More Excuses for Screens in Schools

At first glanece, the recent Matt Barnum interview with Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE, might seem to feature the head of that tech-pushing giant backpedaling (or maybe even backpeddling) on the big tech push that has drawn such backlash lately. But let's look at what he says again:

On the backlash:

You know, in some ways I’m surprised it’s taken this long. I was watching how we were managing technology in the wake of COVID, and we were not doing it very thoughtfully. When you start handing out devices very quickly without preparing teachers, without carefully selecting the tools, without monitoring them for quality, stuff starts to go off the rails.

 On bad tech in schools:

People very quickly want to focus on the tools, on the screens, and it just doesn’t line up with what we see. It’s almost entirely about how the technology is used. In some cases, we have kids just clicking next through PowerPoint, and that’s terrible learning. That’s just the equivalent of a worksheet on a screen.

So I think we just need to have a moment where we go back and say ‘we did things wrong.’ Unfortunately, what we’re hearing are far less effective strategies. I mean, our friends in L.A. are doing the worst possible approach to trying to course correct.

He's referring to recent policy decisions in LAUSD calling for limits on screen time.  Which Culatta thinks is a bad idea. 

But is he saying here that we made a mistake putting all those screens in front of youthful eyeballs? 

He is not. He is, in fact, using one of the most popular dodges in the annals of bad education policy ideas, fully recognizable to anyone who was teaching during the Common Core backlash.

Our product is awesome! You're just implementing it wrong.

Culatta admits that somebody, somehow, might have overpromised with ed tech, but, hey now-- let's not get crazy:

I don’t think it was oversold. It was oversimplified, and so this idea that you could just put some software in front of a kid with no need for a teacher anymore — I mean, we’d hear stuff like that. What happens is when there are big sweeping statements like ‘oh technology will solve everything’ and then it doesn’t — of course it doesn’t — then people think technology is garbage, and we should ban it.

Yes, it was absolutely oversold. Hell, it's still being oversold. And not in a "we'd hear stuff" from who-onows-where way, but in a pushy deiberate ed tech company marketing way. We've got entire schools (looking at you, Alpha School) selling themselves as "No teacher needed-- magical AI ed tech will do it all, and in only two hours a day."

Notice that he also skips right over the question of whether there is something fundamentally problematic about ed screens. It is true that not all tech packages are created equal, that software (like paper books) come in both well-designed and stunningly crappy varieties. But it is also true that we haven't dealt nearly enough with the ways in which parking a student in front of a screen turns a process that rests of social and human dimensions into a process that is isolating and humanity-deprived. I don't care if you have the best damned software in the world-- I still don't want my child spending a huge chunk of his school day staring into the electronic abyss.

Screens are inevitable. Screens are good. You just have to make sure you do screens the right way. This practice is as old as a Studebaker dealership-- it's called assuming the sale, and it gets the customer to talk about how they're going to buy your product rather than question whether or not they ought to. Ed tech just layers on "Well, if it's not working, that's because you're using it wrong." None of this is particularly helpful right now. I get that, to  edit a phrase, there's no point in hoping someone will ask questions when his livelihood depends on not asking those questions. But somebody has to ask them, and we all have to pay better attention to the answers we get.

ICYMI: Lakeside Edition (8/9)

The Institute continues its remote operation this week, so output is down a bit. We are conducting some deliberate field tests of enforced boredom, a parenting technique in which one refuses to provide one's offspring with constat entertainment, thereby forcing them to create their own activities. This actually works pretty well for the Board of Directors, which is encouraging. 

But I've still got a reading list for you. Make the best of it.

Science of Reading Mandates: Who’s Listening to The Experts?

Nancy Bailey breaks down the spread of Science of Reading and offers up a handy list of actual experts who deserve some attention while this wave is rolling through.

Trump’s Dept. of Ed. Rescinds Longstanding Formal Federal Rules Protecting Black, Brown, and Native American Students’ Civil Rights

Jan Resseger looks at the end of "disparate impact" policies-- basically, it now only counts as racism if someone annunces that they are introducing a policy for racist reasons.

The Trump team gives Head Start the DOGE treatment

Checker Finn may be a long time reformster, but he has also turned out to be a fairly reliable measure of what actual conservatives think of MAGA policies like gutting Head Start.

Florida AG’s threat to Catholic schools ‘clear violation’ of the First Amendment, law scholar says

The violation in question is not allowing religious exemption from vaccine requirements, because religious freedom means the state gets to tell you how to practice your religion.

The Silly Season Comes to School

TC Weber looks at some beginning of year shenanigans, and even if you aren't in Memphis, you're going to recognize some of them.

An alphabet without an F: AI slop seeps into Teachers Pay Teachers curriculum marketplace

Can't say I was ever a huge fan of Teachers Pay Teachers, but now Lily Altavena at Chalkbeat reports it's one more place crowded with AI inaccurate slop.

Art Made Us Human

From history professor Steven Mintz, one more answer to why AI is bad for us and some excellent historical context for the importance of art.

Why the Democrats Probably Won't Save the Humanities

Cultural Knowledge explains why the Dems are not going to rescue the humanities. Famliar problems with a slightly different framing.

Texas Republican Platform: Leaving Children Uninsured, Underserved, Unheard, and Unprotected

Bruce Lesley finds the Texas GOP platform less than great for children.

Give Them an Inch...

Jess Piper looks at the Heritage Foundation's desire to get rid of women's sports (because they make women all uppity)

The Phonics Gambit: The Zombie Reading Policy that Fails but Won't Die

Paul Thomas has the numbers for yet another phonics-forward policy that doesn't actually seem to work.

Primary schools to be told to identify children at risk of future unemployment

This is from the UK, but it can certainly serve as a cautionary tale for the US.

I love a good cross-genre cover.

Covid-19: Once Upon a Time...

Lord knows I don't really want to revisit those halcyon days of 2020, but we are apparently going to be subjected repeatedly to fantastic tale of What Happened iBack Then The rough outline goes something like this:

In 2020, Dr. Fauci manufactured a panic over Covid-19 which was A) basically harmless, B) manufactured by the Chinese and/or C) some sort of Deep State plot. The teachers union forced (somehow) schools to close and then proceeded to keep them closed practically forever for no good reason at all, because teachers were excited about getting a paycheck for doing nothing. 

I'm going to skip over some aspects of this fairy tale other than to point out that A) the leader of the US government in 2020 was President Donald Trump and B) millions of people died, including millions of people in countries all around the world, which is a hell of effort to make for a conspiracy aimed at fooling the American people.

But I do want to write down my own narrative from those days, jsut so that I can get it out every time US politicians are making me feel as if I'm nuts.

Covid-19 dropped for realsies in March of 2020. We had just started to hear about it, and then we were all on lockdown. Spring musicals all across the country were shut down. It was sudden and scary. "Just for two weeks," at first, and then indefinitely, when it became clear the spread wasn't slowing. Local districts here scrambled to cobble together some sort of distance learning. For districts like the one my wife works in, that sometimes meant teachers hand-delvering packets to student homes. 

My newest grandson was born in March. I was booked to fly to Seattle to meet him. The airline postponed the flight, and then postponed it again. When the twins were exposed, it took a few days to find a place a couple towns over that could do testing. We ordered a lot of take-out in hopes it would keep our favorite restaurants in business.

Infrmation was soarse and uncertain. The feds, given a chance to show real leadership in a time of challenge, ttally biffed it. Betsy DeVos made one good call-- no Big Standardized Test in spring of 2020 (a decision that would mobilize an entire industry to launch a push to bring those tests back ASAP)-- but otherwise told local schools they were on their own. Your local newspaper was probably publishing a daily number of infected, hospitalized, and dead. Some of them were teachers. Tick, tick, tick.

