Narcissus and AI

In Adam Becker's must read book about our AI overlords More Everything Forever, one chapter opens with futurist Ray Kurzweil's plan to resurrect his father. 50 boxes of his father's possessions, his letters and music. AI will send some nanobots to extract DNA from the grave. Nanobots will extract memories from Kurzweil himself. AI will put it all together and a program will reproduce the father's behavior, even in situations that he never encountered in his life.

"Ultimately it will be so realistic it will be like talking to my father," Kurzweil claims. "You can certainly argue that, philosophically, that is not your father, but I can actually make a strong case that it would be more like my father than my father would be, were he to live."

So much yikes. But my first thought was that, maybe--maybe-- it will seem to you like your father was there, but it certainly won't seem like that to him.

AI "resurrection" is alarmingly commonplace, to the point that it only attracts attention when it crosses a new threshold of eww, as when Jim Acosta interviewed an AI construct of Joaquin Oliver, a student killed almost eight years ago in the Parkland school shootings. The interview happened with parental permission, I guess partly because it helps promote their gun control advocacy, but also, as the father said, so he and his wife could hear their son's voice again. Which is different from giving him the chance to speak again.

AI avatars of real people are disturbing. Schoolai caused a stir by unleashing an AI avatar of Anne Frank for classrooms as just one of their offerings of zombie historical figures for the classroom. In fact, there are now more outfits offering AI avatars for student use than I can even delve into here. Some are especially terrible; Wisdom of the Ages lets you chat (text only) with some big names of history, and within the first sentence, the Einstein avatar was talking about "he" rather than "I." Their "Adolph Hitler" also lapsed quickly into third person. Humy offers a Hello History app that promises all sorts of "engaging historical simulations" and an "in-depth and personal interaction with the historical figure of your choice." And don't forget the company that offers you the chance to take a writing class taught by a dead author.

There are numerous problems here, not the least of which is simple accuracy. One historian noted that the Anne Frank avatar was reluctant to say anything mean about Nazis. Imagine if PragerU trained its own set of historical avatars, giving students the chance to see and hear a realistic simulacrum of a colonial enslaved person explaining why they actually kind of enjoyed being enslaved. 

Historical simulations are nothing new, from movies to that person who dresses up as Lincoln and visits your third grade class. But those simulations come with a built-in distance. It's just a movie, and nobody thinks that guy with the fake beard is really Lincoln come to life. But AI avatars promise to be easily mistaken for the real thing.

The idea of using AI to resurrect dead loved ones really brings home the inadequacy of this whole exercise. 

The premise of Kurzweil's resurrected father and the Olivers' resurrected son is that they know enough about their lost family members that they can faithfully and fully reconstruct them. I have my doubts. With a famous historical figure, maybe the many scholars who have pored objectively over that person's life have unearthed enough information that we could reconstruct a fully detailed and nuanced portrait of the person. Maybe, but I doubt it.

But I double doubt that for ordinary people. I've known my parents and my children for a long time. Am I arrogant enough to imagine that I know them so well, so completely, that I could perfectly reconstruct them? 

No, what I know about them is my own impressions, my own feelings, my own memories of my own perceptions of them. But that's as much about me as it is about them. 

There is, of course, a whole industry set up to let you "resurrect" your loved one. It's creepy. And it does not give the departed another chance to talk to you-- it only gives you another chance to talk to them. Except it doesn't really do that because they are not there. The AI does not bring them back; it takes your own memories and impressions and pushes them into a screen.

Chatting with a bot is playing ping pong with yourself. The software extrudes a probable string of words, but you do all the work of injecting meaning into them. 

When you face an AI avatar for a famous person, you are likely facing a mask that has been slipped over someone's software expression of their own particular agenda wrapped around an incomplete and shallow imitation of a real human waiting for you to respond by giving that silicon golem meaning. But when you use the technology to create an avatar built out of your own incomplete memories, you are simply talking to yourself. You have not given that person another life; you have only given yourself another way to imagine they are still here.

None of this is the same as talking with another living human who is actively trying to convey meaning and intent to you. In real life, projecting your own ideas into another's words gets in the way of actual communication, of actually reaching to understand. In the world of chatbots, your projection is necessary for the "conversation" to continue; you have to take care of both sides.

Narcissus gives us "narcissism," currently on the list of Top 5 Favorite Amateur Diagnoses. But the story of Narcissus was of a person who sat by a pool of water, gazing at his own reflection and imagining it was another person, until he eventually melted away. We would do better to try to hear and see and understand the live human beings who are still around us than to sit down by the silicon pool, gazing into a reflection that we imagine is another actual human. 

