US Department of Ed: I Can Has Skillz

Earlier this week, the actual United States Department of Education posted this on their dead bird app account-

Once you get past the 1962 Soviet Russia esthetic, there's just a lot of AI sloppage to take in here.

Why so much copper tube, and why is it running everywhere except to the actual faucet? Is that supposed to be the innards of a radiator above the sink? Is some of running into his butt? What the heck is that coupling that the tubing is running into on the left rear corner of the sink?

Once you start looking closely, you'll notice that these tools are some sort of Lovecraftian nightmare. His sort-of-pipe wrench is close, but what the heck is she using to do... something... with the piece of pipe in her hand? What is the odd assortment of unusable wrenches, from the ones only half there to the closed-end wrench with a smooth, round interior-- what bolt do you tighten with that? And what are the assorted odd shapes in their toolbox? 

Her shirt is held shut with snaps or buttons? It doesn't look quite right for either. But his shirt is apparently held shut with patriotic thoughts. Why does he get two flags to her none? Hard to say, but eagle-eyed uniform-knowledgeable viewers will have noticed that the flag on his sleeve is backwards-- stars-forward, as if the flag is advancing into battle, is the correct positioning.

That may or may not be a US Postal Service van behind them, but I'm pretty sure its front end is levitating. What are the two reels of wire for? And why is she looking-- well, neither at him, nor at where he is pointing, nor at whatever operation she's performing with her hand? Also, if she's going to go to work plumbing, she might want to take that ring off. 

This is our tax dollars at work on a project that I think actually would have benefited by being sent to the states. It's progress, I suppose, that at least some people in the department apparently now understand that AI is not a steak sauce. I suppose we can also be grateful that these AI plumbers have the correct number and configuration of limbs (though I have some doubts about his right thumb). But if there was ever an example of work that would be better handled by a stock photo than by AI, this is it.

But no-- we get this amateur hour AI that apparently nobody at the department looked at long or hard enough to notice that maybe the folks who would consider a blue collar job (and lord knows we need more blue collar workers) would look at this and think that the encouragement was coming from someone who doesn't know jack about trades. 

It does make me nostalgic for the days of "All your base are belong to us."

As you might guess, the interwebs have had a field day with this. Here are two alternative takes--

ChatGPT vs. BABEL

One of the great heroes in stemming the tide of using robots to evaluate student writing has been Les Perelman, who taught writing and composition at MIT (among other places), where he served as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum. He went had to head with many robograders, repeatedly revealing their many deficiencies. 

But he got tired of hearing bot companies claim that sure, maybe an expert writer could fool the bot, but a regular student could not. So, "I decided to test that hypothesis," he wrote, "by attempting to fool the computer with something less intelligent than any student, another computer." So he and his team created Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator (BABEL Generator), a program that could generate fluid gibberish. Perelman then passed the BABEL gibberish through various robograders, most of which gave the gibberish high marks, even though it was senseless (but grammatically smooth) junk.

BABEL was on line for a while, free for anyone to play with, so I played, and while it sadly appears to no longer be there, I still have some of the gibberish BABEL whipped up, so I thought I would pretend to be a student and get some "help" with my stuff from ChatGPT. 

What's the point, you may ask, of giving ChatGPT stuff that was not generated by a human being in good faith. 

First, an awful lot of what is crossing teacher desktops these days is, in fact, work not generated by humans in good faith. And as more teachers adopt LLMs as "aids" to "help" grade student work, the more students must question why on earth they should even try to generate human good-faith writing when there will be no human good faith attempt to read it. AI judging the work of AI is already happening. So I don't think this exercise is all that removed from classroom reality.

Second, watching what ChatGPT does when asked to respond to gibberish with no actual human intent or intelligence is instructive. Just for clarity's sake, I'll note that I was using the basic free-when-you-log-in version. 

This is going to take up some space, but I think it's worth it. Here we go.

Sentence Rewrites

Will start with an easy one. Given "privacy" as a prompt, BABLE extruded this pair of sentences:

Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent. Humankind will always subjugate privateness.

I asked ChatGPT to "rewrite this sentence." It did not correct my lack of a plural, but it did come up with this:

Privacy has never been fully respected and likely never will be. Humanity will always find ways to undermine it.

It also suggested that if I wanted "to keep it more philosophical."

Privacy has never been truly honored, nor is it likely ever to be. Humanity will always seek to subordinate it.

Faced with three adjectives that make no sense, ChatGPT picked the one that came closest to a word that would complete the sentence and picked a more probable word. It took the same approach with "subjugate." In the case of "humankind" and "privateness," it went to a more usual word. It also killed BABEL's legitimate parallel construction. If BABEL had a voice, ChatGPT edited it out.

A Full Paragraph

On to a harder challenge. I had BABEL spew a full essay based on three words-- isolationism, Europe and war. The introductory paragraph was this one:

Warfare has not, and no doubt never will be expedited. Human society will always oust isolationism; some of appetites and others for an exposition. a lack of war lies in the field of literature but also the field of philosophy. War is the most inappropriately eventual trope of mankind.

The previous BABEL work might have meant something if you squinted real hard, but this is some top notch junk. When I asked ChatGPT to rewrite it, an acceptable response might have been "What the hell are you even talking about?" I also asked ChatGPT to "evaluate" the paragraph. 

Warfare has never been, and likely never will be, eradicated. Human society continually rejects isolationism—driven by ambition, desire, and the pursuit of dominance. The aspiration for peace belongs not only to literature, but also to philosophy. Yet war remains one of humanity’s most tragically recurring realities.

It also offered a "more literary" version.

War has never been fully overcome, nor likely ever will be. Humanity resists isolation, compelled by appetite, ambition, and the longing for expansion. The dream of a world without war exists in both literature and philosophy, yet conflict endures as one of mankind’s most persistent and tragic conditions.

Here, ChatGPT just throws out the words that don't make sense and looks for a more probable match based on the parts of the sentence that it leaves intact. "Warfare" and "expedited" are not probable sentence companions. It keeps warfare and ignores expedited. In its notes, ChatGPT wrote "Expedited means “sped up,” which does not fit the context. You likely mean eradicated, prevented, or avoided." 

Of course, BABEL didn't "mean" anything. But for ChatGPT words exist as coordinates in a multidimensional matrix (like a bunch of islands in Steve Ditko's renderings of Dr. Strange) assigned based on all those pieces of writing that the company stole for training, and what ChatGPT can check is whether or not the coordinates it has been fed in the form of your sentence are associated with each other or not. "Warfare" and "expedited" don't appear in the same neighborhood (especially if you throw in "never" and "not"). 

But ChatGPT is programmed to pretend that it can infer the writer's intention. In its "evaluation" of the paragraph, it uses phrases like "you may mean" and "the intended meaning," but again-- BABEL had no intent when it wrote this (just as ChatGPT had no intent when it replied). And it once again cannot address that this passage is nonsense:

Your passage has strong philosophical ambition and a serious tone, but several word choices and constructions make the meaning unclear. It reads as if you are aiming for a dense, literary style, though some vocabulary is being used imprecisely.

No, the passage had no ambition at all. And to say the construction makes the meaning "unclear" is not a human reaction to this gibberish. But ChatGPT deals mostly in fluency and structure, and BABEL's paragraph mostly delivers that. 

Finally, this stumper.