It became quickly clear that the school year was over. Maybe we could regroup in time for the fall.

The summer was filled with handwringing. Nobody (with the exception of a few outliers and the ed tech industry) wanted to do more distance learning, zoom school, or otherwise continue the excrutiating experiment of the spring. But what to do instead? I wrote the following in June 2020:

We know that nobody really knows how dangerous re-opening schools will be. Will students become super-spreaders, sharing it at school and bringing it home to vulnerable family members? How great a risk will teachers be running? 

We know that “official” guidance on how to open schools is in short supply, and that what is out there is, for teachers, mind-boggling. The average teacher’s reaction to CDC guidelines is an eye roll powerful enough to shift the earth’s axis. Teachers have conjectured repeatedly that the members of the CDC must have never set foot inside a school, but that’s not the CDC’s job. Their job is to figure out what safety would require. Somebody else will have to figure out how, or if, that can be done.

Finally, we know that based on everything we think we know right now, the price tag for safely opening schools again is huge. Lots of folks are trying to run numbers, and everyone agrees that the figure will be in the billions—many of them. And simply throwing up our hands and going back to some version of distance learning is, we already know, not much of an option—unless we pour a bunch of money into getting it right.

That, of course, did not happen. Instead, the fall was marked by variations of this conversation:

Leaders: We really want to get these schools open again.

Teachers: Thank God. So what are we doing to mitigate danger to teachers, students, and families? Mandatory distancing? Regular testing? Air treatment for classrooms? School issued masks? What are we doing to keep everyone safe?

Leaders: Yeah, that stuff would be really expensive, so we thoughgt we'd, you know, open the building and let you all take your chances.

Teachers: We would really rather not do that.

Leaders: See, everyone! The teachers are refusing to re-open the building, for some unknown reason.

Remember all the fun variations in the fall of 2020? Split the student body in half and run alternate days, or morning and afternoon school. Have teachers teach half the students in person and half over the internet. Open full in person, but any time someone tested positive, send the class home for 5 days of Zoom school. All of these variations had one thing in common-- a shit ton of extra work for teachers. Betsy DeVos popped up to tell us "we're all in this together," which was some real baloney.  She was busy harnessing Covid panic and discontent to sell school choice. 

The fall of 2020 was a mass of school approaches. Cautious parents stuck to pods. Plenty of private and charter schools, as well as schools in states with powerless unions, chose to stay closed. More information about Covid suggested that children weren't in as much danger, but it was still unclear how much danger an infected Junior was to Grandma. Testing and reporting was by and large on the honor system.

By the fall of 2020, districts were pretty much on their own to make decisions. That was a challenge. It was not a good omen when administration at my old district decided to hold a planning session in person and it turned into a mini-spreader event. 

In my corner of the world, the fall and winter of 2020 were actually the worst part. Our numbers were low in September, but by December everyone knew somebody who had been hit by the virus; many folks knew someone who had died. Our local hospital was at capacity. While people were still arguing that it was just like a bad case of the flu, a former thirty-something colleague was describing how Covid made it exhausting for him to climb steps, and hard to just think clearly. 

You may have forgotten the timeline, but it was mid-December before vaccines were available. Trump could have justifiably claim them as a triumph, a win for his administration, but by then the loons were hollering at full volume, so, you know, maybe drink some bleach or have some horse worm medicine, but don't let them stick you with that secret micro-ship. Some of those anti-vax folks were teachers. 

In 2020, most people did the best they could with limited information and rudderless government. Hindsight shows that some choices could have been better, but hindsight does not set policy. Millions of people died, millions more were hospitalized, and yet six years later, we're dealing with folks who insist that it wasn't real. That the teachers union somehow kept schools closed for no good reason because, I guess, teachers wanted to collect their big fat pasychecks for doing work that was harder and more grueling than their usual work. "I don't want to go back if you won't take steps to keep us all safe" has been shortened to "I don't want to go back."

The Covid story is a variation on an old education theme-- society faces a problem, won't muster the resources to fully address the problem, leaves teachers to pick up the slack (see also IDEA). All Covid added was a layer of A) the problem was made up and B) it was teachers' fault. 

So if, like me, you hear the Covid rhetoric and wonder if your memories of 2020 are somehow defective, I'm here to tell you you're not imagining things. 

Teaching and the $1.98 Porsche

One of the most widely read pieces I ever wrote was a piece for Forbes about the need to stop talking about a "teacher shortage," which incuded this paragraph. 

You can’t solve a problem starting with the wrong diagnosis. If I can’t buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn’t mean there’s an automobile shortage. If I can’t get a fine dining meal for a buck, that doesn’t mean there’s a food shortage. And if appropriately skilled humans don’t want to work for me under the conditions I’ve set, that doesn’t mean there’s a human shortage.

That $1.98 Porsche line has been quoted more than a few times, and I have continued to try to argue for different framing for nthe widespread problem of staes that cannot find enough qualified people to hire for classrooms. 

The discussion of that shortage has simmering since the pandemic because COVID and the reaction to it (including the bizarro revisionist history that insists that schools were shut down for no reason at all by the teachers unions) were no help at all for the already-struggling recruit-and-retain machinery of the teaching profession. 

Matt Barnum (thank goodness he's back at Chalkbeat and out from behind the WSJ paywall) has been digging through numbers to unveil the reality of the problem, and Anne Lutz Fernandez continued the discussion with a well-sourced post asserting that yes, there is a teacher shortage. In discussing that post, a poster in Bluesky broughht up the $1.98 Porsche isn't a shortage line, and Fernandez made this sensible reply

I agree with him in principle, but I have to come to believe that if we don't call it a shortage, there is less political pressure to do something.

True enough-- especially because so many folks have tried to argue that there isn't really a shortage (these are almost always on the national level because on the state and local level everyone knows they are having trouble filling teacher spots.

But I will continue to stick up for the Porsche line. Here's why--

When I conclude that there's a Porsche shortage because I can't buy one for $1.98, I am really arguing that the problem is not me, and therefor the solution does not rest with me. And that kind of thinking continues to be a problem with the troubles with recruiting and retaining teachers. "There's a teacher shortage" is too easily interpreted by policy makers as "Kids These Days just don't have the proper attitude toward service." And the "shortage" frame leads to terrible solutions like creating a program in a box that any shmoe can deliver effectively, or hiring anyone with a pulse to stand in a classroom. 

The problem, declare policy makers, is out there somewhere. Certainly here in the room with us.

Barnum and Fernandez note several of the obvious reasons that teaching is a less attractive profession these days. Low pay, especially if you compare it to the pay for similarly-educated professions. The rising tide of bad behavior from students. The onslaught of attention-sapping technology. The insistence that good education is only for the right people and for other people we just need schools to crank out compliant meat widgets to serve corporate overlords.

There are more complex issues. Take the steadily collapsing pipeline; fewer students enroll in teacher prep programs, and colleges respond by cutting those low-yield programs.

There is the absolute unrelenting negativity directing at the profession. Twenty years ago, American schools were failing, and it was all teachers' fault. Then teachers were run down as groomers and pedophiles. Then they were part of the evil conspiracy behind COVID. Commies and traitors! If you aren't on the ground, in schools, I'm not sure you can realy grasp just how relentless and ugly the steady denigration of teachers has been in this country for the past few decades. And the folks who could be the next generation of teachers have had a front row seat.

