Honoring Juneteenth

Juneteenth has been around a long time, with some historians placing the first observances back in 1866. But it has only been a federal holiday since 2021 when Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a law making the observance a national holiday.

The holiday is, of course, highly annoying to MAGA and other cultural conservatives who are certain that white men should be the center of everything. But Dear Leader has done his best to clamp down in his general assault on DEI. Consequently many businesses and the armed forces have pulled away from honoring the holiday. If schools were still in session, rest assured that the feds would be making sure that schools did not mark such a holiday that does. not properly center white guys.

My small town is marking Juneteenth with a festival in the park including food and dancing and music. It's a modest fun time and an appropriate way to honor the occasion.

I think painting it a Black or DEI holiday misses some of the point. It's an American holiday first and foremost because Black Americans are, in fact, Americans, and it is appropriate to mark the point at which they received a more complete version of citizenship to which they were always entitled. But it's also an American holiday because it marks a point at which the country tried to change directions and become a better version of what we had always promised to be. 

It's a complicated holiday. In the main, it is joyous in celebrating the freedom from slavery for an entire people. But it also marks the point at which the country stopped tolerating an odious and inexcusable evil. We should be able to celebrate the first part, but for many folks, it's hard to acknowledge what made the freeing of enslaved people necessary.

It's the root of all those laws against teaching divisive concepts or teaching anything that might make some (white) kids feel bad. The preferred culture panic narrative is "Yes, there was slavery but then se stopped, and yes, some bad individuals did some racism, but we stopped that, too." And since we stopped doing the bad things, it would be impolite and divisive to bring up the Bad Things part. That unwillingness to talk about what some of us did to others of us--what was done, who did it, and how they made themselves okay with it-- has given us a long history of wrestling inconclusively with racism problems. Banning the mention of such topics from school (and national parks and anywhere else) is not helping. 

Like many holidays, Juneteenth has the artificial quality of suggesting that an important thing happened all at once on one day. But there is nothing wrong with taking one particular day to honor an important event, even if that event was actually a long process. As a nation, we did some awful stuff, and then after we stopped, some folks had a very hard time getting past the ideas and attitudes that were used to justify the awful stuff in the first place.

Juneteenth reminds some of us that some uncomfortable conversations need to be had, but maybe not today, while some Americans are celebrating their emancipation. I do wish school was in session right now, but we may honor the day as best we can.

AZ: Pushing Vouchers By Ignoring Voters

Arizona has been on the forefront of privatizing education. They're also at the forefront of demonstrating how voucher programs depend on legislators who will ignore the will of the voters. And they're at it again.

Arizona’s first voucher law passed in 2006, but in 2009 that program was thrown out by the state supreme court.

In 2011, the legislature tried again with education savings accounts (ESA), which redirected taxpayer money from public schools to parents who in turn could give the money to private or parochial schools, or spend it on education-related expenses. That extra set of hands in the money chain washed enough of the “public” off the funds to satisfy the courts, and ESA vouchers for special needs were established.

The vouchers were expanded over several years until 2017, when Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill to make taxpayer-funded school vouchers available to any Arizona students. But when legislators moved to make vouchers universal, grass roots group collected signatures and forced the measure to go on the November 2018 ballot.

The proposal to expand vouchers was heavily defeated at the ballot box. The voters had spoken, but the Arizona legislature simply ignored them and in June of 2022 passed the most expansive school voucher program in the nation. (For the moment, we'll skip over the program's history of massive fraud and abuse.)

Save Our Schools Arizona has been an absolute MVP in trying to thwart the voucherphiles in the state that is, after all, the home of privatizing groups like the Goldwater Institute. This year, they teamed up with the Arizona Education Association to launch a ballot initiative to implement some voucher program accountability (because "history of massive fraud and abuse").  Included in the measure:

Safety measures to protect students, including a requirement that voucher-funded schools follow fire and safety codes and require background checks for all staff.

Bans on use of voucher funds for luxury and non-education items.

Return of unused voucher funds to public school district. Currently, families can bank unused voucher funds indefinitely, so those taxpayer dollars can end up filling a family’s college fund. In July 2025, Harris reported that around 10,000 accounts had banked over $10,000; over $440 million was sitting in accounts.

Reporting requirement to show how much voucher money is going to the private schools that accept taxpayer-funded voucher money.

Creation of a subsidy cap. Require that taxpayer-funded vouchers be available only to those families with income at or below $150,000.

Require academic measures. Voucher-funded schools would have to administer and report results on the same sorts of standardized tests used by public schools. Currently, private schools have no requirements to show how well they are actually educating the students whose tuition is subsidized by taxpayers.

Privatizers tried a new approach to resist this initiative. Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children launched its own ballot petition under Fortify AZ that promised accountability and transparency but not, you know, too much. Not since the fox offered to reform henhouse security operations has anyone taken such a noble stand. Did Fortify expect their petition to win? Or did they just hope that dual petitions would dilute the thirst for reform enough that neither would go through? 

Doesn't matter, because Fortify has now bowed out. There was almost a deal with legislators to drop all the petitions in exchange for some reform (but not too much), but that didn't happen and now Fortify has dropped its petition and will concentrate on what we can assume has always been its goal: "Fortify is focused on ensuring that the teachers union initiative does not become law,'' said spokesman Barrett Marson.

But don't count those wily legislators out yet. They pushed through their own last-minute initiative that would serve as a poison pill, invalidating the voucher reform initiative even if the majority of Arizona voters voted for it. The heart of their bill is a masterful piece of PR-- the Military Protection Act says you can't confiscate funds from military families. The SOSAZ proposal includes (see above) a requirement to return unused voucher funds (currently, voucher families are banking piles of taxpayer funds, collected to fund K-12 education, as college funds). But that would count as "confiscating" funds from military families' children, thereby invalidating the entire reform package. Now watch [privatizers work hard to make sure that the voters don't understand what is actually happening.

There's a whole lot of energy and money being put into not giving the voters of Arizona an actual say in what their legislature is going to do. But, you know, democracy is such a pain in the butt when you have your own ideas about dismantling institutions and selling off the parts. Stay tuned for the next chapter. 

NY: Replacing Education With Child Labor

If, like me, you had wondered what the point was to adopting fuzzily vague "portrait of a graduate" language at the state level, well, now the another shoe has dropped, and it's not pretty.

Portrait of a Graduate language started to catch on a few years ago, spreading to at least 17 states. The AASA (the School Superintendent's Association) proudly announced a Portrait of a Graduate Academy in 2023 and slapped Portrait branding on all sorts of programs. 

Theoretically, a Portrait is a vision statement "that clearly outlines the skills, competencies, and traits students need to succeed in college, careers, and life."

Here's New York's version of the Portrait language:

A New York State high school graduate who is culturally responsive builds strong, respectful relationships, valuing diverse perspectives as essential to a rigorous, inclusive learning community. New York students who embody responsiveness and academic readiness--demonstrating creativity, critical thinking, communication, reflection, and global awareness--will be prepared to learn, grow, innovate, and contribute meaningfully to society. These graduates will be equipped with the interpersonal and intellectual skills needed to thrive in an interconnected, ever-evolving world.

