreme Court case that could have major effects for schools across the country. 

Here's a little David Byrne. Many is the time I have pulled this song out to give me a little boost. 

You can sign up for my newsletter that will keep you up to date with whatever I'm putting out into the world. And it's free, now and forever.

Another Bad AI Classroom Guide

We have to keep looking at these damned things because they share so many characteristics that we need to recognize so we can recognize them when we see them again and react properly, i.e. by throwing moldy cabbage at them. I read this one so you don't have to.

And this one will turn up lots of places, because it's from the Southern Regional Education Board. 

SREB was formed in 1948 by governors and legislators; it now involves 16 states and is based in Atlanta. Although it involves legislators from each of the states, some appointed by the governor, it is a non-partisan, nonprofit organization. In 2019 they handled about $18 million in revenue. In 2021, they received at $410K grant from the Gates Foundation. Back in 2022, SREB was a cheerful sock puppet for folks who really wanted to torpedo tenure and teacher pay in North Carolina. 

But hey-- they're all about "helping states advance student achievement." 

SREB's "Guidance for the Use of AI in the K-12 Classroom" has big fat red flag right off the top-- it lists no authors. In this golden age of bullshit and slop, anything that doesn't have an actual human name attached is immediately suspect.

But we can deduce who was more or less behind this-- the SREB Commission on Artificial Education in Education. Sixteen states are represented by sixty policymakers, so we can't know whose hands actually touched this thing, but a few names jump out.

The chair is South Caroline Governor Henry McMaster, and his co-chair is Brad D. Smith, president of Marshall University in West Virginia and former Intuit CEO. As of 2023, he passed Jim Justice as richest guy in WV. And he serves on lots of boards, like Amazon and JPMorgan Chase. Some states (like Oklahoma) sent mostly legislators, while some sent college or high school computer instructors. There are also some additional members including Youngjun Choi (UPS Robotics AI Lab), Kim Majerus (VP US Public Sector Education for Amazon Wen Services) and some other corporate folks.

The guide is brief (18 pages). It's basic pitch is, "AI is going to be part of the working world these students enter, so we need schools to train these future meat widgets so we don't have to." The introductory page (which is certainly bland, vague, and voiceless enough to be a word string generated by AI) offers seven paragraphs that show us where we're headed. I'll paraphrase.

#1: Internet and smartphones means students don't have to know facts. They can just skip to the deep thinking part. But they need critical thinking skills to sort out online sources. How are they supposed to deep and critically think when they don't have a foundation of content knowledge? The guide hasn't thought about that. AI "adds another layer" by doing all the work for them so now they have to be good prompt designers. Which again, would be hard if you didn't know anything and had never thought about the subject.

#2: Jobs will need AI. AI must be seen as a tool. It will do routine tasks, and students will get to engage in "rich and intellectually demanding" assignments. Collaborative creativity! 

#3: It's inevitable. It is a challenge to navigate. Shareholders need guidance to know how to "incorporate AI tools while addressing potential ethical, pedagogical, and practical concerns." I'd say "potential" is holding the weight of a world on its shoulders. "Let's talk about the potential ethical concerns of sticking cocaine in Grandma's morning coffee." Potential.

#4: This document serves as a resource. "It highlights how AI can enhance personalized learning, improve data-driven decision-making, and free up teachers’ time for more meaningful student interactions." Because it's going to go ahead and assume that AI can, in fact, do any of that. Also, "it addresses the potential risks, such as data privacy issues, algorithmic biases, and the importance of maintaining the human element in teaching." See what they did there? The good stuff is a given certainty, but the bad stuff is just a "potential" down side.

#5: There's a "skills and attributes" list in the Appendix.

#6: This is mostly for teachers and admins, but lawmakers could totally use it to write laws, and tech companies could develop tech, and researchers could use it, too! Multitalented document here.

#7: This guide is to make sure that "thoughtful and responsible" AI use makes classrooms hunky and dory.

And with that, we launch into The Four Pillars of AI Use in the Classroom, followed with uses anbd cautions.

Pillar #1
Use AI-infused tools to develop more cognitively demanding tasks that increase student engagement with creative problem-solving and innovative thinking.

"To best prepare students for an ever-evolving workforce..." 

"However, tasks that students will face in their careers will require them..."