Why Pluralism In The Classroom Matters

There's a theory out there that allowing families to sort themselves into separate schools based on shared values and ideologies would be a good thing. It's a bad idea, a dangerous idea, and we are exposed to the evidence all too often.

It's not the polarization of American politics-- it's the surge of a particular idea of how to deal with it.

While we like to talk about the Founding Fathers as if they were some sort of fully unified body, they disagreed on many issues (including whether or not we should be a single country or not), and much of the shape of our Constitution and early history comes from those opponents figuring out how to launch a country that included all of them.

Abraham Lincoln famously included many of his political enemies in his own administration, forcing them to work together.

These days, a prevailing idea in politics is that the way to deal with people who oppose you is to silence them by whatever means at hand. Don't like the election results? Storm the capital and force the government to erase the vote. Don't like the idea of LGBTQ persons? Simply erase all references to them. Gerrymander districts so that your opponents' votes don't matter. When people say things you don't like, bully and threaten them into shutting up. 

Right now we have a President who fully believes in making his opponents shut up and disappear, who has regularly called for violence against people who bug him. We're certainly not the only culture to suffer from this mindset, that it's okay to try to brutalize Those People into silence, and Trump's list of strongmen he admires is a quick guide to other leaders who subscribe to the same notion.

Combine the ideas that 1) you deal with people who disagree with you by silencing them and 2) God wants you to have a gun; the result is predictable political violence.

So the idea the world and this country would be better places if we gave young humans fewer chances to practice co-existing with other human with whom they disagree.

I recognize there are a host of intertwined issues here, including outrage machinery, amoral leaders, feckless politicos, a media environment that is fifty years behind the curve, and an overabundance of fear and hatred. I also recognize it gets complicated to talk about because not all sides carry equal weight of responsibility. And lord knows that we need to work on that whole gun thing.

But damn-- it couldn't hurt to operate schools and classrooms on the premise that there are people around that you dislike and disagree with but you still have to find ways to coexist with them because vanishing or silencing them is not a real option. It can be a tough sell, because many students are coming out of homes where the message of silencing those with whom you disagree is sold hard. And what is the anti-DEI movement except a push to silence the voices of people who disagree. 

But if schools don't do it, where else can young humans hope to pick up the message that while you may believe that certain people are really really wrong and you may not like them or approve of them, you still need to coexist with them somehow. 

How The Youngs Can Get Ahead

There is a particular odious brand of commentary, a sort of cousin to the standard Kids These Days laments, which explains that the Youngs are unhappy and poor because they just make bad choices. These are simultaneously stupid and awful, and yet, we just had another one drop.

The genre got a lot of notice in 2017, when 35-year-old Australian millionaire Tim Gurner went on Australia's 60 Minutes to scold other millennials for their whining about having trouble buying a house.

"When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn't buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each," Gurner told the Australian news show 60 Minutes.

"We are coming into a new reality where … a lot of people won’t own a house in their lifetime. That is just the reality," Gurner said. “We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high.”

When asked if he thought that young people may never own a home, he said, "Absolutely, when you’re spending $40 a day on smashed avocados and coffees and not working. Of course."

Gunner started his first business at age 19-- with a $34,000 loan from his grandfather.

The genre also includes all those articles about how to live frugally written by trust fund babies. 

Joel Kotkin writes about urban affairs for right-tilted outfits like The Daily Beast and The Spectator as well as being connected to the Civitas Institute and the Manhattan Institute. He's also a 73-year-old boomer. In 2012, he wrote an almost-reasonable piece for Newsweek about millennials calling them Generation Screwed and explaining the many ways in which boomers had messed things up for them.

But last month he dropped a sort of sequel for The Telegraph entitled "The young would be less screwed if they started making better choices," and Golly Bob Howdy but it is a piece of work. It's worth a look because as long as the youngs are getting this kind of advice (what in the pontificating biz we call "bad" or "silly") we can expect their generational stress level to stay high. Kotkin starts out well enough:

In the United States, the basics have been evident for some time – low rates of marriage and property ownership, and diminishing demand even for educated workers. Overall, notes the Financial Times, under-40s are less conscientious, more neurotic and less agreeable than previous generations. The political ramifications can already be seen, from the swelling numbers of socialist hipsters in New York’s “commie belt” to the angry, alienated incels living in parental basements, mostly in suburban and exurban areas.