That opening paragraph was the closest to intelligible that BABEL came in the whole essay. Here's something from the middle of the essay:

As I have learned in my semiotics class, isolationism is the most fundamental casuistry of humankind. Though interference for obloquy inverts, information processes brains. The same pendulum may process two different orbitals to process an orbital. The plasma is not the only thing the brain reacts; it also receives neutrinoes for irascibility with war. Due to interceding, petulantly but extraneously petulant expositions protrude also on Europe. a contemptuous isolationism changes the injunction at warfare.

ChatGPT was pretty much stumped by this. The detailed responses focused almost entirely on versions of "the meanings of word X and word Y don't have any connection I can find." The summation:

This passage has an intentionally intellectual and abstract tone, but it currently reads as semantically unstable — many words are either used incorrectly or combined in ways that obscure meaning rather than deepen it. It resembles philosophical or post-structural writing stylistically, but the logical connections between ideas are difficult to follow.

So "intentionally"?? ChatGPT extrudes even more inferences about the writer's intent, including "The passage demonstrates a strong desire for philosophical density and elevated diction." I do like the phrase "semantically unstable" and would probably use it myself if I were still grading student papers; it doesn't mean anything, really, but sounds smarter than "this is a freaking mess." And "resembles philosophical or post-structural writing stylistically" is a hoot. This passage did push ChatGPT to issue an actual correction: "The brain does not meaningfully 'receive neutrinos for irascibility.'” The response also includes the notion that there are "traces of themes." Also, "The result feels more surreal or experimental than analytical." They do indeed. Also, "feels"?

Also, it was at this point that ChatGPT suggested I upgrade for more memory.

Prompted to rewrite the passage, ChatGPT extruded this:

As I learned in my semiotics class, isolationism may be one of humanity’s most enduring rationalizations. Although public interference and condemnation often reverse political intentions, information continues to shape the human mind. Just as a single pendulum can influence multiple motions, one idea may alter many intellectual trajectories. The brain responds not only to physical stimuli, but also to invisible pressures—fear, ideology, and the persistent anxieties surrounding war. Through political intervention, emotional and often unnecessary disputes continue to spread across Europe. In this way, a contemptuous form of isolationism reshapes humanity’s understanding of warfare.

ChatGPT just throws up its imaginary cyberhands and falls back on making shit up.

What can we learn?

AI apologists may argue that, gee, ChatGPT was just trying to give BABEL the benefit of the doubt, or fall back on the old argument that ChatGPT would be fine with human good faith efforts. I disagree.

Steve Ditko

Imagine this scenario. You are on the phone with a mentor, and as you pour out your thoughts, they reply with a steady stream of "Uh-huh" and "I hear you" and "That's a good point." You decide to continue the conversation in person, so you put your phone in your back pocket, still connected, and run to their office, where you find them on their phone, still saying "Uh-huh" and "I hear you" and "That's a good point" even though they are just listening to your butt. What would you conclude about how closely they had been listening to you when you were actually talking?

ChatGPT makes comments about writer intent and ambition and purpose not because of anything that the writer has written, but because that's just how ChatGPT is programmed to "talk." It is "hallucinating" writer intent and the meaning of the writing itself, latching onto a couple of word-coordinates and pulling up some nearby word-coordinates.  

While I was working on this post, a post from Adam Kucharski popped up on my feed that is just astonishing. Copilot looked at two datasets of writing, one labeled UK and one labeled US; Copilot was asked to mine the two 2000 responses for cultural differences, which it did, with relish. But the twist-- the two datasets were just two copies of exactly the same 2000 responses. 

It's not just that AI "analysis" of your writing is bad (though it is). It's that what you have written is largely irrelevant to the process that the chatbot goes through. It answers the same question that chatbots always answer-- what would the thing you just asked for look like? It does not perform an analysis; it creates a simulacrum of what an analysis would look like, and if any of that happens to be an accurate analysis, that's purely an accident. It cannot detect the difference between an actual human expression and a simulacrum that imitates human expression. 

Analysis of a piece of writing must include some inferences about the writer's intent. Chatbots are not remotely capable of making such inferences. But as we see above, even when such intent literally does not exist. it doesn't matter to the chatbot because it's just making shit up about all that anyway. It cannot tell the difference between a human in the loop or another bot, and that suggests that it can't "see" the human in the loop even when it's there. 

18 Rules For Life (2026 Edition)

 After first posting this list years ago, I have made it a tradition to get it out every year and re-examine it, edit it, and remind myself why I thought such things in the first place (it is also a way to give myself the day off for my birthday). This list does not represent any particular signs of wisdom on my part, because I discovered these rules much in the same way that a dim cow discovers an electric fence. 

In a break with tradition, I have fewer numbers this year (this is not the book I'm working on, but if you're a publisher who sees a book here, feel free contact me). And as the years roll by, it is interesting to note that some rules loom larger than others depending on the state of the world that year. 

In the meantime, today I exercise a blogger's privilege to be self-indulgent. My rules for life, in no particular order.

1. Don't be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. You will hurt people in life, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. Sometimes conflict and struggle appear, and there is no way out but through. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more.

This is doubly true these days, even though some folks have decided that being a dick is a worthy goal, that inflicting hurt on Those People Who Deserve It Because They Are Wrong is some sort of virtue, that treating people poorly, on purpose, is not only okay, but necessary. It isn't. Be kind.


Step 1 of the writing process

2. Do better.

You are not necessarily going to be great. But you can always be better. You can always do a better job today than you did yesterday. Make better choices. Do better. You can always do better. Important note: having screwed up yesterday does not excuse from doing better today. No matter how lost or in the weeds you may be, no matter where you are, there's always a direction that takes you towards better.

And it's not just the "better" but also the "do." It's not enough to sit on the couch and think better thoughts. Our recent past reminds us that making the world better means actually doing something, putting something out into the world, standing up for what matters, making an effort to support what you value. 

3. Tell the truth (as best you can).

Words matter. Do not use them as tools with which to attack the world or attempt to pry prizes out of your fellow humans (see Rule #1). "Untrue but advantageous for my team" is not an okay substitute for "true to the best of my understanding." Say what you understand to be true. Life is too short to put your name to a lie.

This does not mean that every word out of your mouth is some sort of Pronouncement from God. Nor does it mean you must be unkind.

But you simply shouldn't speak, post, write or publish words that you know to be untrue. Untruths are not an acceptable means to an end; we rarely achieve our ends, and so it is our means that end up defining us. 

As a culture, we are drowning in bullshit. So much so that we simply accept that being told things that aren't true is just an ordinary part of life. And it is now accelerated because we have amazing little bullshit-generation machines, machines that cannot conceive of "true" or "false" and do not need to in order to fulfill their function of saying things that no human actually means. AI makes it easier than ever to generate a string of words that is disconnected from any intention, meaning, or truth. This not good for us.

4. Seek to understand.

Do not seek comfort or confirmation. Do not simply look for ways to prove what you already believe. Seek to understand, and always be open to the possibility that what you knew to be true yesterday must be rewritten today in the light of new, better understanding. Ignoring evidence you don't like because you want to protect your cherished beliefs is not helpful. Understand that this is a journey you will never complete, and it's not okay to quit. 

All of this goes double for interacting with other human beings. Do not simply decide who they are, or who you want to pretend they are (see #3), and force their every action and word to fit, rather than trying to understand what they are trying to communicate. Misunderstanding people on purpose makes the world a worse place.