Couple that with the rise of test-centered schooling, in which the teachers' job was reduced to Getting Students Ready for the Big Standardized Test (which in turn would be the one measure of how good the teachers are). Micro-management and dis-empowerment stripped the profession of much of what made the profession appealing. And I don't think we too easily overlook the fact that college-age students today have never known any kind of school except test-centered schooling. Test prep and data obsession-- that's the normal they grew up with. We have raised a multiple-choice generation and now they are unprepared for an essay question profession.

There is a shortage of quality teachers in this country, but it's a mistake to accept certain implications of "shortage"-- that the teacher tree has failed to. bear fruit or that a generartion of teachers was lost to drought. It's a mistake that goes hand in hand with the notion that teachers are born and called rather than made and recruited. It's goes hand in hand with the mistake of blaming the raw materials of the profession rather than the system that is failing to support and produce them.

The teacher shortages across the country are a symptom of larger problems in our entire cultural relatuionship with education and the young. There are no quick, simple solutions, and the start of any improvement will be more discussion of the shortages by people like Barnum and Fernandez who are willing to look past the folks who are sad about the lack of $1.98 Porsches. And Fernandez is exacty right-- whatever we do, it needs to put pressure on the policy leaders who are making the decisions that are breaking the pipeline.

ICYMI: Down East Edition (8/2)

The Board of Directors, CMO, and I are currently operating from the Maine field office, an annual adventure completre with woods, water, a little ocean, and other rebalancing team building exercises designed to increase our synergistic effciiencies with extreme fidelity and also fried clams and devil dogs. But there is still reading to be done.

Ridiculous Headlines about Public Education

Nancy Flanagan takes us on a stroll through the latest is silly education headlines.

The Best Correspondent’s Dinner Message That Should Not Go Unnoticed!

Nancy Bailey caught a widely ignored speech at the correspondent's dinner from Weijia Jiang, Emmy Award-winning television journalist. 

The Alpha School Debate

Natalie Wexler has mined a considerable number of materials related to Alpha School. None of it makes them seem less snake oily, but specifics are always nice.

Who Is Watching Nevada's classroom technology?

Kelsey Penrose writes for Carson Now about the parents pushing back against ed tech in Nevada.

Arizona judge strikes down GOP ballot measure threatening teachers unions' existence

The Arizona GOP keeps trying like hell to keep the public from having any say about taxpayer=funded vouchers, but the latest attempt to screw with the voters has been struck down by a judge.

Most Adults Don't Want Standardized Testing and Neither Do Kids: So, Why Do We Still Run Schools Around It?

Bruce Lesley has done plenty of homework on this answer to the decades-old question.

How a years-long rise in teacher turnover reshaped American classrooms

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat has been looking at the data about teacher turnover, and he's drawn some conclusions.

Three Things I Would Encourage Every Teacher To Do Going Into This School Year

Marcus Luther offers some year-launching advice for teachers. It's a good list.

Your Reading is Out of Control

Rachael Gabrield presents an altern ative view of the current handwringing over the student reading crisis.

Anthropic Launched Claude for Teachers. We Blocked It for Our District.

Want one more post slamming the advent of Claude for Teachers? This one from Joe Phillips is excellent.

At Forbes.com last week, I wrote about to make a writing classroom AI-resistant, and about a study showing the school sports are more available to some than to others.

Turn this one up.

The Bad Administrator Matrix

Teach long enough and you learn that it's a mistake after the announcement of a change in administration, "Well, at least it can't get any worse." It can always get worse. 

What's surprising is that sometimes the new boss can be totally different from the old boss, and still be terrible. How can that happen? Let me offer this matrix as an explanation of the very different ways in which a school administrator can be terrible.

We can do this with two axes. For one, we have the benign-toxic axis. Here we're charting the difference between an admin who is an actual toxic, negative presence in the district and one who is not at all angry or destructive. On the benign, we have an admin who avoids conflict and strife at every turn-- even the conflict and strife that are necessary and unavoidable. But hey-- maybe if we all get along, problems will just kind of take care of themselves. The toxic admin creates a poisonous atmosphere, hoping to stay in charge through fear and conflict. 

For the effective-ineffective axis, we're talking about how effective they are at implementing whatever idea has taken root in their head. Do they have a vision with no clear, concrete way to implement it, or are they skilled at dragging their ideas into life.

Let's look at each of the quadrants.

Benign-Effective

This administrator is loaded with ideas, and she knows how to implement them. They just aren't ideas that help teachers get education done in the building. Benign admins often focus on ideas that miss the point, like special "morale" contests that reward the teacher with the best classroom door with an extra jean day. You feel bad complaining about the benign-effective admin because they aren't scary or abusive. But when you need help with a problem student and they can't help because they're in a meeting with the parent-advisory group in charge of getting new flower pots for the front entrance, it gets kind of annoying. 

The benign-effective admin seems to be getting stuff done, but none of the stuff is particularly helpful, and sometimes (like the time she wanted your department to get all of the scores from the Practice Big Standardized Test into a cool spreadsheet) it can come with tremendous opportunity costs. The workplace atmosphere is pretty okay, but still you may feel like a hamster on a treadmill, running hard and getting nowhere and doing it all with no support.

Benign-Ineffective 

This clueless goof means well (probably) but they have not figured out that they are in charge, yet. Your tongues is almost entirely bitten through from all the times she has said some version of, "Yeah, you're right. That's definitely a problem. Someone should do something about that" and you have wanted to scream, "You!! You should so something about that!"

You have a lot of freedom under this sentient jello sculpture, but unfortunately so do your most irresponsible colleagues. And every teacher in the building knows that the admin will provide zero assistance with discipline issues. You aren't afraid that you'll be facing any danger from the front office, but you always feel as if any other corner of the building could combust at any second.

Toxic-Ineffective

Cannot figure out how to make anything, but will rant and bully the people he thinks are failing to understand. He used to be a classroom teacher who never explained his expectations to his students and then browbeat them for not meeting those expectations. Now he runs staff meetings where people shoot each other frightened glances of "Do YOU know what the hell he's complaining about." 

Often this is the admin who gets angry about things that he doesn't understand, and so he's angry a lot. His building smells like sweat and fear, his staff unsure about what might set him off next. But somebody is going to pay a price.

Toxic-Effective

At his worst, this bad admin also likes to rule through fear and threats, but he also understands that just flailing around won't get the job done. He's a snake, not a bull, and everybody had better watch their backs. He knows how to undermine a staff member or get vengeance on an employee who crosses him. He knows how to force people out just because he doesn't want them there. And he knows how to play the politics and ally-building necessary to get away with whatever wants.

He enjoys flexing his power, but like all bad admins, he's not particularly focused on the idea of educating students. He just wants to dominate and control, the feel the raw rush of power. Of the four types, this is the one most likely to be a full-blown sociopath. He gets stuff done, but he makes sure that nobody can ever really relax and feel good about it.

There are ways to deal with each of these types, from sycophantic up-sucking to staying so very still and quiet that maybe you won't be noticed. And every one of these quadrants can look actually not so bad to people stranded under the leadership of one of the other quadrants. But these folks are all bad bosses, a testament to how, yes, sadly, it can always be worse. 

ICYMI: 170th Anniversary Edition (7/26)

I have played trombone in our town band since I was in eighth grade. It is a special kind of treat to sit on that bandstand in the park, playing with a group of amateur musicians for members of the community. This week we celebrate 170 years of musical service to the community. We were founded in 1856, and without accomplishing any particular world-shattering achievements, we have kept on playing for all those years, and I think that's pretty cool (I've researched and written an entire book about it if you're interested in this kind of thing). This afternoon I'll kick off our week with a talk about the history at our local music museum-- also a cool thing. My small town has its share of cool things. 