We should sympathize with this crowd, he advises, but hey-- every generation deals with Stuff (and he offers a list that includes Depression and World Wars alongside the Civil Rights movement and sexual revolution).  So-- "if millennials and their successors, the so-called Gen-Zs, want to get ahead, maybe it's time to stop complaining and start changing." I get that up to a point-- if the world is covered in crap, you can complain or you can get a pair of hip boots. You could also work to make the world less craptastic. Maybe you would be a bit testy about getting advice about how to deal with the crap from boomers who didn't have to deal with any such crap at all.

But what is his advice? Well...

First, move. If only he had just stopped there--

The first step is to move. People have been gravitating away from expensive, elite-controlled areas throughout history; the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all products of this kind of aspirational movement. Indeed, America’s great national myth, Manifest Destiny, was shaped by people who left the East Coast for the opportunities west of the Appalachians.

The United States was settled by people trying to get away from expensive elites? "Expensive" is doing a lot of work here for a period in human history in which the gap between rich and poor was way narrower than it is today. But Australia??!! Australia was a penal colony that criminals were sentenced to colonize. I don't think they were getting away from expensive elites.  

"Go where the jobs are" is not a hot new idea, but Kotkin seems to be suggesting that the youngs make a cultural move and get away from "hipster socialists backing Zohran Mamdani" and "various left-wingers on the Pacific Coast." Are small towns a good alternative to pricey cities? It certainly is my preference, but as a long time small town resident, I can tell you that life is great here-- if you can find work that pays well enough to support you. 

Next, Kotkin plugs his own version of the success sequence.

As numerous studies have found, both homeownership and marriage are key elements for success in life, leading to higher incomes, less child poverty and probably higher fertility rates.

"Are key elements" is doing a lot of work here, as we are reminded for the gazillionth time that correlation does not equal causation. The notion that homeownership leads to higher incomes is just bizarre. If there is one thing buying a house does not do, it does not lead to increased income. 

Finally, Kotkin suggests making better career choices. He suggests that "follow your passion" is bad advice. Maybe skip the college route and go to a trade school. 

So, millennials, move to a small town, become a plumber, buy a house, get married, and you will become wealthy, your life will be great, and we won't have to listen to you bitch any more.

If all of this does not make clear Kotkin's dismissal of harsh realities and his general contempt for millennials, check the final paragraph, where he explains what he thinks millennials are doing instead of bootstrapping and right-thinking their way out of despair:

Taking these steps may not be as appealing as living by the beach, indulging in singular fantasies, accessing pornography, or working in a protected job in government or a non-profit. But if attitudes don’t adjust to reality, the next generation will be forced to depend on the generosity of our increasingly parlous state for their sustenance. Then they really will be permanently screwed.

Yup. It's not that we've priced a huge chunk of the population out of the housing market, or that jobs don't pay well enough to build a life (just ask all those folks saying we shouldn't raise the minimum wage because it's not supposed to support a person), or that our systems are increasingly hostile to young parents trying to raise a family. It's because Kids These Days are a bunch of porn-watching slackers who won't face reality. I agree that someone here seems detached from reality, but I'm not sure it's the porn-watching slackers.

What I do know is that K-12 education needs to be talking about a variety of ways for students to make their ways in the world, because "work hard, get good grades, and things will fall into place" doesn't ring quite as true as it used to. We can argue about how true it really is, but to newer generations it doesn't feel true.

And perhaps more disheartening is the underlying message of the attitude typified by this piece. We've gone past the good old American "If you work hard, you'll be able to get ahead in this world" and onto something darker, something along the lines of "You are living on the narrow edge of disaster and failure and one wrong move will tip you over the edge, and managing that balancing act is all on you and you alone." It fits in a culture that is currently being reorganized around the idea that freedom means never having to care about or concern yourself with any other human beings, but it's rather scary and alienating for some of the youngs.  

Privatizing Taxpayer Dollars

Charter and vouchers schools are excellent at turning public dollars into private wealth. But they can also be excellent at converting public dollars into private assets.

Let's consider this example from, of course, Florida.

Renaissance Charter School Inc is a big-time charter school chain that has mastered the art of handing money off to companies that operate or support their schools, most notably Charter Schools USA, a for-profit charter management organization that works a lot in Florida and which apparently owns Renaissance Charters. 

The charter school in Leon County opened in 2012 as Governor's Charter, a for-profit charter. Then-governor Rick Scott was there to help cut the ribbon, as well as Democratic Congressional Candidate Al Lawson. But the school was already butting heads with the Leon County Public Schools. According to WFSU, the public school system had to take the charter to court to get some basic information like how many students had enrolled. The K-6 school had 560 students enrolled in that first year in the shiny new building, tucked in between a housing development and a big pond. 