It's a pleasant salad of education-lite argle bargle, a description by committee, and it fails on the whole "clearly outlines" part. There's little in these broad strokes to draw objections, though I can't help but notice that students' self-direction and personal goals don't make an appearance. But as with the world of social-emotional learning, I question how one provides formal instruction and assessment for many of these qualities. It's all drifting towards educational goals like "the graduate will be a good person" in which "good person" is lifting the entire world on its shoulders. 

Look, my own broad definition of education (Helping the student find their own best selves while grasping what it means to be fully human in the world) is very broad, but I'm not suggesting we design the whole education system of instruction and assessments around it. 

And ordinarily, I would not get excited about something like the Portrait, which reads like one more vision statement that can be ignored because it is so broad it could mean anything. 

Uh-oh.

New York's education leaders have decided that it could mean that the current three-tier system of diplomas (already an ugly idea) would be replaced with an assortment of badges and seals and endorsements. And students could display those "competencies" by means other than seat time and course credits. As reported by FingerLakes.com

Education leaders say the goal is to ensure a diploma reflects what students can actually do rather than simply documenting how many courses they completed.

The proposal would also expand the role of project-based learning, career-connected experiences, internships, portfolios and capstone projects. Students could demonstrate mastery through a body of evidence developed over time instead of relying primarily on exams and course completion.

We've seen this before-- called The Ledger it was a plan to just collect a bunch of "competencies" through "life experiences" and your "credentials" could be stored on blockchain so that corporate overlords could go shopping for exactly the meat widgets they were looking for. 

It will, unfortunately, dovetail nicely with the federal vouchers that New York's governor thinks are super cool. Want to get some extra badges to lift you off the meat widget track and work your way up to an office drone seal on your diploma? Start applying for that federal voucher!

I can't wait to see how this works. "Hey, my shift manager at McDonalds signed off on my Got Critical Thinking paperwork-- let me have that badge now."

This is not an education system designed to lift up all students-- it's a system designed to sort them into different classes before they even get a diploma. "You're on the meat widget track?" says the friendly guidance counselor. "Then you need to chuck all this book learning and go get started on your child labor career!" You don't need a diploma or a transcript-- you just need your list of badges certifying the various "skills" that will be of use to your future employers (or, I guess, your present employers).  Honestly, I did not have on my Bingo card "New York goes all in on catching up with states that have been implementing child labor." 

Do I think students develop plenty of useful skills and areas of knowledge outside the classroom? I do. Do I think that work experience can be an important component of education? Absolutely-- I taught CTE students my whole career. Do I think these factors should be used to shortchange some students of a full education in service of some vague and ill-defined objectives? I do not. 

The plan currently calls for implementation to begin in the fall of 2027. Here's hoping something derails it before then. 

Hanushek Plays The Hits (Chicken Littling The NAEP)

The NAEP scores have inspired a great deal of handwringing and navel gazing and at least one more addition to the edu-panic vocabulary (make way for a "learning recession"). And it provides another round of attention to economists who specialize in education blarney.

So the Washington Post's consideration of NAEP math scores, comes the headline "Math scores remain lower than a decade ago. It's a bad sign for the economy."

The second part of that headline signals the return of Eric Hanushek, the economist who has followed fellow economist Raj Chetty to the assertion that getting the right elementary school teacher will lead the student to make oh so much more money as an adult. A decade ago, this was a popular argument for those who wanted us to use Value-Added Measures to find all the Bad Teachers so schools could fire their way to excellence. That was a dumb idea.

One might ask how, exactly, any scientist could come up with evidence that the right teacher would lead to adult riches. Was it some sort of empirical anecdotal evidence, like multiple class reunions where everyone noticed that all of Mrs. Swellteach's former students were rich and all of Mrs. Dullbutt's students were poor? It was not, though one would think that if Chetty and Hanushek were correct, such anecdotes would be easy to come by.

This may sound like a silly notion, but Hanushek has been pushing it for at least fifteen years. Here's a paper from 2011 where he lays out a very specific connection between a teacher's percentile and the exact number of lifetime dollars that a student will gather. Seriously. See for yourself:

Take a good but not great teacher, one at the 69th percentile of all teachers rather than at the 50th percentile (that is, a teacher who is half a standard deviation above the average). She produces an increase of $10,600 on each student’s lifetime earnings. Even a modestly better than average teacher (60th percentile) raises individual earnings by $5,300, compared to what would otherwise be expected. While those numbers are not trivial, they burgeon dramatically once we recognize that every student in the class can expect such increases in earnings. Consider, for example, a teacher with a class of 20 students. Under such circumstances, the teacher at the 60th percentile will—each year—raise students’ aggregate earnings by a total of $106,000. The impact of one at the 69th percentile (as compared to the average) is $212,000, and one at the 84th percentile will shift earnings up by more than $400,000. But there is also symmetry to these calculations. A very low performing teacher (at the 16th percentile of effectiveness) will have a negative impact of $400,000 compared to an average teacher.

This was music to the ears of the nominally-Democrat crowd of reformsters, the folks in the Obama/Duncan axis who insisted that if everyone in the country got an advanced degree, nobody would be poor. ("Masters degree??!" exclaims the Walmart manager. "Then we'll start paying you $35 an hour!"). 

Hanushek's whole shtick is to slice test scores into pieces of standard deviation. It's Hanushek and friends who came up with the "days of learning" which is just a slice of standard deviation on a test score. 

So how did he come up with this connection between good teachers and lifetime earnings? I'm going to over-simplify here, because we're talking about economist stuff here, but it goes pretty much like this: We know that a better teacher is better because their students get higher test scores, and we know that students with higher test scores go onto have generally wealthier life outcomes.

Hmmm. Well, first we've got to ignore the fairly small teacher effect on student success in school. And maybe high test scores cause higher earnings, or maybe it's that (as we already know) students from wealthier backgrounds do better on standardized tests, and that students from wealthier backgrounds tend to grow up to be wealthy adults? At this point, we can also call out the data that aren't there. We've had plenty of time to follow the students of high and low VAM teachers to compare how they're all doing and see if there's a pattern then. And somebody could have pursued the biggest question of all-- is there a shred of evidence that raising a student's test score raises their life outcomes? 

You would think all of that is more than enough to retire this baloney. But Hanushek has adapted to the new educational preoccupations. In February of 2020 (aka The Last of the Before Times) there he was, insisting that NAEP scores showed we'd have to get better teachers in classrooms soon, issuing a full-on policy analysis from the Hoover Education Success Initiative-- "The Unavoidable: Tomorrow's Teacher Compensation." The Initiative is a gathering of the usual suspects-- the executive committee is Hanushek, Chester Finn (Fordham Institute boss-emeritus), Paul Peterson, and Margaret Raymond (CREDO chief and Hanushek's wife). Only by using test scores to select and recruit the best teachers can we usher in an era of prosperity.

Now, six years later, for some reason Lauren Lumpkin gave Hanushek a call so that he could explain that today's graduates will earn an average of 8% less through their lifetimes. Because they have fewer skills, a thing he knows because of the NAEP math scores ("Oh, you're one of those," groans the Walmart manager. "We'll start you at 8% less than these older guys.")