Here's the reading list for the week. Remember to share the things that speak to you. In this age, everyone can be an amplifier.

What Actually Makes a Classroom Work Has Nothing to Do With What You Teach

I have some quibbles with this post from The Rea; Classroom (I'd absolutely add "know what the hell you're talking about" to list, which absolutely has to do with what you teach) but she still has some good points to make in this list.

In home state, Moms for Liberty shows lackluster influence in school board races

Trinity Webster Ross reports for the Florida Trib on the waning influence of everyone's favorite culture panickers.

Big kids, big problems

Men Yell At Me is usually more political and cranky, but this post about parenting teens is beautiful and on point.

Gifted and Talented Education Issues

Thomas Ultican unpacks some of the problems still plaguing gifted and talented education.

Boys Should Go to Music Camp

Retired music teacher Nancy Flanagan is right on the mark here. 

Sally the Robot Was Coming to a New York School. Then the Plug Was Pulled.

Looks like the AI teacherbot might not be coming to Salamanca after all. From New York Times (if I did this right, a gift link, maybe?)

Why Is Claude for Teachers

Anthropic is making its bid for a slice of the education pie, and Ben Riley correctly questions why this is even a thing.

Who Is Ed-Tech For?

Audrey Watters is likewise skeptical about this newest iteration of edutech and puts it in the context of other bad edutech ideas as only she can.

Why Educators and School Leaders Should Be Skeptical with Anthropic's Free AI Access Offer and How to Protect Their Schools

Yeah, Anthropic has stirred up an ocean of skepticism. John Robinson reminds us that there is nothing free-- just the hope that you'll be so hooked that you'll be willing to pay later.

Big tech pitches AI for teacher burnout. Educators call it a Band-Aid

Devin Pavlou at San rounds out the mini-list of Claude-doubting. Come for this quote from Martina Meijer: 

“We’re training their models for free, and they’re telling us it’s a gift,” Meijer said. “No, no, no — our labor, our experience, our intellectual work — that is a gift. And I don’t give that gift to corporations. I give that gift to children.”

By One Dishonest Measure

Gary Rubinstein puts his number crunching skills to work dismantling claims about how many students are "trapped in failing schools."

Why we can't have nice things

Jeff Waid has some thoughts about why teacher well-being is so often administration talk and not action.

A Fairy Tale Reform

Larry Cuban shares the tale of a reform attempt from the 1930s, a study that was swallowed by the war, but deserves just a little bit of attention.

Ohio Legislature Ensures that Public School Funding Will Remain Inadequate and Grossly Inequitable

Jan Resseger suspects that the Ohio legislature doesn't actually care about public education. 

Put to the Test

Ted Dintersmith is an interesting animal, a rich guy who has dabbled in education but seems to have done so with actual interest in learning stuff rather than imposing his own genius ideas. Here he draws some conclusions about the Big Standardized Test as a central feature of education.

Meta is testing an AI bedtime story app for people with no imagination

I love a story that wears its attitude on its sleeve. Amanda Siberling at TechCrunch looks at Zuckerberg's latest boneheaded idea:

The good news about StoryKit is that it could be a lot worse. Meta regularly ships boneheaded ideas like Instagram deepfake generators and “pervert glasses.” Comparatively, is it so bad to doom children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected anything better from the company that promised us a utopian world of virtual reality work meetings?

Short, worthwhile read.

Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose

I discovered a new-to-me newsletter this week (thanks, Joanna) called "Worse on Purpose" and this post is a fine introduction. 

When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers, and so on…

Yes, this website is about markets and products and consumers and enshittifcation, which are not obviously education issues, except that in a country where people are trying so hard to turn education into a market commodity, we really need to pay attention to how the marketplace actually works these days.

At Forbes.com this week, I look at the latest chapter in the Maine lawsuit-fest that is still trying to establish a religious school's right to discriminate as it wishes while demanding taxpayer dollars to fund its discrimination. Also, maybe states considering federal vouchers should also consider some regulatory guardrails to go with them. 

The band has a theme song; here we are playing it at the beginning of our 150th anniversary concert (for which we invited back former players). Not exactly perfect video quality from our local cable access station, but you get the idea.

Subscribe and get all the stuff, for free.

The Conversation We Aren't Having

Since the days when Milton Friedman first cast his gaze on public education, education debates have been heavily influenced by a conversation we mostly haven't had.

Yes, there have been pushes to break the teachers unions. Yes, there has been lots of maneuvering to break the public system so that the parts can be sold off and the gazillion dollar edu-piggy bank can hoovered up by profiteers. Yes, there has been plenty of noise about accountability, plus, heaven knows, no end of debate about choice. And these days there's a whole other bunch of noise about parental rights. 

The thing is, as much as we talk about these topics, we're really talking-- indirectly-- about something else entirely. 

We're talking about rewriting the foundational principles of our public education system. We're talking about shifting the responsibility for children's education. 

Look at how we talk about school choice. There are many ways to provide educational choices, but choicers only really discuss one-- choice based on the idea of education as a commodity supplied in a free(ish) marketplace. 

In this conception, the community has no responsibility to educate your child. That's your problem, to be solved as the best you can with whatever resources you have at your disposal. The old promise-- that as a society we would get the best possible education to every single child, regardless of zip code-- would be null and void, and families would be left to rise or fall based on what they and they alone can bring to the table.

That major shift in How Education Works is masked a bit with the promise of vouchers-- a little money that families could use to pad their limited resources (though the advent of universal vouchers guarantees that the gap between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy will remain exactly the same). The major shift is also sold with decades of insistence that the traditional public system is broken, even dangerous.    

It's not that we have ever done a perfect job of fulfilling the promise of a decent education for every child. It's not even as if we started making the promise for strictly noble, egalitarian reasons ("Let's get those delinquents off the street"). But way too much of the education reform debate has not really been about fulfilling the promise, but about changing the promise.

This goes double for the MAGA crowd, for whom any sort of societal responsibility is anathema. Society is composed of layers, their premise goes, and no government should interfere with those layers naturally sorting themselves into winners and losers, based on what they deserve (because some people are, in fact, more deserving of power and privilege than others). There should be no SNAP or social safety net, because the poors should be left to their well-deserved fates. DEI should not be used to lift non-white folks out of their proper position of subordination to white folks. The government should not be supporting health care or pushing vaccinations, because those who aren't strong enough to deal with illness and disease should be left to their well-deserved fate. And the education system should not be some sort of socialist scheme for lifting all children.

This is the conversation we aren't having--

Do we want to try to for a collectively funded, owned, and operated system that tries to deliver an excellent education for every child, or do we want a system in which each individual parent must navigate a largely unregulated market in which they get whatever quality of education they can personally afford?

We really need to have that conversation, because it lurks and nibbles at the edges of every other conversation we have about education. We really need to have that conversation out loud, because we keep trying to have it without having it, and it makes much of the education debate more tiring than it needs to be. 

Three Guiding Principles of Alpha School

I've been following Alpha School ever since the days they were trying to launch a cyber school in Pennsylvania. The picture that emerged (here's the piece) was of some folks with tech expertise, finance skills, PR savvy, and absolutely no clue about education. I expected this snake oil operation to burn out quickly.

I was wrong. My collection of Alpha School PR links just keeps growing, people keep taking them seriously, and, most important to their business model, rich folks keep forking over huge piles of money.

God bless Todd Feathers over at Wired, who seems to have noticed that the emperor's wardrobe is a bit lacking. "Alpha School’s Ritzy New York City Campus Costs $65,000 a Year—but Isn’t Actually a School" looks at Alpha's decision to open a school in Manhattan, and then, when the state department of education denied its application to become an independent school, just pivoted to becoming a sort of homeschool hub-thing.