Within a few years, the charter had expanded to K-8, but enrollment did not keep up, dropping to under 250. It had a grade of C from Niche, and a steady line of Cs and Ds from the state. By 2023, it was still getting complaints from the Leon County School District, which charged that the school was out of compliance with its contract on at least 9 points, including just basic sloppy stuff like no attendance taken for many students and failure to submit documents for Title I Grant reimbursements-- a bit of a problem for a Title I school.

That complaint was filed in April 2023. In July, the school announced that it would get a new name and new leadership. The Tallahassee Democrat and reporter Alaijah Brown have been all over this story for years reported that the new principal of Renaissance Academy would be Precilla Vaughn. Vaughn has a BS in secondary education from Florida State, and a Masters in educational leadership from American College of Education, an on-line for profit college based in Indianapolis. Vaughn had ten years of experience, all within the Charter Schools USA network. Reported Brown:

“We are thrilled to have Ms. Vaughn as our new leader at Renaissance Academy,” Charter Schools USA’s Florida State Superintendent Eddie Ruiz said this week in a news release. “She ushers in a new era in our school with a rebirth and renewal that gives our students new opportunities for growth."

Last spring the Renaissance Charter in Leon County announced that it would be closing because they had leased the property to Tallahassee Preparatory Academy. Too bad, 242 students, but the charter business is a business (specifically, it is very often a real estate business) not some philanthropy with a mission to take care of children, so see ya later. Teachers were told they could apply for a job in the new school or see if CSUSA had a place for them somewhere in its network.

The switch from charter to private is not an unusual one. A private school can grab taxpayer money with far less oversight and accountability than even the minimal amount that charters must deal with. Tallahassee Prep will not have to negotiate a contract with the Leon School District. 

Leon Schools superintendent Rocky Hanna expressed frustration over things going from bad to worse, thanks to universal vouchers.

"This is what I feared the most," Hanna told the Tallahassee Democrat. "These mom-and-pop private schools opening up their doors with no accountability whatsoever and cherry-picking students."

Sure enough. TPA is pitching itself as a STEM school, but it won't have resources for students with disabilities or for whom English is a second language-- those kinds of services aren't "built into the business plan." Also, students who don't score high enough on the state end of year exams in math and English Language Arts may not be able to get in or stay in. 

But the Leon County School District has not given up yet.

In July, the district started looking at legal action against Renaissance Charter. If the "public charter school" was closing, then its taxpayer-funded property was supposed to revert to the district. CSUSA declined to even provide a list of its assets.

The lawsuit didn't happen (lots of expensive trouble, decided a board majority), but then another bomb dropped. TPA was supposed to open in August. And it just... didn't. The education service provider for the school, Discovery Science Schools, told the Democrat that it was "inadequate enrollment." 

The building is 63,000 square feet. When it was brand new in 2012, its sale price was listed as $11.3 million. That price would have been paid by the taxpayers, but as one board member noted. Brown reports:

"The property is not ours. It belongs to Charter Schools USA. Even after the former occupant’s school was closed, the property did not revert back to the Leon County School District," School Board member Darryl Jones chimed in on social media.

"We do not have any jurisdiction to collaborate on anything relative to that property. Millions of dollars of technology and furniture and equipment paid for with taxpayer dollars locked in that building. Sad state of affairs."

This is just one of many such examples of this grift being run since charters first appeared. It can be even worse; in some states, the charter school may buy up an old school building, which means that taxpayers foot the bill for building the school, and then taxpayers foot the bill for the charter buying the school from the district.

In Pennsylvania, cyber charters are seriously overpaid, which has allowed Commonwealth Charter Academy (the 800 pound gorilla of cyber charters in PA) to spend nearly $100 million just on real estate. Sometimes they buy (a huge former Macy's near Pittsburgh) and sometimes they build new property (about eight miles away from where I am sitting right now). It's all done with dollars that taxpayers gave them to educate students, but instead it is going to create a real estate empire. And though that empire was paid for with taxpayer dollars, the taxpayers don't own a bit of it. CCA could decide tomorrow that it would like to get out of the school business and instead go into the lease and rental business, and that would just be tough luck for taxpayers.

All of this is part of larger picture of charter grift and self-dealing (check out this recent article about how Florida's charter queen Erika Donalds has made herself a bundle).

It's a sweet deal to be able to get the taxpayers to buy you some property, particularly when they gave the money for a different purpose. Watch for it in your community. 

ICYMI: Little Things Edition (9/7)

This week I brought home a new keyboard, this time with keys that are lit up. It's delightful. The office desk lighting situation here at the Curmudgucation Institute has never been particularly awesome, and sometimes I have felt as if I were typing in the dark on faceless keys; this just makes life so much easier. I bet I'm even slightly more accurate now. So we all win.