That's the pitch. Students will need to be able think "critically and creatively." So they'll need really challenging and "cognitively demanding" assignment. Now more than ever, students need to be creators rather than mere purveyors of knowledge. "Now more than ever, students need to be creators rather than mere purveyors of knowledge."

Okay-- so what does AI have to do with this?

AI draws on a broad spectrum of knowledge and has the power to analyze a wide range of resources not typically available in classrooms.

This is some fine tuned bullshit here, counting on the reader to imagine that they heard something that nobody actually said. AI "draws on" a bunch of "knowledge" in the sense that it sucks up a bunch of strings of words that, to a human, communicate knowledge. But AI doesn't "know" or "understand" any of it. Does it "analyze" the material? Well, in the sense that it breaks the words into tokens and performs complex maths on them, there is a sort of analysis. But AI boosters really, really want you to anthropomorphize AI, to think about it as human-like un nature and not alien and kind of stupid.

"While AI should not be the final step in the creative process, it can effectively serve in the early stages." Really? What is it about the early stages that makes them AI-OK? I get it--up to a point. I've told students that they can lift an idea from somewhere else as long as they make it their own. But is the choice of what to lift any less personal or creative than what one does with it? Sure, Shakespeare borrowed the ideas behind many of his plays, but that decision about what to borrow was part of his process. I'd just like to hear from any of the many people who think AI in beginning stages is okay why exactly they believe that the early stages are somehow less personal or creative or critical thinky than the other stages. What kind of weird value judgment is being made about the various stages of creation?

Use AI to "streamline" lesson planning. Teach critical thinking skills by, and I'm only sort of paraphrasing here, training students to spot the places where AI just gets stuff wrong. 

Use AI to create "interactive simulations." No, don't. Get that AI simulation of an historical figure right out of your classroom. It's creepy, and like much AI, it projects a certainty in its made-up results that it does not deserve. 

Use AI to create a counter-perspective. Or just use other humans.

Cautions? Everyone has to learn to be a good prompt engineer. In other words, humans must adjust themselves to the tool. Let the AI train you. 

Recognize AI bias, or at least recognize it exists. Students must learn to rewrite AI slop so that it sounds like the student and not the AI, although how students develop a voice when they aren't doing all the writing is rather a huge challenge as well. 

Also, when lesson planning, don't forget that AI doesn't know about your state standards. And if you are afraid that AI will replace actual student thinking, make sure your students have thought about stuff before they use the AI. Because the assumption under everything in this guide is that the AI must be used, all the time.

Pillar #2
Use AI to streamline teacher administrative and planning work.

The guide leads with an excuse-- "teachers' jobs have become increasingly more complex." Have they? Compared to when? The guide lists the usual features of teaching-- same ones that were there when I entered the classroom in 1979. I call bullshit. 

But use AI as your "planning partner." I am sad that teachers are out there doing this. It's not a great idea, but for a generation that entered the profession thinking that teacher autonomy was one of those old-timey things, as relevant as those penny-farthings that grampa goes on about. And these suggestions for use. Yikes.

Lesson planning! Brainstorming partner! And, without a trace of irony, a suggestion that you can get more personalized lessons from an impersonal non-living piece of software.

Let it improve and enhance a current assignment. Meh. Maybe, though I don't think it would save you a second of time (unless you didn't check whether AI was making shit up again). 

But "Help with Providing Feedback on and Grading Student Work?" Absolutely not. Never, ever. It cannot assess writing quality, it cannot do plagiarism detection, it cannot reduce grading bias (just replace it). If you think it even "reads" the work, check out this post. Beyond the various ways in which AI is not up to the task, it comes down to this-- why would your students write a work that no other human being was going to read?

Under "others," the guide offers things like drafting parent letters and writing letters of recommendation, and again, for the love of God, do not do this! Use it for translating materials for ESL students? I'm betting translation software would be more reliable. Inventory of supplies? Sure, I'm sure it wouldn't take more than twice as much time as just doing it by eyeball and paper. 

Oh, and maybe someday AI will be able to monitor student behavior and engagement. Yeah, that's not creepy (and improbable) at all.

Cautions include a reminder of AI bias, data privacy concerns, and overreliance on AI tools and decisions, and I'm thinking "cautions" is underselling the issues here. 

Pillar #3
Use AI to support personalized learning.

The guide starts by pointing out that personalized learning is important because students learn differently. Just in case you hadn't heard. That is followed by the same old pitch about dynamically adaptive instruction based on data collected from prior performance, only with "AI" thrown in. Real time! Engagement! Adaptive!