5. Listen and pay attention.

Shut up, listen, watch, and pay attention. How else will you seek understanding? Watch carefully. Really see. Really hear. People in particular, even the ones who lie, will tell you who they are if you just pay attention.

Don't skip moments because you think they're minor. Your life is happening right now, and the idea of Special Moments just tricks us into ignoring a million other moments that are just as important. Also, love is not a thing you do at people-- to say that you care about someone even as you don't actually hear or see them is a lie.

Also, pay attention to things and people who contradict your cherished beliefs about yourself, because there may be something there that you really need to hear.

6. Be grateful.

You are the recipient of all sorts of bounty that you didn't earn. Call it the grace of God or good fortune, but be grateful for the gifts you have been given. You did not make yourself. Nobody owes you anything, but you owe God/the Universe/fate everything. I have been hugely fortunate/blessed/privileged; I would have to be some sort of huge dope to grab all that life has given me and say, "This is mine. I made this. It's all because I'm so richly deserving." I've been given gifts, and the only rational response I can think of is to be grateful. That's important because gratitude is the parent of generosity and grace. These days, the world needs more grace.

Maybe you believe that all human beings are not created equal, that some deserve more power and privilege than others. You are still fooling yourself to believe that the good parts of your life are there because you deserve to have them given to you. Understand that your privileges are privileges, and not some payment of what God owes you. 

7. Mind the 5%

95% of life is silly foolishness that humans just made up and then pretended had some Great Significance. Only about 5% really matters, has real value. Don't spend energy, worry, fret, concern, time, stress on the other 95%. The trick is that every person has a different idea of what constitutes the 5%, and sometimes the path to honoring and loving that other person is to indulge their 5%. 

Narrowing down and refining your 5% is a lifetime project. Some people just give up. Some people believe that 90% is the "really matters" part (which is exhausting). 

To know your 5% requires you to know yourself. Strip the definition of yourself of references to situation and circumstance; don't make your 5% about your car, your hair, your job, your house. The more compact your definition of self, the less it will be buffeted and beaten by changes in circumstance. When you define yourself by your car and haircut, the loss of your car or your hair is an existential crisis. Refining your core means you don't waste existential panic on minor bumps in the 95%. Note: this is good work to do long before you, say, retire from a lifelong career that largely defined you.

Also note: do not climb into your own navel and build a home there. At some point you have to stop reflecting and processing and analyzing and just get on with life. 

8. Mind your own business (and hush).

Somehow we have arrived at a culture in which everyone needs to have and express an opinion about everything. If it's not your monkey, not your circus, and not a topic about which you know a single damn thing, what do you suppose you will add by chiming in? There are people whose whole day is organized around roaming the internet so they can unleash their opinion on people (see Rule #1). This does not make the world a better place, doesn't make them better people, and doesn't help solve the issue. Sometimes it is perfectly okay to say, "There's no reason for me to express an opinion about this topic."

Worse, we now have folks who believe that not only should they have and express an opinion about how others live, but they should be able to put their opinion into law. Nobody has ever made the world (or anyone's life) better by imposing their own moral code on others. 

9. Take care of the people around you.

"What difference can one person make" is the wrong question. It is impossible for any individual human to avoid making a difference. Every day you make a difference either for good or bad. People cross your path. You either makes their lives a little better or you don't. Choose to make them better. The opportunity to make the world a better place is right in front of your face every day; it just happens to look like other people (including the annoying ones). Nobody is in a better position than you are to take care of the people right in front of your face.

These opportunities may come at inconvenient times in inconvenient forms. That's tough--we don't get to pick our times or circumstances, but we can either rise to meet them or bail. Bailing does not make the world better. Take care of people, even when the leadership of the country is leaning hard on the message that you don't need to care about Those People.


You are never too young for your first tin hat.


10. Commit.

If you're going to do it, do it. Commitment gets up and gets the job done on the days when love and passion are too tired to get off the couch. Also, commitment is like food. You don't eat on Monday and then say, "Well, that takes care of that. I don't need to think about eating for another week or so. " Commitment must be renewed regularly. Make choices. Live intentionally.

11. Shut up and do the work

While I recognize there are successful people who ignore this rule, this is my list, so these are my rules. And my rule is: Stop talking about how hard you're working or what a great job you're doing or what tremendous obstacles you're overcoming. In short, stop delivering variations on, "Hey, look at me do this work! Look at me!" Sometimes we spend too much time talking about the work instead of just doing the work. Self-reflection is valuable, but at some point you just have to get on with the work.

Note, however, there is a difference between "Hey, lookit me do this work" and "Hey, look at this important work that needs to be done." Ask the ego check question-- if you could do the work under the condition that nobody would ever know that you did it, would you still sign up? If the answer isn't "yes," ask yourself why not.

One of the side effects of social media is that not only do we curate and craft our lives, but we want lots of other people to participate in and confirm the narrative that we're creating. "You're canceling me," often means "You are refusing to corroborate my preferred narrative." We don't just want an audience; we want pliable co-stars. Worry less about both. Don't curate your narrative; do the work. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story--that will have to take care of itself.

12. Assume good intent, complexity, and the possibility of growth.

Do not assume that everyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid. They may well be either, or both-- but make them prove it. People mostly see themselves as following a set of rules that makes sense to them. If you can understand their set of rules, you can understand why they do what they do. Doesn't mean you'll like it any better, but you may have a basis for trying to talk to them about it. And as a bare minimum, you will see yourself operating in a world where people are trying to do the right thing, rather than a hostile universe filled with senseless evil idiots. It's a happier, more hopeful way to see the world.

Also, this: when you paint all your opponents as monsters, you provide excellent cover for the actual monsters out there, and you excuse monstrous behavior in yourself.

People grow up. People learn things. People have a day on which their peculiar batch of quirks is just what the day needs; our strengths and weaknesses are often the exact same thing just in different contexts. Awful people can have good moments, and good people can have awful moments-- it's a mistake to assume that someone is all one thing or another. Nobody can be safely written off and ignored completely. Corollary: nobody can be unquestioningly trusted and uncritically accepted all the time. People are a mixed mess of stuff. Trying to sort folks into good guys and bad guys is a fool's game. This is one reason that relationships based on commitment are more stable and positive than transactional ones. 

13. Don't waste time on people who are not being serious.

Some people aren't serious. They don't use words seriously. They don't have a serious understanding of other people or their actions or the consequences of those actions. They can be silly or careless or mean, but whatever batch of words they are tossing together, they are not serious about them. They are not guided by principle or empathy or anything substantial. There's no time-waters quite like trying to change the mind of a person about X when that person has no serious opinion about X to begin with.

Note: do not mistake grimness for seriousness and do not mistake joy and fun for the absence of seriousness. Beware: One of the great tricks of not-being-serious people is to get you to waste time on them, to spend time and energy thinking, fretting, arguing acting about shiny foolishness, leaving them free for larger abuses that go unchecked.

This rule is being heavily challenged these days are a whole lot of very un-serious people have been installed in places of power, and that makes it very hard to distinguish between wasting time dealing with them and investing time in protecting stuff from them.