Cross country season has started, and the board of directors had their first meet yesterday. They would happily join the Olympic tag team or anything else that allowed them to run full out for long periods of time. They had a respectable time for their first outing and had fun, too. It was almost worth waking up at 5:30 AM. 

I will also take this moment to exhort you to contact your elected representative, because lord knows there's a wide assortment of things that Congress could be doing to make itself more useful during the current regime. They need to hear about it, from the crazy-pants death cult running Health and Human Services to the attempt to slash the ed department into oblivion to the use of armed forces against our own citizens to--well, you know, it's a lot, and they need to be hearing about it all day every day. 

Now the week's list.

These federal programs help low-income students get to and through college. Trump wants to pull the funding

You might not even know what TRIO is, but for a very long time it has been helping many folks get a degree who might otherwise not have made it. But it helps a lot of people who aren't white, so Dear Leader says it has to go. Michael Vasquez reports at Hechinger.

New Goals for a New School Year

In the face of encouragement to work AI into his practice, Marcus Luther of The Broken Copier doubles down on doing what works for humans in a human classroom.

My Kid Hates AI And I'm Proud

Anya Kamenetz has a child who knows better, which is certainly encouraging for the rest of us.

I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.

Oh, look! At the Atlantic, a real live student explains why AI is bad news in education. 

How Chatbots and AI Are Already Transforming Kids' Classrooms

This piece at Vauhini Vara is not so encouraging, though it does contain further details about the Alpha school grift that is drawing so much glowing press elsewhere.

Governor Ayotte Wants to Keep Schools Substandard and Property Taxes High

Andru Volinsky calls out the governor of New Hampshire for her bad education policy ideas.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans fired thousands of Black teachers. Twenty years later, these groups are bringing them back

The Guardian joins the Katrina anniversary party with this piece from Melissa Hellmann about one the huge impacts of that disaster.

Selling New Orleans

Jennifer Berkshire looks at a great antidote to the balonified happy talk about New Orleans post-Katrina-- a new book from New Orleans parent and activist Ashana Bigard.

From Public Good to Personal Gain: How Florida’s ESAs Invite Abuse

Well, I'm not sure everyone considers it "abuse" as much as "a fair chance for the right people to line their pockets with taxpayer dollars." But Sue Kingery Woltanski goes into some detail on how Florida's vouchers are designed for abuse of taxpayer dollars. 

What I Still Believe about Public Education

Nancy Flanagan writes about threats to public education, and why she still thinks it is one of America's best ideas.

Acknowledging the existence of transgender students isn’t “goofy stuff”

Steve Nuzum disagrees with the governor of South Carolina on what qualifies as "goofy stuff" that needs to be removed from sex ed.

Trump Admin. Says Public Schools Can Stop Protecting Students’ Right to Learn the English Language

Jan Resseger looks at the Trump administration's steps to end ELL teaching for students. Make 'em speak 'murican or else!"

Uniform Policy

Jennifer Berkshire again, this time in The Baffler. She's always an excellent tracker of political currents, like the mysterious right wing turn against corporate influence in education.

NOLA’s Carver High School Legacy: “What We Stand to Lose” by Kristen Buras

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at important slice of New Orleans history (and offers a book recommendation)

We are the song death takes it own time singing

Ben Riley offers a moving meditation on death and life and humanity and AI.

Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppy

Not for the first time, we learn that the magic behind AI is actual human beings.

AI Is Failing at an Overwhelming Majority of Companies Using It, MIT Study Finds

A study finds that AI is wasting a lot of corporate money. 

At Forbes.com, I offer yet more evidence that Pennsylvania's cyber charters are taking in way more taxpayer money than is appropriate.

Can't believe I haven't used this clip yet, which should be viewed pretty much every day.

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McMahon's Invent The Wheel Tour

Linda McMahon, current Secretary of Education, has headed out on a fifty state tour to help invent the wheel, proclaim the value of oxygen, and promote plans to have the sun rise in the East.

Okay, the actual tour event is called "Returning Education to the States," because that's what Trump and McMahon have decided needs to be their brand right now. Here's the official website blurb:

President Trump has tasked U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to take the lead on one of his most momentous promises to families – returning education to the states and equipping all parents to choose an excellent education for their children. 

Secretary McMahon has embarked on a fifty-state tour to empower families and hear from students, teachers, and leaders on best practices in their own communities.