The basic Alpha School pitch is simple. Two hours of screen time are enough to teach students all the core content they need. The rest of the day can be "projects" and "activities" and just generally stuff to keep your child from having to come home by noon while allegedly learning grit and entrepreneurship. There are no actual teachers involved anywhere in the process (though as Feathers notes, MacKenzie Price, the face of the school, has said that they use the words "guides, coaches, teachers" interchangeably.

Feather's article reminds me of three guiding principles that Alpha follows.

1) The ultimate Big Standardized Test result

When high-stakes testing accountability swept the education system, some schools adapted by cutting recess and reducing time in non-tested subjects like science and history and the arts. But what if you were willing to go whole hog and simply cut everything in your education program except test prep for the Big Standardized Test. I give Alpha School credit for just one thing-- dropping all pretense that they were delivering some sort of well-rounded education, and then offering as an academic brag their results on test scores.

2) The Trumpian approach to rules

Feather uncovered memos that show a clear priority-- get schools open quickly, even if you have to cut corners to do it. Trump's whole life has been organized around a particular approach to rules-- if people can't punish you for breaking them, then they aren't rules. And as many corporate bigwigs know, a fine is not so much a "penalty" as a "fee paid to break a rule." Student safety? How much do we have to pay to be exempt from certain requirements. One Alpha School is still operating in areas where they don't have occupancy permits from the fire department. Said one memo, "Opening date > safety > operability > cost efficiency > permanence." 

Another memo explained the need to move at "Alpha speed." 

The only reliable way to achieve Alpha’s opening timelines is subtraction: fewer approvals, fewer handoffs, fewer phases, fewer assumptions, fewer permanent decisions. If a step survives only because ‘that’s how it’s done,’ it is not neutral, it is actively sabotaging the opening date.

3) Selectivity as a marketing tool

Feather provides a picture of how marketing documents framed the approach:

To sway families in places like Miami, New York, and San Francisco, Alpha would need to “invert the power dynamic,” the document says. “We deliberately limit enrollment opportunities, create waiting lists even when capacity exists, and establish application windows that close regardless of capacity—triggering the scarcity psychology that accelerates decisions and enhances perceived value.” It goes on: “We must compress the entire decision process into 48 hours through a carefully orchestrated immersion experience that provides all necessary information, emotional connection, and social proof within a concentrated timeframe, culminating in a binary decision point with genuine scarcity pressure.”

Internal documents note the need to attract the "right" families. I have seen reports that Alpha also screens students for their ability to stay engaged with a screen for at least twenty minutes.

And, of course, the hefty price tag, ranging from $40K in Texas to $65K in Manhattan immediately filters out plenty of prospective customers, while fostering an image of an elite, exclusive operation. Phillips Exeter Academy tuition is $71,797 for students who also get room and board; $56,077 to be a day student at the exclusive prep school. For a school that offers two hours a day on screens with a few more hours being "coached" to price itself in the same league is astonishingly ballsy.

But then, astonishingly ballsy is very much the Alpha School brand. Some days, MacKenzie Price reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes-- repeatedly and charismatically claiming that things that are almost too impossible to believe are true. 

Price also brands Alpha as a school for rebels, badmouthing public education and arguing that she (and her husband and their gazillionaire partner) have cracked the code to making education swift and simple and easy and awesome, and it sure seems unlikely but, oh, wouldn't it be great if it were true, and after all, she's got a big following on social media and outlets keep running her claims and the schools keep spreading and parents keep forking over their money, so surely what's she's selling is real and true (even if Alpha has still avoided any sort of independent examination). 

I suppose it's possible that, somehow, Price is On To Something. But as hard as I squinty, I can't quite make out the emperor's wardrobe or screensaver or whatever. I appreciate writers like Feathers who help me believe I'm not crazy. 

Chesterton's Fence

There are plenty of laws that come up in discussions of modern education reform. In particular, we talk about Campbell's Law and Goodheart's Law, both of which focus on the idea that once you focus on mastering a measurement, that measurement becomes useless (e.g. once you organize your school around getting better test scores, those tests scores cease to provide any real useful data). 

But there's another fine model, known as Chesterton's Fence. It comes from author G. K. Chesterton, and the idea is simple--

Don't tear down a fence until you know why someone put it up.

Just because you don't understand why a particular process, procedure, or tradition is in place, that doesn't mean you can remove it without ill effect. Not until you understand what the original purpose was, and what removal or change would do to that original purpose.

Education has been plagued with reformsters who want to see changes, and they want to see them Right Now. They rarely want to try to understand how aspects of the system were put in place, even if there is history to show that systems are in place in response to failed versions of that same reform in the past (check out works by Adam Laats and Audrey Watters to see historical reform failures laid out in familiar relief). 

Individual schools also suffer from new administrators who make decisions based on the understanding that "kept things running as they always have" isn't nearly as sexy on a resume as "change agent." They will be quick to pick out fences they can tear down and may not even stick around long enough to build anything in their place. 

Chesterton's Fence does not suggest that no fence should ever be taken down; it may very well turn out that removing the fence is a great idea. But when you are contemplating the removal of a fence, it is wise to know what problem the fence was solving, what the current status of that problem is, and what might happen if the fence is removed. Some unanticipated results occur precisely because nobody took the time to try anticipating them. Nobody took the time to ask why the fence is there or what might happen when the fence is blown up. 

ICYMI: Canadian Smokehouse Edition (7/19)

We didn't get it as bad as places like Detroit, but we've been at a good, solid 200+ for a couple of days, and if that number doesn't mean anything to you, congratulations on being Not Downwind of the Canadian forest fires. What a fun summer. My town band canceled a concert for air quality issues, which is the first time that has happened in 170 years. 

It's been a busy time, but I still have a list for you. Remember to share.

Barns, Go-Karts, and Strip Malls: the Wild West of Private Schools that Collect Taxpayer Dollars

This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It.

How To Research Private Schools Like an Investigative Reporter

If you read just one piece on the list this week, let it be these. ProPublica took a look at the world of taxpayer-funded vouchers and the schools that profit from them. It's thorough, alarming, and hugely informative. Outstanding work from the team.

"Venmo government," administered by ClassWallet

Want to know more about ClassWallet, one of the companies cashing in on voucher administration? Steve Nuzum has the story.

Linda McMahon & How the Pledge of Allegiance Represents a Worse America

Jed Bookout at Frazzled explains how the administration's patriotism push is bad news for the country and education. 

She's So Sure

Audrey Watters with another explanation of what AI does not and can not do. 

Tennessee, Exemplar for Meritocratic Rot

James Horn breaks down some numbers to show that Tennessee is using testing to reinforce inequity in the name of merit.

Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price

I have my doubts about the time saving, but Jill Barshay at Hechinger gets the rest right. 

Counter-Narratives: Mississippi Reading Reform

Paul Thomas explains some different, better ways to understand the narrative of the Mississippi reading miracle.

Found Him in the Front Hallway

At EduHonesty, a look through old discipline referral forms provides some insights into the sort of issues that disrupt a classroom.

Dismantling the Department of Education: Ten Bills That Ask Zero Questions About What Happens to Kids

Bruce Lesley takes a look at those ten bills being used to dismantle the Department of Education, and what they don't say about the students.

Dangers Are Embedded in Federal Waiver Proposal Being Advanced by Ohio Department of Education and the Workforce

Jan Resseger looks at a proposed waiver that would allow Ohio to turn federal money into block grants, part of a troubling trend.