And that's not all--

He estimated the combined effect of those losses will cost the U.S. $90 trillion through the year 2100.

He explains

“People don’t get very concerned about this, in part because it’s sort of like blood pressure. It’s the silent killer you don’t notice until you notice it,” Hanushek said of the way math achievement will affect the economy. “What it comes out to is a huge number that we have to pay attention to because it affects our position in the world, frankly.”

 And I shouldn't just pick on Hanushek, because other economists are out there chicken littling about this, too. 

Thomas Kane and a crew at the National Bureau of Economic Research are predicting a lifetime earning loss of $900 billion for all the students enrolled in the 2020-21 school year. Kane is the Harvard GSE guy who stumped hard for Common Core and testing and once published a terrible analogy about how you can't diet without a bathroom scale and a mirror (really). 

These guys all have big ole credentials and big-time jobs, so maybe I'm just not smart enough to follow their lines of reasoning. But it sure looks like a big old pile of baloney to me. And yet somehow it just keeps coming back, floating on zombie air. 

The Fundamental Challenge To Public Education and School Choice

There has always been an obstacle to public education in this country. It's real, its effects are punishing and far-reaching, and school choice doesn't provide the slightest solution.

Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Jessica Poiner is recycling an old reformster falsehood that is baloney wrapped around a kernel of truth. "Traditional public schools aren't open to everyone," she declares. The "So there!" is mostly silent. 

Poiner spins the pro-public ed statement into a "falsehood" by interpreting it as "All traditional public schools are open to all students," and she is absolutely correct that such a statement is absolutely false. Her assertion, however, doesn't really advance the argument because nobody has ever tried to make that argument.               

Poiner goes on to make the argument that between different schools and school districts we find considerable difference in quality and resources, and that access to the "better" schools is inequitable because of the American system ties school attendance to buying a house. Economic inequity is bakes into the US public education system; doubly so in areas where redlining (historically explicit or currently implicit). Poiner appears to be super-pissed that Ohio's voucher program, EdChoice, has been successfully challenged in court by public school districts, suggesting that districts hypocritically trap families so that adults can enjoy the benefits of the public system; students can't just go to the better schools because their parents didn't buy a house in the right place. 

I don't know of anyone who denies that some schools are better supported than others (though there's a whole discussion to be had about how we "know" that East Egg schools are better than West Egg). This points us to one of the most fundamental, long-standing problems of education-- how are we going to provide a good (enough) education for Those People's Children?

There have been a variety of solutions on the table:

1) Guarantee that every single child, no matter where they live, falls within a school district that must provide that child with an education. The use a system of state and federal taxation to even out the disparities between local tax bases.

2) Attach to every family some money and let them search out a school that they'd like to attend, public, private or charter. 

3) Do nothing. Let people sort it out on their own. And maybe cut everyone's school taxes.

Well, 3 is not an actual solution, but it's the MAGA way. Cut all government support for health care, food and nutrition, and education. Some people will end up on the bottom-- sick or ignorant or even dead-- but that's just nature's way of separating the meritorious from the undeserving, and we should not be interfering with God's Plan. But we need to acknowledge 3 because it is not only current federal policy, but it can also easily infect solutions 1 and 2. 

The trouble with 1 and 2 is that they share a critical problem-- both of them require taxpayers with money to help pay the education freight for families with much less money. When that doesn't happen in the public system, the result is schools without enough resources to fully serve their students. When that doesn't happen in a choice system, students just don't get a choice. Which is really the choice supporters' complaint. After all, we have always had school choice; the choice movement has not been about creating choice, but about getting tax dollars to subsidize it. Well, some of it. For some students.

The obstacles to school choice are not policy or bureaucrats or teachers unions or entrenched adult interests. The main obstacles have always been high cost and discriminatory policies.  

Poiner puts it this way:      

The bottom line is this: If you’re rich enough to buy or rent a home in a high-performing district, your kid gets to go to an excellent school. The world is your oyster. If, however, you can’t afford to pay your way into one of these districts, then most—if not all—high-performing public schools are closed to you.

She's not wrong. My problem is that modern taxpayer-funded school choice programs don't really change that at all. Your voucher dollars aren't enough to get you into East Egg Academy. Worse, East Egg can reject you for any reason. The public school system promise is that wherever you are, there is a public school that must provide for your education; wherever you live, there is no charter or private school that has to provide for your education.

I posted that last bit on the dead bird app, and Derrell Bradford replied with an alternative reformster view. 

Wherever you live there is a public school with the power of compulsory attendance and the ability to tax based on your inability to leave or choose no matter how near or far you are from it.

Bradford leads choice advocacy group 50CAN and works with pretty much every other pro-choice group out there, and he's about the most civil reformster out there (sort of the anti-DeAngelis). And here he pretty much encapsulates the point of view that views a local public school as a "have to" instead of a "get to," an infringement on rights rather than a means of exercising them. On this, we disagree. 

What I see as a commonality between the two views is the need for more resources. I've seen one true school choice program in the country, in tiny Croyden, NH, where the deal was that, lacking a local high school, the district would pay full tuition to any school of a student's choice. But I only learned about the program because the local Libertarians were trying to chop its budget. Meanwhile, voucher programs

A choice program that fulfilled the promise of an good education for every child, would A) cost a bunch of money, B) require charter and private schools to stop discriminating against students they wanted to reject and C) require useful measures of "good education." A public school program that fulfilled its promise would take whatever steps necessary to make sure that every school in every was providing a good job, which would A) cost a bunch of money and B) require useful measures of "good education."

Both visions are up against the same challenge-- people whose approach to education is some version of, "Yeah, education is important, but can't we do it for a lot less?" And if you let them keep talking, some version of, "I don't mind educating my own kid, and I welcome government help to do that, but I don't want to pay taxes to make a nice school for Those Peoples' Children." Also, a suggestion that compulsory education is a bad thing.

It has never not been an issue, going back to the days when many folks just didn't need a fancy education for anything (in 1950, 34.3% of Americans over age 25 had a high school diploma) all the way through to the days when Brown v. Board of Education spurred white taxpayers to bitch and moan about the Communist plan to take their money to educate Those Peoples' Children all the way up through recent history when states argued that students on the McDonald's track don't need courses like algebra. As a culture, we wave vaguely in the direction of the importance of education, but we'd rather not pay for it for Other People (see also: health care, food, families, and children). 

There are many many more issues to wrestle with in the larger education debates, but I'm trying to focus on just one point. Economic inequity is manifest in our education system. Modern choice programs, welded to free market ideology, do not offer a real solution to that inequity, and in many ways promise to make it worse. 

ICYMI: Counterclockwise Edition (6/14)

Several decades ago, my brother and I played in a strolling dixieland band at Conneaut Lake Park, a delightful small amusement park that has since fallen on difficult times, and one of the things we noticed at the time was that small children would "dance" to our music by running in little counterclockwise circles. Lo and behold, researchers have discovered that turning counterclockwise is an unexplained but real human thing. We humans truly are a mysterious species. 

Here's your reading list for the week. Read it in whatever direction you like.