Thing is, the states were already in charge of education. McMahon underlined this by making one of her first stops in Oklahoma, a state that has amply demonstrated it will damn well create its own education policies regardless of what federal authorities or people with a lick of sense have to say. Education Dudebro-in-Chief has overseen a variety of policies including First Amendment-violating directives to teach the Bible, launching the nation's first Catholic charter school, and trying to strip teacher licenses for disagreeing with him. At no point does he seem to have felt the need to assert states' rights, because he apparently feels perfectly free to impose his own ideas on the state's education system. In fact, there's an irony here in that Walters has actually tried to align his state's educational system with federal priorities, from calling for schools to teach the Big Lie of 2020 to testing teachers for wokitude as part of a partnership with the right wingnut propaganda folks at Prager(not really a)U.

But here's the thing-- he could do things like turn the state's social studies standards into a right wing christianist nationalist baloney-fest because the control of such things already rested with the state, just as it always has.

There is no "returning" education to the states-- the feds are already forbidden to tell the states what and how to include in their educational programs. 

When it comes to K-12, the feds have two jobs. One is to distribute funding to help level the funding playing field for students who are not so wealthy or who have special needs. The other is to make sure that the civil rights of students are not violated, that there are no more Dorothy Counts stories, no more stories of students who are underserved because they come from the wrong family or neighborhood.

So in addition to making it clear that they don't really want to do either of those jobs (cut budgets to the bone and operate on the premise that the only group subject to discrimination is white Christian folks), the current administration is going to performatively shed itself of the job it never had-- directing education in the states.

Granted, it's not unheard of for the feds to use the levers they have to try to get around the laws forbidding them to direct state education policy. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were all about trying to get around the law and strongarm state education departments, and Betsy DeVos couldn't resist the levers of power. 

But a simple "we're going to follow the law" would cover that.

Instead we get this bizarre little tour, the spectacle of McMahon simultaneously declaring "I'm not going to tell you what to so" while also saying "Here are the things you're doing that I approve of."

So the tour has actually been McMahon visiting school choice-related sites, like celebrating with Parents for Education Freedom in North Carolina, charter and private schools in Florida, or shmoozing on Fox and Friends with Gov. Sarah Huckabee. She has touted literacy and career training which are fine things that a "send education back to the states" federal education department should have nothing at all to do with. Likewise, the federal government has no legitimate role in states school choice policies, but she's pushing the heck out of those as well. 

The tour page is also a bit muddled-- the tour supposedly kicked off in Louisiana on August 11, but the map counts a Nevada visit from April. 

That's fine. Bureaucratic baloney and wandering around the country to make mouth noises about your preferred policy are fine traditions of the office. For all her aspirations to be a radical new kind of secretary, McMahon is shaping up to be one more disconnected bureaucrat with an agenda that is at once undesirable and incoherent. One part Arne "Bossy Clueless Amateur" Duncan and one part Betsy "Who Cares About Public Schools" DeVos. "Don't let me tell you what to do, but let me tell you what you ought to do." 

In this country, states have the ultimate responsibility for their own education systems. They don't need the federal government's permission to shoulder that responsibility, particularly from someone who says that her job is to eliminate her job. This tour will supposedly extend to all fifty states, but it looks to me like this series of meetings could be an e-mail. 

Drones In Schools

School surveillance continues to be a growth industry, maybe because students don't have a lobby and some adults curl up every time someone says, "But it's for the safety of the children!" Nevertheless, it just keeps getting creepier.

Back in January of 2020, I predicted that one of the big stories of the coming year would be a growth in the student surveillance industry. I'd been following the story as it popped up, because it was everywhere. 

Florida (you know--the Freedom State) was implementing a huge student surveillance system. Colleges were using student phones for all manner of tracking. Public schools were experimenting with all sorts of creepy facial recognition and surveillance software. Audio surveillance was another great frontier. In 2019, California enacted the Cradle-to-Career Data Systems Act, intended to data mine the hell out of California's minor citizens. And that was on top of the old stuff like Pearson's crazy student surveillance to protect its tests (a story I can't fully relate because a piece about it was one of the few posts that Google ever took down on my blog).

That prediction was looking pretty good in January of 2020. Then March of 2020 kind of pushed it to the back burner, as far as coverage went. But the fact that we were all kind of distracted did not stop the march of ed tech's surveillance industry. 

Now we're getting a new trend in this kind of surveillance. Drones.

Drone security is growing in many sectors, with companies like Titan promising "24/7 aerial protection, lightning-fast response, and real-time visibility." Also, of course, it's cheaper than hiring live humans.