Dear Alpha School: I Hope You’re Right

I'm still baffled by the continued fawning coverage of Alpha School, but this week Robert Pondiscio provided a useful critique from the reformy side of the aisle.

Let's try something a little more soothing this week. Huntertones are proof that you can still start a band in college and keep it going into your alleged adulthood. 

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Communication Communication Communication

We've been having a couple of weeks of medical adventures here with my 92-year-old mother, and it has reminded me of some of the things we get wrong in public education.

Here is Northwestern PA, most medical care comes one way or another through the folks of Unimaginable Piles of Money Collected. There are advantages to dealing with such an institutional behemoth, most notably a digitized medical record that is up-to-date and available to the patient and the family. It is routine for my sister to see and share test results before the doctor can make it around to the room to talk to us about them, and this is invaluable in terms of coming up with useful questions to ask. 

Hospitals deal with people who are extremely vulnerable, and that makes communication important. Our hospital quality check folks who sometimes amble into the room to ask questions about how well your health care professionals are communicating with you (best question asked-- "Do you know what you are waiting for?")

But this time we went through some real communications whiplash. We knew what they were doing, what they expected, what the goals were-- and then one morning we were moving--rapidly--in a whole other direction. Not because of any new change in the patient's condition; just in how the hospital was responding to it. No real communication about the what or why, catching both us and the facility on the other end of these choices flatfooted. It was an odd moment-- for about 24 hours, while nothing really changed for Mom, it still felt like we were handling an emergency situation.

It sucks enormously to be in a vulnerable medical situation and have nothing communicated to you beyond "We know what we're doing, so just sit there and trust us." It's frustrating and alarming, and if you have a family member who's good at interrogating the functionaries involved, you may make some progress.

The education world should take all of this to heart.

While it may not be a life and death situation, it feels hugely vulnerable to hand your child over to the care of others-- especially if you don't know those others personally. And it surely doesn't help if the school's answer to "What are you going to do with my child" is a hand wave and vague, "You know, school stuff." 

Many districts have an administration-level policy that opposes communication. Not that they phrase it quite that way, but the basic principle is "If we tell people about this, I will get phone calls, so let's just not tell them." This trick never works. Years ago my district contemplated closing an elementary school and decided to deal with the anticipated fallout by keeping the whole business quiet as long as possible. All they got for their trouble was members of the public who were angry about the proposed closure AND the lack of communication.

And it doesn't count as communicating if what you are really trying to do is use a carefully crafted line of baloney to "manage" the public. That is the opposite of communication, and its shiftiness is not hidden if you wrap it in shiny AI slop.

After roughly 100 very lonely parent open house evenings, I absolutely get that attempting communication from the school side can feel like shouting into the void. And we have made progresses-- the pressure to keep that digital gradebook up to date may be annoying some days, but from the parent side, it is a huge blessing. Digital gradebooks, e-mail, even those damned learning platforms-- it is easier than ever for parents to hunt down the information they want.

But none of that means that school districts, school buildings, and classroom teachers cannot do better at communicating to parents. Asking parents to add yet another app to their phones doesn't count. Information passed through channels that are already available and easy does count. For districts and buildings, this may mean spending some money. It is astonishing to me how many school websites do NOT have current information, but I know why it happens--because website maintenance has been assigned to someone who is expected to do updating work in spare minutes between the demands of their actual real job. I know how much time it takes to keep a website current; many school administrators have not a clue.

It is easy, living the dailiness inside the bubble, to imagine that the whole world is awash in the information of what's going on, what people are doing, what is the Usual Stuff of the school. When I passed out of that bubble at retirement, even I was surprised at how little information makes it outside of that bubble. (I wrote to my old district's leadership and board about the issue. "Do you want to do the job," they snarked back. No, because one, I'm retired and two, it needs to be done by someone inside the bubble.)

If you are a district administrator, a building administrator, or a classroom teacher, and you are not reaching outside the bubble at least once a week, you aren't doing enough. Talking to your students doesn't count-- they are inside the bubble with you. For the love of God, do not have an AI agent do it, because the resulting bloated bland and boring product is just noise. You have to let people know what you are doing.

Yes, I know-- lord, I know-- that you don't have time for this. But I am telling you that you can't afford not to take the time. It is how you build trust and support and partnership in your community. It is how you reduce the total amount of unnecessary fear and uncertainty and anxiety in your community (and really, these days, we all need less of that). Will you sometimes get pushback? But the correct response to pushback is to A) examine your premises and practices, B) make your case, and C) listen to the cause of the pushback and decide if it might be worth considering.

If we were better at this in education, reformsters over the last forty years would have heard a lot more, "I don't know what you're going on about. I know what my school does and your claim that they are a disasterific mess are just wrong!"

It's a big ask. It's one more damned thing. But right now I'm living through the difference between navigating with clear complete communication and being left to fumble through opaque and spotty communication, and the difference just feels really huge and the world, including the education portions of it, would be a much better place with less of the latter and more of the former. Inside the bubble, it may not feel like a big deal, but outside the bubble, it's huge. 

NY: District Will Install Teacherbot For the Fall. Yikes.

It is, of course, a rural district, a district located on the Seneca Nation reservation in Western NY.  The Salamanca City Central School District enrolls roughly 1400 students K-12, roughly a third of whom are Native American. 

And they're getting a "humanoid robot" teacher. 

There are so many red flags flying around this story. Take this description from Melissa Manno at New York Focus who talked to Andrew Siguel, CEO of Toronto-based Realbotix (more about them in a bit):

The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.

The "female" robot? Robots do not have gender, as far as I know. Students will use a unique id code to announce themselves to the bot, so the bot can id with whom it is speaking. Place your bets now on how many nanoseconds until students decide there is fun to be had by switching id codes. 

The robot will be tied into the school's tech curriculum, which was developed by Steve Sozniak "to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs," and I sure hope they aren't referring to all those coding jobs that are now being handed over to AI.

But hey-- nothing like waving jobs and technology at rural, marginalized districts (the district has roughly 79% low-income students) in an attempt to get them to sign up to be some tech bro's guinea pig.

And it won't just help students, who might, for instance, "upload photos of homework for feedback, ask the avatar to generate lessons on topics that interest them, or receive real-time translations in over 100 languages." You know. Cheat. But teachers benefit, too-

If a teacher loses their place during a lesson or needs a prompt on what comes next, Kiguel said, they can ask the robot for guidance because it has been loaded with the district’s curriculum.

Good lord in heaven. How the hell does a teacher "lose their place" in a lesson, unless it's in a district that is so tightly scripted that teachers are required to memorize the script? Maybe she turned two pages at once? And what the heck does it do to student respect for the teacher if they get to watch the teacher be redirected and corrected by a bot??  

Teacherbot will cost $57,590, but it will not come with some of the advanced features of Realbotix's other products, and if you're thinking "What features" or "How do this company think it's ready to make a roboteacher, anyway," well, hold onto your hat.

Realbotix is already in the humanoid robot business. Specifically, the humanoid sex robot business. 

Realbotix used to be Tokens.com, a crypto company (which let you rent real estate in Zuckerberg's Metaverse) that bought Simulcra, the company behind RealDoll, in 2024, into That was merged with RealBotix with the intent to expand above and beyond the sex robot biz into AI and other robots. That move was funded in part by investor Arthur Hayes, a crypto-bro with legal problems of his own (to add to the confusion, Bed Bath and Beyond just bought the Tokens.com domain). Realbotix also wants you to know that they make companion robots, intended to fight the loneliness epidemic (but not, apparently, with sex). 