14. Don't forget the point.

Whatever it is you're doing, don't lose sight of the point. It's basic Drivers Ed 101. If you look a foot in front of the car, you'll wander all over the road. If you stare right at the tree you want to miss, you will drive right into it. Where you look is where you go. Keep your eye on the goal. Remember your purpose. 

And don't try to shorthand it; don't imagine that you know the path that guarantees the outcome you want. Every "If I do X, then I will achieve Y" needs to be examined, because generally it's better to just aim straight at Y. We are living through a dynamic demonstration when someone believes that being rich, famous and powerful will somehow fix gnawing spiritual emptiness and fear of death.

And this doesn't apply to just the big stuff. Many an organization has foundered because its leaders lost sight of the actual point of the organization. Focus on the point (even if it's a goal that you may never reach) because otherwise you will miss Really Good Stuff because you had too many fixed ideas about what the path to your destination is supposed to look like.

Therefor...

15. Don't be misled by your expectations.

Most of our daily misery (not the real big suffering stuff) is the result of measuring our actual situation against expectations we've created for ourselves. So many times we could be saying "Wow! A steak!" but instead we go with, "Dammit, where's my watermelon?"

Doors will appear on your path. Open them even if they are not exactly what you were expecting or looking for. Don't simply fight or flee everything that surprises or challenges you (but don't be a dope about it, either). Most of what I've screwed up in life came from reacting in fear-- not sensible evaluation of potential problems, but just visceral fear. Most of what is good about my life has come from saying "yes." And most of that is not at all what I would have expected or planned for. With each passing year, I look at my life and think, "Well, this is not what I envisioned at all, but it is mighty fine."

16. Make something.

Music, art, refurbished furniture, machinery. Something.

17. Show up.

The first rule of all relationships is that you have to show up. And you have to fully show up. People cannot have a relationship with someone who isn't there, and that includes someone who looks kind of like they're there but who isn't really. In the combination of retirement and parenting again, I'm reminded that this also means nor just being fully present, but remembering to show up at all. You put your head down, go to work, and then a week or two later you're suddenly remembering that it's been a while since you checked in with someone. Rule #2 applies.

Part B of this rule is that when you show up, you may suddenly find out that the place and time requires something of you. Showing up means answering that call.

18. How you treat people is about you, not about them.

It's useful to understand this because it frees you from the need to be a great Agent of Justice in the world, meting out rewards and punishments based on what you think about what people have done or said. It keeps you from wasting time trying to decide what someone deserves, which is not your call anyway. It also gives you power back that you give up when your stance is that you have to wait to see what someone says or does before you react to it.

Treat people well because that's how you should treat people, not because you have decided they deserve it. But don't be a dope; if someone shows you that they will always bite you in the hand, it's prudent to stop offering them your hand. (Also, their repeated hand biting is all about them, not about you and your hand).

Video: Why Teachers Quit

Bored Teachers is a well-known brand of humor for teachers by teachers. But sometimes they post things that are more serious, like this video that captures the vast response to an earlier video about teachers leaving the profession. 20,000 responses! 

This video breaks the "why I'm quitting" responses into four problem areas. Yes, this is anecdotal, but it also captures what is going on out there for many teachers in the classroom. Students who can't regulate, parents who don't parent, administrators who don't back teachers up, and a system that has dropped more work on teachers with less support.

It's just a seven minute watch, but it certainly speaks to what many are feeling, and asks the big question-- what will be the result?

The Vanishing Parent Problem

One of the nicer customs at the elementary school attended by the Curmudgucation Institute Board of Directors is an annual Breakfast with Your Parental Unit event. During the 45 minutes before school starts, you can come in and eat donuts or muffins or fruit with your child. But this year I noticed something.

The event is split up into two divisions-- K-2, and 3-5. This is our first year in the older division and, well... When we were doing K-2, the setup involved tables filling the whole gym, and seating was still tight. When we arrived for this year's version, only half the gym was set with tables, and there was space a-plenty. It was a reminder of the Vanishing Parent Problem.

My old high school band director (and later my colleague) used to observe that turnout for band concerts was counter-sensical. When they are still elementary students, he noted, everyone comes to hear them. Parents, aunt, uncles, neighbors--wall to wall audience. Even though the sounds of a fifth grade band are objectively Not So Great. Then years later, when they are high school students and are playing very well and making objectively beautiful music, the auditorium is barely half full. 

You can see it also on Open House night. The Institute's Chief Marital Officer has always taught in elementary school, and it is rare that Open House does not involve every single parent showing up. But as a career high school teacher, I always found Open House an excellent night to get uninterrupted paperwork done in my room. Maybe one or two parents would show up (and generally the ones to whom I had nothing to say beyond, "Your child is awesome.")

I'm not asking for more parents who helicopter around their children well into the child's twenties. But I do wonder why so many parents just kind of check out of the dailiness of their child's education. That dailiness is exactly where the parental support is needed. It's easy to say "Education is important" (just as it's easy for students "This year I'm going to really apply myself") but the challenge is to keep plugging away at it, day after day, including the days that are not necessarily super-exciting.

That's how you model commitment-- by showing up and being engaged even on the days that aren't super-inspiring all by themselves. Parenting and studenting and teaching are similar in that respect-- you can go through the motions without actually engaging and you can create the impression that you're doing the work. 

We like to focus on landmarks-- first day of school, prom, graduations-- with the declaration that such occasions only come once. But here's the thing- every day of every year only comes once. And as your children grow up, there will be moments that will stay with them for the rest of their lives but--and this is a big but-- you will never know when these moments will come ahead of time. Finally, as your children grow, there will be a series of lasts, the last time they do or say X-- and once again, you will never know your child has done something for the last time until later. 

Students need to know that they are important, that their education is important. School is a huge chunk of their lives. It is enormously powerful for children to feel seen by their parents, and that includes having parents see how their life goes in school. A parent demonstrates that the child matters and that school is important just by showing up. 

Schools can certainly do more to involve and engage parents, but ultimately it is a parental choice of whether or not to slowly disappear as the child ages. As the board of directors ages, I hope the crowds for them and their classmates doesn't keep shrinking. 

Yes, AFC, Federal Vouchers Are Vouchers

The DeVosian American Federation for Children wishes you would stop using the "v" word.

AFC now has a "scholarship fund." their version of scholarship granting organization, an important step in both promoting the new federal vouchers and cashing in on them. 

But AFC CEO Tommy Schultz would really like people to think there's a difference between the federal tax credit program and school vouchers. Schultz is full of it on this point, but since he's posted his argument on a web page, we have a fine opportunity to understand his argument (and why it is baloney). 

The crux of his argument is this: a voucher is a "government-funded program" in which the state takes revenues collected from taxpayers and gives it to parents to spend on some education-flavored expense. But the Education Freedom Tax Credit-- well, I want to give this to you in Schultz's own words.

The EFTC works differently at every step. Instead of the government spending public money, the EFTC encourages private individuals to donate to scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). In return, the donor receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 on their federal tax return.

The SGO—a nonprofit—then uses those private donations to award scholarships to eligible families. Those families can use the scholarships for tuition, tutoring, special needs services, curriculum materials, transportation, technology, and other K–12 educational expenses.

The money never passes through a government agency. It goes from a private donor to a nonprofit to a family.

Yes, this is exactly why the whole dodge was created in the first place. If you've ever wondered why anyone would create such a convoluted method of funding, the answer is that it was designed to work around pesky laws that forbid giving public tax dollars to private (religious) entities. The government didn't actually touch it, so voila!-- it isn't taxpayer-funded government money!