The website Dangerous Schools last year touted drones as a "transformative tool in bolstering school safety." They can provide "real-time aerial surveillance" and "monitor large areas efficiently." They can "swiftly assess emergency situations," because, as with some other surveillance tools, the promise is that AI will be able to judge the situation. And always, the advantage of being "cost-effective."

And, of course, the drones will be armed.

Campus Guardian Angel is a Texas-based firm offering "an elite, on-site safety response capability that teams with law enforcement, confronting any active shooter threat in seconds to save lives."

The start-up is a fine fit for Texas, where a 2023 law requires an armed person on every campus (the state's half-assed response to the Uvalde murders). But many Texas districts asked to opt out of the law because armed guards were too pricey. Voila! Just get a patrol drone for enhanced "situational awareness." In a Texas demo, CEO Justin Marston promised that once as teacher hit a panic button, the drones could find the shooter in 15 seconds and incapacitate them in 60. 

A set of six drones is a mere $15,000, plus a per-pupil monthly prescription.

And it's not just Texas. A few months ago, Newsweek ran a story about Florida school districts considering CGA. 

Campus Guardian Angel CEO Justin Marston told Newsweek that the drones were equipped with pepper rounds plus a glass breaker, allowing them to quickly navigate inside and outside classrooms.

"We feed live video to police, show exactly what's happening, where the suspect is, and even smash through windows with a glass punch to create distractions. This tactic, like during the SAS's famous hostage rescue [at the Iranian Embassy in London], can give officers a huge advantage," Marston said.

As with all surveillance products, this is being pitched in the context of the worst possible events, while the question that really needs to be asked is, "Once this is in place, what other uses will district administrators find for it?"  Pepper rounds to break up fights on the playground? Pepper rounds to break up what the AI thinks is about to be a fight in the hall? Assign a drone to hover over your most challenging problem students all day?

We've already got surveillance tools that are aimed at calculating students who might be considering suicide or acts of violence, so why not tie that kind of analysis to a surveillance tool that can hover over students all the time? 

Oh, and the Florida drones would be captained by people in Austin, Texas. I can't imagine how many ways that could go badly.

I get that high security for low costs has a seductive appeal, and reportedly Homeland Security is going to buy $100 million worth of drones. But there are just so many ways this could be abused or simply go wrong. Here's hoping that this little industry fades away sooner rather than later. 

The Big Standardized Test Is Still The Worst Thing In Education

For forty-some years, an array of forces have tried to shape public education in damaging ways, and I have bitched about pretty much all of them in this space. But if you gave me the power to wipe any one of these ugly insects off the windshield of public education, I would not need to think for a second. The worst--the very worst--of the forces employed to dismantle and disfigure public education is the Big Standardized Test.

The BS Test, an annual event inflicted by the state on every public school system, has undergone its own transformative journey even as it has been employed by an assortment of toxic movements. Let's collect data on students so that we track them cradle-to-career, the better to let employers order up the exact meat widgets they're shopping for. Let's come up with objective data that will let us pinpoint the worst schools so we can dismantle them. Let's collect data that will let us pinpoint the worst teachers so we can fire our way to excellence. Let's make every state use the same BS Test so that we can put some teeth behind a national standards movement. 

And it hasn't made a damned bit of difference which politicians were in charge. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden-- every one of them has kept the BS Test grinding away like a blind badger digging its way through the guts of the public education system. 

BS Testing has warped schooling itself. The tests create a hierarchy of content, with schools reducing the amount of arts, music, science, history, even recess because that content is Not On The Test. Not that favored content fares any better; in English class, full texts have been replaced with short excerpts, and meaningful slow, thoughtful discussion has been replaced with a quick solitary race to answer multiple choice questions.

Test-centered schooling encourages sorting students into three groups, usually via more time-wasting "practice" or "benchmark" tests early in the year. Students are labeled as 1) probably going to get a good score on the BS Test, 2) probably no hope they'll get a good score on the BS Test, and 3) enough of a borderline case that if we really hammer them, maybe we can get a good score out of them. Group 3 gets to suffer intensive test prep. That's because test-centered school is upside down-- the school is not there to serve the students' educational needs; instead, the students are there to serve the school's need for good data, aka high scores.

In that pursuit, we waste soooo much time on the test. Prepping for it, practicing for it, taking it-- the school year has been radically shortened by the BS Test. 

And as the BS Test became cemented as part of the status quo, a generation has absorbed the notion that the BS Test is the whole point of school, that the year is about prepping for the test and once the test is done, the year is basically open. At an even deeper level, we find the underlying assumption being passed on that Understanding and Knowing are just the acts of selecting and plugging in the One Correct Answer (which is already known by someone Out There). And these meager and stunted ideas about education and school are now part of a self-feeding loop as students who have spent their life on this tiny treadmill come back to the classroom as teachers. 