The "how did this even happen" part is its own little story. Manna reports that Salamanca's superintendent Mark Beehler says that the "partnership with Realbotix began after a former colleague met an investor at a dinner and discussed the possibility of bringing the company’s robots into the education sector." 

The company provided a demo of the teacherbot "counseling" a child who has been bullied, with basically, "I'm sorry that happened to you. You should go tell a trusted adult." 

And you may be wondering about the wisdom of getting teaching support from AI and its tendency to just make shit up. Realbotix thinks it has that whole "hallucination" thing under control. 

To avoid AI-generated inaccuracies, Beehler said Realbotix trained the robot and avatar to say, “I don’t know,” instead of generating fabricated or misleading responses known as “AI hallucinations.”

That seems both unlikely and inadequate.

Look, I would not be particularly concerned if my child's teacher was a former sex worker, but I would sure as hell be concerned if it weren't even human. And I would be doubly concerned if that non-human was given a bunch of synthetic humanoid features designed to trick my children into thinking of it as a person rather than a plagiarism-fueled next-token-predicting machine. 

It would also be super if all these Frankenstein wannabe's stopped unleashing their ideas on poor, rural families who lack the clout to push back. Behhler says he'll assess the success of this nightmare fuel through "qualitative feedback" from teachers and students. And Ryan Schaaf of Notre Dame told Manna he's optimistic, but that it will require "thoughtful implementation" (yikes) and lots of teacher monitoring and guiding student interaction with the bot (in other words, another new tech making more work). Here's hoping this doesn't waste a whole year of student's learning.                                   

Chatbots Can't Read Your Essay (Part 1,299,437)

This is one more example of how a chatbot will NOT read your writing and provide useful insights into what you have created. I referenced this piece of mini-research before, but it deserves its own post (partly so I can find it easily when I want to reference it again).

Adam Kucharski is, according to his bio, a mathematician/epidemiologist. He wrote Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty, and his work has appeared in Wired, Guardian, and New Scientist, among others. 

Back in May, he published an account of a simple experiment. It started with a simple question-- how good is Copilot at finding insights in a data file. 

To test it out, I asked Copilot to look at differences in how people in US and UK expressed emotions in an Excel dataset that contained thousands of survey responses.

Copilot found all sorts of deep insights. The responses differ "mainly in tone, intensity, and wording style," the bot typed. And it went on to provide deeper analysis. "US responses were typically more direct and emotionally amplified, while UK responses were more restrained." or how about "UK responses use more poetic, metaphor-rich phrasing; US responses favor plain, action-oriented wording." And even "UK wording reflects understatement and nuance; US wording emphasizes clarity and emphasis."

Wow, that is some deep and nuanced analysis. 

Except that the dataset wasn't real-- and it wasn't different. Kucharski explains his technique:

First, I’d created 2000 free-text responses and labelled them ‘UK’. Then I copied and pasted the exact same 2000 responses but labelled these ‘US’. Finally, I combined them to create a dataset of 4000 total responses, and jumbled them up.

So Copiloty looked at two identical data sets--not made by a human in any country-- and found all these nuanced differences between them. It's almost as if the chatbot is just making shit up.

So he tried it again:

This time, I got an LLM to simulate 200 statements about career aspirations. Then I duplicated the dataset five times, labelling each one ‘US’, ‘UK’, ‘France’, ‘Germany’, ‘Italy’.

Again, the bot found a variety of differences and nuanced distinctions between the five different countries. It even generated a chart that shows the likelihood of people in a particular country pursuing particular careers-- In France, they are twice as likely as the UK to pursue a career in the arts. US citizens are most likely to pursue a career in business, and way more likely to pursue one in medicine. 

Again-- all this analysis is based on identical datasets generated by a bot that is not a citizen of any country. 

Kucharski's post gets into some specifics and offers links to his datasets. Plus some updated follow-ups by other folks who took a stab at the same experiment. And it addresses a bit the question of "Well, if you used a different process..." You know who doesn't have knowledge of the best ways to trick the bot into doing the thing for real? The kind of folks who think the computer is smart and will help them with their writing.

Any time someone tries to tell you that a chatbot can be a useful tool for analyzing your writing, you should be thinking of this (and many other) actual demonstrations of how badly bots do at this task. 

One of the most useful checks I've seen came from anonymous writer online who suggested that the best way to think of a prompt is that you're not asking "Do an X for me" but instead "What would an example of X look like?" The bot is not going to do an actual analysis-- it's just going to extrude an example of what an analysis would look like based one whatever stolen analyses it was trained on. 

It is not reading your work. It is not analyzing your work. It is most definitely not your writing partner or editor.

ICYMI: Under Water Edition (7/12)

It has been a week. Maybe we'll talk about it some other time. But I still have a reading list for you.

I Asked My Students About AI Again

Marcus Luther talked to his students about AI. Maybe that tidal wave isn't coming.

The Real Cost of Fifty Years of Policy:

Greg Wyman puts the last several decades of education reform in context.

What Schools Can’t Do

David Larabee reprints a speech from 2009, and it is taking perhaps a broader view than classroom practice, but boy dose some of this really hit. Like:

we pass off on schools social problems that we are unwilling to accomplish through the political process, where the capability for success actually resides. Instead of addressing these problems directly through political action, we foist them off on schools and then blame them for continually falling short of the desired goal.

And also:

Reformers are loath to give up their aims in the service of making the reform acceptable to teachers, so they tend to plow ahead in search of ways to get around the obstacles. If they can’t make change in cooperation with teachers, then they will have to so in spite of them. They see a crying need to fix a problem through school reform, and they have developed a theory for how to do this, which looks just great on paper. Standing in the state capital or the university, they are far from the practical realities of the classroom, and they tend to be impatient with demands that they should respect the complexity of the settings in which they are trying to intervene.

There's plenty more where that came from.

AI: The Trust-Breaker

Matt Brady examines the effects of AI use on the trust necessary for schools to work.

Where's the Science?: Not in Think Tank Reports or Reading Legislation

Nobody has critiqued the Science of Reading movement more relentlessly that Paul Thomas. Here's his reaction to a new "report" from the National Council pn Teacher Quality.

‘Wasteful and extravagant’: Here’s what Utah auditors found digging into the first year of school voucher spending

Utah's new Arizona-style voucher program seems riddled with Arizona-style abuse and fraud. Reported by Carmen Nesbitt for the Salt Lake Tribune.

The GOP-created university civics centers aren't popular. They want to require attendance.

Ohio set up university centers to combat liberal bias, but students weren't interested, so now the GOP, champions of the free market, will just force everyone to attend. Morgan Trau reports for News 5 Cleveland.

Let AI Burn

If you like your anti-AI arguments brutal and uncompromising, Ed Zitron is your guy.

Looping. It’s Not New. It’s Not a Panacea.

Nancy Flanagan on the recycling of old education ideas.

Arizona students with disabilities fuel rapid growth in billion-dollar ESA voucher program

What do you suppose would happen if you set up your taxpayer-funded vouchers system to incentivize a diagnosis of special needs? Craig Harris reports for 12 News.

Families hoard ESA funds as Arizona public schools face low funding, records show

Arizona's taxpayer-funded vouchers are also piling up big money stockpiles for some parents. Craig Harris again.

Teachers in Michigan school district can pick from 32 phrases or face legal review over classroom posters

How stupid can the attempts to police teacher posters get? Pretty stupid. Lily Altavena at Chalkbeat.

Big Changes to Federal Grants Are Coming: What They Could Mean for Schools

Much of the boring routine funding from the feds is about to be disrupted. Marl Lieberman at EdWeek reports.