Why Schools Keep Relearning the Same Lessons

Matt Brady on how schools have an unfortunate tendency to simply lose expertise and institutional history.

Excerpts over excellence: How Seattle Public Schools is preventing middle school teachers from teaching full-length books

Julie Letchner provides a specific, local example of how one district confuses compliance with quality, and how full length books are kept out of the classroom.

The Screen Time Lies Powering i-Ready's Ed-Tech Crisis Response

Part 4 in series of posts at Epostasy looking at how i-Ready is a mess, and how they are trying to spin their way out of trouble.

K-12 Educational Reform: Always a “Silver Bullet”

Greg Wyman takes a look at reform history all the way back to A Nation At Risk, and the search for an education silver bullet.

What About All Those ONLINE Science of Reading Programs?

Nancy Bailey questions the use of more screen time to improve reading.

Florida AG Says School Boards Must Let Students Leave Class For Religious Instruction

Lifewise has come for Florida's students, and the state is only too happy to hand them over. 

Education voucher funds for college? Arizona ESA spending raises new questions for growing program

Craig Harris continues to be an absolute beast in covering Arizona's voucher grift. Here's yet another variation on this theft from taxpayers.

ACT and SAT---Sophist Wastes

Thomas Ultican looks at the resurgence of standardized testing support in California.

The ‘Generational Collapse’ in Literacy

Nancy Flanagan responds to the complaint from college professors that their students can't read. 

Ohio Legislature Keeps Advancing School Reforms that Don’t Work but Fails to Fund the Public Schools

Jan Resseger keeps track of Ohio education shenanigans, including the legislature's fondness for leaning into failed policies while refusing to support the public school system.

The One-Room Schoolhouse

TC Weber is a busy guy this week, with observations about everything from discipline to nostalgia

(Teacher) Life Work

Adrian Neibauer spins off from Donald Hall's book Life Work, into a layered and layered look at life, work, and teaching. Quite a nice read.

Tough Times for an Education Budget Hawk

Not sure I've seen this take from anyone on any side. Frederick Hess asks why bother with education cuts if we're just going to blow a mountain of money and saddle the next generation with mega-debt?

AI Ain’t So Smart

Russell Frank, columnist for StateCollege.com, thinks maybe his AI devices are not doing great work. Best line:

The Machine can do a lot of things that we mere mortals cannot. But it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, which means it may be artificially intelligent, but it isn’t artificially wise.

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

Nothing like a good rant. This rant by Brian Phillips is pretty delightful. Thanks to Benjamin Riley for highlighting this in his fine Punk is anti-AI post.

The Federal Assault on History

The Organization of American Historians has released a report that attempts to summarize all of the current administration's attempts to rewrite or erase history.

This week at Forbes.com I took yet another pass at explaining why federal school vouchers are bad news. It's not just the money-- it's the fundamental change to the public education mission. I'd be delighted if you shared this one with your favorite elected state official. 

If you were a band kid in the early seventies, you listened to Maynard. We were lucky enough to see him live at Edinboro University every summer for a buck. When he scored a semi-hit with "Gonna Fly Now" that marked the end of MF Horn Maynard (concert closer: "Hey Jude") and the beginning of disco Maynard (concert closer: "Maria") but we didn't begrudge him his success, and later he moved back around to cool stuff like this:

Subscribe! It's free!

Fordham Institute Almost Figures Out Testing

When someone from the other side of debate announces that they Get It finally, you can find yourself torn between reactions. A sarcastic "No shit, Sherlock" wrestles with a sincere, "Why that's an excellent insight. Good job."

So here's part of the opening paragraph from a recent post by Dale Chu at the ever-reformy Fordham Institute. It opens with a discussion of a new drive by states to come up with what we're calling "through-year" assessments. 

Through-year assessment is appealing because it promises to address multiple longstanding frustrations with existing state tests. But growing enthusiasm for it rests on a shaky assumption: that a single assessment can simultaneously satisfy accountability requirements, improve instruction, provide timely feedback, reduce testing burden, preserve local flexibility, and produce valid statewide comparisons. It slices, it dices, it even juliennes!

No shit, Sherlock. I mean, that's an excellent insight. One of the major problems with the state Big Standardized Tests, from all the way back in the No Child Left Behind era, is that they are advertised as slicing dicing and juilienning. 

The BS Test is supposed to provide teachers with information about how students are doing and where there are "gaps" in instruction. They are supposed to provide schools with data on how well their curricula are designed and working. They are supposed to provide an accurate instrument for evaluating both teacher and school performance. They are supposed to provide useful "customer" information for parents choosing a school. They are supposed to provide "accountability" information for at least three different constituencies-- taxpayers, state and federal. They are supposed to provide a measure that facilitates comparison across space and time. And that's all before we get to less-explicitly-discussed purposes like exerting control over local curricular choices.

As Chu writes-

It is the same dilemma captured in the classic Saturday Night Live commercial for “New Shimmer,” a product advertised as both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Through-year assessment has something of a New Shimmer problem: It is being asked to function simultaneously as an accountability instrument and an instructional tool, as a system for comparability and a system for flexibility—design goals that do not naturally coexist in a single product.

Chu also points out, "Assessment experts have been warning about this dynamic for years." If by "assessment experts" he means "assessment experts, actual teachers, and plenty of parents," then sure. That's an excellent insight. 

More instructional utility often comes at the expense of comparability across students and schools. Additional testing windows may yield more information but increase logistical complexity. Faster feedback requires sacrifices elsewhere in the system, most commonly in the depth and breadth of what the assessment can cover.

These tradeoffs are not simply technical problems that can be papered over through more sophisticated psychometric design.

What an excellent insight. 

Look, teachers have been saying this for year, all the way back to NCLB and then the Common Core tests that were designed by prioritizing could be measured over what was important to measure. Teachers have pointed out now for decades that when they are literally forbidden to see the questions that students answered or to know what the students responses were, but are simply given a single score, usually months after the students have left their classroom-- that is an absolutely useless test from an instructional standpoint (but hey--protecting testing companies' valuable IP is more important than any educational goals).

Chu frames this whole piece as a discussion of what states are trying to set up for the future. But he comes really close to the most important insight. 

The challenge, then, is not a lack of good intentions or even a lack of innovation. It is that state assessment systems are being asked to solve multiple problems at once, requiring choices that satisfy no purpose fully and inevitably sacrifice elements of each. In the process, states may be required to spend more time, money, and resources on unproven assessment models—and probably add to students’ total testing burden—at a time when there is little, if any, appetite for doing so.

Yes, these limits of testing utility and accuracy are a hurdle, and states may "mistake an unavoidable tradeoff for a design problem that can be engineered away."

But Chu isn't describing a possible pitfall for future testing-- he is describing the fatal flaw of the state testing that is going on right now. The current program of BS Testing in the states has not even pretended to grapple with the problem of balancing different purposes for the testing, and so we've been saddle with a tradeoff that exchanges the generation of easily-managed numbers masquerading as data for -- well, everything. In pretending to do everything, state tests do pretty much nothing useful at all. 