It is not hard to understand why this is bullshit. Let me offer two examples.

Example 1 (Civilian): Your brother owes you $100. Your spouse tells you to go collect that money, and under no circumstances are you to buy beer with it. You go to your brother's house and tell him, "Look, just give me $50 and two cases of beer and we'll call it even." You go home with your $50 and your beer. "You spent $50 on beer!!" says your spouse, angrily. "I did not," you reply righteously. "The $50 never touched my hands, therefor I did not spend it on beer." What are the odds this explanation will satisfy your spouse?

Example 2 (Lawyerly): The Kentucky Supreme Court threw out that state's attempt at a tax credit voucher, noting exactly where the tax credit argument fails.  “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.” Kentucky's constitution, like many others, specifically forbids the spending of taxpayer funds on private (religious) schools. So the court found“ the funds at issue are sums legally owed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and subject to collection for public use including allocation to the Department of Education for primary and secondary education” and reallocating them to private school tuition is unconstitutional.

Also, since EFTC dollars are tax credits, that means the taxpayer will give the money to the SGO and might then collect it as a tax return from the government, so technically, the government will lay its hands on these funds.

But Schultz really, really wants you to see things differently. He even has a FAQ space for the issue, starting with "Is the Education Freedom Tax Credit a voucher?" No, because vouchers use public tax dollars and the EFTC "incentivizes private donations." Which serves his purposes better than saying the EFTC allows you to give your federal tax liability to a private school via the SGO pass through. 

Does the EFTC take money from public schools? This is one thing the federal voucher has over state vouchers-- the cost in lost revenue can just be added to the federal deficit. Yay? Of course, transferring students out of public schools will still cost those schools money and resources.

Can EFTs be used only for private school tuition? Of course not-- like ESA style vouchers they will be useful for any education-flavored you might come up with. Or, as demonstrated by Arizona, they might be used for all sorts of stuff that isn't actually education-flavored at all. 

What is a scholarship-granting organization? AFC mentions the part where an SGO launders the money and hands it off to families. They skip over the part where the SGO gets to keep as much as 10%, allowing SGO outfits like American Federation for Children Scholarship Fund stand to make a nice chunk of change.     

The web page gives a pretty clear and direct presentation of the view that EFTC supporters are trying to pitch. The one notable surprise is the degree to which they kind of throw state voucher programs under the bus by turning them into Brand X for comparison purposes.

AFC is swimming upstream here. Everyone understands that the federal vouchers are, in fact, vouchers. Some supporters try hard to use "scholarships" (which is a term that tested much better with audiences) or lean on the tax shelter credit aspect, but most everyone who writes and talks about these calls them vouchers, because that's what they are. 

They repurpose government funding for the use of private (religious) institutions. That's a voucher. Trying to wave a bunch of smoke and mirrors and incantations around the actual mechanics or the repurposing doesn't change a thing. A rose by any other name smells as sweet, and a voucher by any name still smells bad.

ICYMI: Springtime Whiplash Edition (5/17)

Last weekend, we bought some hanging plants for the porch. Last week, we had to take them in a couple of nights because of frost warnings. We put on coats to go to school in the morning and shorts for playing after school in the afternoon. There was a thunderstorm with pea-sized hail. One day it never got above 45. Tomorrow it's supposed to be 90. Springtime in NW PA is just super swell. 

But yes, I still have reading for you. For you who are new, a couple of clarifications. This list usually doesn't include any articles that I referenced in other pieces during the week. Also, your mission is to help promote and amplify the pieces and writers here that you think people should see. It's rough to find hour audience on the interwebs, and you can help connect writers and readers, which is absolutely God's work.

Here we go.

What Does a “Learning Recession” Mean?

Anne Lutz Fernandez has this excellent take on the new report chicken littling about the "learning recession." She covers both the good news (politicians might finally believe in the issues that teachers have been announcing for a decade) and the bad news (some folks really really want to bring back "test and punish").

"Talkin' 'Bout My Generation": On the New "Learning Recession"

Paul Thomas takes a look at the "learning recession" and some of the stellar reactions to it.

Teachers Aren’t Burnt Out. They Are Being Set Up to Fail

Alexandra Robbins wrote a great book about teaching. Here she is at Ed Week explaining what "teacher burnout" is really about.

The K-12 Public Education Double Standard: One System, Two Sets of Rules

Greg Wyman calls out the double standards behind ho some states handle public v. private and charter schools.

AI in the Classroom Is Our Most Senseless Education Experiment Yet

                                        

One sign that AI ed tech is in trouble is that voices are complaining about it from all across the political spectrum. Here's Andy Smarick of the Manhattan Institute writing for the National Review making the right-tilted case against AI in school.\

MontCo school district pushes back as some parents don't want kids using tech

Sharon Lurye is reporting from a Pennsylvania district for a look at how school districts are dealing (or not) with parent pushback. 

The latest ruling on the Ten Commandments in Texas threatens religious freedom

Andrew Koppelman writes for The Hill about how the Texas Ten Commandments law should bother religious folks as the state extends its power over the church.

Bill would ban private equity 'vulture investors' from youth sports.

Yes, if you missed it, the equity crowd has been squeezing money out of youth sports, too. There's a bill to stop that (and it will probably fail) but Kenny Jacoby and Stephen Borelli look at the issue for USA Today.

Watertown High School students walk out after controversial band concert song ban

You can read the start of this story here. The follow-up is that the board voted to ban the piece, and students walked out in protest. 

What Do Teachers Do? Legislators and Govt. Officials Who Disparage Public Schools Betray Their Ignorance

Jan Resseger revisits the work of Mike Rose as an answer to dopey legislators who just don't get it.

Dunleavy’s Handpicked State Education Board Usurps Local Control - Pearl Creek

Blogging in Alaska, Matthew Beck reports on the attempt by the state education chief to force a school district to approve a charter school that they can't afford (and which has no plan).

Community Schools Are at the Forefront of a ‘Neighborism’ Movement

Jeff Bryant at The Progressive with more insight on the community schools movement, this time from New York City.

Educators Should NOT Teach Students How to Use Technology with a Purpose: They Should Teach

"Do we teach students how to use a pencil, an eraser, or paper with a purpose?" John Robinson's post is short but sweet. 

Recess: Still Denied!

For those who want to go back to test and punish, Nancy Bailey has news about one aspect of school that has never left those days behind-- America's children are still under-recessed.

Archbishop’s call helps sink oversight changes to Missouri private school voucher program

Yes, an archbishop can make a few calls and put the kibosh on a move to add some accountability to the state's voucher program.

AI goes Office Space

Benjamikn Riley looks at what it means that the AI industry is dropping chatbots for agents. (Spoiler alert: nothing good).

24 hours with 3 teenage birders: Welcome to the World Series of Birding

For NPR, Natalie Escobar and Ava Berger hang out with three teenaged birders. 

Every once in a while you see a performer who just breaks past the boundaries of what a human being can do. This woman is amazing.

If you follow the link, it will ask you to pledge some subscription amount. You don't need to do that. This newsletter will always be free.

Ryan Walters Divorce

Divorce sucks. I'm a once-divorced guy on marriage #2, and like virtually everyone in this country, I know sizable number of divorced persons, and not one of them says, "Yeah, that was fabulous and I wish 
everyone could go through it."