AI can provide special adaptations for students with special needs. Like text-to-speech (is that AI now). Also, intelligent tutoring systems that " can mimic human tutors by offering personalized hints, encouragement and feedback based on each student’s unique needs." So, an imitation of what humans can do better. 

Automated feedback. Predictive analytics to spot when a student is in trouble. AI can pick student teams for you (nope). More of the same.

Cautions? There's a pattern developing. Data privacy and security. AI bias. Overreliance on tech. Too much screen time. Digital divide. Why those last two didn't turn up in the other pillars I don't know. 

Pillar #4
Develop students as ethical and proficient AI users.

I have a question-- is it possible to find ethical ways to use unethical tools? Is there an ethical way to rob a bank? What does ethical totalitarianism look like?

Because AI, particularly Large Language Models, is based on massive theft of other peoples' work. And that's before we get to the massive power and water resources being sucked up by AI. 

But we'll notice another point here-- the problems of ethical AI are all the responsibility of the student users. "Teaching students to use AI ethically is crucial for shaping a future where technology serves humanity’s best interests." You might think that an ethical future for AI might also involve the companies producing it and the lawmakers legislating rules around it, but no-- this is all on students (and remember-- students were not the only audience the guide listed) and by extension, their teachers. 

Uses? Well, the guide is back on the beginning stages of writing

AI can also help organize thoughts and ideas into a coherent outline. AI can recommend logical sequences and suggest sections or headings to include by analyzing the key points a student wants to cover. AI can also offer templates, making it easier for students to create well-structured and focused outlines.

These are all things the writer should be doing. Why the guide thinks using AI to skip the "planning stages" is ethical, but using it in any other stages is not, is a mystery to me.

Students also need to develop "critical media literacy" because the AI is going to crank out well-polished turds, and it's the student's job to spot them. "Our product helps dress you, but sometimes it will punch you in the face. We are not going to fix it. It is your job to learn how to duck."

Cross-disciplinary learning-- use the AI in every class, for different stuff! Also, form a student-led AI ethics committee to help address concerns about students substituting AI for their own thinking. 

Concerns? Bias, again. Data security-- which is, incidentally, also the teacher's responsibility. AI research might have ethical implications. Students also might be tempted to cheat- the solution is for teachers to emphasize integrity. You know, just in case the subject of cheating and integrity has never ever come up in your classroom before. Deepfakes and hallucinations damage the trustworthiness of information, and that's why we are calling for safeguards, restrictions, and solutions from the industry. Ha! Just kidding. Teachers should emphasize that these are bad, and students should watch out for them.

Appendix

A couple of charts showing aptitudes and knowledge needed by teachers and admins. I'm not going to go through all of this. A typical example would be the "knowledge" item-- "Understand AI's potential and what it is and is not" and the is and is not part is absolutely important, and the guide absolutely avoids actually addressing what AI is and is not. That is a basic feature of this guide--it's not just that it doesn't give useful answers, but it fails to ask useful questions. 

It wraps up with the Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrix. Whoopee. It's all just one more example of bad guidance for teachers, but good marketing for the techbros. 

ICYMI: Birthday Board Edition (6/8)

This week the Board of Directors here at the Institute celebrated their birthday. This involved some extended book store time and a day at Waldameer Park in Erie, an old amusement park that the Chief Marital Officer and I had not visited in many years. The board was both delighted and exhausted, and I got enough steps in that I believe I can just sit for the upcoming week. That's how that works, right?

Have some reading.

Diabolus Ex Machina

Amanda Guinzburg tries some new games with AI and ends up providing yet another demonstration of how terrible chatbots are at doing the most simple reading assignments.

Texas Schools to Get a Bit More Cash and a Lot More Christian Nationalism

Just how bad for public education was this last session of the Texas legislature? Brant Bingamon breaks it down for the Austin Chronicle.

How Educators Can Escape Toxic Productivity

Peter DeWitt and Michale Nelson at Ed Week address one of the oldest problems in education--the expectation that a good, productive teacher will just beat the living crap out of herself to do the job.

Big Changes and Controversy in Oakland

Why do I often include highly specific and local pieces, like this one from Thomas Ultican? Because what is happening elsewhere often illuminates what is about to happen in your neck of the woods. Including twisty board vs. superintendent politics.