So yeah-- these are some great insights. Please catch on to the other implications, and could somebody please forward these testing insights on to all the people who think we can fix the "learning recession" by leaning harder into test and punish policies of the past. Because when your tests are too multipurpose to be useful, "test and punish" feels a lot like "punish randomly." And I don’t want to wait years for some folks to have that insight.

Google's Classroom AI Rage Bait

Nobody likes to train teachers like Google, who, like tobacco companies, understand that if you can lock those customers in while they're young, you'll get to keep them for life. Hence, Google's pre-eminence in training teachers to use whatever damn thing they've come up with. The "pipeline of future users" memo was turned up by NBC journalist Tyler Kingkade. Kingkade just came back from a free two-day Google training camp for pushing Gemini, Google's house brand of odious AI, and the resulting piece is exactly the sort of thing I'm not supposed to read unless I wash it down with a double order of blood pressure medication.

But here, in one place, we can find so much of what is wrong about the AI-in-the-classroom boosterism. I've read this so you don't have to, but it's going to be neither short nor sweet. God bless Kingkade for suffering through the whole thing.

Kingkade opens with a group of k-12 educators "sitting in an atrium on Google's campus" trying to imagine what pushback they'd get from some old fossil of a colleague, the kind who is upset that cursive is no longer taught. She might "yell" that AI is just another shiny fad. "What’s next, she might ask — robots teaching kids how to read?" Oh, that whacky old fossil.

Where do they turn to get help with this dinosaur? Why, they ask Gemini for tips, of course. 

They would win over this skeptical English teacher by explaining what generative AI could do for her: create classroom materials for phonics lessons, reducing what would normally be hours of work to just two minutes. The key, the educators agreed, was to avoid getting into an argument or letting this AI critic unload all her fears uninterrupted.

Got that? Don't listen to her-- don't even let her finish talking. Instead, act like a computer program, not a human colleague. And certainly don't treat her concerns as if they are legitimate. Focus on "pain points" says one leader, and how Gemini can take away your pain. And I have to tell you-- in my youth, I went through training for how to handle penitent peers who had answered an altar call, and some of this "training" seems very familiar.

“It’s not as scary if you’ve taken something off of my plate versus giving me a new thing that I have to then go out and learn,” Winston Roberts, director of an AI initiative at ISTE+ASCD, a nonprofit education group that worked with Google to develop the training, told educators from a stage.

When a non-profit is pushing a particular profit, you have to ask who is paying the bills. In this "partnership," somebody has invested a lot of their marketing budget. Teachers get way way wayyyyyy too much of this kind of "training" that is actually marketing masquerading as "help" for teachers.

Kingkade takes a moment to note the considerable growing backlash against AI in general and screens in classrooms in particular. Then we are back to the session.

We meet an English teacher from Hawaii who notes that AI is now part of student vocabulary; the example is that students use AI to call things fake, which ought to tell us a valuable lesson right there. And then she offers this comparison: 

“If a student’s running in the hallway, you don’t take away the hallway — you teach them the proper behavior for the hallway.”

With all due respect to my Hawaiian colleague, no. If a student is shooting at things with a gun, you take away the gun. You don't let them drive a car until they are 16 and have passed requisite tests of competence. 

Google rolled out it's "free" online training that includes "guidance about creating study guides, crafting lesson plans and analyzing where students are getting stuck," but not arguments for why AI might be a bad match for those tasks. Crafting lesson plans? That should be done by someone who knows the material and the students- AI knows neither. Analyzing where students get stuck? I'm unconvinced that AI can do that at all, but even if it could, the important question is WHY students get stuck. That is one of the most basic teacher functions-- working out what mistakes in thinking are taking the student into the weeds. Simple repeating, "Yeah, you are in the weeds again" is no help; students need help figuring out what wrong turn they took.

The training materials describe Gemini as “an engine for high-quality instruction” to do the “heavy lifting” for designing classroom lessons. “As an educator, this shift moves you into the role of a ‘learning conductor,’” one slide states.

Learning conductor? Learning conductor??!! Time for another blood pressure pill. Gemini is not an engine for high quality instruction because high quality instruction involves a human. Nor can Gemini design high quality lessons; it can only mimic and average the lessons it has input. And wait a minute-- isn't "learning conductor" a fancy update of "guide on the side," a version of teaching that is widely and justly mocked?

“It’s really, really important that we use it,” Joseph South, chief innovation officer for ISTE+ASCD, "because Google has bet a shit-ton of money on this, and we need these kids to grow up into paying customers." Okay, he didn't say that last part. “We can’t just ignore it, we can’t ban it, we can’t keep it out of our schools — that’s not gonna prepare us for the future.” That may be at least partly true, but "just lie back and let it roll over you" doesn't seem like great future prep, either.

Kingkade reminds us about the "pipeline" memo and reminds us that Google is company that convinced every that schools needed Chromebooks ("What if a laptop, but broken") which we're now thinking, maybe not. Kingkade has watched a 2018 presentation about keep Google atop education mountain includes this great quote

“Educators are sitting on a growing goldmine of data,” the presentation said, but they needed help organizing and making sense of it. If Google designed ways for schools to use student data, it would set “the stage for us to reinvent the education system through data.”

Goldmine of data indeed. Also, shades of our data overlords, who used to be so sure that if they had all the data, they could control the world. Remember the claim that given access to all the data, the company could tell the student what to eat for breakfast on test day? Or that students wouldn't have to take the SAT because we'd already know what they were going to get? Yeah, that company is now toast, but the notion that a "data-driven" ed system would be awesome (and profitable and provide a digital profile of future meat widgets that corporations would love)-- apparently that kind of creepy Big Brother thinking still has a home.

Speakers at the training emphasized that humans should always stay involved with any AI use and that technology shouldn’t replace teachers [or, you know, learning conductors]. They focused instead on how a teacher could use Gemini to create a comic strip that explains how greenhouse gases trap heat, for example, or how elementary school children could use AI to generate more realistic depictions of their ideas than they are capable of drawing.

What the hell is wrong with these people??! Yes, the most important part of a third grade project is how realistic the rendering of the art is! After these last few years, Google, with all of its millions, is still struggling to come up with a non-stupid use case for AI in a classroom. But hey-- let's have a heavy dose of irony  --

Casey Cuny, a high school English teacher in a Los Angeles suburb, described asking his students to debate their takeaways from readings — like the concept of “doublethink” from “1984” by George Orwell — with Gemini before discussing them in class.

“It’s the best discourse I’ve seen in years on some of these Socratic seminars I’ve been running in my classes,” he said. “It does push the thinking when used intentionally and strategically. And remember that I’m still using teaching methods — I’m not just putting it on the AI and walking away.”

Yes, class, turn and talk to your surveillance plagiarism machine about themes in 1984. Time for another blood pressure pill. You know what else is good for pushing thinking intentionally and strategically?? Human teachers and students! But it's good to know that when he turns on the AI, he still stands right there. Many of these AI boosters remind me of the Common Core days when teachers would self-own with variations of "I couldn't do my damned job until I had the Common Core Standards to tell me what to do." Sigh. I'm sorry. Cuny is probably a lovely human being and maybe a fine teacher, but I cannot begin to describe the rage I would feel if I found out that this was what was happening in my child's classroom.