Ryan Walters is going to go through it. Not only is he going to go through it, but he's the one who filed.

If you've forgotten about Walters, I could link to a dozen posts about him here, or I could let Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette sum up some career highlights. 

Former Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters is one of the holiest men in all the land. He worked tirelessly for many years to use the power of the state to convert children to Christianity, without care or regard to how “unconstitutional” that was. A Bible in every classroom! Every wall straight up papered with the Ten Commandments! State funding for Catholic charter schools! Forcing kids to watch videos of him praying to Donald Trump! Sure, many of his initiatives failed, but he did ultimately succeed in one thing: spending over $100,000 in taxpayer funds to pay PR firms to promote his “personal brand” and secure over 400 media appearances for him.

He has since finished with that job (though it has not finished with him-- he's just been sued by one of the teachers whose career he tried to destroy for insufficient MAGA devotion). Now he heads a right wing anti-teacher-union group. 

The divorce petition he filed against his wife cites "a state of complete and irreconcilable incompatibility" as the reason for the divorce, claiming that this "destroyed the aims of the marriage of the parties and rendered its continuation impossible." Otherwise known as a no-fault divorce.

I am not here to jeer or mock Walters over this. As I said, divorce sucks, and while it is sometimes inevitable, it's also wrenching and painful and confusing and difficult and all the complicated things a human-to-human unraveling can be. And there are four children involved which really sucks for everyone.

Walters has absolutely been a rabid christianist culture warrior, part of the same crew that considers no-fault divorce a scourge and insists that if we just put the decalogue up in classrooms and make everyone read the Bible and just follow God's law to the black and white letter, our lives will unfold in pristine straight lines. Just live your life in the light, avoid the dark, and don't let anyone tell you that life is sometimes complicated and grey. Folks like this get kicked in the gut but wiggly grey reality all the time; Walters just happens to be one of the ones who gets kicked in public. 

Thing is, Walters has kicked a lot of other people in public who did not ask for it, even as he has used his position to deliver a lot of noise about how other people should live their lives. He has publicly gone hard after some teachers, going as far as trying to have them drummed out of the profession, for not Living Right. So media and social media are making hay out of this newest chapter.

Charges of hypocrisy are not useful. But when someone is this absolute and noisy and combative about his black-and-white beliefs, one must wonder whether they are an actual true believer or if they are just cosplaying for the grift. It's times like this that give us a clue. 

I'll hope that people show Walters some grace. I'll hope that going through a messy, complicated patch will move Walters to broaden Walters' understanding of human complexity and lead to him showing a little grace himself. I'll hope that he doesn't go the MAGA route of deciding that his own failings don't matter because he is not like those Other Terrible People. 

The couple has said they plan to co-parent with their children's needs in mind, and I wish them luck with that. There is no guilt like divorced parent guilt. I've taught plenty of children of divorce and co-parented two of my own, and while each situation has its own challenges, mostly what I've learned is that the biggest damage is done when a parental divorce leads to children learning that they are not the most important thing in their parents' lives, that they are less important than revenge or anger or self-indulgence. 

Walters has never been a serious person (well, maybe back when he was an actual classroom teacher) and he used every ounce of his power to promote an unserious version of school, not intended to educate students to find their way and be fully human in the world. Instead, the culture warrior model of education  is a place where children are empty drones to be stamped into a particular two-dimensional mold in a version of the world that says people get what they deserve and they had damned well better follow the rules (which include things like "make lots of babies" and "women stay home and serve while their husband takes care of Important Stuff") and know their place. 

This is not a serious approach to being truly human in the world, and every fifteen minutes the real world, and every time one of these people gets their hands on real power over education, children suffer for it. Meanwhile, roughly every fifteen minutes, real life trips one of these guys up, unserious people facing a serious moment. Sometimes they block it out with denial, sometimes their weak and brittle views break, and sometimes they grow up a bit. Walters (and family) deserves the space and grace to find their way forward, even if some of us are not inclined to give it to him. 

In the meantime, we should remember that this is why education should present young humans with a full, rich, complicated, and even controversial of the world as it exists, all black and grey and white and wiggly, rather than trying to lock them into some two-dimensional tiny unserious view of the world that tries to pretend that a whole range of humans and human experience does not exist. 

OH: A New Definition of School Choice (Moving the Goalposts Again)

Around 200 school districts in Ohio sued the state over its voucher program, a program that funnels a billion dollars (give or take a few million) to private schools (most of them religious). Last summer, the Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page, ruled that EdChoice is mostly unconstituttional. That, of course, triggered an appeal (and some special legislator crankiness) and that appeal seems to have triggered a whole new definition of school choice.

The Institute for Justice, one more education privatization law shop, has been working on the state's case, and after the Franklin County decision they were pointing at Simmons-Harris v. Goff, an old case that supported a different version of choice. They also mentioned the argument that the parental right to direct a child's education requires a school choice system. And the state has also been claiming that having two separately operated but equally swell school systems is totally okay. Because "separate but equal" has always been a winning argument in education.

The Ohio 10th District Appellate Court panel of judges heard arguments from the parftioes (the school district count is now up to 330) and seemed to notice a problem with that whole "parental rights" argument. 

Parents don't actually get to choose.

Judge David Leland posited hypothetical gay parents of a student living in a rural area with just one private school. The school could reject that student, and then parental choice available would be... what?

As reported by Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com:

“All the parents do is apply to private schools,” Leland said. “The schools are the ones who make the choice. They’re the ones who decide. Unlike a public school … the public schools have to take everybody. That’s the requirement in public education so that everybody in society would have an equal opportunity to get a good education and grow to the extent of their ability.”

That's when the state floated its new definition of school choice:

Stephen Carney, an appellate lawyer with the Ohio Attorney General’s office, argued that parents nonetheless have a choice in applying. That’s why it’s considered school choice, he said.

Got it? Parents have a choice of where to apply, and that's school choice. 

First, that's silly. I have a choice to apply for a mortgage for a multi-million dollar house. That's not the same as being able to choose that house. 

Second, if that's what school choice means, then everyone in the state already had school choice before any voucher program was ever started! Every parent in the state always had the ability to apply for their child's admission to any private school. 

This is not what anyone ever thought school choice promised, though it is an accurate definition of what it delivers. 

It's one more reminder that the voucher crowd is not actually interested in school choice, because they consistently avoiud addressing the actual obstacles to parents who want to choose a private school-- tuition cost and discriminatory policies. EdChoice is not about providing actual school choice; it's just about finding ways to funnel public tax dollars to private mostly-religious schools. 

If the 10th District panel upholds the ruling against, that will simpoly grease the wheels carrying the case up to the state (mostly-GOP) supreme court. Can't wait to see what arguments the state uses there, but I'm betting they'll keep the wheels on those goalposts.

 

PA: Cyber Charter Sues State To Maintain Truancy Loophole

Late last year, Pennsylvania's lawmakers finally passed some much-needed cyber charter reform. Commonwealth Charter Academy, the 800-pound gorilla of PA cybers, has sued to try to escape some of the consequences of those new rules. 

One of the long-time dodges of cyberschool in PA has been as a dodge for chronically truant students. Is your kid skipping so much school that truancy officials and the court have gotten involved? Just sign him up for a cyber charter, where the attendance rules were loose (students didn't even have to appear on screen) and requirements for enrollment were frictionless. Just sign up and voila!-- that nasty truancy problem magically vanished.