You can argue that attempts have been made to reduce the high stakes of BS Testing, but little has been done that made a difference. A decade of insistence that this test is a valid measure of school, teacher and student achievement has produced a public that thinks "what are the test scores like" is an incisive probe into school quality--and many of those folks are now on school boards. 

If that were the end of the matter, it would be problematic enough. But every troubling trend in public education has been nourished with water from this toxic spring. 

Of course, BS Test scores were important in selling school privatization, allowing fans of that movement to claim that they had hard data "proving" that public schools were failing. When it turned out that results for charter and private schools weren't any better, BS Test scores quietly exited the discussion. But the damage was done; one of the biggest frauds perpetrated in education policy and journalism is the continued use of "student achievement" as a euphemism for "test scores."

Yet there's a secondary effect-- the BS Test has made alternatives to public school more attractive by making public schools less attractive, because it turns out that parents are not that excited about subjecting their children to test-centered schooling and its hollowed-out de-humanized version of education. 

As we've sold the idea that knowledge and understanding are about being able to Pick The Right Answer, it's no wonder we've also seen the rise of "Why should students learn stuff when they can just google the right answer." This is life under the BS Test-- schooling is about grabbing right answers and generating data deliverables. 

The widely reported difficulties with student behavior and attendance have complex roots, but BS Test-based schooling shares some of the blame. What is there in test-centered schooling to engage students? What is the message beyond "As long as you can pick up those answers on the test, the job is done." I'll argue that when the treadmill stopped for the big pandemic pause of 2020, many folks looked at what they had been doing on autopilot and thought, "Wow, that was some bullshit." That includes students, because by 2020, test-centered school had injected a great deal of BS into schools (not that I'm going to argue that schools were ever fertilizer-free pastures).

Ditto for teachers. Of all the things that inspire people to go into the profession, "I've always wanted to help students prep for a mediocre multiple choice standardized test" is not top of the list. The BS Test is a monument to the general stripping of autonomy from the profession, encouraging districts to prescribe exactly how and what teachers should teach. 

Even the newest educational panic over AI owes much to BS Testing. AI moves most easily into spaces where heart and humanity have already been hollowed out, and a system centered on forking over the preferred answer is primed for AI. Approach students with an attitude of "Just fork over the right answer, kid," and they will find a quick and easy way to do just that.

We could argue about all of the above if the BS Test was actually useful for something. It is not.

Teachers are not allowed to see the questions on the test, and therefor get results that are meaningless, vague, broad, and way too late. And that's before we even get to the baloney of using maths to beat data into value-added scores. We have seen repeatedly that school level results correlate directly to socio-economic demographic data. 

That correlation is meaningless because twenty-some years in, we still don't have a lick of data (despite the claims of Hanushek et al) that raising BS Test scores improves life outcomes. The premise is that if we take a student who would have scored 55 on the test and fix her so she'll score a 75, she'll be more successful, make more money, and have a better life. Researchers have had decades to provide evidence of that premise and yet they haven't found enough evidence to cover a gnat's eyelash.

And that's before we even address the question of whether or not students even make a serious attempt on these things. 

"But if we stop giving the Big Standardized Test," come the objections, "how will we hold schools accountable? How will we know how schools are doing?"

You know what's worse than not knowing something? Believing you've got an answer when you don't. Ceasing the search for the truth because you have accepted a lie in its place. Or, to quote Josh Billings (probably), "I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so."

I agree that accountability is important, and that we should know how schools are doing. Big Standardized Tests don't give us either of those, and in fact make public education worse and less accountable. The answer to those objectors' question is, "You don't know any of those things now, and you are damaging the system at the same time."

Lord knows I'm not going to argue that eliminating the BS Test would return public education to some imaginary state of perfect grace. There are other issues that need--have always needed--to be addressed. But test-centered schooling is an obstacle rather than an aid to pursuing those improvements. 

One of the challenges of public schools is inertia, and after all these years, the BS Tests have inertia on their side. When the pandemic pause hit, there was a moment when that inertia was interrupted, and testophiles panicked and fought hard to keep testing, and mostly, they won. Now some states are testing more (while pretending they'll test less). I haven't said anything here that I haven't said multiple times over the past umpteen years, but one of the ways that institutional inertia works is that Bad New Ideas become that Same Old Thing We're Tired Of Complaining About. 

If we're looking for things to reform, axing the BS Test would be a great place to start. We wouldn't lose much of anything worth having, and we would take back time, money and focus for education in this country.