Kingkade notes that the indoctrinees knew they'd be facing "challenges in evangelizing for AI." But one tech teacher said the training equipped him to "show skeptics how AI could be beneficial to learning-- not just for cheating." And “They may not like it, but I don’t think that’s going to change things,” he said. “The naysayers are not going to stop it.”

Yeah, you can't do AI marketing without just insisting that it's inevitable, which is admittedly so much easier than trying to provide compelling reasons that a teacher with a free will and professional conscience should choose to incorporate it. 

Google and ISTE+ASCD are planning a host of these trainings across the country so that teachers can learn that using Gemini is awesome and great, also, how to roll over those terrible old-timey teachers who want to question whether there's any actual good reason to hand the class reins to Gemini while they become learning conductors. Because "training" here means not teacher training, but unpaid field sales evangelist training. I'm going to go do some deep breathing exercises now. 

 

John Oliver Looks At New College

You may recall Governor Ron DeSantis's attempt to turn a tiny Very Liberal Arts college into the Hillsdale of the South, a project that was going to be a proof-of-concept for red state governors across the country. He even enlisted that great culture panic soldier, Chris Rufo, whose whole thesis is that back in the sixties, lefties took over higher education as a start to taking over the entire culture.

I've checked in on the story from time to time, but this week, New College got the John Oliver treatment. As always, there is language Not Suitable For Work, but it's a pretty sharp take on the whole fiasco, and provides lots of screen time for our old buddy Christopher. Well worth a watch to see how badly this was botched. As Oliver correctly points out, it's not impossible to have a Very Conservative college-- but dear Lord, not like this--

Federal Anti-LGBTQ Students Bills

I wish it were more complicated than this, but it isn't.

For cultural right-wingers, the idea is that the dominant culture in this nation should be white (European), male, (a certain type of) Christian, and unfailingly straight.

Add "with wealth and poverty flowing towards those who deserve them" and you get right wing free marketeer.

Add "because God says so" and you get Christian nationalist.

And to get MAGA, you add anger and vengefulness aimed at anyone who ever dared to contradict any of the above.

We've seen the varieties of anti-LGBTQ bills championed on the state level, from censoring books that dare to mention that such persons exist to requiring schools to force all students to perform straight identities, regardless of how true those may be.

Unfortunately, we're seeing more of the same baloney on the federal level, especially in the House.

Back in May, the House passed a bill entitled "The Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act" (so..um.. SIPKA?). It's short and simple. 

For one, it would forbid any ESEA funds being used to teach "gender ideology," and if you're wondering what exactly that is, the bill refers you to Donald Trump's executive order Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, which defines "gender ideology" in part as "the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one's sex." That's part of a long rant that boils down to "biology and science say there are just two sexes and so your gender is determined by your genitals period the end shut up" which ignores the actual science of sex. But opposition to "gender ideology" is a particular type of marker, indicating someone who doesn't want to argue that LGBTQ people do not actually exist, and that anyone who claims otherwise is delusional or stupid or evil.

The other part of the bill requires schools to obtain parent permission before making any accommodations for "gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name on any school form" for a student in elementary or middle grades. Works fine except for all those students whose parents do not support or accept them. 

House Education and Workforce Committee also reported out HR 8705-- "Civics and History Advancement to Restore Learning, Integrity and Education Act" (CHARLIE Act, because they are determined they really think they've got something with that guy).  Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah tossed this one out there, and it's more of the same--                          

The bill says "no funds may be used for discriminatory equity ideology or gender ideology." You may have missed the part where Dear Leader tossed out "Discriminatory Equity Ideology" as an alternative meaning for DEI, but it's once again the notion that anything that tries to push straight white male Christians out of the spotlight on center stage is Very Bad and is, in fact, discrimination. 

But by censoring any piece of history education that doesn't center straight white Christian men, these guys hope to restore balance and fairness. They are so sure that they lost that center stage spot because evil lefties took over education and started indoctrinating children-- so the obvious solution is to get in there and start indoctrinating children to the right way of thinking. 

"We just want neutral instruction," say the supporters, believing in their hearts that a truly neutral view of American history and society would present straight white Christian men in a central spot.\

Well, none of this is new, but it's worth noticing that these kinds of attempts to enforce the culture right's ideology on students is now getting pushed at the federal level (you know-- the level where MAGA says they want to send control of schools back to the states). Now is no time to stop contacting your elected representatives, no matter who they are. 

PA: Center for Cyber Charter Information

I've referred to their work many times over the past few years, but I want to take a moment to plug Education Voters of Pennsylvania. They are an exceptional resource for information about privatization shenanigans in Pennsylvania.

In particular, they have become the commonwealth's premiere source for information about the cyber charter industry, in no small part because they have been willing to drag the cybers back into court time and time again, because even though the cyber industry loves to hoover up mountains of taxpayer dollars, they would really rather not be accountable to taxpayers for how those dollars are spent. Repeatedly confronted by the Right To Know laws in the state that require them to make public their financial activities, cybers continue to fall back on the tactic of "Make me! Take me to court, I dare you!" And EVP has, and in the process they have accumulated an extraordinary pile of data.

Previously EVP put out a series of posts-- "Cyber Charter Waste of the Week" -- now all included in one page of the EVP website. These break down the huge piles of taxpayer dollars being spent on things like sports team sponsorships, marketing swag, and Amazon gift cards. 

In an entire report, EVP breaks down the millions of dollars of dollars spent on advertising, as well as the lousy return in actual students achievement. 

There is a report on the massive hoarding of assets (including a massive real estate empire). There's a raft of advocacy tools for people who want to get involved but aren't quite sure how. 

And there's a new transparency hub, where you can look at the documents that EVP has managed to claw out of cyber charter hands, including actual minutes of Board of Trustees meetings for those schools. EVP has put financial transparency documents there as well. 

This is one of EVP's strengths-- they always show their work, so you can check for yourself. 

Every state needs an organization like Education Voters of Pennsylvania to bring transparency to how certain education-flavored businesses are handling the dollars that taxpayers contributed for educating students (and not for enriching charter executives). For Pennsylvanians and those who follow Pennsylvania education issues, it's a huge help. For folks in other states, it's a model. 

Government Picks "Real" Religions

I have argued a gazillion times that allowing when a government makes noise about protecting religious liberty and putting God back in assorted government places, they are really talking about exerting government control over religion. And now we've got one more example to add to the list.

The list already includes some classics. Like the time that Florida thought they would be clever by authorizing pseudo-chaplains (with the all the title and none of the training) to get into public schools. As they are wont to do, the Satanic Temple immediately announced their intention to get their own chaplains in the field, and Governor DeSantis declared that they were not a real religion and wouldn't be allowed (despite the law clearly saying that even people with no religion at all could be pseudo-chaplains). 

Even the bill's sponsor was smart enough to see the problem here (and it's not Satan). Senator Erin Grall told Soule:

I think that as soon as we get in the middle of defining what is religion and what is not, and whether or not someone can be available and be on a list, we start to run (into) constitutional problems.