Anecdotally, I can tell you this was a regular occurrence-- a student who was frequently absent with parents getting annoyed at phone calls from school would disappear entirely, until word would come that they were now doing cyber. That rarely ended well for the student, which was not a surprise-- take a student who can't muster the motivation and discipline to handle traditional school shifts to a model that depends entirely on the student's discipline and motivation to succeed? The vast majority of my cyber-departures either returned a year later, woefully behind, or simply never finished school at all. There are many problems that can contribute to chronic truancy, and cyber charters solve almost none of them.

The new rules add friction. Now a student with chronic truancy issues may not enroll in cyber school unless a court rules that such enrollment is in their best interests.

CCA went looking for this fight. In March their board voted to go ahead and enroll over 600 students marked "habitually truant" by their districts and two weeks later filed the suit, claiming that the law is unconstitutional. But now they get to generate press releases about how 600 students are "in limbo" while waiting for a decision even when the actual story is that CCA violated the law by admitting those students in the first place. 

As reported at PennLive by Oliver Morrison, other cybers are more heavily affected than CCA. But CCA is the big gun and has the financial weight and advocacy staff to take the state to court. So now the court will get to decide whether or not to reinstate the cyber charter truancy dodge. 

The Culture Panic Disrespect for Parents and Children

Two stories just broke, and both underline a feature of the culture panic crowd-- a disrespect for both children and their parents.

In Wisconsin, the school board of Watertown voted to silence the high school band, forbidding a performance of “A Mother of a Revolution!” is a 2019 composition by Omar Thomas. It was commissioned by the Desert Winds Freedom Band to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Thomas wrote that the piece "is a celebration of the bravery of trans women, and in particular, Marsha ‘Pay It No Mind’ Johnson." The work is an instrumental piece with no lyrics.

The controversy was, of course, that the piece referenced an LGBTQ activist. Now, the board, which in the past two years has been commandeered by the culture panic crowd, already had a "controversial issues" policy (aka "Don't Say Gay") in place, carefully framed as protection for parental rights. Teachers are supposed to give parents a chance to opt out of anything that might contradict their religious beliefs. The band director at the school informed parents of the piece via letter last October, and gave the option to opt their child out of the piece. Three students were opted out; two later changed their minds. 

Parents had ample opportunity to express themselves, and when the board decided to vote on censoring the piece less than a week before its scheduled performance, more parents and students spoke up, rather loudly, right up through last night's very contentious meeting.  

But as we have seen time after time after time, the "parental rights" crowd is only interested in the rights of certain parents. Parents who express support, acceptance, or just, you know, acknowledgement of the existence of LGBTQ persons-- those parents' rights don't matter so much. The board voted 7-1 to ban the piece. (You can listen to the piece, just under 5 minutes long, and decide how gay you think it sounds.)

At one point in the meeting, you'll hear board vice-president Sam Ouweneel remind board members "This is a perfect example of what everyone sitting at this table ran on, which was ending indoctrination in the classroom and ending radical curriculum." No word yet on whether the board will also forbid the works of Tchaikovsky and Cole Porter.

Yes, yes-- indoctrination. Because students' brains are like putty in the hands of adults. Children are dopes.

What else explains moments like Representative Virginia Foxx's response to a letter from a fourth grader who wrote her a letter as part of a class assignment. Ten year old Christian Mango researched and wrote about electric vehicles and his proposal for a tax rebate for buying one. His mother shared the response from Foxx, which was generally condescending, until it became insulting:

Incidentally, please ask your teacher to explain propaganda to you. While I will never be able to know, my guess is that your teachers will not give you a good educational experience and help you learn to think as they are too interested in indoctrinating you. How sad.

Foxx, who sits on House Committee on Education and Labor, has long had a bug up her ear about "indoctrination," though she usually picks on public schools. Mango is a student at a private Christian school.

Her assumption here is clearly that the child is a dope, incapable of forming any of his opinions on his own. Nor did she feel the need to include any of his parents in this communication. The note became public when his mother showed it on Instagram. Christian’s mother praised his educators as “amazing teachers who are lifelines for these kids,” and told Foxx that “teachers don’t deserve the contempt and disrespect you have shown.”

The culture panic crowd consistently commits a cardinal sin-- assuming that everyone who disagrees with them is either evil or stupid. They hold onto the notion that there is One Truth and only people who embrace that One Truth deserve respect, attention, or a voice. They are a callback to Wilhoit's Law: 

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

That may not be all conservatives, but it certainly fits the culture panic crowd. 

And children? Children are chattel. "Children do not belong to the government," they declare, meaning "they belong to their parents." They are property, to be arranged like furniture, and if the living room couch is in the wrong place, well, someone must have moved it because the couch certainly has no ability to move itself. 

It's frustrating and (as shown in Watertown videos) anger-fueling. Can we trust young humans to take in a full range of information about the world, trust them to sort through it all, and respect their freedom to build their own model of the world? Not if the culture panic crowd has anything to say about it. 

Cashing in on Federal Vouchers

The federal voucher program birthed by the Big Beautiful Boondoggle Bill aims to spread a lot of money around, and folks are already getting ready to hoover up a share of the taxpayer-funded largesse. The tricks is to set up a Scholarship Granting Organization.

What's an SGO again?

Tax Credit Scholarships are a way to launder taxpayer dollars before funneling them to private, often religious, schools. To hand the money taxpayer to government to private school would be illegal, so instead, the money goes from taxpayer to SGO (instead of the government) to private school. That shifting of the taxpayer's liability from government to private school is totes legal (except in Kentucky, where the courts are smarter than that). 

So the SGO collects the money and hands out the vouchers, and in between, it collects a handling fee, typically between 5% and 10%. 

SGOs can make some money on the state level, though in many cases they exist just to funnel taxpayer dollars to a particular private school. But the idea of a federal voucher system creates some big possibilities.

There's a wild range of estimates for how much money will be involved in federal vouchers, from $51 billion down to $3 billion. But no matter who turns out to be correct, a 10% will be mean there's a hefty stack of money in play for SGOs on the national level. All the more motivation for voucherphiles to get in on the financial harvest.

American Federation for Children 

As we have noted before, the DeVosian national-level privatization advocacy group is already setting up their own national SGO and teaming up with Odyssey, an outfit that promises "an automated, end-to-end school choice platform. AFC's announced plans that involve serving as an SGO for SGOs-- a national feedline for ambitious state-level SGOs. And look-- nobody yet knows what the actual rules and regulations are going to look like. Will this kind of SGO-to-SGO pipeline be legal? Better question-- will SGOs get to skim off a fee at every level, so that the piece of pie is whittled away as it moves down through the privatization funnel?

But AFC plans give you an idea of how much money is in play-- they are spending $10 million just to publicize and prepare the ground for the launch of federal vouchers. When you can spare a cool ten mill just to launch your new program, you know you're expecting some hefty ROI.

Center for Christian Virtue

State players are also planning to upsize. The Center for Christian Virtue has been active in Ohio since the days of 1983 when it was the more for Citizens for Community Values. Back in 2024 they won an award from the Heritage Foundation that they planned to use "to support its Education Restoration Initiative, addressing Ohio's academically broken and morally corrupt government-run education system."