Kids: 1, ICE: 0

ICE grabbed a high school kid on his way to volleyball practice, and a whole community rose up to protest. Jennifer Berkshire with an encouraging story from her neck of the woods.

Book-banning, Book-burning, Book reading—and Truth

It is disheartening when a community you love has important institutions commandeered by the anti-book crowd. Nancy Flanagan tells her own story of a small Michigan community.

Hard Times

Audrey Watters finds a connection between Charles Dickens and the modern day "just teach facts" crowd and bad tech, plus a load of excellent links. 

Do "pronatalists" like Musk care about children and babies?

Okay, not a hard question to answer. But Steve Nuzum digs deep into the natalism crowd's issues, and it's not pretty.

Chall’s Missing STAGES OF READING DEVELOPMENT in the Science of Reading

Nancy Bailey points out some critical info that the Science of Reading crowd misses.

Robo-teachers?

Larry Cuban is not excited about the idea of robots providing human care.

They Want Missouri Education Policies to go Nationwide

Just how bad has it gotten in Missouri? Jess Piper, noted activist, paints the broad picture.

Ohio Senate Budget Plan Released on Tuesday Bodes Ill for Ohio Public School Funding

Jan Resseger breaks down the details in Ohio's newest attempt to become the Florida of the Midwest.

Rain, Meet Piss: How Ohio Keeps Screwing Over Public School Kids

Yeah, Stephen Dyer has some thoughts about that budget as well. 

Nary a Deviation From The Playbook

TC Weber continues to chronicle Penny Schwinn's rise from Tennessee embarrassment to national embarrassment. He actually followed her confirmation hearing, and has some notes.

Exposed: University of Michigan Hired Undercover Spies to Target Students

Jullian Vasquez Heilig reacts to reporting that his alma mater has hired goons to spy on students.

From Policy to Prosecution: Florida Raises The Stakes for School Boards

In Florida, right wingers continue to use manufactured outrage over naughty books to attack public schools, and they've decided to throw in threats of criminal prosecution. Sue Kingery Woltanski reports.

A little Gilbert and Sullivan today, with Kevin Kline working really hard!

NM: Stride Caught Misbehaving Yet Again

A New Mexico school district has terminated its contract with Stride Inc, the 800 pound gorilla of the cyber school world, after a load of legal and academic violations. It's not a new issue with the company, which generally seems to consider educating students a mission secondary to the search for more profit.

Who are these guys?

Stride used to be K-12, a for-profit company aimed at providing on-line and blended learning. It was founded in 2000 by Ron Packard, former banker and Mckinsey consultant, and quickly became the leading national company for cyber schooling.

One of its first big investors was Michal Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” Milken was sentenced to ten years, served two, and was barred from ever securities investment. In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Elison, who both kicked in money for K12.

Also investing in K12, very quietly, was the financial giant Blackrock, founded and run by Larry Fink. Larry graduated from the same high school as Milken. Larry's brother Steve is a member of the Stride board, and at one point ran division of Knowledge Universe. Larry Fink is noted for his privacy about family, and a search for the two brothers’ names turns up only one article— a Forbes piece from 2000 which notes that Steve Fink, in 1984, moved next door to Micheal Milken and went on to become “one of Milken’s most trusted confidants,” a “guy he’s relied on to fix business trouble.”

Have they been in trouble before?

Oh lordy. Here's a partial list.

In 2011, the New York Times detailed how K12's schools were failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers wrote tell-alls about their experiences. In 2012. Florida caught them using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cyber schools that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country, "despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012."

In 2013 K12 settled a class action lawsuit in Virginia for $6.75 million after stockholders accused the company of misleading them about “the company’s business practices and academic performance.” In 2014, Middlebury College faculty voted to end a partnership with K12 saying the company’s business practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation and educational mission of the college.”

Packard was himself sued for misleading investors with overly positive public statements, and then selling 43% of his own K12 stock ahead of a bad news-fueled stock dip. Shortly thereafter, in 2014, he stepped down from leading K12 to start a new enterprise.

In 2016 K12 got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, resulting in a $165 million settlement with then Attorney General Kamala Harris. K12 was repeatedly dropped in some states and cities for poor performance.

In 2020, they landed a big contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent); subsequently Wired magazine wrote a story about their "epic series of tech errors." K12 successfully defended itself from a lawsuit in Virginia based on charges they had greatly overstated their technological capabilities by arguing that such claims were simply advertising “puffery.”