We have multiple examples of states opening up a voucher program to fund private religious schools and then having a fit because it turns out that there is such a thing as a non-Christian religious school, and they would really like to not have that.  

And there are those states, like Texas and Florida and Louisiana, that would like to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Only there are multiple versions of the decalogue in the Bible, and more variations to be found among the different religious traditions, even if we're just talking Jewish and Catholic and Protestant traditions. The states were only too happy to dictate their own version of the sacred text, which not only quietly settled centuries of religious debate, but at the same time reduced the sacred text to a secular political offering on par with the Declaration of Independence. Louisiana even helpfully offered some poster ideas that equated Moses with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Really. 

Having chipped away at the wall between church and state, some folks are still doggedly pursuing the idea of making charter schools eligible to collect taxpayer dollars to teach religion to children. People of faith ought to be opposed to this idea (and to their credit, some on the right are very much so) because such a system will inevitably lead to the government deciding which religions are "real" and belong on the list.

For a demonstration, look no further than the Department of Defense, where a list of over 200 recognized religions has been reduced to 31. “This decrease in religious affiliation codes is not designed to make any claims on the legitimacy of any faith or religious belief, nor is it intended to provide a list of ‘officially approved’ religions,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement issued to the press so that they could not see him roll his eyes in person. 

The Unitarians didn't make the list. The Mormons are upset because the list says they aren't actually Christians, which has been a debated issue since Joseph Smith first talked to angels, but I guess the matter is now settled by the DOD. 

For the gazillionth time-- the First Amendment is not just to protect the government from religion, but to protect religion from the government. Any government Office of Religious Freedom and Awesomeness will inevitably be used to push government control over religion. This goes double for all the attempts to funnel taxpayer dollars to private religious schools and funnel religion to public schools. Sooner or later, there will be a list. 

ICYMI: Board Birthday Edition (6/7)

As of this week, the Board of Directors is now a year older an infinitely wiser. What a party we have had. A fine way to kick off summer vacation. Most of my grandchildren, located in other parts of the country, must labor on for a couple more weeks, so best wishes to them and their parents. But here at the home office, things look pretty much like this.

But I still have things for you to read. Here's the list. 

The Machine They Built to Dismantle Public Education

Miss Frazzled is a widely-followed voice in the teacher and education space, and she has written this comprehensive view of the work being done to dismantle education. Definitely worth the read.

Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school’ closes permanently

Colorado wanted to be on the forefront of legalizing religion in a "public" school, but that dream is going to have to wait, because their trend-setting "public Christian school" has shut down. Ann Schimke reports for Chalkbeat.

Legislators scramble to try to make EdChoice Constitutional. They can't.

Ohio's big voucher program has been ruled unconstitutional, and besides fighting that ruling in the courts, the legislature is trying to tweak the law to make it not so constitution violatey. Stephen Dyer says they might as well give up.

A Koch-connected school choice contractor could get $2 million from Florida taxpayers

Oh look. The Kochtapus is going to try some of those sweet federal voucher dollars. Courtesy of Florida, of course. 

Can AI Handle Parent-Teacher Conferences?

Nancy Flanagan looks at the prospects of using AI to help with parent-teacher conferences. Just simulations, mind you. Because a bot can definitely simulate a parent.

Misunderstanding Third-Grade Reading Proficiency: On Resisting Efficiency and Punishment in Reading Policy

Paul Thomas breaks down some details on the zombie policy of retaining third graders.

Who Speaks for Children?

Bruce Lesley is concerned about the loss of some of the infrastructure for children's advocacy. But at least he has a thought about what you can do.

Teachers’ emotions can make or break student learning

A new study from the American Psychological Association suggests that teacher feelings actually affect student learning. Johnathan Kantrowitz explains.

What Landry’s Executive Order on La. Teacher Pay Actually Does (and Doesn’t)

Louisiana's governor made some big-sounding promises. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks through the fine print for us.

Trump officials went after dozens of colleges. Now they’re rewriting the rules for all of academia

Sigh. Collin Binkley reports for the AP on the big fat program from Dear Leader's minions to bring higher education to heel.

Must Everything Be About Money?

Speaking of which, what about the new policies focusing on how much graduates with particular degrees make? Steve Nuzum responds. 

The Worst Use Case for Generative AI is Writing

John Warner has been arguing all along that using AI for writing is a terrible idea. Now he's seeing some signs that maybe some folks are catching on.

Most Americans broadly support public education for undocumented students – regardless of their political affiliation and religion

Some actual research showing that actual Americans support a decent approach to educating all children who live in this country.

The Rise of Right-Wing "Biblical Economics"

Katherine Stewart has done exceptional work chronicling Christian nationalism in this country. Here's a look at the idea that God really wants us to be free marketeers.

I’m Trying to Teach Humanity Before It Disappears

An odd headline to find at EdSurge, but Amanda Rosas gets to the challenge of teaching in the age of MAGA.

I might have posted this before. I think of it many times a year, as certain birthdays drive by. It's supposed to be a child's lullaby, but it gets me every time. 

Subscribe! It's free and always will be.

Will Public Schools Benefit From Federal Vouchers?

Discussion has heated up about the federal voucher program and, specifically, whether blue states should opt in, and whether such opt-inning is inevitable. Colorado's Jarid Polis and New York's Kathy Hochul appear to be primed to take Trump Education Dollars. Folks are looking at Pennsylvania's voucher-curious governor Josh Shapiro (I suggested he not, but that may not be enough to keep it from happening). 

The temptation centers around two issues. 

First, people from the state are probably going to take the tax credit that goes with contributing to the voucher program. Shouldn't governors, the argument goes, make sure that money from their own state doesn't end up going to some other state. It's an odd argument, because without the tax credit, those dollars would have gone to DC and on to Lord Knows Where anyway, so it's not like non-participating states are losing anything                    

Second is the assertion that some of this voucher money can be used to fund public schools and not just private ones. Consider, for instance, this slide show from a presentation by Marguerite Roza of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Roza spent fifteen years at University of Washington's Center for Privatizing Reimagining Public Education (taking one year off to work with the Gates Foundation) and took the Edunomics director's job in 2012. Edunomics folks have thrown their weight behind some bad reformy ideas like the Super Sardinemaster teaching model (fire all the bad teachers and jam all the students into class with the good ones). 

In her slide show, Roza gets one thing exactly right-- the Treasury Department hasn't yet issued the exact rules for the federal vouchers (Education Freedom Tax Credits), so there's a whole lot we don't yet know. 

What seems clear is that the mechanics of the federal vouchers (like all other vouchers) make it hard for public schools to get a piece of the funding stream. The donors hand money to the Scholarship Granting Organization, and the SGO hands the money to a famnily-- not the school. 

So the missing link is the means of having the families hand their money to a public school.

They aren't going to hand it over in the form of tuition, because it's a free public school. Roza suggests there are three "scenarios" under which the public school could get its hands on some of that money.

Scenario 1: Homeschool or private school students who purchase add-ons from the district. I'm not clear what that might involve; at least in Pennsylvania, most of those students are entitled to get extras from their district for free, including everything from advanced classes to extracurriculars like band and theater and sports. In this state, I'm pretty sure the public school couldn't charge an other-schooled student for anything that district students get for free.