“One Big Beautiful Bill” Has Already Begun Damaging Children’s Well-Being: It Will Only Get Worse

Jan Resseger looks at the worst side-effects of that thing.

AI Data Centers: Greed Rather Than Need.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the threats coming from data centers.

Teens Arrested for Breaking Into High School With a Homemade Plasma Cannon

Are you worried that Kids These Days just aren't as ambitious or creative as they used to be? This is a story for you. Luis Prida at Vice covers a North Carolina story.

This week at Forbes.com, I took a look at how Arizona is one step closer to imposing actual accountability on its taxpayer-funded voucher program. 

A video artifact-- a medley from the cast of the then-current musical Hair, on Ed Sullivan. Asks your parents (or grandparents) what's going on here. 

The Federal Religion Commission on Education

The federal Religious Liberty Commission just coughed up its 224-page report, and I'm not about to shovel through the whole thing here, but it does devote a whole chapter to education, and that's worth a look for what it tells us about the MAGA view of education.

Much of the report is taken up with some anecdotes from students who allege various versions of being picked on in/by schools for their faith. One fifth grade student was "forced" to read a book about transgenderism to his kindergarten buddy, and this qualified for testimony because somehow being anti-trans is a Christian belief. One student was denied the right to wear a covid mask with "Jesus Loves Me." One student was denied the right to thank Jesus in his graduation speech. One girl's attempt to sing a Christian song in the school talent show. One girl wanted to pray with friends in a corner of the cafeteria and was denied. And one more student was subject to antisemitic bullying.

The stories are dramatically embellished (when the graduating student went ahead and thanked Jesus anyway, everyone clapped, teachers embraced him, and the principal cried). Sure. And we'll never know just how quiet the cafeteria prayer really was. But while the trans book story is complicated, the other stories, if accurate, are stories of students whose rights were, in fact, violated by their school. 

They are anecdotes. The commission might have included others, like the story of the kindergartners who wore hijabs to graduation and were held up for abuse by the President of the United States. There are undoubtedly other anecdotes that bend the other way; take my own former superintendent who routinely opened elementary graduation ceremonies with a Jesus prayer, or my former student whose fourth grade teacher who pressured her to convert from Judaism to Christianity. 

The commission deals with the anecdotal nature by offering a blanket observation that the "story is not an isolated event." 

That's fine-- providing a compelling narrative is how folks do the commission testimony thing. But what's more notable is the principles outlined to provide context for the narratives.

The commission offers the now-familiar tale of how institutions have been captured by the Bad Guys. For a century, they assert, teacher training institutions "have increasingly framed education not as the transmission of intrinsic moral truths, but as a vehicle for ideology-driven social transformation." 

Well, now. "Social transformation" has arguably always been the point, as in transforming society by trying to make everyone numerate, literate, and knowledgeable. "Ideology-driven" only makes sense as analysis if you remember, as implied by this construction, that "ideology" only refers only to ideology followed by Those Guys, while our ideology is actually "truth." Either way, it's a stretch. Virtually every teacher I've ever known or worked with mostly had a classroom ideology of Can We Please Learn This Content. Though I'll bet you can find a few ideologues of every flavor in classrooms here and there about the country (there are over 4 million teachers, guaranteeing at least one of everything you can imagine). 

But what really strikes me is the commission's idea of what schools are supposed to do--

The transmission of intrinsic moral truths.

That's a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting, but dovetails with the notion that the world is all absolute truths, probably already figured out by some dead Greek and Roman guys. Once grasped, the truths allow for no negotiation, discussion, and certainly no revision (see also the argument that we don't need to respect all religions because everything that's not Christian is just wrong). 

They go after John Dewey (though I'll bet you that there aren't 25 teachers working in 2026 who could name two things Dewey believed) and accuse him of this kind of stuff:

He proposed that schools create an “embryonic community life,” where children would be taught primarily not how to think or explore truth, but to develop habits useful to the state, such as cooperation, shared purpose, and democratic citizenship.

Dewey gets charged with re-characterizing schools as "a vehicle for ideologically driven social progress." Again, I think his offense here is not going after "social progress" so much as letting the incorrect ideology have a say. 

Their example is sex ed. After the sexual revolution of the sixties (the decade when everything went to shit for these folks) schools started teaching sex ed and exposing young kids to discussions of sex (bad, because otherwise young humans would not have ever heard about sex). Also, they taught birth control instead of abstinence, which is bad, because schools should prioritize politically correct over actually works.

The commission argues that "ideological current has too often left little room for students who hold traditional religious convictions, such as the belief that God created man and woman, that moral truth is real, or that America—though imperfect—is not fundamentally evil." Maybe not so much "left little room" as "didn't allow these beliefs to occupy a central place over all others." And I'm not sure how beliefs about America qualify as traditional religious convictions (even if, as they apparently mean, only certain religious traditions count here). But humans have a historic tendency to confuse their own personal beliefs with the Will Of God.

The report positions all this debate of the First Amendment as a battle over culture:

It is part of a larger cultural struggle over whether schools will form children in the moral inheritance of Western civilization or in a newer creed that often treats historic religious belief as something backward, suspect, and even harmful.

"Form children." Yikes. (I refer you to Russell Barkley's contention that we are shepherds, not engineers.) And historic religious belief has, at times, been backward and harmful, and remembering that ought to inform any discussion of the First Amendment and what the founders had in mind.

But from there we're on to the argument that some sort of hostile secular religion displaced "the 2,000-year canon of Western moral and religious tradition" (the writers are careful not to explicitly argue for Christianity by name, but they might as well have). 

This is a bogus argument and always has been. Public schools have no official position on vegetarianism. Their only mandate is to offer an assortment of healthy choices and the freedom to pack a lunch from home. Likewise, the First Amendment mandates that religion not be on the menu of what schools offer, leaving students free to practice as they wish. There is no such thing as "secular religion," rather, "secular" is what is left when you remove all the religious parts. 

We can find three issues in the commission's complaint.

One is that some schools, over-zealous (or afraid) about church-state separation take steps to squelch student religious expression when they should not. School officials should not lead a religious prayer at graduation, but if student speakers want to thank Jesus, they should. Admittedly, the line is sometimes tough to spot-- if a student, as part of a school project, chooses to paint a religious image, that's probably okay, but if the painting is on the wall of the school, the issue is fuzzier. 

Second is the part they try to avoid saying out loud, which is the belief that White Christianity should be the dominant culture in America, and that should start in school. 

Third is the notion, repeatedly taken into court, that one cannot fully exercise one's religion unless one is free to inflict it on others. That includes financing that exercise with public tax dollars and discriminating against certain Others. This goes hand in hand with having a dominant position. 

Some folks will absolutely regret it if they ever win these debates. For one, they will find themselves swamped with people who want to claim a religious free-money-and-no-rules card. For another, the inevitable result will be government commandeering and regulation of religion-- you know, like setting up a federal commission to oversee religion in this country. The First Amendment is just as much about protecting the church as it is protecting the state.

The commission offers all sorts of recommendations. Some involve providing more guidance about First Amendments, which isn't a bad idea depending on whether or not the training is related to the actual language. "Know Your Rights" posters for school. Sure; posters really work in school. Set up a portal so that people can report naughtiness on line. Sic the DOJ on those naughty schools. Get behind courtroom support for the transparently unConstitutional laws requiring Ten Commandments displays. Also, school choice. They don't bother to explain why they want it; they just want it.

Nothing here you wouldn't expect from a commission headed up by Dan Patrick and including Ben Carson, Dr. Phil, Franklin Graham, Cardinal Tim Dolan, Paula White, and Todd Blanche. Can't wait to see what they come up with next.