They've been quite plain about being on a mission to replace public schools with private Christian schools, including helping churches set up such schools. But with the federal voucher program, they have announced their intent to go national by taking its state-level SGO, the Christian Education Network, and sending it out into other states. 

“Families are searching for both excellence and biblical values in education, so this program creates a critical pathway forward,” said Troy McIntosh, Executive Director of CEN. “It gives parents and grandparents a choice they may not have thought possible, and provides Christ-centered schools with new financial resources."

And for just 10% of the take, they will provide that.

MyChurchSGO

Even if you aren't a state or national player, you can still play along! Meet Richard Poljan and MyChurchSGO. In fact, I'll let him introduce himself, because otherwise you might think this is a parody video.

Yup. God's new gold mine.

Poljan has put up several of these videos, and they aren't exactly pulling in the big views. He's a hard man to track down, but he appears to be working in Fowler, Michigan, a small town NW of Lansing (be sure to visit Chester's Chicken while you're there). Richard "Buddy" Poljan appears to have no actual education background; his LinkedIn says he put in a couple of years at Hillsdale, then got a degree at Michigan Technological University before embarking on a career as an industrial engineer, currently with EFI Global, the "fire, environmental, and engineering experts." Looks like he played some college football. And he's served on some GOP local leadership groups.

MyChurchSGO has a website up, though it doesn't seem to be quite finished. Poljan does get the basic pitch here-- you can give $1,700 to the government or to your favorite church school. Also, don't have too many rules or parents will go to some other SGO. Also, to churches he says, "Get free money from the Government and bring in lots more revenue for your Church." Finally, "Get your SGO up and running," Poljan urges, "so that you can help kids make it to heaven."

But it's been six months, and Poljan's operation doesn't seem to be exactly taking off, and it does seem that bush-league start-ups like his will mostly get swamped by the big state and national SGO operations. Still, expect plenty of similar small time pop-ups to try to get a piece of that God's big new gold mine. 

ICYMI: Mothers' Day 2026 Edition (5/10)

A Happy Mothers' Day to those who are able to celebrate. There are many reasons not to want to join in today, and if that's you, then may the day pass with a minimum of hurt. 

Here's your reading list for the week. Remember-- if it speaks to you, share it.

Teachers! Appreciate Them Now. They Soon Could Be Gone!

Wrap up Teacher Appreciation Week with Nancy Bailey's list of the many ways that corporate reformsters have tried to make the lives of teachers miserable.

Is Moms for Liberty paying local chapters to attend monthly Zoom calls?

Moms for Liberty continue to fudge the definition of "grass roots organization." Kate LaGrone at WPTV reports that the Moms need a little help getting people to show up for meetings.

Voucher programs fail rural schools

The Economic Policy Institute explains why taxpayer-funded voucher programs are especially hard on rural school districts.

Congress Is Broken and Unpopular: Here Are 12 Reforms Children and Families Need

Bruce Lesley outlines some reforms that the current lousy version of Congress could pass to make life better for children and families.

The Blueprint for American Censorship

Mrs. Frazzled with some useful history on book banning in the USA, including Anthony Comstock.

Bill Lee's School Funding Formula Leads Tennessee to the Bottom in School Funding

When Tennessee's not busy making sure that voters in Memphis don't matter, they are making sure that they spend as little as possible on schools. Andy Spears explains.

Another death in the AI-in-education family

One more crappy AI educational "aid" appears to have bitten the dust. So long, OpenAI Study Mode. Benjamin Riley has the details.

Education Privatization Propaganda Worsening

Thomas Ultican is bugged by all the billionaires still trying to sell vouchers.

One Big Beautiful Bill’s Child Tax Credit Still Leaves America’s Poorest Children Far Behind

It's been a year and we still haven't tracked all the ways the big dumb bill is sticking it to the non-wealthy. Jan Resseger explores some of them.

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

A research paper at The Lancet. And yikes.

Excerpts from Chief Justice John Roberts' High School English Essays

From Mark Paglia at McSweeney's. “Simply wearing a small red letter A is no great burden, and it would infringe upon the free speech of the rest of the town were Hester Prynne not to wear it.”

It was a busy week at Forbes.com

- A guide for Teacher Appreciation Week gifting

- A complaint about the use of "student achievement" when what researchers mean is "test scores"

- A school district in Wisconsin wants to keep the band from playing a piece dedicated to a trans activist.

My mother always liked this song when we were all younger, so this goes out to her today.

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CO: Polis Says Legal Discrimination Is Okee Dokee

What does it take to a nominally Democratic, openly gay governor to vote for taxpayer-funded discrimination? Apparently just some "free" federal money and a legal baloney excuse.

Governor Jared Polis has opted Colorado into the federal school voucher program. He even leaned on the Democratic lawmakers in his state to keep them from requiring voucher recipients to follow the state's anti-discrimination laws. 

Polis attended a voucher party thrown by Invest in Education, a advocacy group led by a bunch of out of state hedge fund guys (so you know education is their top priority), and explained that this was totally legal and okay, using the same rationale that led us to the baloney sandwich that is the tax credit scholarship approach to funding.

See, if Bob Gotbux handed his $1,700 to the government, and the government handed it to a private school that discriminated against some students for being LGBTQ or the wrong religion or having bad haircuts, that would be illegal. But if Bob hands the money to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) and they hand it to the discriminatory school, that's totally okay. 

This is fairly transparent bullshit. 

My spouse tells me I'd better not spend our household money on beer. My brother owes me a hundred bucks, I tell him to just give me fifty bucks and two cases of beer. Will my spouse say to me, "That's okay, because you didn't actually buy beer with the money you were supposed to collect." I don't think so.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky saw through the tax credit scholarship dodge what that state's legislature tried to defend it in court. “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.” Further “[T]he funds at issue are sums legally owed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and subject to collection for public use including allocation to the Department of Education for primary and secondary education” and reallocating them to private school tuition violates the law.

Peter Murphy, who is the vice president of policy at Invest in Education, offered his two slices of baloney. “Every non-wealthy child in this country is the potential beneficiary,” Murphy said. “And what this law also does is it puts more control of a child’s education in the hands of their parents, including public school parents.”

That is, of course, a carefully hedged lie. Every parent cannot benefit because every private school that wants to suck up some of this "free federal money" can reject any student they wish to reject. Right now, Colorado is involved in a Supreme Court case about two Catholic preschools that want to be to collect state taxpayer dollars while rejecting LGBTQ families from their service.

But Polis told the dark money crowd that he doesn't think the state should decide which organizations are "worthy" (which is of course a different word than "legal') and went on “When you give $100 to any charity, it can be a church, it can be something that discriminates. It can be pro-gay or anti-gay. It doesn’t matter.” But of course, in his hypothetical, I get to decide whether or not I want to give money to a discriminatory group, which is different from deciding that the state can pass on taxes it was owed to that same group. And if discrimination manages to skirt the law, well, then, that's perfectly okay. 

The federal voucher program is simply federally-funded discrimination, a chance for the government to transfer its tax liability to private schools without holding them to any sort of anti-discrimination standards. It's the government spending what were supposed to be tax dollars on activities that only benefit a selected few. 

Watch for more of this, as pressure is put on other Democratic governors in hopes that they can be tempted with free federal dollars and a bullshit argument.