Scenario 2: Disrtict students who sign up for "extras" like tutoring, summer programs, etc. Students could even choose "priced electives/clubs, e.g.financial literacy, robotics, possibly APs and VocEd, etc." I don't even know where to start with this. If some of these "extras" are being provided by third parties, klike a tutoring service, then the district doesn't get a penny. But if we are talking about a district that offers some parts of its academic program only for those who will pay for it, that's a crazypants model, a model that takes the "public" right out of public education. 

Especially given some of her examples: "Below grade-level students can opt in to extended yearservices, small group supports, homework help, etc." Are you behind in school? Maybe in danger of not graduating on time? Well, for just a few dollars more, you can get the rest of the education that we promised you!

But that's really just the warm-up for 

Scenario 3: Every district studentparticipates in a bundled set of“enhanced” services.

This is absolute dystopian bullshit, a literal use of the "subscription to unlock what ought to be regular features" model from the world of software. This image is taken straight from the slide:

""Go get us some of that free federal money," declares Imaginary School District, "or your kid will only have access to Public Education Basic, with none of the benefits of our Plus or Premium plans." Look at Roza's hypothetical list. AP classes? Full day K? Orientations!! Mental health!!! What the hell school district charges for that stuff? Surely she also meant to include lunches on her list. 

This is like airline pricing ("You can buy a ticket to fly on our plane, but if you would like to bring luggage or sit down or breathe our air, that will be extra!")

In her presentation, Roza suggested that this is all just a neat way to replace fund raisers. She also suggests that districts could require families to fill out a scholarship form as part of registration. She also recommends you do some arm-twisting of friends and relatives to make their contribution to the SGO that serves your kids. Which would seem to suggest a funding system that re-enforces the already-existing gap between wealthy and non-wealthy districts. Do you have lots of folks who can donate to your district's SGO? No? Well, it's Public Education Basic for you.

This sure seems like a recipe for creating a multi-tier school system, where options that ought to be part of the program become upsells. It's a proposal to lower the floor for what constitutes a minimal free public education down into the basement, with steps out of that basement on a strictly pay-to-play basis. But there's another downside.

This is also a recipe for putting local schools at the mercy of federal operators, because now a major revenue stream will flow through DC. That means federal leverage over local policy ("Get rid of those Naughty Books or you are cut off from federal voucher funds"). There is a certain genius in the federal vouchers in that should MAGA be swept out of office, the revenue flowing through this program will create pressure from even blue states to keep this right wing policy in place. 

The federal voucher program does not support school choice; it's a private school subsidy wrapped in a tax shelter. It's not meant to help public schools, and it won't, unless they are willing to bend themselves into a twisted fun-house mirror version of what a public school system is meant to be. 

Historian Adam Laats points out that this kind of public subsidy for private schools has a history of failure, And a zillion people have pointed out that this voucher, like all voucher's, is about the school's choice, not school choice (because your right to choose is not nearly as sacred as school operators' right to discriminate against any children for any reason). 

And maybe that's part of the point of these various attempts to sell the idea that this will be a subsidy for public schools as well as private schools. Except, of course, if the federal government really wanted to subsidize public schools, they could just do it or, at the very least, stop trying to slash the meager amount of funding that they do provide, instead of sending the money to public schools via this long, twisty path. Honestly, this whole "federal vouchers will benefit public schools" argument is the kind of convoluted baloney that only a thinky tank wizard or a government bureaucrat could love. Which, unfortunately, doesn't mean it won't work. 

The Case Against Cheating (And AI)

As schools and teachers have tried to pressure their students to stay away from AI use, they have recapitulated many of the same old arguments against cheating in its traditional forms. 

We English teachers have railed against shortcuts since CliffsNotes first reared their "study guide" heads back in 1958. Then the internet begat SparkNotes and its ilk. And it was always a mistake to frame the argument as some sort of moral or ethical issue. "You're a bad person if you cheat on this assignment," is not a useful message for young humans for many reasons, not the least of which is that they hear variations on "You're a bad person if..." a lot.

As it turns out, the best arguments against old school cheating are equally valid against new school high tech cheating, or just plain AI "augmentation."

Anything worth doing is worth doing yourself

"I would really like to kiss this highly engaging and exciting human being in front of me, so I am going to get someone else to do it and tell me what it was like," said nobody, ever.

You get the most out of life's experiences by, you know, experiencing them. You could sit in a cave somewhere and let your tech feed you a regular summary of what is going on outside, but what would be the point? You find your best self, you learn how to be fully human in the world, by being in the world. 

Too many adults, and far too many adults who work in schools, feed the narrative that students are in some sort of holding pattern, that their real lives in the real world will start further down the road. That's just not true. Your life is going on right now, even if you are not yet an adult. So experience it first hand. And yes, that includes the work that you've been given to do in school. 

Of course, "anything worth doing" is doing some heavy lifting here. That part falls on the teachers. It's part of their job to make sure they are bringing students together with things that are, in fact, worth doing; then they have the task of making the "worth doing" case to students. 

Lying is corrosive

Everyone has seen the memo explaining that lying is wrong. But it's also important to understand that lying is corrosive and self-damaging. And it's nearly impossible to cheat without lying. And lying is corrosive.

Lying builds barriers in relationships; in particular, it ruins trust, and without trust as a foundation, it is difficult to build or sustain any sort of relationship with other human beings. Lying creates a brutal sort of isolation, in which you alone are the only person who knows the truth of your own story. That kind of isolation is the usual root of the whole existential angst thing anyway, but to add the barriers that come with lying just makes it so much worse. 

As I told my students a gazillion times, life is too short to put your name to a lie.

Protect your brain

You do not build muscles by hiring someone else to lift weights in your name. Students are developing their minds, strengthening their brains. There is a natural tendency to draw back from the friction and pain involved, but that's how you build things.

Your brain is the toolbox that will hold every tool you'll need to make your way through the world, both personally and professionally. The more, better tools you collect, the more choices you will have in life. We know that offloading cognitive work to AI is not good for people. It's not good for adults and degrades the tools in their mental toolboxes, but for young humans who are supposed to be accumulating those tools the effects could be even worse-- the absence of necessary tools as they enter the adult world.

It is becoming increasingly clear that AI is not for amateurs, that it is only useful for people who are already knowledgeable about the field in question. Students are not those people. 

You are going to need your brain your whole life, and your school years are the chance to pack it with as many bits of knowledge and skill you can get your mental mitts on. Do not use AI to shortchange that process.

This requires the kind of long term thinking that young humans does not always come easily to young humans. But we adults have to keep reminding them that the work is not to generate an assignment that you can hand in tomorrow, but to wrestle with the work in ways that will help them accumulate the knowledge and skills that will help them move through the world. Speedruns and shortcuts will not help with that. 

Don't avoid cheating or cutting corners or just getting a little extra help because it's Very Naughty. Avoid all of these with either AI or old school methods, because they get in the way of the work of building your self and your life. That should your measure in all things-- is this a tool for helping you grow and live, or a means of avoiding engaging with growth and life? Don't choose the latter.