In November of 2021, K12 announced that it would rebrand itself as Stride.

The New York Times had quoted Packard as calling lobbying a “core competency” of the company, and the company has spread plenty of money around doing just that. And despite all its troubles, Stride was still beloved on Wall Street for its ability to make money.

In 2023, Stride found itself wrapped up in a lawsuit with one of its own division over broken promises and attempts to lie their way out of commitment. 

In 2024, analysts were warning investors away from Stride, saying that, among other things, Stride was lying to investors about how many schools were operating and ghost students being used to puss up enrollment numbers. Later that year, Senator and noted MAGA doofus Markwayne Mullin was in trouble for shenanigans with his Stride stock. 

So, yes, Stride has never been tightly bound by rules.

Who's actually running the outfit these days?

Since 2021, the CEO has been the former CFO, James Rhyu. He is a corporate bean counter, not an educator. The Fuzzy Panda report in 2024, discussing Rhyu's "colorful leadership style;" FP says that "the phrase asshole came up frequently." Former execs also told FP about incidents of rage and bullying. "management by fear, bullying control freak." I've read plenty of pages of the man's depositions, and "slippery weasel" also comes to mind. This example captures his style pretty well:

Q: Mr. Rhyu, are you a man of your word?
Rhyu: I’m not sure I understand that question.
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, sir?
Rhyu: Under what circumstances?
Q: Do you do what you say you are going to do, Mr. Rhyu?
Rhyu: That’s such a broad question. It’s hard for me to answer.

 Is it hard to answer? Because I feel as if it's really easy to answer. It's one thing to offer the "correct" answer and not mean it, but it's a whole other level to pretend that you can't imagine what the correct answer might be.

So what happened in New Mexico?

Gallup-McKinley County Schools includes 4,957 square miles of territory, including some reservations. There are 12,518 students enrolled. 48% of the children in the district live below the poverty line. 

So the district hired Stride to provide an online program, and that was not going well. According to the district's press release, the data was looking ugly:

* Graduation rates in GMCS's Stride-managed online program plunged from 55.79% in 2022 to just 27.67% in 2024.
* Student turnover reached an alarming 30%.
* New Mexico state math proficiency scores for Stride students dropped dramatically, falling to just 5.6%.
* Ghost enrollments and a lack of individualized instruction further compromised student learning.

At the special May 16 board meeting to terminate the contract, the board was feeling pretty cranky.

The district said that the company is failing to meet requirements outlined in their contract. “This is something we’ve literally been working on since the beginning of the year with stride, and we just finally had a belly full of it and we’re ready to make a change,” said Chris Mortensen, President of Gallup-McKinley Schools Board of Education.

The board voted unanimously not just to end the contract, but to seek damages. Stride filed a motion for a restraining order to keep the board from firing them. The court said no. 

Mortenson has had plenty to say about the situation. From the district's press release:

GMCS School Board President Chris Mortensen stated, "Our students deserve educational providers that prioritize their academic success, not corporate profit margins. Putting profits above kids was damaging to our students, and we refuse to be complicit in that failure any longer."

Stride CEO James Rhyu has admitted to failing to meet New Mexico's legal requirements for teacher-student ratios, an issue that GMCS suspects was not isolated. "We have reason to believe that Stride has raised student-teacher ratios not just in New Mexico but nationwide," said Mortensen. "If true, this could have inflated Stride's annual profit margins by hundreds of millions of dollars. That would mean corporate revenues and stock prices benefited at the expense of students and in some cases, in defiance of the law."

"Gallup-McKinley County Schools students were used to prop up Stride's bottom line," said Mortensen. "This district, like many others, trusted Stride to deliver education. Instead, we got negligence cloaked in corporate branding."

The district is looking for another online school provider, and I wish them luck with that. Parents in the wide-ranging district liked the online option, and want something to replace Stride. But finding a cyber-school company that will provide the oversight, transparency and accountability that GMCS wants (not to mention the non-profiteering) is likely to be a challenge. Because if the high-capacity 800 pound gorilla of cyber-school has to cheat to make a buck in your district, who else is going to do any better? 

Of course, that's the Stride business model, so maybe there's hope. Maybe. Stride, for its part, can be expected to just keep grinding away, unchastened and searching for the next district that hasn't done enough homework that they will fall for Stride's sales pitch.